This paper develops a statistical model to study the Brazilian country risk using a country beta model in the spirit of Harvey and Zhou (1993), Erb et al. (1996a, b) and Gangemi et al. (2000). Specifically, the impact of macroeconomic variables is analysed using a time-varying parameter approach. An extension of the original model is applied in order to verify the parameters' stability over time. It is found that monetary policy had a significant and stable impact on Brazil's country risk and international reserves presented a significant impact only during the fixed exchange rate period.

The main objective of this paper was to visualize the relation between government spending on basic education and the human capital accumulation process, observing the impacts of this spending on individual investments in higher education, and on economic growth. From the results obtained, we may reach the central conclusion that basic education affects agents' decisions over their lifetime, and that the significance of the relation between public spending on education and economic growth is altered by changes in the composition of government spending with regard to basic and higher education, and this relation may be insignificant when higher education is not promoted. * We would like to thank Adolfo Sachsida, Jorge Arbache, Bernardo Müller and Samuel Pessoa for valuable comments and insights. The usual disclaimer applies.

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the monetary policy of the Bank of Japan (BOJ). The main findings confirm [McKinnon, R., Ohno, K., Dollar and Yen, Resolving Economic Conflict between the United States and Japan. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1997] thesis that the BOJ has tried to stabilize exchange rate. The interest rate is counter-cyclical to the exchange rate and the coefficient of inflation, which is not weakly exogenous, is significantly smaller than 1. Impulse response analysis confirms the BOJ's sensitivity not only to inflation and output gap but also to exchange rate. Finally, historical decomposition reveals a major role for exchange rate in explaining cyclical patterns of the interest rate, especially during the bubble period.

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar o papel da dívida pública no mecanismo de transmissão monetária enfatizando o efeito riqueza como potencial fonte de ineficácia da políticamonetária. Omodelo elaborado consiste em uma curva IS na qual não prevalece a Equivalência Ricardiana e em uma curva de Phillips estimadas por FIML, GMM e Bootstrap. A restrição orçamentária do governo permite a análise de dois tipos de títulos: (i) prefixados e (ii) indexados pela taxa de juros de política monetária. Para concluir o modelo, estipula-se uma regra monetária compatível com Taylor (1993) e uma regra fiscal. As funções de impulso resposta indicam que os ciclos dependem da composição da dívida pública.
This paper deals with the role of the public debt on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in order to evaluate the wealth effect as a source of monetary policy ineffectiveness. An IS function where the Ricardian Equivalence does not prevail and Phillips curve are estimated by FIML, GMM and Bootstrap methods. The government constraint allows the analysis of two kinds of bonds: prefixed bonds and bonds indexed by monetary policy interest rate. Two additional relations are added to the model, one monetary rule and one fiscal rule. The impulse response functions present cycles that depend heavily on the composition of the public debt

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