Alexandre Fonseca

Working papers:

Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality [draft}

(with Diogo G. C. Britto , Paolo Pinotti , Breno Sampaio and Lucas Warwar)

The Review of Economics and Statistics Revised and Resubmitted

Explore in: The Global Opportunity Atlas

Op-Ed: VoxEU Column

Media Coverage: Folha de S. Paulo, Valor Econômico, TV Cultura, Record News, TV Assembleia, Brazilian Report.

Podcasts: Direito e Economia (Portuguese), Explaining Brazil (English)

We provide the first estimates of intergenerational income mobility using population-wide administrative data for a large developing country, namely Brazil. We measure formal income from tax and payroll data, and we train machine learning models on census and survey data to predict informal income. We develop novel methods to quantify and characterize the estimation bias resulting from income imputation and other sources of measurement error, and show that such bias remains negligible in our context. A 10 percentile increase in parental income rank is associated on average with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, and only 2.5% of children born to parents in the bottom quintile reach the top quintile. Mobility varies widely by gender, race, and geographical areas, and causal place effects explain 57% of variation in mobility across regions. Parental income impacts several long-term outcomes beyond income, including education, teenage pregnancy, crime victimization, and mortality.

Job Loss, Unemployment Insurance and Health: Evidence from Brazil [IZA WP]

(with Guilherme Amorim, Diogo G. C. Britto and Breno Sampaio )

The Review of Economics and Statistics Revision Requested

We study the effects of job loss and unemployment insurance (UI) on health among Brazilian workers. We construct a novel dataset linking individual-level administrative records on employment, hospital discharges, and mortality for a 17-year period, rarely available in the context of developing countries. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we find that job loss increases hospitalization (+33%) and mortality risks (+23%) for male workers, while women are not affected. These effects are pervasive over the distribution of age, tenure, income and education, and men's children are also negatively affected. Remarkably, about half of these impacts are driven by external causes associated with accidents and the violent Brazilian context. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that access to UI partially mitigates the adverse effects of job loss on health. Our results indicate that the health costs of job loss are only partially explained by the income losses associated with job displacement.

Decentralization, Tax Administration and Taxation: Evidence from Brazil´s Rural Land Tax [draft ]

(with Arthur Bragança , Diogo G. C. Britto , D. Moura, Breno Sampaio ,André Sant'Anna , and Dimitri Szerman)

September 2025 submitted

This paper evaluates a nationwide reform in Brazil that offered municipalities the possibility to administer rural property taxes in exchange for receiving a higher share of revenues. Using over 120 million tax returns and a difference-in-differences design exploiting implementation failures, we find that decentralization increased tax revenue by over 15% within five years, largely via higher reported land values. Satellite imagery shows no distortive changes in land use. A cost-benefit exercise using administrative cost data indicates that the reform had large returns. Taken together, these results indicated that administrative decentralization—paired with incentive-compatible transfers and central oversight can improve tax enforcement with none or little efficiency losses

Mental Health Centers and Educational Outcomes of Children

(with Diogo G. C. Britto , Bilge Erten , Pinar Keskin, Rodrigo Pinto and Breno Sampaio )

Octuber 2025 submitted

We present the first causal evidence that large-scale provision of public mental health services improves educational outcomes for children. We exploit the roll-out of Juvenile Psychosocial Care Centers (CAPS), which were introduced as a community-based substitute for inpatient mental healthcare, across municipalities in Brazil. Using unique nationwide data linking multiple large administrative datasets, we find that these centers increased the provision of mental health services for children through public outpatient care. Following a juvenile CAPS opening, children in treated municipalities experienced an increase in their probability of remaining enrolled in school by up to 1.6 percentage points. These effects are concentrated among children from relatively more disadvantaged backgrounds, with mothers who have not completed high school and who live in lower-income municipalities. The increases in enrollment are more pronounced for boys, who are twice as likely to receive treatment and at younger ages due to the early onset of the mental conditions they typically experience. Our findings indicate that providing accessible mental health services through community-based centers can significantly enhance educational outcomes for children.

Selected Work in Progress:

Family Connections, Nepotism and Political Bargaining

(with Yuri Barreto, Diogo G. C. Britto, Manoel Gehrke, Paolo Pinotti and Breno Sampaio)

Parenthood and Productivity: Evidence from Administrative data in Brazil

(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Bruno Ferman, Caio de Holanda, Breno Sampaio and Lucas Warwar)

Children's Health Shocks, Parental Employment, and the Lack of Social Insurance

(with Guilherme Amorim, Diogo G. C. Britto and Breno Sampaio )

Conditional Cash Transfers and Intergenerational Mobility

(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Paolo Pinotti, Breno Sampaio and Lucas Warwar)

Dry Lives: Climate Adaptation and Mortality in the Semi-arid Regions of Brazil

(with Diogo G. C. Britto , Clément Imbert , Breno Sampaio and Gabriel Ulyssea )

PIT Gap and Audit Selection through Machine Learning: Evidence from Brazilian Data