Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:34:26Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Caio Amuri Varga.pdf: 1399912 bytes, checksum: 72a9a9eea2cbc14a91cfb937971007ca (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-06 / This paper is tied to the line of research Citizenship Shaping the State of the lato sensu post-graduate program of the Law School of the Mackenzie Presbyterian University and was developed with the specific purpose of demonstrating the impact of tax enforcement actions on the slow-paced Brazilian Judiciary and, from that reality, present the possibility of reducing the litigiousness concerning such claims through the dejudicialization of some procedural acts related thereto. The monograph was divided into an introductory text, five development chapters with brief and specific conclusions to each of them, and a general conclusion at the end. In the first of such chapters, a historical analysis is made of the sluggishness of the Brazilian Judiciary and of the several attempts to fight it through changes of the procedural rules. The second chapter addresses how the Government operates in Court Cases and the causes leading it to be the largest litigator in Brazil. The third chapter is dedicated to specifically demonstrate the impact of tax enforcement actions on clogging the Judiciary and the consequences of the total lack of efficiency of the current model. The fourth chapter shows some already existing cases of dejudicialization of claims involving the Government. Lastly, the fifth and last chapter demonstrates the possibility of dejudicialization, at least partly, of the procedures related to tax enforcement actions that are currently exclusively conducted by the Judiciary. / O presente trabalho está vinculado à linha de pesquisa Cidadania Modelando o Estado, do programa de pós graduação lato sensu da Faculdade de Direito da Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie. Ele foi desenvolvido com o escopo específico de demonstrar o impacto das execuções fiscais de natureza tributária na morosidade do Poder Judiciário brasileiro e, a partir de tal realidade, apresentar a possibilidade de diminuir a litigiosidade relativa a tais demandas por meio da desjudicialização de alguns dos atos processuais a elas relacionados. A monografia foi dividida em um texto introdutório, cinco seções de desenvolvimento com breves conclusões específicas para cada um deles e uma conclusão geral ao final. Na primeira dessas seções de desenvolvimento faz-se a análise histórica do problema da morosidade do Poder Judiciário brasileiro e das diversas tentativas de combatê-la a partir de alterações nas normas processuais. A segunda aborda a forma de atuação da Administração Pública em Juízo e as causas que a levam a ser a maior litigante brasileira. A terceira dedica-se a demonstrar de forma específica o impacto das execuções fiscais no congestionamento do Poder Judiciário e as consequências da completa ineficiência do modelo atual. Na quarta são demonstradas algumas hipóteses já existentes de desjudicialização das demandas envolvendo o Poder Público. Por fim, na quinta e última seção de desenvolvimento, demonstra-se a possibilidade de se desjudicializar ao menos parte dos procedimentos relacionados às execuções fiscais que atualmente são conduzidos exclusivamente pelo Poder Judiciário.

The thesis consists of four chapters. The introductory chapter clarifies different notions of rationality used by economists and gives a summary of the remainder of the thesis. Chapter 2 proposes an explanation for the common empirical observation of the coexistence of infrequently-changing regular price ceilings and promotion-like price patterns. The results derive from enriching an otherwise standard, albeit stylized, general equilibrium model with two elements. First, the consumer-producer interaction is modeled in the spirit of the price dispersion literature, by introducing oligopolistic markets, consumer search costs and heterogeneity. Second, consumers are assumed to be boundedly-rational: In order to incorporate new information about the general price level, they have to incur a small cognitive cost. The decision whether to re-optimize or act according to the obsolete knowledge about prices is itself a result of optimization. It is shown that in this economy, individual retail prices are capped below the monopoly price, but are otherwise flexible. Moreover, they have the following three properties: 1) An individual price has a positive probability of being equal to the ceiling. 2) Prices have a tendency to fall below the ceiling and then be reset back to the cap value. 3) The ceiling remains constant for extended time intervals even when the mean rate of inflation is positive. Properties 1) and 2) can be associated with promotions and properties 1) and 3) imply the emergence of nominal price rigidity. The results do not rely on any type of direct costs of price adjustment. Instead, price stickiness derives from frictions on the consumers’ side of the market, in line with the results of several managerial surveys. It is shown that the developed theory, compared to the classic menu costs-based approach, does better in matching the stylized facts about the reaction of individual prices to inflation. In terms of quantitative assessment, the model, when calibrated to realistic parameter values, produces median price ceiling durations that match values reported in empirical studies.<p><p>The starting point of the essay in Chapter 3 is the observation that the baseline New-Keynesian model, which relies solely on the notion of infrequent price adjustment, cannot account for the observed degree of inflation sluggishness. Therefore, it is a common practice among macro- modelers to introduce an ad hoc additional source of persistence to their models, by assuming that price setters, when adjusting a price of their product, do not set it equal to its unobserved individual optimal level, but instead catch up with the optimal price only gradually. In the paper, a model of incomplete adjustment is built which allows for explicitly testing whether price-setters adjust to the shocks to the unobserved optimal price only gradually and, if so, measure the speed of the catching up process. According to the author, a similar test has not been performed before. It is found that new prices do not generally match their estimated optimal level. However, only in some sectors, e.g. for some industrial goods and services, prices adjust to this level gradually, which should add to the aggregate inflation sluggishness. In other sectors, particularly food, price-setters seem to overreact to shocks, with new prices overshooting the optimal level. These sectors are likely to contribute to decreasing the aggregate inflation sluggishness. Overall, these findings are consistent with the view that price-setters are boundedly-rational. However, they do not provide clear-cut support for the existence of an additional source of inflation persistence due to gradual individual price adjustment. Instead, they suggest that general equilibrium macroeconomic models may need to include at least two types of production sectors, characterized by a contrasting behavior of price-setters. An additional finding stemming from this work is that the idiosyncratic component of the optimal individual price is well approximated by a random walk. This is in line with the assumptions maintained in most of the theoretical literature. <p><p>Chapter 4 of the thesis has been co-authored by Julia Lendvai. In this paper a full-fledged production economy model with Kahneman and Tversky’s Prospect Theory features is constructed. The agents’ objective function is assumed to be a weighted sum of the usual utility over consumption and leisure and the utility over relative changes of agents’ wealth. It is also assumed that agents are loss-averse: They are more sensitive to wealth losses than to gains. Apart from the changes in the utility, the model is set-up in a standard Real Business Cycle framework. The authors study prices of stocks and risk-free bonds in this economy. Their work shows that under plausible parameterizations of the objective function, the model is able to explain a wide set of unconditional asset return moments, including the mean return on risk-free bonds, equity premium and the Sharpe Ratio. When the degree of loss aversion in the model is additionally assumed to be state-dependent, the model also produces countercyclical risk premia. This helps it match an array of conditional moments and in particular the predictability pattern of stock returns. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished