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
Deforestation: A Global and Dynamic Perspective, with Farid Farrokhi, Elliot Kang, and Sebastian Sotelo (Mar. 2024 NEW!) [Coverage: TradeTalks]
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
Migration, Specialization, and Trade: Evidence from Brazil's March to the West, with Sebastian Sotelo (Jan. 2024) [App.]
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.
Trade and Technology Adoption in Distorted Economies, with Farid Farrokhi and Ahmad Lashkaripour [Replication] (Nov. 2023) [Slides]
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.
Irrigation and the Spatial Pattern of Local Development in India, with David Blakeslee, Aaditya Dar, Ram Fishman, Samreen Malik, Karan Singh [Replication]
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.
Trade, Farmers' Heterogeneity, and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Colombia, with Margarita Gáfaro [Replication]
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.
From Bilateral to Centralized Markets: A Search Model for Commodity Exchanges in Africa, with Yaw Nyarko
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.
Trade, Productivity, and the Spatial Organization of Agriculture: Evidence from Brazil [Replication]
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
Mining, Agriculture, and Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, with Brian Cevallos Fujiy and Sebastian Sotelo
Commodity Boom-Led Industrialization? The Case of Brazil before WWI, with Brock Rowberry, Andrei Laskievic, and Sebastian Sotelo
Temperature Shocks and Farm Size Distribution, with Julian Artega, Margarita Gáfaro, Ana María Ibanez, and Nicolás de Roux
Teaching
2023 - Economic growth (UG), University of Notre Dame
2021-2022 - Economic Policy and Environmental Economics (UG), NYU Abu Dhabi
2017-2020 - International Economics (UG), NYU Abu Dhabi
2017-2019 - Statistics for the Social Science (UG), NYU Abu Dhabi
Additional Material
A Brief Introduction to GitHub for Social Scientists using Stata and Dropbox, with Andres Fajardo (GitHub website)