Heitor Pellegrina 

Assistant Professor 

Department of Economics 

University of Notre Dame


Research Interests: 

Trade and development [CV]


Contact Information:

Address: Office 3042, Jenkins Nanovic Hall

Email: hpelleg3 [at] nd.edu


Working Papers

We study the impacts of trade policy and economic growth on deforestation through a dynamic, global perspective. We build a dynamic general equilibrium model of trade and land use, in which structural change and comparative advantage determine the extent, location, and timing of deforestation. Preliminary results indicate that the global forest area would expand in response to multilateral trade liberalization in agriculture, but that it would shrink when the liberalization is experienced by individual regions.


Publications and Accepted

Accepted, Journal of Political Economy

What are the regional and aggregate effects of migration on comparative advantage? We develop a quantifiable, overlapping generation model of trade and migration, in which farmers carry crop-specific knowledge across space, to study an episode of large westward migration in Brazil.

Accepted, Journal of International Economics

We study how labor market imperfections distort firm-level technology choices and alter the gains from trade in developing countries. We introduce this feature into a trade model with technology adoption to study quantitatively, and analytically, effects of these distortions on welfare and aggregate labor productivity. 

Journal of Political Economy (Sep. 2023)

We examine the contribution of trade to the rise of modern agriculture, taking into account the interactions between trade, input requirements, and technology adoption We develop a global trade model in which farmers choose which crops to produce, and with which technology, at the level of grid cells covering the Earths' surface.

Journal of Development Economics (Mar. 2023)

What are the effects of agricultural productivity shocks across regions of a country? We exploit a unique dataset from India and a spatial RDD to address this question. We show reduced-form evidence that the effects of the agricultural productivity shocks depend substantially on the geographic incidence of these shocks.

Journal of International Economics (Jul. 2022)

Using farm-level dataset from Colombia, we study how farmers' participation into non-local markets shapes agr. productivity. We show new empirical facts about the relationship between farmers' productivity and market participation, within and between regions of Colombia. We calibrate a spatial economy model with farmers' heterogeneity to study how farmers' selection into non-local markets shape agr. productivity.

Journal of Development Economics (Jul. 2022)

Several African countries have recently centralized their agricultural markets by launching a commodity exchange market. We develop a search model to study the welfare and distributional effects of introducing a centralized market in a village economy in which farmers and traders exchange on a bilateral basis. 

Journal of Development Economics (May 2022)

I estimate a spatial equilibrium model using rich data from Brazil to study the GE effects of the adaptation of soybeans to tropical regions. Agricultural employment fell in regions to which soybeans expanded, but rose elsewhere. I study the GE implications to the returns to agr. research and the RF impact of soybeans on agr. employment.

Work in Progress

Teaching


Additional Material