Macroeconomic management and the division of powers in Brazil : perspectives for the nineties

The federal authority for macroeconomic management in Brazil has experienced a profound change as a result of the institutional changes that culminated with the promulgation of a new Federal Constitution in October of 1988. This paper examines the implications of the new fiscal arrangements for the exercise of macroeconomic policies by the federal government. It examines how recent changes in the division of powers among federal, state, and local governments in Brazil have affected the conditions for macroeconomic management in that country. This examination gains an added significance given that the erratic character of macroeconomic performance in Brazil has often been blamed on macroeconomic mismanagement. It focuses on how federal control of the policy variables has been affected by the latest development in Brazilian institutions.National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Stabilization,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management

Profits and balance sheet developments at U.S. commercial banks in 1998

The performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry remained strong in 1998, but slipped a bit from the remarkable results of recent years. Both the return on assets and the return on equity edged down last year, although they remained high by historical standards. While supported by growth in fee income, profitability was damped by a large decline in the rates banks earned on their interest-bearing assets relative to the rates they paid on their liabilities, and also by higher noninterest costs, especially merger and restructuring expenses. Profitability was uneven last year across bank sizes: Whereas the largest and the smallest banks posted lower earnings, the profits of medium-sized banks--which account for almost two-thirds of industry assets--improved once again in 1998. Nevertheless, though these figures attest to the profitability of most banks, the share of bank assets at unprofitable institutions increased 2 percentage points, to 2.6 percent, the highest since 1994.Banks and banking ; Bank profits ; Bank assets

Bounded Rationality and Strategic Complementarity in a Macroeconomic Model: Policy Effects, Persistence and Multipliers

Motivated by recent developments in the bounded rationality and strategic complementarity literatures, we examine an intentionally simple and stylized aggregative economic model, when the assumptions of fully rational expectations and no strategic interactions are relaxed. We show that small deviations from rational expectations, taken alone, lead only to small deviations from classical policy- ineffectiveness, but that the situation can change dramatically when strategic complementarity is introduced. Strategic complementarity magnifies the effects of even small departures from rational expectations, producing equilibria with policy effectiveness, output persistence and multiplier effects.

Heterogeneous Forecasts and Aggregate Dynamics

Motivated by issues raised in both the nance and economics literatures, I construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents use diering degrees of sophistication when forecasting future economic conditions. All agents solve standard dynamic optimization prob-lems and face strategic complementarity in production, but some solve their inference problems based on simple forecasting rules of thumb. Assuming a hierarchical information structure similar to the one in Townsend's (1983) model of informationally dispersed markets, I show that even a minority of rule-of-thumb forecasters can have a signicant eect on the aggregate properties of the economy. For instance, as agents try to forecast each others ' behavior they eectively strengthen the internal propagation mechanism of the economy. The quantitative results are obtained by calibrating the model and running a battery of sensitivity tests on key parameters. The analysis highlights the role of strategic complementarity in the heterogeneous expectations literature and quanties many qualitative claims about the aggregate implications of expectational heterogeneity