Welcome!

I am an Economics PhD student at Yale University. I am interested in how economic research can inform the design of policies and institutions to mitigate socioeconomic inequality, promote economic growth, and strengthen the rule of law.

Before starting graduate school, I was a predoctoral fellow at Yale's Tobin Center for Economic Policy, working with Prof. John Eric Humphries and Winnie van Dijk on eviction-related projects. I have also conducted research with the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab and the Brazilian Federal Labor Prosecution Office, the Development Impact Evaluation Research Group at the World Bank, and the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Education Policy at Fundação Getúlio Vargas.

I graduated in Economics with Honors from Stanford in 2022. Copy of CV.

For those interested in an Economics PhD, check Economics Mentoring Program.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Employment Preferences of Favela Residents (with Mayara Felix, Beatriz Marcoje, and Ieda Matavelli)

PRE-PHD

Differential Treatment of Politically Connected Labor Traffickers: Evidence from the Brazilian Dirty List of Slave Labor [Updated Nov 2023]

Media coverage: Het Financieele Dagblad, 2023.Awarded the David M. Kennedy Honors Thesis Prize in the Social Sciences and the Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research (2022)

Almost 50 million people worldwide were victims of modern slavery in 2021. While several policies are designed to reduce human trafficking, their success may be undermined by corruption. In this paper, I use novel data on campaign donations by traffickers to study how corruption influences the effectiveness of the “Dirty List of Slave Labor” in Brazil, a flagship policy that penalizes employers involved with trafficking. My results present compelling evidence that perpetrators use political connections to avoid being listed or to reduce the amount of time spent on the list. First, employers donate substantially more before an inspection. Second, among traffickers who donate five years prior to being inspected, those who make large donations are less likely to end up on the Dirty List, and if listed, connected traffickers spend five fewer months on the list than their non-connected counterparts. These results are supported by a placebo test showing that connected perpetrators did not receive differential treatment during a two-year period when the Supreme Court suspended the Dirty List sanctions.

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