We consider a new method to estimate causal effects when a treated unit suffers a shock or an intervention, such as a policy change, but there is not a readily available control group or counterfactual. We propose a two-step approach where in the first stage an artificial counterfactual is estimated from a large-dimensional set of variables from pool of untreated units (“donors pool”) using shrinkage methods, such as the Least Absolute Shrinkage Operator (LASSO). In the second stage, we estimate the average intervention effect on a vector of variables belonging to the treated unit, which is consistent and asymptotically normal. Our results are valid uniformly over a wide class of probability laws. Furthermore, we show that these results still hold when the date of the intervention is unknown and must be estimated from the data. Tests for multiple interventions and for contamination effects are also derived. By a simple transformation of the variables of interest, it is also possible to test for intervention effects on several moments (such as the mean or the variance) of the variables of interest. Finally, we can disentangle the actual intervention effects from confounding factors that usually bias “before-and-after” estimators. A detailed Monte Carlo experiment evaluates the properties of the method in finite samples and compares our proposal with other alternatives such as the differences-in-differences, factor models and the synthetic control method. An empirical application to evaluate the effects on inflation of a new anti tax evasion program in Brazil is considered. Our methodology is inspired by different branches of the literature such as: the Synthetic Control method, the Global Vector Autoregressive models, the econometrics of structural breaks, and the counterfactual analysis based on macro-econometric and panel data models.

Political corruption is considered a major impediment to economic development, and yet it remains pervasive throughout the world. This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in the context of Brazil’s anti-corruption program, which randomly audits municipalities for their use of federal funds. We find that being audited in the past reduces future corruption by 8 percent, while also increasing the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent legal action by 20 percent. We interpret these reduced-form findings through a political agency model, which we structurally estimate. Based on our estimated model, the reduction in corruption comes mostly from the audits increasing the perceived threat of the non-electoral costs of engaging in corruption.

Expansionary fiscal policies have been advocated to induce output expansions and inflation in deep recession or deflationary episodes. We show that, in a fiscalist setup, an increase in deficits can trigger a stagflation by negatively affecting financial intermediation of resources to investments. Financial intermediaries collect deposits to buy government bonds and lend through nominal long-term loans. When intermediaries face financial frictions and a maturity mismatch on their assets and liabilities, a surprise inflation and/or a revaluation of bonds prices impair their net-worth reducing lending, investments, and output. Recession comes with inflation in a fiscal expansion because the fall on capital triggered on the financial sector rises production firms marginal costs. The probability of a recession is higher the greater is the maturity mismatch, the sensitivity of bonds prices to the policy rate, and the share of bonds on banks balances. These results: (1) give theoretical support for the negative relation documented between financial sector performance and inflation (2) help explaining high debt, highflination environments coinciding with banking crisis and, more importantly, (3) expose drawbacks of fiscal inflation policies proposed to inflate and stimulate low inflation economies, where the setup stressed in this paper is more probable to be present.

We develop a multisector model in which capital and labor are free to move across firms within each sector, but cannot move across sectors. To isolate the role of sectoral specificity, we compare our model with otherwise identical multisector economies with either economy-wide or firm-specific factor markets. Sectoral factor specificity generates within-sector strategic substitutability and tends to induce across-sector strategic complementarity in price setting. Our model can produce either more or less monetary non-neutrality than those other two models, depending on parameterization and the distribution of price rigidity across sectors. Under the empirical distribution for the U.S., our model behaves similarly to an economy with firm-specific factors in the short-run, and later on approaches the dynamics of the model with economy-wide factor markets. This is consistent with the idea that factor price equalization might take place gradually over time, so that firm-specificity may serve as a reasonable short-run approximation, whereas economy-wide markets are likely a better description of how factors of production are allocated in the longer run

The demographic transition can affect the equilibrium real interest rate through three channels. An increase in longevity - or expectations thereof - puts downward pressure on the real interest rate, as agents build up their savings in anticipation of a longer retirement period. A reduction in the population growth rate has two counteracting effects. On the one hand, capital per-worker rises, thus inducing lower real interest rates through a reduction in the marginal product of capital. On the other hand, the decline in population growth eventually leads to a higher dependency ratio (the fraction of retirees to workers). Because retirees save less than workers, this compositional effect lowers the aggregate savings rate and pushes real rates up. We calibrate a tractable life-cycle model to capture salient features of the demographic transition in developed economies, and nd that its overall effect is a reduction of the equilibrium interest rate by at least one and a half percentage points between 1990 and 2014. Demographic trends have important implications for the conduct of monetary policy, especially in light of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. Other policies can offset the negative eects of the demographic transition on real rates with different degrees of success.

Analiso a evolução das taxas de juros e câmbio desde o Plano Real. O objetivo é mostrar como a inter-relação entre essas duas variáveis macroeconômicas evoluiu ao longo das últimas duas décadas, gerando a atual configuração de custo de capital para as empresas brasileiras. O capítulo finaliza com uma agenda de tarefas a serem cumpridas para permitir reduzir o custo de capital, assim estimulando o investimento e aumentando o crescimento econômico.

Estimamos um modelo dinâmico, estocástico, de equilíbrio geral para a economia brasileira, levando em conta explicitamente a transição do sistema de bandas cambiais para o regime de metas para a inflação com câmbio flutuante, ocorrida em 1999. O modelo estimado produz dinâmicas bastante distintas sob os dois regimes monetários. Construímos, então, algumas histórias contrafactuais da transição entres os dois regimes, utilizando as séries de choques estruturais estimados. Nossos resultados sugerem que a manutenção das bandas cambiais teria sido praticamente inviável, na medida em que a taxa de juros teria que ter permanecido em níveis extremamente elevados por vários trimestres e a atividade econômica teria contraído fortemente. Acelerar o ritmo de desvalorização da taxa de câmbio após a Crise da Ásia teria produzido taxas de inflação e de juros maiores e atividade econômica um pouco mais fraca. Por último, o modelo sugere que o primeiro semestre de 1998 pode ter oferecido uma janela de oportunidade para uma transição suave entre os dois regimes monetários.

This paper explores the interaction between a credit crunch and the maturity

of government debt, focusing on its impacts on an economy with heterogeneous

households. We nd that an increase in debt maturity helps softening the economic

slump that follows a credit crisis. We show that, immediately after the credit shock,

there is an output drop of nearly 1% when the asset available has on average one

quarter of maturity, while a contraction of only 0.6% follows when debt duration

has three quarters. The rise of asset duration indirectly enhances the income eects

unleashed by general equilibrium price dynamics, which benets bondholders and

thus softens the recession. On the other hand, an increase on debt duration impairs

the improvement of wealth distribution on the long run. The main contribution

this paper paper is to show that debt maturity is a key element to understand the

magnitude of a recession driven by credit and its welfare consequences.

For a given frequency of price changes, the real effects of a monetary shock are smaller if adjusting forms are disproportionately likely to have last set their prices before the shock. This type of selection for the age of prices provides a complete characterization of the nature of pricing frictions in time-dependent sticky-price models. In particular: 1) The Taylor (1979) model exhibits maximal selection for older prices, whereas the Calvo (1983) model exhibits no selection, so that real effects are smaller in the former than in the latter; 2) Selection is weaker and real effects of monetary shocks are larger if the hazard function of price adjustment is less strongly increasing; 3) Selection is weaker and real effects are larger if there is sectoral heterogeneity in price stickiness; 4)  election is weaker and real effects are larger if the durations of price spells are more variable.

The British war effort in the Second World War depended on United States Lend Lease and the accumulation of sterling balances by neutrals, some of which would become belligerents and by the Empire. In the end of the war sterling balances corresponded to 60% of British net receipts under Lend Lease and were 15% higher than total Marshall Plan grants in 1948-52. Of the total sterling balances, about 40% were accumulated by India. This paper seeks to evaluate the costs incurred by India in the process of reduction of these balances after the war. The sources of accumulation of balances are examined and the use of the balances to repatriate India´s sterling debt is described. The issue of a British counterclaim entailing a partial cancellation of Indian balances is considered. British efforts to convince India to accept a partial cancellation of the balances are analyzed singling out the crucial role of Keynes in defining British policy The Anglo-Indian sterling balance negotiations after independence are detailed, including the disposal of balances through releases, transfer of assets to Pakistan, settlement of pensions, purchase of military stores and British gold sales. The possible contribution of British divestment to reduce outstanding balances is assessed, The Indian case is compared with those of other sterling balance holders such as Portugal, Brazil and Argentina. The links between the accumulation of sterling balances and inflation in India are considered. In the end there was a significant reduction in the purchasing power of sterling balances but not for the reasons anticipated by London

We study how real exchange rate dynamics are a¤ected by monetary policy in dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium, sticky-price models. Our analytical and quantitative results show that the source of interest rate persistence - policy inertia or persistent policy shocks - is key. When the monetary policy rule has a strong interest rate smoothing component, these models fail to generate high real exchange rate persistence in response to monetary shocks, as policy inertia hampers their ability to generate a hump-shaped response to such shocks. Moreover, in the presence of persistent monetary shocks, increasing policy inertia may decrease real exchange rate persistence.

This note considers the problem of a principal (she) who faces a privately informed

agent (he) and only knows one moment of the distribution from which his types are drawn.

Payoffs are non-linear in the allocation and the principal maximizes her worst-case expected

profits. We recast the robust design problem as a zero-sum game played by the principal and

an adversarial nature who seeks to minimize her expected payoffs. The robust mechanism

and the worst case distribution are, then, the Nash equilibrium of such game. A robustness

property of the optimal mechanism imposes restrictions on the principal’s ex-post profit

function. These restrictions then lead to the optimal mechanism. The robust mechanism

entails exclusion of low types and distortions at the intensive margin that (in a precise sense)

are larger than what those that prevail in standard Bayesian mechanism design problems

We consider the problem of a seller who faces a privately informed buyer and only knows

one moment of the distribution from which values are drawn. In face of this uncertainty,

the seller maximizes his worst-case expected profits. We show that a robustness property

of the optimal mechanism imposes restrictions on the seller’s ex-post profit function. These

restrictions are used to derive the optimal mechanism. The optimal mechanism entails

distortions at the intensive margin, e.g., except for the highest value buyer, sales will take

place with probability strictly smaller than one. The seller can implement such allocation by

committing to post prices drawn from a non-degenerate distribution, so that randomizing

over prices is an optimal robust selling mechanism. We extend the model to deal with the

case in which: (i) M goods are sold and the buyer’s private information is multidimensional

and (ii) the seller and the buyer interact for several periods. In the case of multiple goods,

there are several optimal mechanisms. With multiple goods full bundling is optimal, as

well as selling the goods in a fully separable way. In the dynamic model, we show that

repetition, period by period, of the static-optimal mechanism is optimal.

This paper examines the role of human capital persistence in explaining long-term

development. We exploit variation induced by a state-sponsored settlement policy

that attracted a pool of immigrants with higher levels of schooling to particular regions

of Brazil in the late 19th and early 20th century. We show that municipalities that

received settlements experienced increases in schooling that persisted over time. One

century after the policy, localities that received state-sponsored settlements had higher

levels of schooling and income per capita. We provide evidence that long-run effects

were driven by persistently higher supply and use of educational inputs and shifts in

the structure of occupations towards skill-intensive sectors

This paper tests whether demand shocks affect firm dynamics. We examine whether

firms that win government procurement contracts grow more compared to firms that

compete for these contracts but do not win. We assemble a comprehensive data set

combining matched employer-employee data for the universe of formal firms in Brazil

with the universe of federal government procurement contracts over the period of

2004 to 2010. Exploiting a quasi-experimental design, we find that winning at least

one contract in a given quarter increases firm growth by 2.2 percentage points over

that quarter, with 93% of the new hires coming from either unemployment or the informal

sector. These effects also persist well beyond the length of the contracts. Part

of this persistence comes from firms participating and wining more future auctions, as

well as penetrating other markets

In this paper we show the validity of the adaptive LASSO procedure in estimating stationary

ARDL(p,q) models with GARCH innovations. We show that, given a set of initial weights,

the adaptive Lasso selects the relevant variables with probability converging to one. Afterwards, we

show that the estimator is oracle, meaning that its distribution converges to the same distribution

of the oracle assisted least squares, i.e., the least squares estimator calculated as if we knew the

set of relevant variables beforehand. Finally, we show that the LASSO estimator can be used to

construct the initial weights. The performance of the method in finite samples is illustrated using

Monte Carlo simulation

We study the asymptotic properties of the Adaptive LASSO (adaLASSO) in sparse,

high-dimensional, linear time-series models. We assume that both the number of covariates in the

model and the number of candidate variables can increase with the sample size (polynomially or

geometrically). In other words, we let the number of candidate variables to be larger than the

number of observations. We show the adaLASSO consistently chooses the relevant variables as the

number of observations increases (model selection consistency) and has the oracle property, even

when the errors are non-Gaussian and conditionally heteroskedastic. This allows the adaLASSO

to be applied to a myriad of applications in empirical finance and macroeconomics. A simulation

study shows that the method performs well in very general settings with t-distributed and heteroskedastic

errors as well with highly correlated regressors. Finally, we consider an application to

forecast monthly US inflation with many predictors. The model estimated by the adaLASSO delivers

superior forecasts than traditional benchmark competitors such as autoregressive and factor

models.

We estimate a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model of the Brazilian economy taking into account the transition from a currency peg to inflation targeting that took place in 1999. The estimated model exhibits quite different dynamics under the two monetary regimes. We use it to produce counterfactual histories of the transition from one regime to another, given the estimated history of structural shocks. Our results suggest that maintaining the currency peg would have been too costly, as interest rates would have had to remain at extremely high levels for several quarters, and GDP would have collapsed. Accelerating the pace of nominal exchange rate devaluations after the Asian Crisis would have lead to higher inflation and interest rates, and slightly lower GDP. Finally, the first half of 1998 arguably provided a window of opportunity for a smooth transition between monetary regimes.