Relationships are a valuable technology to produce loans. (Berger and Udell [1995], Petersen and Rajan [1994], Aoki and Dinç [2002]). While there are convincing theories in which relationships solve hidden action or hidden information problems, there is very little empirical corroboration of...

While the literature has focused on relationships as a technology for solving hidden information problems in credit markets, hidden action has been very little explored as an explanation for the existence of relational lending. In this paper, we propose a theory in which relationships are driven...

By engendering horizontal differentiation, non-price advertising increases the incentives to accommodate on the price dimension. However, advertising also increases the size of the market and, consequently, the payoffs to price undercutting, which induces more aggressive price competition. We...

O economia brasileira avançou na década seguinte à chegada ao poder do ex-presidente Lula. Ainda mais importante foi o avanço nos temas sociais. Não obstante, o desempenho brasileiro, quando medidoem relação ao melhor grupo de comparação entre emergentes, foi, em geral, muito aquém do...

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...

We report two results. First, we evaluate the impact of a nationwide anti-firearm legislation passedby the Brazilian Congress in December 2003 (Estatuto do Desarmamento, henceforth ED). Our identificationstrategy hinges on the hypothesis that the law had stronger impact in places where gun...

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...

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...

Over the last 15 years, several Latin American cities have adopted dry laws, which restrain the sale of alcohol in bars and restaurants during specific hours of the week. Bogotá, in 1991, was the first. Several more have followed suit, or are likely to do so in the near future. Policy makers...

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...