This paper estimates the health dimension of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil

incorporating age, gender, educational, and regional heterogeneities. We use the marginal

willingness to pay approach from the “value of life” literature to assign monetary values to the

welfare cost of increased mortality due to violence. The results indicate that the present

discounted value of the welfare cost of homicides in Brazil corresponds to roughly 78% of the

GDP or, measured in terms of yearly flow, 2.3%. The analysis also indicates that reliance on

aggregate data to perform such calculations, without taking into account the relevant dimensions

of heterogeneity, can lead to biases of the order of 20% in the estimated social cost of violence.

This paper investigates the impact of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs on crime. Making use of a unique dataset combining detailed school characteristics with time and geo-referenced crime information from the city of São Paulo, Brazil, we estimate the contemporaneous effect of the Bolsa Família program on crime. We address the endogeneity of CCT coverage by exploiting the 2008 expansion of the program to  adolescents aged 16 and 17. We construct an instrument that combines the timing of expansion and the initial demographic composition of schools to identify plausibly exogenous variations in the number of children covered by Bolsa Família. We find a robust and significant negative impact of Bolsa Família coverage on crime. The evidence suggests that the main effect works through increased household income or changed peer group, rather than from incapacitation from time spent in school.

This paper introduces cash transfers targeting the poor in an incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents facing idiosyncratic risk. These transfers change the degree of insurance in the economy and affect precautionary motives asymmetrically, leading the poorest households to decrease savings proportionally more than their richer counterparts. In a model economy calibrated to Brazil, once the cash transfer program is adopted, wealth inequality and social welfare increase, poverty decreases, while employment and income inequality remain about the same. Imperfect access to financial markets is important for these  results, whereas whether the program is funded with lump sum or distortive taxes is not.

This article is on the activities of British money doctors in South America between the 1890s and the 1930s, hitherto overlooked in the literature. It focuses on Sir Otto Niemeyer’s missions to Brazil and Argentina in the early 1930s compared to his earlier report on New Zealand and Professor Edwin Kemmerer’s report on Chile in the mid-1920s. The impact of their visits on the market evaluation of risk related to bonds floated by the largest South American economies is quantitatively analyzed. Difficulties involved in generalizations about links between policy proposals and market evaluation enhance the interest of studying specific experiences.

Niemeyer’s general proposals to the Brazilian government in mid-1931 advising on a possible return to the gold standard are evaluated. His specific proposals on central banking in New Zealand, Argentina and Brazil are discussed in contrast with Kemmerer’s proposals in Chile. The focus is on the autonomy of central banks, representation of sectoral interests, the role of gold in total foreign exchange reserves, and the exertion of foreign influence though directors, shareholders and permanent experts. Finally, the realism of proposals is evaluated in the context of contemporary economic conditions compared with advice provided by other experts on related issues

A ser publicado em Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2012.

We derive the asymptotic distribution of the ordinary least squares estimator in a regression

with cointegrated variables under misspecification and/or nonlinearity in the regressors. We show

that, under some circumstances, the order of convergence of the estimator changes and the asymptotic

distribution is non-standard. The t-statistic might also diverge. A simple case arises when the intercept

is erroneously omitted from the estimated model or in nonlinear-in-variables models with endogenous

regressors. In the latter case, a solution is to use an instrumental variable estimator. The core results in

this paper also generalise to more complicated nonlinear models involving integrated time series.

Publicado em Econometic Reviews, v. 33, n.7, p. 713-731, 2014