Published and Fortcoming Papers
Dismantling a Market for Stolen Goods: evidence from the regulation of junkyards in Brazil - Journal of Development Economics, 2025.
Media Coverage: Vox Dev - How regulating junkyards reduced car theft in Brazil
This paper investigates the impact of monitoring and market regulation on the illicit market for stolen goods, focusing on the association between junkyards and auto theft. I explore the effects of a state-level regulation implemented in São Paulo in 2014, which enhanced supervision of the auto parts market. I find an 8.11% decline in auto theft for municipalities presenting at least one junkyard specialized in auto parts compared to the control group. Additionally, I provide evidence of a meaningful decrease in vehicle insurance prices, suggesting tangible economic benefits for citizens as a result of lower crime rates. These findings offer crucial insights into market regulation as a crime deterrence strategy to reduce the trade of stolen goods, highlighting its complementarity with traditional public security policies.
When the State steps down: Reduced police surveillance and gang-related deaths in Brazil - World Development, 2025.
Violent crime is prevalent in developing countries, requiring substantial investments in law enforcement. This paper shows how police surveillance is crucial to deterring homicides in violent areas. I investigate the impact of reduced law enforcement on crime by leveraging data on police strikes, violent deaths, victims’ records, and criminal groups. Following a police strike, homicides in Brazilian states increase temporarily by 45%, and 88% of deaths in neighborhoods with many criminal groups are of suspected gang members. My theoretical model describes the mechanism behind increased killings, demonstrating that police strike amplifies the expected gains from gang conflicts and retaliation. This pushes criminals to attack rivals, even when territories are evenly divided.
When Streets Have No Men: Urban Traffic Restrictions and Air Pollution (with Lucas Macoris, Naércio Menezes-Filho) - Revista Brasileira de Economia, 2024.
In this paper, we analyze two quasi-experiments to assess how urban traffic restrictions and social distancing norms affect pollution levels in the municipality São Paulo, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. First, using hourly air pollution levels measured in thirty-three monitoring stations in the state of São Paulo, we exploit exogenous variation in quarantine rules following the COVID-19 outbreak to estimate how social distancing norms affected pollution levels across different municipalities. We find an average decrease of 22.4% in air pollution after the first days of the capital's quarantine announcement, with heterogeneous effects across pollutants, driven by decreases in the vehicle fleet and urban mobility. Second, we compare this effect with another quasi-experiment that explores exogenous suspensions of traffic restriction rules between 2000-2018 in the municipality of São Paulo. We also document increases in pollution levels when more cars are allowed in the streets, with an average increase of 16.7% in air pollution. Finally, we use our estimates to show that a reduction of 4.7 times the estimated ATT in the quarantine period is necessary to reach the capital's long-term air quality goals.
Public versus private wage differential in Brazilian public firms (with Enlinson Mattos) - EconomiA, 2020.
This work explores that Brazilian public firms were allowed to hire workers either as statutory ("civil servants") as well as under private market labor regime ("CLT"). We use RAIS that matches employer-employee data for all formal firms in Brazil from 2014 to 2016 to control for fixed effects at the individual and firm levels and the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to quantify the size of the wage differential explained by the labor regime versus individual characteristics. We find that CLT civil servants earn in average R$ 310.00 per month less than similar statutory positions, a difference of 13% comparing the average wage of each group. Only for high skilled workers we found a salary R$ 95.98 larger for CLT employees. Last, our decomposition strategy reveals that the largest share of the gap is not explained by endowments differences.
Working Papers
Motorized and More Motivated? Militarized Patrols and Crime in Ceará, Brazil
(with Joana Monteiro, Michael Lee Weintraub) - Submitted
Countries in the developing world bear high costs associated with violent crime. Diverse solutions to reducing violent crime focus on retooling police forces, but these approaches have proven inadequate because the problems run so deep. Can new, more militarized, and better-motivated squads reduce crime? Using two different empirical approaches - a difference-in-differences strategy and a regression discontinuity design that uses a population threshold to determine program eligibility - we evaluate the roll-out of the Rondas e Ações Intensivas e Ostensivas (RAIO) across municipalities in Ceará, Brazil, a state of nearly 10 million inhabitants. We find meaningful reductions in homicides and property crimes. Given that we find no increases in arrests, we believe the crime reduction effects are likely due to deterrence, rather than incapacitation of criminals. We pair these crime results with a citizen survey in Fortaleza, Ceará's capital, which includes embedded survey experiments, to better understand the mechanisms behind these improvements in public safety.
Home (not so) sweet home: remote work and medical leaves in Brazil.
(with Elisa Peres) - Revise and Resubimit, Labour Economics
The COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented shift to remote work worldwide. In this paper, we investigate the dual impact of this transition on physical and mental health by analyzing over 1.5 million medical leaves in Brazil from 2018 to 2021. Using a differences-in-differences model, we compare workers from firms that transitioned to remote work (non-essential services) and the ones that stayed commuting to their workplace (essential services) before and after the pandemic. Our paper reveals a significant decrease in labor accidents, primarily driven by fewer bodily injuries, but a substantial increase in medical leaves related to mental health issues, particularly among men. The abrupt transition to remote work and increased domestic responsibilities in a setting of social distancing norms likely contributed to elevated stress levels and work-life conflicts. Our finding highlights remote work's contrasting health impacts during the pandemic and underscores the need for targeted mental health support in remote work policies.
Heavy-Handed, Light Results: evidence from a huge police crackdown in Brazil.
This paper evaluates the impact of Operação Verão, a high-intensity policing initiative launched in São Paulo state, on crime rates and police lethality. Using municipal-level monthly panel data and difference-in-differences models, I find that while the operation significantly increased police use of lethal force, its effect on most crime indicators was small and short-lived. These results raise concerns about the cost effectiveness and strategic value of such interventions.