OBJECTIVE To analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and health in Brazil. METHODS The analysis of the impact of employment and income on mortality in Brazil was based on panel data from Brazilian states between 1981 and 2002. Mortality rates obtained from the national mortality database was used as a proxy for health status, whereas the variables employment, income, and ill...

This paper considers the design of macroeconomic policies in the face of uncertainty. In recent years, several economists have advocated that when policymakers are uncertain about the environment they face and find it difficult to assign precise probabilities to the alternative scenarios that may characterize this environment, they should design policies to be robust in the sense that they mini...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks. We define fundamental volatility as the volatility that would arise from an economy made entirely of idiosyncratic sectoral or firm-level shocks. Fundamental volatility accounts for the swings in macroeconomic volatility in the major world economies in the past half-century. I...

Asset pricing theory has long recognized that financial markets compensate investors who are exposed to some components of uncertainty. This is where macroeconomics comes into play. The economy-wide shocks, the primary concern of macroeconomists, by their nature are not diversifiable. Exposures to these shocks cannot be averaged out with exposures to other shocks. Thus, returns on assets that d...

We explore the link between wealth inequality and macroeconomic volatility in a two-sector neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous agents. The model has a unique aggregate steady state which is independent of the level of inequality. However, whenever preferences do not exhibit hyperbolic absolute risk aversion, wealth heterogeneity may affect the volatility of output. In particular, we sh...

In this chapter we consider the effects of exogenous energy shocks on an agentbased macroeconomic system and study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics. We introduce automatic stabilizers that allow the artificial economy to absorbe the shocks. Two types of macroeconomic stabilization policies are implemented: a consumer subsidy scheme that compensates households for their loss in purchasing power, ...

The estimation of the impact of macroeconomic announcements on the Brazilian futures markets is used to uncover the relationship between macroeconomic fundamentals and asset prices. Using intraday data from October 2008 to January 2011, we find that external macroeconomic announcements dominate price changes in the Foreign Exchange and Ibovespa markets, while the impact of the domestic ones is ...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms’ leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non–financial US firms drawn from the COMPUSTAT qua...