We investigate the effects of extreme weather events on voicing political opposition against authoritarian regimes. We use the Brazilian general elections of 1982 as a case study. At the time, Brazil was under a military dictatorship that promoted local and gubernatorial elections to validate its authoritarian power. This context provides a positive measure of protest coined shrimp vote. Moreover, during the elections, the country’s northeastern region was facing a long-lasting drought that started in 1979. Using data from meteorological ground stations to compute a measure of drought severity that takes rainfall and evaporation into account, we estimate the effects of the drought on the voting behavior of individuals in this region. Our findings suggest a negative causal effect of adverse weather shocks on the share of protest votes. Specifically, a one-standard-deviation from the historical average water deficit reduces the share of shrimp vote by 2.5%. We also test for heterogeneity among factors such as relief transfers, clientelism, social vulnerability, and economic vulnerability. We only find heterogeneous effects for economic vulnerability. Namely, municipalities whose economy depended less on weather-resistant crops featured stronger declines in protest in response to drought severity.

This paper studies a central bank’s optimal interest rate corridor choice in the presence of an endogenous interbank network. We first provide a characterization of the unique equilibrium of banks’ liquidity holdings for any network of credit lines. Then, we endogenize the network and show that every equilibrium network is a complete coreperiphery graph. Central banks face the following trade-off. A narrower corridor implies more precise targeting of the interbank rate. But, when accounting for banks’ endogenous linking decisions, a narrower corridor may lead to a sparser interbank network with higher aggregate liquidity holdings. This incurs an implic it cost, since these funds could be invested in the more productive illiquid asset instead. We solve for the optimal corridor width and provide a comparative statics analysis.

This paper studies the effects of campaign spending limits on the political entry, selection, and behavior of local politicians in Brazil. We analyze a reform that limits campaign spending for mayoral elections. The limits were implemented with a discontinuity that we exploit for causal identification. We find that stricter limits reduce reelection rates and increase political competition by attracting more candidates who are also less wealthy and rely less on self-financing. Despite their effects on electoral outcomes, stricter limits did not lead to significant short-run improvements in policy outcomes, such as in education and health.

This paper analyses whether electing a miner as mayor in a Brazilian municipality has implications on municipal environmental expenditure and general health. First, by merging different public administrative data, this paper identifies candidates for municipal office in Brazil who hold a mining permit. Then, I use close elections to apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of electing a miner mayor on public environmental expense. Furthermore, by using a difference-in-differences approach, I focus on the election of mayors who mine gold, a highly contaminating activity, and check whether potential mercury contamination due to gold mining affects health outcomes in neighboring municipalities. In both cases, this paper does not find a statistically significant causal effect, however, the analysis lacks statistical power due to the small sample size.

We explore the relation between monetary policy and welfare in a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian (HANK) model by grouping households in wealth classes. Our goal is to analyze the principal channels through which monetary policy affects classes’ income, savings and how it is related to their welfare after a demand and technology shocks. Our analysis covers different signs and magnitudes for these shocks, along with different Taylor rules and parameters’ calibration. In the demand shock case, the wealthiest 10% and poorest 90% have irreconcilable policy preferences. We propose total income is central to explain classes’ policy preferences. Bigger streams of income augment the number of consumption and leisure streams households can choose, improving welfare. In the technology shock case, after a negative shock, rules more reactive to output moderate the rise in interest rates and the recession. We propose it is relatively easier to cushion the shock under these rules by increasing borrowings. Consequently, households prefer them instead of rules more reactive to inflation and non reactive to output. However, after a positive shock, households prefer the Taylor rule which maximize total income, following the same logic from the demand shock case.

We characterize jump dynamics in stock market returns using a novel series of intraday prices covering over 80 years. Jump dynamics vary substantially over time. Trends in jump activity relate to secular shifts in the nature of news. Unscheduled news often involving major wars drives jump activity in early decades, whereas scheduled news and especially news pertaining to monetary policy drives jump activity in recent decades. Jump variation measures forecast excess stock market returns, consistent with theory. Results support models featuring a separate jump factor such that risk premium dynamics are not fully captured by volatility state variables

In 2014, the Brazilian Securities and Exchange Commission included equity offerings in the restricted efforts regulatory instruction, allowing firms to issue equity through simpler, faster procedures, disclosing less information to the market. In turn, firms choosing that issuance method are allowed to sell their new shares to a group consisting of no more than 50 qualified investors. Since the new rules came into force, almost all seasoned equity offerings carried out by listed companies took place under restricted efforts. In this work, we study the impact of the new regulatory setting on two types of costs regarding seasoned equity offerings: the first, an indirect one, is the effect of offering announcements on the issuer’s stock price. An event study shows that abnormal returns in a three-day window around the announcement are, on average, 3.23 percentage points higher when the company issues equity under restricted efforts rather than traditional rules. The second type of cost, the direct one, consists of fees paid to the underwriters and other expenses. Under restricted efforts, those fees (as a percentage of total offering proceeds) are, on average, 1.01 percentage point lower than fees charged in the offerings that follow the traditional procedures. We argue that the reduction in the two types of costs is due (at least partially) to the mitigation of information asymmetry provided by the new issuance method.

I analyze how two reforms, introduced to expand college access in Brazil, impacted enrollments of low-SES students. The first policy centralized applications in a nationwide platform (SISU), and the second expanded affirmative action quotas (AA) to a uniform share of 50 percent of vacancies offered by degree. Results show that SISU changes enrollment decisions of high-SES students, crowding out low-SES groups from the least competitive degrees disproportionately. In contrast, AA increases enrollments of low-SES individuals not only mechanically but also through behavioral responses. Finally, their interaction creates a complementary effect, protecting the low-SES groups from the crowding-out of centralization