The presence of deterministic or stochastic trend in US GDP has been a continuing debate in the literature of macroeconomics. Ben-David and Papell (1995) found evidence in favour of trend stationarity using the secular sample of Maddison (1991). More recently, Murray and Nelson (2000) correctly...

Inasmuch as the investment-savings correlation is related to capital immobility and each country has specific and time-varying capital account liberalization and financial deregulation processes, we might not expect a constant and identical correlation for a group of countries. We performed both...

One of the reasons for the existence of social security systems is that they function as an income redistribution mechanism (Diamond, 1977). Nevertheless, there is no obvious consensus about this social security property. We test it to the Brazilian case and try to answer an additional question:...

It is consensual that the increasing on the Social Security?s deficit is one of the most important constraints imposed upon sustained economic growth in Brazil. Many proposals have been discussed, from adjustments on the age of retirement, equalizing men and women, to a complete reform, by...

The present paper analyses the influence of the judiciary and bankruptcy law in the credit market and in the economic growth in differents regions of the world. This paper also criticizes the current "Law and Finance" theory, mainly the papers of La Porta et al (1997,1998) and Levine et al...

This study investigates the relationship between debtor punishment and the development of the credit market. We empirically analyze how the level of debtor punishment relates to the credit market expansion. We find evidence that an increase in debtor punishment tends to produce a positive effect...

Following Almeida, Campello and Weisbach (2003), we use the link between financial constraints and firm’s demand for liquidity to test the effect of financial constraints on firm policies in Brazil. The effect of financial constraints can be captured by a firm’s propensity to save cash out...

This study investigates the relationship between debtors? punishment and the credit market development. As the main goal we analyze empirically which is the optimal level of the debtors? punishment, providing the highest credit market development. Aligned with earlier theoretical findings from...