Working papers:

Changing the Geography of Agricultural Employment: Evidence from the 1975 Frost, September 2023, revision requested by Regional Science and Urban Economics.

How do temporary shocks affect the spatial distribution of employment in agriculture? I investigate this question by examining the 1975 frost that damaged coffee trees in Brazil. I find that the frost persistently affected the spatial distribution of employment in agriculture. To identify the effects of the capital destruction from the frost, I compare changes in agricultural employment across local economies that had different coffee tree densities right before the frost and that were in states differently affected by it. The frost resulted in a persistent decline in agricultural employment. The findings are consistent with a history versus expectations model in which fixed and specific capital (such as coffee trees) prevents multiple equilibria despite strategic complementarities in crop choice.

Historical Occupation and Modern Deforestation: Evidence from Indigenous Extinctions in the Amazon, April 2024, with A. Ferreira.

This paper studies the long-run relationship between historical Indigenous extinctions and modern deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. We use information on the historical location of Indigenous groups, their extinction status, and the likely underlying extinction causes. We find that modern deforestation is substantially higher in the proximity of historically extinct Indigenous groups. This association holds for violent and disease-related extinctions, but not if the likely extinction cause is assimilation. Historical extinction events are also associated with more cities and private land tenure, but only after the onset of large-scale deforestation circa 1970. Our findings suggest that historical occupation patterns affected deforestation in the long run, plausibly by removing a deterrence force by Indigenous peoples against the expansion of large-scale agriculture.

Employment Resilience to Transit Interruption: Evidence from São Paulo, February 2024, with G. Navarro, submitted.

This paper estimates null effects of a temporary interruption of transit on the spatial distribution of employment. We employ a difference-in-differences approach, exploiting a plausibly exogenous six-month shutdown of service in a line of the São Paulo metropolitan rail network. Using administrative data on formal employment, we find that the interruption did not change employment flows between affected neighborhoods and the central business district. From a monthly labor market survey, we find null effects on unemployment, earnings, and formality, but negative effects on self-employment activity.  We interpret our findings as evidence that employment matches are sufficiently valuable so they are resilient to large temporary increases in commuting costs.

Paths that Led to Gold: Historical Roads, Trade, and Persistence, December 2023, with A. Portugal.

We investigate the heterogeneity in the long-run effects of two colonial roads in Brazil. These roads connected the coast to a thriving gold mining region in the highlands. The oldest of the two roads was heavily used at the beginning of the gold rush, but tax collection concerns led colonial authorities to commission the construction and favor the use of an alternative road. By the middle of the gold rush, trade flows through the newer road vastly surpassed those through the older road. We combine georeferenced data on the colonial roads with spatial data on modern economic activity, modern infrastructure, and historical settlements. We use a difference-in-differences approach to estimate that the persistent effects of proximity to the newer colonial road are larger than the persistent effects of proximity to the older colonial road. Our results suggest that the past importance for trade of a historic road determines whether the effects of the road persist in the long run.

A Positive View of Entry Costs, work in progress (draft soon!), with B. Camargo and G. Stein.

Publications:

Road Endpoints and City Sizes, Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming.

I examine the long-run effects of the timing of railroad construction on city sizes. I first present a stylized model which predicts that towns that are railroad endpoints for longer become persistently larger. I then show that, in a sample of Brazilian railroad towns, time as endpoint strongly predicts town size: each additional year that a town was a railroad endpoint in the past is associated with a town population 0.107 log points larger in 2010. Additional testable implications of the model and an instrumental variable approach suggest that such association reflects a causal effect. WP version.

Signaling in Dynamic Markets with Adverse Selection, Journal of Economic Theory, 206 (2022), with B. Camargo.

We study trade in dynamic decentralized markets with adverse selection. In contrast to the literature on the topic so far, we assume that the informed sellers make the offers so that signaling through prices is possible. We establish basic properties of equilibria, discuss the standard two-type case in detail, and then analyze the general finite-type case. We prove that market efficiency, measured by the maximum gains from trade in equilibrium, is invariant to trading frictions. Our analysis shows that screening and signaling lead to markedly different trading outcomes. Longer WP version.

Cities on Pre-Columbian Paths, Journal of Urban Economics, 122 (2021).

Does the geographic distribution of pre-Columbian societies determine the location of New World cities? This paper provides evidence that a pre-colonial indigenous trail influenced the location of modern cities in southern Brazil. To distinguish the causal effects of historical settlement near the trail from the effects of geographic fundamentals that could correlate with it, I compare how population density and urbanization change with proximity to the trail in two different regions. The first region has been settled by Europeans since the 16th century, while European settlement in the second region was interrupted after a 17th-century slave raid. Proximity to the indigenous path is associated with higher population density and urbanization in the first region, but not in the second. These findings suggest a path dependence that goes back to the pre-colonial past. WP version. 

Other:

Teaching: I taught the following classes in recent years

• • Statistics for Economics (undergrad, syllabus, in Portuguese) 

  • Development Economics (graduate elective, syllabus)

  • Microeconomics (third class in graduate micro sequence, syllabus)

  • Post-Crisis Microeconomics (executive, syllabus, in Portuguese) 

Ethnohistoric data: I published some of the work in cataloging the Ethnohistoric Map of Curt Nimuendajú (2017), used in Barsanetti and Ferreira (2023), as a publicly available dataset for other researchers. If you use them, please cite these data, Barsanetti and Ferreira (2023), and the references for the original map.

Second Annual LAUrban Meeting: I co-organized this workshop, which took place at FGV EPGE on December 1 and 2, 2023. See: call for papers, program, website.