Fiscal Policy in Brazil through the Lens of an Estimated DSGE Model

This paper takes Brazilian data to an open economy DSGE model that features realistic aspects of fiscal policy in Brazil. The model incorporates primary surplus targets, cyclical expenditures and social programs in the form of public transfers, public investment and distortive taxation. We test for two competing specifications of the role of public capital in the real economy. Bayesian model comparison favors the infrastructure approach to public capital. The presence of non-Ricardian households allows fiscal policy shocks to affect real economy aggregates and distribution. The model is used to address questions regarding the effect of shocks to different fiscal policy instruments upon the business cycle. We also investigate whether recent fiscal policy in Brazil has exerted significant inflationary pressures.

Comment on Market Discipline and Monetary Policy by Carl Walsh

This paper aims at correcting flaws in the way expectations are set in a paper by Walsh (2000) in order to assess with precision the impact of complex market rigidities and market expectations in the optimal choices of inflation in a monetary game between society and central bankers. After setting the expectations right, one of the results achieved indicates that the optimal inflation under any type of central banker is higher than that obtained in the original paper, suggesting that the time inconsistency phenomenon plays a more important role in explaining an inflationary bias than originally interpreted by Walsh (2000). However, if society organizes itself towards shorter tenure wage contracts, inflation will be lower. The results obtained for the output gap of the economy also differ from those achieved by Walsh in the sense that a central banker who is highly committed to previously announced inflation targets will have more opportunities to generate output growth above equilibrium rates and still commit. Finally, the stability of the premises regarding the contractual structure of the economy proposed by Walsh is tested under a game theoretic approach. The outcome of the test is that stability can be guaranteed only under strong assumptions and high symmetry in the sectoral distribution of firms. By using a social welfare function in which price surprises in any direction lead to welfare loss, the results indicate that society is better off by choosing longer tenure wage contracts, moving away from shorter tenure ones, at the cost of higher inflation.

The Incidence of Reserve Requirements in Brazil: Do Bank Stockholders Share the Burden?

There is consensus in the economic literature that the reserve requirements are a tax levied upon financial intermediation, yet the incidence of the tax remains controversial. In this paper, we test whether changes in reserve requirements in Brazil impact the stock returns of the financial system distinctly from the rest of the economy. We find evidence that Brazilian bank stock returns were affected by changes in reserve requirements on both time deposits and transaction accounts, which implies that the tax burden of required reserves was not fully passed through to banks' borrowers or clients. Stock returns of non-financial firms were also affected by these changes, suggesting that in some cases, reserve requirements on time deposits and transaction accounts served as a non-neutral instrument of monetary or fiscal policy in Brazil.

Uma Breve Análise de Medidas Alternativas à Mediana na Pesquisa de Expectativas de Inflação do Banco Central do Brasil

This note presents a brief analysis of representative measures of the forecasts surveyed by the Investor Relations and Special Studies Department at the Central Bank of Brazil, aside from the median forecast. We build time series of the core and mode of survey forecasts from January 2001 to December 2010, and compare their predictive power with median forecast and with the CPI core measure for the 12-month-ahead horizon.

Market Forecasts in Brazil: performance and determinants

This paper assesses a wide set of aspects of market forecasts in Brazil: rationality, predictive power, joint performance, epidemiology and determinants. Using the survey conducted by the Central Bank of Brazil (CBB) among professional forecasters during the inflation targeting period, the main results are as follows: i) credibility in Brazilian monetary policy has increased over time, since inflation targets are important to explain inflation expectations, and private agents perceive the CBB as following a Taylor-type rule that is consistent with the inflation targeting framework; ii) market inflation forecasts had similar or better forecast performance than ARMA-, VAR- and BVAR-based forecasts with standard information sets; iii) the joint performance of market forecasts has improved over the past years; iv) in the decomposition of forecast errors for inflation, interest rate and exchange rate, the common forecast error component prevails over the idiosyncratic component across survey respondents; v) top-five forecasters published by the CBB are influential in other respondents’ forecasts; vi) inflation forecasts are unbiased but not fully efficient; and vii) inflation forecast uncertainty is positively related to increasing inflation and to country-risk premium.

A brief analysis of aggregate measures as an alternative to the median at Central Bank of Brazil's Survey of Professional Forecasts

This paper presents a brief analysis of representative measures of inflation expectations from Central Bank of Brazil's Survey of Professional Forecasts that are alternative to the median response. We build time series with the mode and core measures of inflation expectations from the panel of professional forecasts surveyed from January 2002 to September 2012. We compare them to the median response with respect to their predictive power in a 12-month-ahead horizon. We also compare the predictive power of the alternative measures with the realized core of consumer price inflation.Esse artigo apresenta uma breve análise de medidas representativas alternativas à mediana da pesquisa de expectativas conduzida pelo Departamento de Relacionamento com Investidores e Estudos Especiais (Gerin) do Banco Central do Brasil. A partir do painel de expectativas coletadas de janeiro de 2002 a setembro de 2012, construímos séries históricas de núcleos e da moda das expectativas para a inflação, que, a seguir, são comparadas com a mediana em relação ao seu poder preditivo para o horizonte de 12 meses à frente. Comparamos também o poder preditivo dessas medidas com respeito ao núcleo de inflação do IPCA

Comment on ‘Market discipline and monetary policy’ by Carl Walsh

This paper shows that the results Walsh (2000, Market discipline and monetary policy, Oxford Economic Papers, 52, 249--71) obtains are highly sensitive to the assumption that different wage contracts are based on different information sets even though they are negotiated simultaneously. In particular, the power of future expectations to discipline an opportunistic central banker is much weaker when homogeneous information sets are used. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.