Suchergebnisse

The Covid-19 crisis has lead to a reduction in the demand and supply of sectors that produce goods that need social interaction to be produced or consumed. We interpret the Covid-19 shock as a shock that reduces utility stemming from 'social' goods in a two-sector economy with incomplete markets. We compare the advantages of lump-sum transfers versus a credit policy. For the same path of government debt, transfers are preferable when debt limits are tight, whereas credit policy is preferable when they are slack. A credit policy has the advantage of targeting fiscal resources toward agents that matter most for stabilizing demand. We illustrate this result with a calibrated model. We discuss various shortcomings and possible extensions to the model.

We document that a huge frustration shock, clearly unrelated to government's actions, was perceived to lead to substantial punishment at the polls months later. In particular, we provide evidence that Brazil's 7-1 humiliating defeat to Germany in the 2014 World Cup was perceived by financial market participants as a political shock against the incumbent president. To do so, we explore an empirical strategy that allows us to extract daily political news content from stock market data. Among the many events that affected the convoluted 2014 presidential election, the 7-1 defeat to Germany was among those perceived to have high political impact. We propose an explanation whereby this huge frustration shock triggered a transfer of domains that led Brazilians to update their beliefs regarding government's poor performance.

A public job can be seen as a source of insurance against income risk. Indeed, many public employees have job stability, which is compounded with less volatile and more compressed wages. Hence, by increasing its number of public employees, the government enhances the overall degree of insurance in the economy. In this paper, we introduce public employment in a standard incomplete markets model with overlapping generations. The aim is to explore the welfare gains or losses due to a larger government, accounting for this extra source of insurance. In a model economy calibrated to Brazil, where public employment is around 13.5 percent of the workforce, we find that if the government relies on consumption taxes to balance its budget, the optimal size of public employment is nearly flat, ranging from 8 to 12 percent of the workforce. However, if the public employment is reduced from 12 to 8 percent, welfare losses due to a reduction in the degree of insurance are 2 percent, which are compensated by welfare gains due to level and inequality effects. This insurance effect is robust to a missepecification of the production technology associated with the public sector

Abstract
While most economic studies of crime have examined the determinants of criminal activity, this paper asks the reverse question: how does crime affect economic behavior? We study the relationship between crime and savings in the cities of São Paulo, a wealthy but crime-ridden state in Brazil. Our empirical results suggest that property crime is associated with an increase in savings. However, we do not observe a relationship between violent crime and savings, findings that are consistent with the theoretical explanation as to why crime induces thriftiness. These results are robust to an extensive sensitivity analysis that includes: 1) the inclusion of a large set of demographic covariates when examining cross-city variation; 2) accounting for city and period fixed effects when studying cross-city variation over time; 3) accounting for sample selection; and 4) splitting the sample by population size and income. We provide evidence that the association is not driven by reallocation towards bank deposits in general, which are safer assets in high-crime environments. Finally, we find a similar impact using household consumption and savings data.