"Vox Populi, Vox Dei" - A Discussion of Dissent Within the Modern Catholic Church

The final question is: what happens in the meantime? Is it effective to dissent while conservatives hold power and clearty are not about to make any major changes? What good does it do to repeatedly bang one's head against the wall when progress is not being made? There is no one simple answer to this question, but rather several applicable ones. The first possible answer is that dissent currently does little good. The conservative hierarchy is still the dominant force within Catholicism. This hierarchy has made a habit, evidenced by the birth control debate, of pressing its conservative agenda despite popular opposition. Many people think, that if this hierarchy has not given in to the mass of opinion against it yet, dissent is futile and useless. Why argue with someone who does not listen to your argument?

Opening the Windows of the Church to the World: The Creation of Nostra Aetate and Its Impact on the Christian-Jewish relationship

It is important to assert that this study is not a work to inflict guilt on the Catholics or Catholicism for their silence and indifference during the Holocaust. Instead, this study is about the process of moving on from the Catholic Church's past to where the Jewish community's theological existence was finally recognized and the Jewish people were no longer seen as the Others who killed Christ. This was, achieved through a church declaration titled Nostra Aetate (In Our Time). This study records the journey traversed by this declaration, the insurmountable odds it faced in its creation until its promulgation and the impact it has on the Jewish-Christian relationship.

The Brazilian social security program:diagnosis and proposal for reform

The Brazilian pay-as-you-go social security program is analyzed in a historical perspective. Its contribution to income inequality, and the role played by the inflation as a balancing variable are discussed. It is shown that budgetary constraints due to the increasing informalization of the labor force can no longer be reconciled with protligate eligibility criteria. A tailor-made proposal for reform is presented as well as a plan for financing the transition from today's system to the proposed one.

A model of rural conflict : violence and land reform policy in Brazil

In the past ten years the struggle for land in Brazil has taken the shape of invasions of private land by welI organized groups of land less squatters. It is argued in this paper that these invasions and the resulting contlicts are a direct response to the land reform program which has been adopted by the govemment since 1985. which is based on the expropriation of farms and the creation of settlement projects. The set of formal and informal institutions which compromise the land reform program are used as the background for a game-theory model of rural contlicts. T estable implications are derived trom this model with particular emphasis on the etfect of policy variables on violence. These are then tested with panel data at state levei from 1988 to 1995. - It is shown that govemment policy which has the intent of reducing the amount of violence has the opposite etfect of leading to more incentives for contlicts.

Tax reform under fiscal stress: a CGE analysis of the Brazilian tax reform

In spite of a general agreement over the distortion imposed by the current Brazilian tax system, attempts to reform it during the last decade have faced several restrictions to its implementation. Two of these restrictions were particular binding: a) fiscal adjustment restriction (public sector debt cannot increase), b) fiscal federalist restriction (revenues from individual states and municipalities cannot decrease). This paper focuses on a specific reform that overcomes in principle the fiscal federalist restriction. Using Auerbach and Kotlikoff (1987) model calibrated for the Brazilian economy, I analyze the short and long run macroeconomic effects of this reform subject to the fiscal adjustment restriction. Finally, I look at the redistributive effects of this reform among generations as a way to infer about public opinion’s reaction to the reform. The reform consists basically of replacing indirect taxes on corporate revenues, which I show to be equivalent to a symmetric tax on labor and capital income, by a new federal VAT. The reform presented positive macroeconomic effects both in the short and long run. Despite a substantial increase in the average VAT rate in the first years after the reform, a majority of cohorts experienced an increase in their lifetime welfare, being potentially in favour of the reform.

Creditor's protection and bank loans: lack of competition hamprers bankruptcy reform's effects

This dissertation investigates how credit institutions’ market power limits the effects of creditor protection rules on the interest rate and the spread of bank loans. We use the Brazilian Bankruptcy Reform of June/2005 (BBR) as a legal event affecting the institutional environment of the Brazilian credit market. The law augments creditor protection and aims to improve the access of firms to the credit market and to reduce the cost of borrowing. Either access to credit or the credit cost are also determined by bank industry competition and the market power of suppliers of credit. We derive a simple economic model to study the effect of market power interacting with cost of lending. Using an accounting and operations dataset from July/2004 to December/2007 provided by the Brazilian Central Bank, we estimate that the lack of competition in the bank lending industry hinders the potential reducing effect of the BBR on the interest rate of corporate loans by approximately 30% and on the spread by approximately 23%. We also find no statistical evidence that the BBR affected the concentration level of the Brazilian credit market. We present a brief report on bankruptcy reforms around the world, the changes in the Brazilian legislation and on some recent related articles in our introductory chapter. The second chapter presents the economic model and the testable hypothesis on how the lack of competition in the lending market limits the effects of improved creditor protection. In this chapter, we introduce our empirical strategy using a differences-in-differences model and we estimate the limiting effect of market power on the BBR’s potential to reduce interest rates and on the spread of bank loans. We use the BBR as an exogenous event that affects collateralized corporate loans (treatment group) but that does not affect clean consumer loans (control group) to identify these effects, using different concentration measures. In Chapter 3, we propose a two-stage empirical strategy to handle the H–Statistics proposed by Panzar and Rosse as a measure of market competition. We estimate the limiting effects of the lack of competition in replacing the concentration statistics by the H–Statistics. Chapter 4 presents a structural break test of the concentration index and checks if the BBR affects the dynamic evolution of the concentration index.

Regulatory reform in the brazilian railway sector and concession valuation: a preliminary assessment

Trabalho apresentado na 4th Conference on the Regulation of Infrastructures

Regulatory reform in the brazilian railway sector and its potential effects

Trabalho apresentado no Law and Society Annual Conference, 2015

Regulatory reform in the brazilian railway sector: a preliminary assesment

Escola de Direito do Rio de Janeiro da Fundação Getulio Vargas