Balance Sheet Effects in Currency Crises: Evidence from Brazil

In third generation currency crises models, balance sheet losses from currency depreciations propagate the crises into the real sector of the economy. To test these models, we built a firmlevel database that allowed us to measure currency mismatches around the 2002 Brazilian currency crisis. We found that between 2001 and 2003, firms with large currency mismatches just before the crisis reduced their investment rates 8.1 percentage points more than other publicly held firms. We also showed that the currency depreciation increased exporters revenue, but those with currency mismatches reduced investments 12.5 percentage points more than other exporters. These estimated reductions in investment are economically very significant, underscoring the importance of negative balance sheet effects in currency crises. Jel Codes:F32; F34; G31; G32Investment; Balance sheets; Currency crises; Hedge; Financial constraints.

Debt management in Brazil : evaluation of the Real Plan and challenges ahead

Brazil's domestic debt has posed two challenges to policymakers: it has grown very fast and, despite progress, remains extremely short in maturity. The authors analyze Brazil's experience with domestic public debt management, searching for policy prescriptions for the next few years. After briefly reviewing the recent history of the country's domestic debt, they decompose the large rise in federal bonded debt in 1995-98, searching for its macroeconomic causes. The main explanations: extremely high interest payments (caused by Brazil's weak fiscal stance and quasi-fixed exchange rate regime) and the accumulation of assets (especially obligations of Brazil's states). Simulations of the net debt path for the near future underscore the importance of a tighter fiscal stance to prevent the debt-to-GDP ratio from growing further. The authors'main policy advice is to foster and rely more on inflation-linked bonds--the least harmful way to lengthen debt maturity.Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Strategic Debt Management,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Strategic Debt Management,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Municipal Financial Management

Balance Sheet Effects in Currency Crises: Evidence from Brazil

"Third-generation currency crises models" argue that capital losses from exchange-rate depreciation propagate the crises to the productive sector. To test these models, we use a firm-level dataset that allows us to measure currency mismatches around the 2002 Brazilian currency crisis. We find that, between 2001 and 2003, firms that shortly before the crisis had large currency mismatches decreased their investment rates by 8.1 percentual points, relatively to other public firms. Moreover, we show that the currency depreciation implied large competitive gains for the exporters, and yet the investment of exporters with large currency mismatches fell by 12.5 percentual points, relatively to other exporters. The estimated falls in investment are economically very relevant, thereby corroborating the relevance of third generation models negative balance sheet effects.

O financiamento à infra-estrutura e a retomada do crescimento econômico sustentado

Bibliografia: f. 19Ao contrário dos ciclos de desenvolvimento anteriores, o novo ciclo que deverá completar o atual esforço de estabilização representado pelo Plano Real não poderá contar com o Estado como principal agente executor e financiador de maciços investimentos em infra-estrutura. Esta é uma tendência mundial, que originou o project finance, modalidade de financiamento que viabiliza a parceria -público-privada em projetos de infra-estrutura. O project finance separa o risco da empresa do risco do negócio, desenhando-se operações de financiamento exclusivas para projetos determinados. No Brasil, sobretudo após a aprovação da lei de concessões e com a aceleração do programa de privatizações, tal forma de financiamento à infra-estrutura deve ser largamente utilizada. Para que a repartição de riscos exigida pela parceria público-privada se efetive, é necessário que haja clareza quanto à regulação da atividade e que os contratos sejam críveis, impedindo que o setor público tenha que "salvar" investimentos eventualmente insolventes. Explicita-se uma proposta para o Sistema BNDES - o seguro do risco macroeconômico de crédito -, que visa proporcionar a criação de um mercado de crédito privado de longo prazo no Brasil.Unlike previous growth cycles in Brazil, the new one that will complete the Real stabilization plan can no longer count on the state as the main financier and undertaker of the infrastructure investments. This represents a world trend, that originated the project finance, a way to finance heavy investments designed to make possible the private/public partnership. The projectftnance separates the firrn risk from the business risk, and designs finance arrangements that are specific to each investment project. In Brazil, now that the law that regulates concessions to the private sector has been enacted and the privatization program has been accelerated, the project finance will probably constitute the main finance procedure for infrastructure Investments. For the projectfinance to work, the regulatory environment should be clear and the contracts should be credible, preventing the public sector to be put into a comer, forced to bail out insolvent projects. A new proposal for the BNDES System - an insurance against the macroeconomic risk in credit operations - is laid out. This proposal aims at building a long term credit market in Brazil

Provisão pública e privada da infra-estrutura e desenvolvimento econômico

Resumo -- 1. Teoria do crescimento -- 2. Dados empíricos -- 3. Exemplos de participação privada -- 3.1. Rodovias privadas da Califórnia -- 3.2. Rodovias privadas da virgínia -- 3.3. A experiência da Espanha com rodovias privadas -- 3.4. Rodovias privadas na França -- 3.5. Outras rodovias privadas -- 4. Conclusões -- Referências bibliográficasBibliografia: p.15-17Este artigo faz um levantamento da literatura sobre infra-estrutura e desenvolvimento econômico e discute vários exemplos de provisão de infra-estrutura pelo setor privado. A primeira parte apresenta uma discussão teórica sobre a função dos gastos públicos com investimento no crescimento econômico de longo prazo. A segunda parte discute alguns dos trabalhos empíricos que verificam a existência de uma relação positiva entre níveis de infra-estrutura e taxas de crescimento. A parte final apresenta diversos exemplos de parceria público-privada em projetos de infra-estrutura no mundo

The Fourteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment

The fourth generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-IV) has been in operation since July 2014. This paper describes the second data release from this phase, and the fourteenth from SDSS overall (making this, Data Release Fourteen or DR14). This release makes public data taken by SDSS-IV in its first two years of operation (July 2014-2016). Like all previous SDSS releases, DR14 is cumulative, including the most recent reductions and calibrations of all data taken by SDSS since the first phase began operations in 2000. New in DR14 is the first public release of data from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS); the first data from the second phase of the Apache Point Observatory (APO) Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), including stellar parameter estimates from an innovative data driven machine learning algorithm known as "The Cannon"; and almost twice as many data cubes from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO (MaNGA) survey as were in the previous release (N = 2812 in total). This paper describes the location and format of the publicly available data from SDSS-IV surveys. We provide references to the important technical papers describing how these data have been taken (both targeting and observation details) and processed for scientific use. The SDSS website (www.sdss.org) has been updated for this release, and provides links to data downloads, as well as tutorials and examples of data use. SDSS-IV is planning to continue to collect astronomical data until 2020, and will be followed by SDSS-V.Comment: SDSS-IV collaboration alphabetical author data release paper. DR14 happened on 31st July 2017. 19 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJS on 28th Nov 2017 (this is the "post-print" and "post-proofs" version; minor corrections only from v1, and most of errors found in proofs corrected

Energy Estimation of Cosmic Rays with the Engineering Radio Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory

The Auger Engineering Radio Array (AERA) is part of the Pierre Auger Observatory and is used to detect the radio emission of cosmic-ray air showers. These observations are compared to the data of the surface detector stations of the Observatory, which provide well-calibrated information on the cosmic-ray energies and arrival directions. The response of the radio stations in the 30 to 80 MHz regime has been thoroughly calibrated to enable the reconstruction of the incoming electric field. For the latter, the energy deposit per area is determined from the radio pulses at each observer position and is interpolated using a two-dimensional function that takes into account signal asymmetries due to interference between the geomagnetic and charge-excess emission components. The spatial integral over the signal distribution gives a direct measurement of the energy transferred from the primary cosmic ray into radio emission in the AERA frequency range. We measure 15.8 MeV of radiation energy for a 1 EeV air shower arriving perpendicularly to the geomagnetic field. This radiation energy -- corrected for geometrical effects -- is used as a cosmic-ray energy estimator. Performing an absolute energy calibration against the surface-detector information, we observe that this radio-energy estimator scales quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy as expected for coherent emission. We find an energy resolution of the radio reconstruction of 22% for the data set and 17% for a high-quality subset containing only events with at least five radio stations with signal.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Measurement of the Radiation Energy in the Radio Signal of Extensive Air Showers as a Universal Estimator of Cosmic-Ray Energy

We measure the energy emitted by extensive air showers in the form of radio emission in the frequency range from 30 to 80 MHz. Exploiting the accurate energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory, we obtain a radiation energy of 15.8 \pm 0.7 (stat) \pm 6.7 (sys) MeV for cosmic rays with an energy of 1 EeV arriving perpendicularly to a geomagnetic field of 0.24 G, scaling quadratically with the cosmic-ray energy. A comparison with predictions from state-of-the-art first-principle calculations shows agreement with our measurement. The radiation energy provides direct access to the calorimetric energy in the electromagnetic cascade of extensive air showers. Comparison with our result thus allows the direct calibration of any cosmic-ray radio detector against the well-established energy scale of the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DOI. Supplemental material in the ancillary file