Capital Controls in Latin American Economies: Stylized Facts, Optimality and Welfare Analysis

Advisor: Márcio Garcia

Co-advisor: Diogo Abry Guillén

The present work investigates the relationship between capital controls and external accounts in Latin American economies and addresses the idea of capital control’s optimality in a small open economy. The work presents capital controls as countercyclical, where they are intended to mitigate adverse shocks in the current account. Also, using data for the Brazilian economy, the results suggest that capital controls may mitigate the volatility of the economy and allow welfare gains in the steady state. At the same time, the work shows that, at excessive taxation, an ad-hoc capital control loses its capacity to generate welfare gains, which in turn alludes certain parsimony in their introduction.