Essays on the monetary aspects of the term structure of nominal interest rates

Interest rates are key economic variables to much of finance and macroeconomics, and an enormous amount of work is found in both fields about the topic. Curiously, in spite of their common interest, finance and macro research on the topic have seldom interacted, using different approaches to address its main issues with almost no intersection. Concerned with interest rate contingent claims, finance term structure models relate interest rates to lagged interest rates; concerned with economic relations and macro dynamics, macro models regress a few interest rates on a wide variety of economic variables. If models are true though simplified descriptions of reality, the relevant factors should be captured by both the set of bond yields and that of economic variables. Each approach should be able to address the other field concerns with equal emciency, since the economic variables are revealed by the bond yields and these by the economic variables.

The impact of daycare attendance on math test scores for a cohort of 4th graders in Brazil

We estimate the impact of having attended center-based daycare institutions during early childhood on Math test scores at the 4th grade of elementary school. Because enrollment in daycare centers may depend on unobservable character-istics of the family and the child, we build and estimate a structural model of endogeneous choice of school to deal with the selectivity problem. We nd that attendance to daycare institutions is associated with a gain of approximately 0,04 standard deviation in Math test scores. This result is important to the extent our OLS results as well as most of the studies for Brazil nd no e¤ect associated to daycare attendance, suggesting selectivity may play a role on this finding.