How large are welfare costs associated with economic aggregate fluctuations is a topic of great concern among economists at least since Robert Lucas' well-known and thought-provoking exercise in the late 1980s. Our analysis assesses the magnitude of such costs for nine countries in South America...

Consumption is an important macroeconomic aggregate, being about 70% of GNP. Finding sub-optimal behavior in consumption decisions casts a serious doubt on whether optimizing behavior is applicable on an economy-wide scale, which, in turn, challenge whether it is applicable at all. This paper...

The aim of this work is to analyze the regional unemployment rate behavior in Brazil. Firstly, unit root tests with structural breaks were used to determine which theoretical framework - hysteresis or NAIRU - is more appropriate to explain the unemployment dynamics not only in six Brazilian...