Publications

A tale of two cities: heterogeneous effects of COVID-19 on domestic violence in Brazil (with C. Machado and S. Roman) Social Science & Medicine 331 (2023)

An evaluation of COVID-19 deaths through the databases of the Civil Registry, the Registry of Acute Upper-Respiratory Syndromes and the Mortality Registry in Brazil in 2020. (with C.Machado, R. Guedes and G. Dutra) Cadernos de Saúde Pública 39 (2023)


Working Papers

A Chip Off The Old Block? Genetics and The Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth (with L. Carvalho, S. Barcelos, T. Galama and S. van Alten)

Life’s two lotteries: modelling the effects of genes and environments in human capital formation (with S.Roman, T. Galama and S. van Alten and M. Lindeboom)


How and When: Cash and Care Effect of Conditional Cash Transfers on Birth Outcomes (with Cecilia Machado and Fernando Mattar)

While conditional cash transfers are a powerful tool to alleviate poverty and improve many short-run socioeconomic outcomes of targeted families, very little is known about how and when these programs improve in utero conditions of babies. Moreover, there is scarce evidence on whether additional transfers to already eligible families can improve outcomes at birth. This paper fills these two gaps by exploring quasi-random income variation in one of the world’s largest CCT programs – the Bolsa Família in Brazil – taking advantage of sharp eligibility criteria that are due to birth dates of family members. Overall, the results point to a null effect of additional income on birth outcomes, even when transfer amounts are sizable. We also find no behavioural responses on conditionality compliance and prenatal care of pregnant mothers. However, additional cash transfers to women meeting adequate prenatal care reduce preterm birth by 10%, with effects concentrated in transfers that occur as early as in the first trimester of pregnancy. Our findings speak to the role of complementarity between prenatal care and family income in producing health at birth: even small amounts of cash transfers can be effective in improving birth outcomes when coupled with adequate prenatal care.

Born in Bolsa Família Dataset: linking vital records, social welfare registries and longitudinal Bolsa Família payroll data (with Cecilia Machado and Fernando Mattar)

In this article, we describe the Born in Bolsa Família dataset which contains information on 6.1 million births that happened in low-income families in Brazil between 2011-2015. The dataset was constructed by linking administrative records from Brazil's conditional cash transfer scheme Bolsa Família and its social security registry Cadastro Único to national natality and mortality registries. We compute sensitivity and accuracy analysis of our linkage procedure using a gold standard dataset of known mother-child pairs. We recover between 60-75% of all births that happened in families registered with Brazil's social security systems depending on the year of analysis, at very high precision with a positive predictive value which ranges between 97-99%.

Can early childhood policies affect the technology of skill production? A structural assessment of Chile Crece Contigo (with Soraya Roman)

The article assesses the impact of Chile’s early childhood policy, Chile Crece Contigo (ChCC), using data from Chile’s Longitudinal Early Childhood Survey (ELPI). We estimate a CES production function of skills of children exposed to ChCC since gestation and compare to those exposed to the policy only at later developmental stages. The results show that ChCC is associated with higher socio-emotional abilities and cognition as well as higher levels of parental investments. Differences in production function parameters between pre-ChCC and post-ChCC cohorts, including the productivity of parental investments, explain between 66% to 95% of total effects. In addition, we find evidence that ChCC effects were concentrated on vulnerable families. 

Human capital formation from gestation to age 18: Evidence from Brazil (with Gabriel Ulyssea and Naércio Menezes Filho)

In this article, we estimate a production function of child abilities from birth to age 11 and relate these abilities to human capital in early adulthood. We use data from the 1993 birth cohort study from Pelotas, Brazil. Our results show that abilities at birth are produced mainly by gestational investments and maternal health. We find cross productivity between abilities at birth and health as well as external socio-emotional abilities at age 11. All of our production functions exhibit complementarity. Additionally, the year 1993 in Brazil was characterised by hyper-inflation, allowing us to explore how exogenous shifts in the real value of the national minimum wage during gestation affect child development. We find that an increase of one standard deviation in the real value of the national minimum wage significantly increases gestational investments and abilities at birth. Abilities at birth affect health and external socio-emotional abilities in childhood which in turn affect measures of human capital at age 18. However, the magnitude of these effects is small. Finally, we find that the effects of changes in the real value of the minimum wage during gestation are more pronounced for families in the lowest income deciles.