The impact of regulation on the economic performance of regulated sectors depends crucially on the appropriateness of the design of the regulatory agencies' structure and process, that is, on regulatory governance. Governance refers not to the policies that emerge from regulation, but rather to...

Social contracts about inequality and redistribution are country-specific. We rely on a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge in given country. We link the model to the recent literature on beliefs and argue that beliefs are a major determinant of which...

Brazil is the world's sixth-largest economy, and for the first three-quarters of the twentieth century was one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. While the country underwent two decades of unrelenting decline from 1975 to 1994, the economy has rebounded dramatically. How did this...

We link a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge, to the recent literature on beliefs, and argue that changes in beliefs may shift the equilibrium over time. We present evidence that beliefs are typically very stable over time, yet argue that Brazil has...