Publications
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 forthcoming
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.
Working papers:
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 Revise and Resubmit
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
Transforming Minds: The Impact of Public Mental Healthcare Provision on Education Outcomes in Brazil [draft]
(with S. Zhangⓡ , B. Ertenⓡ , P. Keskinⓡ , B. Sampaioⓡ , and D Brittoⓡ)
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy Revise and Resubmit
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.
We examine the impact of children’s health shocks on parental labor supply in Brazil, leveraging a novel dataset linking administrative data on employment and hospitalizations to millions of parent-child relationships over several decades covering diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Using a differences-in-differences approach exploiting variation in the timing of children’s hospitalizations, we find these lead to persistent increases in parents’ labor supply and earnings, ranging from 3% to 6% for both mothers and fathers. These effects are accompanied by increased registration in children's disability insurance (DI) and spending on private healthcare services. Using a machine learning approach to construct a hospitalization severity index, we find that high-risk hospitalizations instead decrease mothers' labor supply, suggesting a trade-off between earning income and providing care. Exploiting randomized awards of money prizes through federal lotteries, we show that increased liquidity around the time of children's hospitalizations reverse the increase in parental labor supply.
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 )
February 2026
We evaluate a large-scale policy that distributed rain-fed cisterns to poor households in Brazil’s semi-arid region. Linking administrative data between 2011 and 2019, we find that cisterns reduce emigration by 25% and mortality by 19% relative to untreated households. The mortality reduction is more than twice as large for women than for men, and more than doubles among households who received an additional cistern for agricultural use. We estimate benefit-to-cost ratios of 600-1000 depending on the Value of a Statistical Life used. Our findings demonstrate that this simple, affordable technology enables in-situ climate adaptation at scale and saves lives.
Parenthood and Productivity:
(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Bruno Ferman, Caio de Holanda, Breno Sampaio and Lucas Warwar)
April 2026 submitted
Does parenthood impair workers’ on-the-job productivity? We study this question and its implications for understanding the child penalties in employment observed for mothers. We focus on judges, a profession that helps overcome key empirical challenges: output can be measured precisely, it can be observed for all workers before and after childbirth because virtually no parent leaves the profession, and workloads are evenly distributed, limiting scope for selective task allocation. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find no evidence that mothers’ -- and fathers’ -- output declines during pregnancy or after they return from parental leave, and we can rule out moderate declines. We validate this result using a broad set of measures capturing both the quantity and quality of judicial work, and we document similar patterns for self-employed labor lawyers. Our findings show that motherhood need not reduce on-the-job productivity and suggest that, at least in some contexts, child penalties in employment may not be driven by lasting declines in on-the-job productivity.
Selected Work in Progress:
Family Connections, Nepotism and Political Bargaining
(with Yuri Barreto, Diogo G. C. Britto, Manoel Gehrke, Paolo Pinotti and Breno Sampaio)
Conditional Cash Transfers and Intergenerational Mobility
(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Paolo Pinotti, Breno Sampaio and Lucas Warwar)
Territorial Informality, Slums, and Urban Development
(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Lucas Conwell, Breno Sampaio, Gabriel Ulyssea, and Lucas Warwar)
Informality and Motherhood Penalties over the Life Cycle
(with Karolina Andrade, Diogo G. C. Britto, Lucas Finamor , Fernando Mattar, Breno Sampaio, Gabriel Ulyssea)
PIT Gap and Audit Selection through Machine Learning: Evidence from Brazilian Data
(with Diogo G. C. Britto, Felippe Moura, Breno Sampaio, Marcelo Silva and Lucas Warwar)
Publications (in Portuguese):
Lacuna Tributária e Arrecadação: O Impacto da Receita Federal do Brasil
(with Leonardo Moreira and Marcelo Silva)
Revista da Receita Federal: Estudos Tributário e Aduaneiros (2025)