What kind of judiciary do we want?: the access to justice in Brazil

The goal of this paper is to discuss a key issue in the Democratic Rule of Law State: what are the role and main functions of the Judiciary in Brazil? Is the Judiciary mainly a public service provider, adjudicating disputes and guaranteeing individual rights? Or also as a state power, it should mainly control and guide the moral values of the society, changing the status quo and reducing social conflicts? In this sense, what are the conflicts that must be examined by the Judiciary? We will seek to answer these questions based on a discussion subsidized by courts official statistics and the results of surveys conducted with the Brazilian general population. The surveys measured how do citizens feel about their judicial system and what are the circumstances and the facts that determine the judicialization of conflicts. We work with the perceptions and attitudes of citizens relating to the Judiciary as it is today and discuss the Judiciary they want. Then, we compare how attitudes and perceptions relate to actual behavior and use of courts.

Regulation and wage adjustment patterns : non parametric evidence from longitudinal data

This paper gives a first step toward a methodology to quantify the influences of regulation on short-run earnings dynamics. It also provides evidence on the patterns of wage adjustment adopted during the recent high inflationary experience in Brazil.The large variety of official wage indexation rules adopted in Brazil during the recent years combined with the availability of monthly surveys on labor markets makes the Brazilian case a good laboratory to test how regulation affects earnings dynamics. In particular, the combination of large sample sizes with the possibility of following the same worker through short periods of time allows to estimate the cross-sectional distribution of longitudinal statistics based on observed earnings (e.g., monthly and annual rates of change).The empirical strategy adopted here is to compare the distributions of longitudinal statistics extracted from actual earnings data with simulations generated from minimum adjustment requirements imposed by the Brazilian Wage Law. The analysis provides statistics on how binding were wage regulation schemes. The visual analysis of the distribution of wage adjustments proves useful to highlight stylized facts that may guide future empirical work.

Aplicação da inflação diária para previsão do IPCA

Since 2006, the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) calculates a daily version of the Broad Consumer Price Index (IPCA), the official inflation index, calculated under the responsibility of the IBGE, the federal statistics agency in Brazil. Ardeo et. al. (2013) showed the importance of this indicator and how this daily information can be useful to a country that had high level of inflation. Despite the fact that this measure is a fair antecedent variable for inflation, due to some peculiarities concerning the collection period, the initial daily rating may not anticipate some effects, such as seasonal factors and the increase in prices controlled by the Brazilian Government. Hence, by taking into account the Monitor´s daily time series, this paper intends to forecast the IPCA for the first six days of data collection. The results showed up that the proposal technic improved the IPCA forecast in the beginning of data collection.