Working Papers

The Impact of Admission to a Selective College on Crime: Evidence from a Tuition-Free University in Brazil
 with Suzanne Duryea, Breno Sampaio, and Giuseppe Trevisan, accepted for publication in the Journal of Labor Economics.
Presented at:

We investigate the effect of admission to a top-quality, tuition-free university on future criminal charges. Using data on students' application to a public university and the universe of criminal records in Brazil, we document that admitted students are 69% less likely to be prosecuted in the decade following application. This effect is mostly driven by a reduction in violent crimes among low-income men. Changes in educational attainment, incapacitation, financial distress, unemployment, and earnings do not explain our findings. Our results suggest that the returns to expanding access of low-income students to high-quality universities extend far beyond job opportunities.

Cultural Productivity and Short-Term Financial Commitment
 with Philipp Ehrl. Presented at:

How does entrepreneurs' ancestry affect their firm's performance? Based on surnames, we classify entrepreneurs in Europe and Asia into ethnic groups. For each group, we estimate the expected productivity and capital structure, controlling for size, country, and industry. Then we verify whether these ethnic effects predict firms' productivity in a multi-ethnic country overseas, Brazil. This approach accounts for differences in institutions and human capital supply, discrimination, and selection into entrepreneurship. Our results reveal a one-to-one relationship between ethnic productivity in Brazil and abroad. Ethnic influence on capital structure explains about 40-60% of this relationship, whereas management practices explain the remaining. In particular, the higher the propensity to raise short-term loans, the higher the performance. This finding is consistent with the positive disciplinary role of frequent debt repayments. To further test this hypothesis, we explore a credit expansion policy that encouraged entrepreneurs to extend debt maturity. Although this policy targeted highly productive groups, the beneficiaries presented lower performance than comparable firms.

Business Creation, Incorporation, and the Role of Personal Bankruptcy Protection: Evidence from the BAPCPA
 Online appendix. Presented at:

This paper investigates how business creation, earnings, and survival are related to incorporation and personal bankruptcy codes. In theory, individual debtor protection might either affect entrepreneurship or just prevent the incorporation of household firms. To examine this issue, I exploit the bankruptcy reform of 2005 as an exogenous reduction in the protection granted by homestead exemptions. Generous exemptions are found to encourage low-skilled entrepreneurs to sustain unincorporated firms. However, these exemptions also encourage high-skilled entrepreneurs to undertake profitable ventures. The evidence is consistent with new entrepreneurs often relying on unincorporated forms as the stepping-stone to a successful business.

Old Working Papers