Paths that Led to Gold: Historical Roads, Trade, and Persistence, April 2025, with A. Portugal. Revision requested by Regional Science and Urban Economics.
Past importance for trade determines if historical roads leave persistent effects on economic geography.
Do Landslides Impact Urbanization Patterns? Evidence from Brazilian Cities, May 2025, with P.J. Alves, R.C.A. Lima and F. Cavalcanti. Revision requested by Journal of Urban Economics (JUE Insights).
Landslides persistently reduce urban areas due to citywide negative effects on labor markets.
Historical Indigenous Extinctions and Modern Deforestation in the Amazon, September 2025, with A. Ferreira. Submitted.
Historical Indigenous extinctions predict higher deforestation in the Amazon today due to the loss of the deterrence of traditional populations against agricultural frontier expansion. Ethnohistorical data. Data on extinction circumstances. Replication data.
A Positive View of Entry Costs, September 2025, with B. Camargo and G. Stein. Submitted.
When court enforcement is weak, entry costs can discourage opportunistic behavior and raise welfare.
Optimal Provision of Urban Infrastructure: Theory and Evidence from Brazilian Cities, November 2025, with T.L. Padovani and V.P. Neto.
In comparison with an optimal provision rule, there is overprovision of local infrastructure in city centers relative to peripheral neighborhoods, leading the city structure to become inefficiently concentrated.
College Access Spillover on High School Performance: Evidence from College Openings, Economics of Education Review, 109 (2025), with T. Rands.
Local access to college increases the academic performance of high-school students. Working paper version. Replication data.
Capital as an Anchor of Agricultural Employment: Evidence from the 1975 Frost, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 108 (2024).
Massive agricultural employment changes after the 1975 frost, which destroyed coffee trees in Paraná, Brazil, show that the spatial distribution of agriculture is vulnerable to path dependence. Working paper version.
Road End Points and City Sizes, Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming.
The timing of transportation infrastructure opening shapes its persistent effects, as illustrated by the long-run effects of time as railroad end points on city sizes. Working paper version. Replication data.
Signaling in Dynamic Markets with Adverse Selection, Journal of Economic Theory, 206 (2022), with B. Camargo.
The efficiency of decentralized lemon markets when there is signaling through prices does not depend on trading frictions. Longer working paper version.
Cities on Pre-Columbian Paths, Journal of Urban Economics, 122 (2021).
Pre-colonial transportation infrastructure still influences the location of modern cities. Working paper version.
Teaching: I taught the following classes in recent years
Economic Geography (graduate elective, syllabus)
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)
Ethnohistorical data: we published our work in cataloging the Ethnohistorical Map of Curt Nimuendajú (2017), used in Barsanetti and Ferreira (2024), as a publicly available dataset for other researchers. If you use them, please cite these data, Barsanetti and Ferreira (2024), and the references for the original map. This version: updated on July, 2024.
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.
"FGTS: saque-aniversário com base em evidências": op-ed in Valor Econômico on our research about the effects of FGTS birthday withdrawals, with A. Kuchenbecker (in Portuguese).
Resting working paper:
