The determinants of technical efficiency in agriculture and cattle ranching are closely related with the debate involving the conservation-development trade-off in the Brazilian Amazon. Concerned with balancing development and environmental conservation, policy makers and academics have...

Moral concepts affect crime supply. This idea is modelled assuming that illegal activities is habit forming. We introduce habits in a intertemporal general equilibrium framework to illegal activities and compare its outcomes with a model without habit formation. The findings are that habit (i)...

This paper presents a new assessment the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, relaxing the neoclassical hypothesis of perfect factor mobility and wage flexibility. We build a model economy in which some sector face imperfect competition and workers are unionized in those sector, so that wages are not...

In this paper, we develop a model that has as main outcome the existence of a non-linear relationship between growth and level of education (human capital). This non- linearity condition accrues from empirical estimation done at international level. Moreover, this non-linearity explains the...

Cross-holding (vertical quasi-integration) is often characterized as a major organizational failure in the Brazilian petrochemical industry. This paper aims to identify if there is governance misalignment in three periods: the end of the 1980's and 1990's, and after the founding of Braskem, in...

We discuss four different concepts of feminization of poverty and analyze household survey data to verify if there is an undergoing feminization of poverty in eight Latin American countries, according to each of these concepts. We also verify if our results are sensible to changes in values of...

This article analyzes the income polarization in Brazil for 1981 and 2003. After we explain the differences between polarization and inequality, we calculate the income polarization for Brazil, based on the work of Esteban, Gradin e Ray (1999). The results indicate that the bipolarization...

This article analyzes the work polarization in Brazil. We can define polarization as the difference between the observed ratio of workless households and the ratio that would prevailed if the work was randomly assigned to people. For example, imagine a simplified world with only two households...

This article aims to apply a dynamic general-equilibrium model to Brazilian regional economics based on a version of "augmented" neoclassical economic growth model of Mankiw, Romer and Weil [QJE, 1992] using computational simulation. The results reach a trend of spatial concentration and...

The introduction of linear-quadratic methods in monetary economics in the 1960s tinged the intense debate about the optimal monetary policy instrument. These methods were widely used outside monetary economics because they delivered easy solutions to complex stochastic models. This same reason...