Since the mid 1990s, theories of speculative attacks have argued that fixed exchange rate regimes induce excessive borrowing in foreign currency as an optimal response to implicit guarantees that the government will not devalue the domestic currency. Using data on Brazilian firms before and...

The resumption of capital flows to developing countries in the nineties is intertwined in the Brazilian case with the attempts to achieve inflation stabilization. A very restrictive monetary policy has offered probably the world’s highest yield to fixed income investments. In the context of...

We propose and implement an index of macroeconomic vulnerability to foreign shocks based on a structural time-varying bayesianVARwith a block-exogeneity hypothesis for a given pair of a large economy and a small open economy. The index is based on the sum of the responses of the small open...

Central banks' liabilities are still often excluded from debt sustainability analyses, despite the enormous expansions in central banks' balance sheets that we have witnessed in recent years. In this paper, we construct a dataset that consolidates both general government and central bank balance...

Brazil has been one of the most active country in intervening in FX markets though several forms: sterilized interventions and foreign reserves accumulation, controls on capital inflows and FX interventions through domestic derivatives markets. During the golden phase of the commodity super-boom...

How countercyclical macroprudential credit policies affect the loan spread? To answer this question, we propose a microeconomic model of bank competition that contemplates differences in the behavior of public and private banks and the peculiarities of the market for corporate loans vis-a-vis...

This paper examines the role of infrastructure in long run economic growth. The paper consists of two sections, the first concentrates on the theoretical role of government spending in models of growth and the second details examples of private participation in infrastructure development. Using...

This paper examines the recent evolution of the Brazilian public domestic debt and interprets it in light of the confidence crisis literature. The analysis of the recent developments in the Brazilian public domestic debt market shows that the likelihood of a default must not be assessed only...

The Brazilian domestic debt has posed two challenges to policy-makers: it has grown very fast and its maturity is extremely short. This has prompted fears that a default or a compulsory lengthening scheme would be imposed. Here, we analyze the domestic public debt management experience in...