In Brazil, few studies have been devoted to proving the existence of and evaluating the internal inefficiencies of state universities. Such work, however, is highly important because state higher learning is free and a great amount of resources is involved in its maintenance. The objective of...

This article aims to estimate the informational rents earned by winning bidders in oil and gas exploration and production auctions in Brazil. We estimate the distributions of bids and bidders' private valuations using a nonparametric structural model and assuming independence and asymmetry...

In 1997, Brazil changed the regulatory framework of its oil and gas sector. After this change, a restrict subset of localities started to receive large amounts of oil rents. The goal of this paper is to evaluate whether such rents distributed under this law contributed to improving some social...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Brazilian municipalities are losing efficiency when collecting local taxes in response to oil windfalls. In particular, the paper aims to analyze the hypothesis that these grants encourage the benefiting municipalities to collect taxes...