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Routine activities theory establishes that the greater the exposure to public spaces with weak guardianship the higher the probability of being a victim of urban violence. Using a unique dataset for the year 2009 that includes all Brazilian metropolitan regions, we provide evidence for the causal effect of a long commute time on the chance of being a victim of violence in these urban centres. The set of evidence was obtained by applying propensity score matching techniques to create counterfactuals and is robust to different robustness checks and sensitivity analysis.

This article analyses the influence of both contextual and individual urban characteristics on violence victimisation in Brazilian cities. A multilevel approach is used to capture the effects of the urban contextual variables with respect to the probability of becoming a robbery victim in Brazilian urban centres. The results demonstrate that factors associated with social context, such as proportions of cities’ recent migrants or female-headed households, affect victimisation, as do individual characteristics. Furthermore, based on an analysis of the intra-class correlation coefficients, the context produces a non-negligible amount of variability.

Resumo: Este artigo investiga a reação da política monetária do Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) às oscilações nos preços das ações e na taxa de câmbio no período de metas de inflação. Em adição, verifica-se se a taxa Selic tem respondido de forma assimétrica aos desvios positivos e negativos do hiato dos preços dos ativos. Para isso, diferentes especificações da função de reação forward-looking do BCB são estimadas pelo Método Generalizado dos Momentos. Os resultados mostram que, no curto prazo, o BCB tem respondido de forma simétrica aos hiatos positivos e negativos da taxa de câmbio, mas não tem reagido ao hiato do preço das ações. Em adição, as estimativas dos parâmetros implícitos da função de reação indicam que apenas a resposta de longo prazo da taxa Selic ao hiato da inflação esperada é significativa. Isso está em conformidade com a visão teórica de que a autoridade monetária deve responder apenas indiretamente aos preços dos ativos, na medida em que esses preços sinalizem alterações na inflação esperada.Palavras-chave: Política monetária. Função de reação Forward-looking. Preços de ativos. Brasil.Abstract: This paper investigates the reaction of the Central Bank of Brazil (CBB)'s monetary policy to stock and exchange rate price movements during the inflationtargeting period. In addition, it verifies whether the Selic rate has responded asymmetrically to the positive and negative deviations of asset price gaps. Therefore, different specifications of the CBB's forward-looking reaction function are estimated by the Generalized Method of Moments. Results show that, in the short term, the CBB has responded asymmetrically to positive and negative exchange rate gaps, but that it has not reacted to stock price gaps. Moreover, the estimates of the implicit parameters of the reaction function indicate that only the long-term response of the Selic rate to expected inflation gap is significant. This is consistent with the theoretical analysis that the monetary authority should respond only indirectly to asset prices whenever such prices indicate changes in expected inflation.

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