Brazil presents severe socioeconomic inequalities among regions and individuals. Several studies analyze the determinants of these inequalities and its effects on social welfare indicators, such as health. This paper measures the socioeconomic inequalities in healthcare utilization in Brazil and...

To what extent can monetary and financial crises and cycles be explained through economic theories? This paper is aimed at highlighting why a reliance on economic theories may be necessary given certain flaws which have been revealed from the recent Financial Crisis. Namely, that economic and...

This work evaluates the bank lending channel in Brazil, in the post-Real Plan period. The work includes descriptive analysis and formal econometric tests based on several indicators of the credit market. First of all, the descriptive analysis shows that the main relationship between credit...

The aim of this paper is to analyse whether the economic policy response capability was a relevant factor for minimizing the 2008 financial crisis severity within its first year. The research hypothesis is that countries with a larger space for expansionary policies have registered a less severe...

This article verifies the occurrence of a real estate bubble in the Brazilian economy. Overall, our results suggest the existence of a bubble in the real estate sector of the economy. The Austrian School of economics provides a solid explanation to this phenomenon, which are reinforced by...

This paper attempts to extend empirical investigations about the asymmetric effects of monetary shocks in the Brazilian economy. We specify and estimate a nonlinear smooth transition vector autoregressive model including output, price level, exchange rate and a monetary policy indicator (Selic...

The evaluation of forecasts performance of market expectations about the Brazilian inflation rate (Focus survey) is important given the prominent role of these expectations in the conduction of monetary policy in Brazil. Lima e Céspedes (2006) showed that, in the period 2000.1 2005.4, several...

This article investigates the effects of monetary policy shock in the Brazilian real state market using structural VAR through the period June/2000 to August/2010. The identification is done following the agnostic procedure suggested by Uhlig (2005). The mains results are: The stock of credit to...

This study aims to estimate the system of bank credit demand and supply in Brazil. Understanding how the balance is established in this market is the key to know the importance of the credit channel. Based on the aggregated data from June 2000 to August 2012 not only for firms but also for...

We present a detailed survey of changes in the reserve requirement system in Brazil and analyze the system's main functions and goals during the period from 1994 to 2012. We identify four different subperiods with respect to the use of this policy tool. In the first subperiod, from july 1994 to...