As contas públicas do Estado do Rio de Janeiro face à legislação de responsabilidade fiscal e previdenciária: 2000 a 2007

Com o advento do Plano Real, que procedeu à estabilização da moeda em meados da década de noventa, ficou patente a gravidade da situação fiscal das unidades subnacionais. De um lado figuravam as dificuldades na condução da gestão financeira por meio da ausência do processo inflacionário que anteriormente possibilitava a indexação das receitas tributárias enquanto as despesas correntes tinham a sua liquidação e pagamento postergados. Por outro lado, a dívida consolidada, majoritariamente mobiliária, disparava em função da política monetária restritiva. Esta situação financeira precária tornou urgente a realização do ajuste fiscal dos estados que teve como condutor a União que instituiu medidas primordiais para atingir este fim, destacando-se três leis federais: a Lei de Renegociação das Dívidas Estaduais, a Lei de Responsabilidade Previdenciária e a Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal. O trabalho em tela estuda a condução das contas públicas do Estado do Rio de Janeiro no período de 2000 a 2007, objetivando verificar a existência de esforços de ajuste fiscal e em que medida estes esforços trouxeram resultados satisfatórios, demonstrando a eficácia do arcabouço legal instituído pela União. Conclui-se neste trabalho que, no período de 2000 a 2006, não ocorreu avanço significativo em direção da melhoria das contas públicas estaduais e que os superávits primários alcançados no período foram impulsionados pelo aumento de receitas de caráter instável, extraordinário e finito. Destacou-se quanto aos riscos inerentes à excessiva e crescente dependência que as finanças estaduais apresentam, relativamente às receitas supracitadas, tendo em vista que estas têm sido utilizadas para pagamento de despesas públicas correntes de caráter continuado. O presente trabalho conclui também que, a partir do ano de 2007, foi dado o pontapé inicial para o alcance do ajuste fiscal, tendo em vista a mudança de patamar do superávit primário, com ênfase na redução das despesas primárias e não no aumento das receitas extraordinárias.

Should voters be afraid of hard budget constraint legislation? fiscal responsibility law in brazilian municipalities

This manuscript demonstrates that voters have nothing to be afraid of when new hard budget constraint legislation is implemented. Our claim is that this kind of legislation reduces the asymmetry of information between voters and incumbents over the budget and, as a consequence, the latter have incentives to increase the supply of public goods. As a nationwide institutional innovation, the Fiscal Responsibility Law (FRL) is exogenous to all municipalities; therefore, there is no self-selection bias in its implementation. We show that public goods expenditure increases after the FRL. Second, this increase occurs in municipalities located in the country’s poorest region. Third, our findings can be extended to the supply of public goods because the higher the expenditure with health and education, the greater the probability of incumbents being re-elected. Finally, there exists a “de facto” higher supply of public goods in education (number of per capita classrooms) after the FRL.

Dodd Frank act and the Brazilian capital market: extraterritorial effects of regulation to the over-the-counter derivatives market

This paper aims to describe the chief alterations proposed by the Dodd Frank Act to the American over-the-counter derivatives market and, at the same time, understand the extraterritorial reach of this law compared to the regulatory framework of the Brazilian derivative market. In order to do so, I will study the extraterritorial effects of the law, particularly in reference to the international nature of Title II of the Dodd Frank, which deals with the over-the-counter derivatives, in order to evaluate its reach to foreign markets, especially the Brazilian market.

Political budget cycles in a fiscal federation : the effect of partisan voluntary transfers

This article first presents an econometric study suggesting that intergovernmental transfers to Brazilian municipalities are strongly partisan motivated. In light of that stylized fact, it develops an extension to Rogoff (1990)’s model to analyze the effect of partisan motivated transfers into sub-national electoral and fiscal equilibria. The main finding is that important partisan transfers may undo the positive selection aspect of political budget cycles. Indeed, partisan transfers may, on one hand, eliminate the political budget cycle, solving a moral hazard problem, but, on the other hand, they may retain an incompetent incumbent in office, bringing about an adverse selection problem.

Signaling in political budget cycles: How far are you willing to go?

This paper analyzes how heterogeneity in two dimensions, competency and character, a¤ects political budget cycles. Competency is the e¢ciency in running the government. Character is the degree of opportunism. In this expanded space, previous results in the literature on the separating nature of the signaling equilibrium hold if heterogeneity in opportunism is low. With high heterogeneity in opportunism, no separating equilibrium exists. Rather, the equilibrium is partially pooling: only extreme types can be distinguished.

The power of the purse : what do the data say on US federal budget allocation to the states?

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the allocation of the US federal budget to the states and tests the capability of congressional, electoral and partisan theories to explain such allocation. We find that socio-economic characteristics are important explanatory variables but are not sufficient to explain the disparities in the distribution of federal monies. First, prestige committee membership is not conducive to pork-barrelling. We do not find any evidence that marginal states receive more funding; on the opposite, safe states tend to be rewarded. Also, states that are historically "swing" in presidential elections tend to receive more funds. Finally, we find strong evidence supporting partisan theories of budget allocation. States whose governor has the same political affiliation of the President receive more federal funds; while states whose representatives belong to a majority opposing the president party receive less funds.

Dip financing of financially distressed companies in Brazil – the conditions provided by the brazilian bankruptcy law act as real incentives for dip lenders as in chapter 11 of the American bankruptcy code?

O objeto deste trabalho é a compreensão do financiamento de empresas em crise, mais especificamente, o financiamento concedido após o pedido de recuperação judicial, como forma de permitir que a empresa saia da situação de crise e retorne à condição de normalidade. Para tanto, nos apropriando do termo cunhado pela doutrina norte-americana, para fazer referência ao aporte de recursos em empresas em dificuldade, utilizaremos o termo DIP financing ou financiamento DIP. Para uma compreensão adequada do objeto, é necessário que entendamos a origem do DIP financing nos Estados Unidos e como é a regulação norte-americana sobre a matéria atualmente. O segundo passo será avaliar a possibilidade de aplicação da mesma estrutura de aporte de recursos no Brasil. Ao estudarmos a origem desse mecanismo nos Estados Unidos, veremos os problemas que surgiram ao longo dos anos e como foram superados jurisprudencialmente e doutrinariamente para que o financiamento DIP se consolidasse como uma das formas de aporte de capital em empresas em crise, culminando no desenvolvimento de uma verdadeira indústria de crédito às empresas em dificuldade. Uma análise dos problemas enfrentados pelo sistema falimentar americano nos levará a hipótese de que, a menos que sejam afirmados mecanismos que assegurem a quem concede o financiamento após o pedido de recuperação judicial, uma super prioridade no recebimento após a recuperação judicial, será possível o desenvolvimento de um mercado de DIP financing no Brasil.

Essays on health care reform, wealth inequality, and demography

This thesis contains three chapters. The first chapter uses a general equilibrium framework to simulate and compare the long run effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and of health care costs reduction policies on macroeconomic variables, government budget, and welfare of individuals. We found that all policies were able to reduce uninsured population, with the PPACA being more effective than cost reductions. The PPACA increased public deficit mainly due to the Medicaid expansion, forcing tax hikes. On the other hand, cost reductions alleviated the fiscal burden of public insurance, reducing public deficit and taxes. Regarding welfare effects, the PPACA as a whole and cost reductions are welfare improving. High welfare gains would be achieved if the U.S. medical costs followed the same trend of OECD countries. Besides, feasible cost reductions are more welfare improving than most of the PPACA components, proving to be a good alternative. The second chapter documents that life cycle general equilibrium models with heterogeneous agents have a very hard time reproducing the American wealth distribution. A common assumption made in this literature is that all young adults enter the economy with no initial assets. In this chapter, we relax this assumption – not supported by the data – and evaluate the ability of an otherwise standard life cycle model to account for the U.S. wealth inequality. The new feature of the model is that agents enter the economy with assets drawn from an initial distribution of assets. We found that heterogeneity with respect to initial wealth is key for this class of models to replicate the data. According to our results, American inequality can be explained almost entirely by the fact that some individuals are lucky enough to be born into wealth, while others are born with few or no assets. The third chapter documents that a common assumption adopted in life cycle general equilibrium models is that the population is stable at steady state, that is, its relative age distribution becomes constant over time. An open question is whether the demographic assumptions commonly adopted in these models in fact imply that the population becomes stable. In this chapter we prove the existence of a stable population in a demographic environment where both the age-specific mortality rates and the population growth rate are constant over time, the setup commonly adopted in life cycle general equilibrium models. Hence, the stability of the population do not need to be taken as assumption in these models.