This work presents the results of a case study about a private institution for certification of suppliers, the PRODFOR. A set of hypotheses arose from fieldwork, and it was further tested empirically with data gathered from a survey. Through signaling with standardization and reduction of risks...

In 2004, Brazil provided an interesting natural experiment concerning personal credit. A new law was enacted allowing banks to offer loans with repayment through automatic payroll or social security benefit deduction, thus removing a significant part of the moral hazard problem by eliminating...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation between corporate governance and corporate events’ performance. Firms that engage in corporate events seem to perform at least as bad as similar firms that did not. Based on agency theory, the authors hypothesize that lower...

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...

In December 2003, the Brazilian Congress passed a law that led to a natural personal lending experiment. The law allows banks to offer loans with repayment through automatic payroll deduction, which, in effect, turns future income into collateral. We estimate the impact of the new law using auto...