Despite a recent expansion in housing finance, Brazil still faces a severe housing shortage, especially among lower-income people, and it is important to examine the development, limitations and prospects of the country`s housing finance market. This paper investigates the recent evolution of...

Government-driven credit played an important role in countervailing the private credit crunch in Brazil during the recent financial crisis. However, government credit concessions continued to expand after the economy recovered. This paper investigates some important features of this expansion...

This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining the banking supervisory functions at the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB). First, these pros and cons are identified and listed using the economic literature, after a brief analysis of the ongoing debate and international...

This paper examines the impact of payroll debit loans - a Brazilian new modality of credit - on interest rates. The main characteristic of the new credit operation is the enforcement of a direct deduction of amortizations from personal payroll checks. Adapting a matching strategy proposed by...

This study seeks to evaluate some effects of the heterogeneity of economic agents, borrowers and lenders, in the bank credit market, and how these differences are reflected in their decision-making and in the operations features. For this, we analyze default data in vehicle financing from May...

This work presents a semi parametric approach to evaluate the role of the Central Bank reserve requirements, both remunerated and non-remunerated, over the bank interest rate distribution in Brazil between September/2000 and March/2004. We adopted the semi parametric approach developed by...

Reserve requirements are used as an additional policy instrument in many countries. The present paper examines whether the use of this instrument helps to improve macroeconomic stability. The analysis is conducted by estimating and simulating a semi structural model for the Brazilian economy....