The paper studies the frequency of price changes from a survey data on Brazilian companies. The data set has the advantage of including all of the economic sectors: agricultural and food products, trading, industry and services. Strong evidence of nominal price rigidities is found on the data with average and median price durations around 10.1 and 8.1 months, which is very close to results reported for the euro area and the United States. Using econometric modeling through an ordered probit and also an OLS regression, we find that price change duration is mostly explained by the wage duration, the degree of competition, product specialization, the elasticity of demand and economic sector dummies. The empirical results refute somewhat commonly used macroeconomic modeling for monetary policy evaluation; however they do not refute time-dependent models since those are consistent with different price durations across firms. These results shed light on some stylized facts that a macroeconomic price-setting model would need to reproduce.

O desempenho de previsão para fora da amostra é testado para um amplo conjunto de modelos empíricos de taxa de câmbio em uma economia emergente com taxa de câmbio flutuante e regime de metas de inflação. Comparado à literatura recente de modelos de previsão da taxa de câmbio, nós incluímos um conjunto mais extenso de modelos. São testados modelos tradicionais da década de 1980, modelos de equilíbrio comportamental da taxa de câmbio dos anos de 1990 e um modelo baseado na regra de Taylor. Neste último, o modelo incorpora um função de reação do Banco Central, na qual a taxa de juros é definida de acordo com uma regra de Taylor. Nossos resultados demonstram que modelos de regra de Taylor e de equilíbrio comportamental da taxa de câmbio, este último combinando diferenciais de produtividade com ajustes de carteira, têm desempenho fora da amostra superior a um passeio aleatório. Evidências de poder de previsão também são obtidas para modelos parcimoniosos baseados em argumentos de paridade descoberta da taxa de juros.

Forecasting performance is tested for a broad set of empirical exchange rate models for an emerging economy with independently floating regime and inflation target monetary arrangement. Compared to the recent literature on out-of-sample exchange rate predictability, we include a more extensive set of models. We test vintage monetary models of the 1980's, exchange rate equilibrium models of the 1990's and a Taylor Rule based model. This last model assumes an endogenous monetary policy, where the Central Bank follows a Taylor rule reaction function to set interest rates. Our results show that Taylor Rule models and Behavioral Equilibrium Exchange Rate models, the last one combining productivity differentials with portfolio balance effect, have superior predictive accuracy when compared to the random walk benchmark. Some out-of-sample predictability is also obtained with parsimonious models based on uncovered interest parity arguments.