We use data on immigrants who live in the United States to study the effects of exposure to hyperinflation on occupational choice. To do so, we calculate the number of years an individual had lived under hyperinflation before arriving to the US. We find that its marginal effect on the...

This paper tests and find evidence that support the view that credit interest rates respond more to increases than to decreases in the Central Bank basic interest rate (Selic). This asymmetry is robust to an event analysis, in which the availability of a dataset containing daily information is...

While most economic studies of crime have focused on its determinants, we study the reverse question: does crime affect economic behavior? Being such an important social phenomenon, one would expect crime to affect economic decisions. Using local data on crime rates and savings per capita in a...

Mimicking the US in 1980 and 1990s, Brazil is a remarkable case of a major shift in homicides. After increasing steadily throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, homicides reached a peak in 2003, and then fell. I show a strong time-series co-movement between homicide rates and the...

After reaching a historic peak by the end of the 1990s, homicides in large cities in the state of São Paulo dropped sharply. Several explanations have been advanced, most prominently improvements in policing, adoption of policies such as dry laws, and increased incarceration. In this paper, we...

Whether campaign advertising influences election outcomes is an open question; a paradox given the amount spent on campaigning in general and TV advertising in particular. We argue that such “absence of documentation” is due to the focus of the empirical literature on the United States, in...

We measure the competitive effect of public ownership of banks in concentrated local banking markets in Brazil by extending Bresnahan and Reiss’s [1991] framework to measure the effects of entry in concentrated markets. We use variation in market size, the number of competitors and their...

We document a novel type of international financial contagion whose driving force is shared financial intermediation. In the London peripheral sovereign debt market during pre-1914 period financial intermediation played a major informational role to investors, most likely because of the absence...

In 2004, Brazil provided an interesting natural experiment concerning personal credit. A new law was enacted allowing banks to offer loans with repayment through automatic payroll or social security benefit deduction, thus removing a significant part of the moral hazard problem by eliminating...

Mimicking the “Great American Crime Decline” (Zimiring, 2007), violent crime in the state of São Paulo dropped sharply in the 2000s after rising steadily throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This paper evaluates the role of crack cocaine in explaining the aggregate dynamics in violence. Four...