This paper explores the link between Brazil's political institutions and its disappointing productivity and growth in recent decades. Although political institutions provide the president with incentives and the instruments to pursue monetary stability and fiscal discipline they simultaneously...

In this project, the authors analyze the budgetary process to determine who decides on public expenditures in Brazil. The focus is not so much on the actual fiscal outcomes that emerge from the budgetary process, but rather on the policy making process that generates those outcomes. This...

This book explains how economies, institutions, and politics interact to produce budget outcomes in Latin America, a region in which informality dominates public governance. It includes detailed country analyses which provide comparative knowledge about the workings of policymaking and budget...

In this project, the authors analyze the budgetary process to determine who decides on public expenditures in Brazil. The focus is not so much on the actual fiscal outcomes that emerge from the budgetary process, but rather on the policy making process that generates those outcomes. This...

We link a model of inequality and redistribution where multiple steady states can emerge, to the recent literature on beliefs, and argue that changes in beliefs may shift the equilibrium over time. We present evidence that beliefs are typically very stable over time, yet argue that Brazil has...

¿Qué determina la capacidad de los países para diseñar, aprobar e implementar políticas públicas efectivas? Para abordar esta pregunta, este libro analiza el proceso de formulación de políticas en ocho países latinoamericanos en base a una metodología común con fundamentos en la...

We found that the driving force behind policies in Brazil is the strong set of powers given to the President by the Constitution of 1988. To have strong powers does not mean unbridled powers. Several institutions constrain and check the power of the President, in particular the legislature, the...

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 gave relatively strong powers to the President. We model and test Executive-Legislative relations in Brazil and demonstrate that Presidents have used pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms. In particular Presidents Cardoso and Lula...

We extend the literature on interest group behavior and policy outcomes by examining how groups with limited resources (votes and campaign contributions) effectively influence government by manipulating media information to voters. Voters in turn lobby politicians to implement the group's...