Several works in the shopping-time and in the human-capital literature, due to the nonconcavity of the underlying Hamiltonian, use first-order conditions in dynamic optimization to characterize necessity, but not sufficiency, in intertemporal problems. In this work I choose one paper in each one...

In this work I analyze the model proposed by Goldfajn (2000) to study the choice of the denomination of the public debt. The main purpose of the analysis is pointing out possible reasons why new em pirical evidence provided by Bevilaqua, Garcia and Nechio (2004), regarding a more recent time...

I start presenting an explicit solution to Taylorís (2001) model, in order to illustrate the link between the target interest rate and the overnight interest rate prevailing in the economy. Next, I use Vector Auto Regressions to shed some light on the evolution of key macroeconomic variables...

Using data from the United States, Japan, Germany , United Kingdom and France, Sims (1992) found that positive innovations to short term interest rates led to sharp, persistent increases in the price level. The result was confirmed by other authors and, as a consequence of its non-expectable...

Brazil's balance of payments has been calculated since 2001 in accordance with criteria suggested in the 5th edition of the International Monetary Fund's Balance of Payments Manual (BPM5). The Balance of Payments account can be divided into two groups: (i) current account transactions and (ii)...

This work derives from the book “Brasil: Uma Análise das Contas Externas”, by the same authors. The present text has been last revised on December 2006 and is based on data available at that date. A further classification of Brazil's sovereign debt one step below investment grade (by Fitch...

This paper presents an overview of the Brazilian macroeconomy by analyzing the evolution of some specific time series. The presentation is made through a sequence of graphs. Several remarkable historical points and open questions come up in the data. These include, among others, the drop in...

Our work is based on a simplified heterogenous-agent shopping time economy in which economic agents present distinct productivities in the production of the consumption good, and differentiated access to transacting assets. The purpose of the model is to investigate whether, by focusing the...