Working Papers

We estimate the impact of environmental law enforcement on violence in the Brazilian Amazon. The introduction of the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (DETER), which enabled the government to monitor deforestation in real time and issue fines for illegal clearing, significantly reduced homicides in the region. To identify causal effects, we exploit exogenous variation in satellite monitoring generated by cloud cover as an instrument for enforcement intensity. Our estimates imply that the expansion of state presence through DETER prevented approximately 1,477 homicides per year,  a 15% reduction in homicides. These results show that curbing deforestation produces important social co-benefits, strengthening state presence and reducing violence in regions marked by institutional fragility and resource conflict.

Presented at São Paulo School of Economics - FGV.

We analyze heterogenous, nonlinear treatment effects in shift-share designs with exogenous shares. We employ a triangular model and correct for treatment endogeneity using a control function. Our tools identify four target parameters. Two of them capture the observable heterogeneity of treatment effects, while one summarizes this heterogeneity in a single measure. The last parameter analyzes counterfactual, policy-relevant treatment assignment mechanisms. We propose flexible parametric estimators for these parameters and apply them to reevaluate the impact of Chinese imports on U.S. manufacturing employment. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity, which is not captured by commonly used shift-share tools.

Presented at São Paulo School of Economics - FGV.

The FAO-GAEZ crop productivity data are widely used in Economics. However, the existence of measurement error is rarely recognized in the empirical literature. We propose a novel method to partially identify the effect of agricultural productivity, deriving bounds that allow for nonclassical measurement error by leveraging two proxies. These bounds exhaust all the information contained in the first two moments of the data. We reevaluate three influential studies, documenting that measurement error matters and that the impact of agricultural productivity on economic outcomes may be smaller than previously reported. Our methodology has broad applications in empirical research involving mismeasured variables.

Presented at Insper, São Paulo School of Economics - FGV, University of São Paulo, and University of Los Andes - Santiago.

We study the effects of a free-fare transport policy implemented by Brazilian localities on employment and greenhouse gas emissions. Using a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we find that fare-free transit increases employment by 3.2% and reduces emissions by 4.1%, indicating that transport policies can decouple economic activity from environmental damage. Our results are driven by workers transitioning from higher-emission to lower-emission sectors instead of being driven by a decline in private transportation use. Cost-benefit analyses suggest that the costly policy only presents net benefits after considering the tax inflows of the increased economic activity and the benefits of reduced carbon emissions.

We investigate the impact of judges' gender on the outcome of domestic violence cases. Using data from São Paulo, Brazil, between 2010 and 2019, we compare conviction rates by judge's gender and find that a domestic violence case assigned to a female judge is 31% (10 p.p.) more likely to result in conviction than a case assigned to a male judge with similar career characteristics. To show that this decision gap rises due to different gender perspectives about domestic violence and not because female judges are stricter than their male counterparts in all rulings, we compare it against the gender conviction-rate gap in similar types of crime. We find that the gender conviction-rate gap for domestic violence cases is significantly larger than the same gap for other misdemeanor cases (3 p.p. larger) and for other physical assault cases (8 p.p. larger). Furthermore, we find evidence that at least two channels explain this gender conviction-rate gap for domestic violence cases: gender-based differences in evidence interpretation and gender-based sentencing criteria.  Lastly, we find that this gender conviction rate has no significant impact on the probability of appeals, ruling reversals or recidivism.

Presented at FEA-RP (USP), SBE's Meeting 2024, 5th GeFam Meeting, PUC-Chile, Universidad de Chile.

This paper presents new econometric tools to unpack the treatment effect heterogeneity of punishing misdemeanor offenses on time-to-recidivism. We show how one can identify, estimate, and make inferences on the distributional, quantile, and average marginal treatment effects in setups where the treatment selection is endogenous and the outcome of interest, usually a duration variable, is potentially right-censored. We explore our proposed econometric methodology to evaluate the effect of fines and community service sentences as a form of punishment on time-to-recidivism in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, between 2010 and 2019, leveraging the as-if random assignment of judges to cases. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity that other tools are not meant to capture. For instance, we find that people who most judges would punish take longer to recidivate as a consequence of the punishment, while people who would be punished only by strict judges recidivate at an earlier date than if they were not punished. This result suggests that designing sentencing guidelines that encourage strict judges to become more lenient could reduce recidivism.

Presented at Brown University, Southern Methodist University, Syracuse University, University of Chicago, Univeristy of Georgia - Athens, Yale University, LACEA-LAMES 2023, SBE's Meeting 2023, Workshop on the Econ of Crime for Junior Scholars.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of information disclosure on price-quality relationship in the private school market in Brazil. We use the disclosure policy on scores of an exit exam in Brazil (ENEM) that took place in 2006. We construct a novel longitudinal data set on private schools that includes information on ENEM average scores in the years before and after its publication and on tuition fees for all years. We show that the correlation between test scores and price significantly becomes positive after the publication and increases over the years. Furthermore, this correlation becomes stronger for schools whose quality was noisily perceived previously.

Presented at the 36th Meeting of the Brazilian Econometric Society (2014), the VII Encontro CAEN-EPGE de Políticas Públicas e Crescimento Econômico (2015), the 20th Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (2015).