Research

My work sits at the intersection of political science and urban studies, and centers on the political economy of cities. I study how fiscal policy, urban planning, and housing shape — and are shaped by — socio-spatial inequalities, using São Paulo as a strategic case for questions that reach well beyond it. My doctoral dissertation, Property and Inequality: Property Tax and Access to Housing in São Paulo (1995–2020), asked how progressive reforms of the urban property tax (IPTU) became politically possible in a highly unequal city, and what their redistributive effects were. Drawing on tax assessment records, socioeconomic data, document analysis, and interviews within a historical-institutionalist framework, it argues that these reforms were not isolated decisions or the product of state capture, but the outcome of coordinated political action — an incremental progressivism in which left-wing governments produced cumulative, long-term effects that were later maintained, and at times reinforced, by right-wing administrations.

Building on that work, my central contribution is to invert the dominant question in the study of the fiscal-urban nexus: rather than asking what taxation does to cities, I ask what urban politics does to taxation. The literature on property taxes explains their failure well: a "double lock" of organized elite resistance and structural electoral unpopularity keeps them systematically underused. But it says little about the opposite condition: when and how governments manage to tax property progressively, sustain those reforms across political alternation, and produce measurable redistributive effects. To account for that, I develop a processual model of analysis built around five interacting elements — fiscal pressure, political agency, bureaucratic capacity, multilevel governance, and institutional legacies — whose combination over time can tip the balance against the mechanisms that normally block reform. São Paulo, where the conditions associated with failure are all present yet reform was nonetheless sustained across three decades and twelve administrations, serves as a critical case for specifying how that configuration works.

I currently develop this agenda as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), extending it along two fronts. The first deepens the analysis of São Paulo, turning the dissertation into a series of studies on the multilevel governance of fiscal reform, the spatial dimensions of tax inequality, and the concentration of property and taxation. The second is comparative: situating São Paulo within a broader analytical frame by examining how property taxation is designed and how it redistributes across other urban contexts, nationally and internationally, in order to move from a single critical case toward a more general account of the conditions for progressive fiscal reform.

Alongside these, a further line connects public finance to the financing of education in Brazil, asking how budgetary rules and allocative choices interact with territorial and social inequalities. Across all these fronts, my interest remains the same — understanding how institutions, actors, and spatial dynamics produce durable inequalities, and how fiscal and urban policies might work to reduce them.