An ordering of measures of the welfare cost of inflation in economies with interest-bearing deposits

This paper builds on Lucas (2000) and on Cysne (2003) to derive and order six alternative measures of the welfare costs of inflation (five of which already existing in the literature) for any vector of opportunity costs. The ordering of the functions is carried out for economies with or without interestbearing deposits. We provide examples and closed-form solutions for the log-log money demand both in the unidimensional and in the multidimensional setting (when interest-bearing monies are present). An estimate of the maximum relative error a researcher can incur when using any particular measure is also provided.

Determinantes da estrutura de capital no Brasil para empresas de capital aberto e fechado

Tomando como base o referencial teórico existente, o presente trabalho estuda os fatores determinantes da estrutura de capital das empresas brasileiras abertas e fechadas, com base em uma amostra de 6.396 empresas dos anos de 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 e 2004, em um total de 31.980 observações. Utilizando o procedimento econométrico de análise de dados em painel, foram realizados testes com base nos modelos de pooled OLS sem dummies de tempo, pooled OLS com dummies de tempo, efeitos fixos, efeitos aleatórios e primeiras diferenças. Para cada um destes modelos, foram feitas regressões para o endividamento de curto prazo(Y1), de longo prazo(Y2) e total(Y3). Os fatores tangibilidade, rentabilidade, liquidez, tamanho da empresa, taxa de crescimento do ativo, giro do ativo, taxa de imposto paga pela empresa, natureza do capital (aberto/fechado), segmento de atuação (classificação industrial) e o fato de uma empresa pertencer a grupo econômico apresentaram evidências de serem fatores que influenciam na estrutura de capital das empresas. Os fatores non debt tax shields (benefícios fiscais não provenientes do endividamento), idade da empresa e região geográfica de localização da empresa não se mostraram conclusivos. E, por último, os fatores singularidade e origem do capital (nacional privado, nacional estatal e estrangeiro) pareceram não exercer influência sobre o grau de endividamento das empresas.

Divisia indexes, money and welfare

We suggest the use of a particular Divisia index for measuring welfare losses due to interest rate wedges and in‡ation. Compared to the existing options in the literature: i) when the demands for the monetary assets are known, closed-form solutions for the welfare measures can be obtained at a relatively lower algebraic cost; ii) less demanding integrability conditions allow for the recovery of welfare measures from a larger class of demand systems and; iii) when the demand speci…cations are not known, using an index number entitles the researcher to rank di¤erent vectors of opportunity costs directly from market observations. We use two examples to illustrate the method.

The Brazilian foreign exchange market through the microstructure perspective

The objective of this study is to investigate whether the relationship between order ow and the spot exchange rate stems from the fact that the ow aggregates information on dispersed economic fundamentals in the economy. To perform this test, a database that includes all transactions of the commercial and nancial segments of the Brazilian primary foreign exchange market between January of 1999 and May of 2008 was used. We show that the order ow was partly responsible for variations in in ation expectations over the time period and that this relationship did not remain robust, drawing comparisons with other fundamentals such as GDP and Industrial Production.