Working Papers
The impacts of studying abroad: evidence from a government-sponsored scholarship program in Brazil (with Rodrigo Oliveira and André Portela Souza) - Job Market Paper, WIDER Working Paper No. 2023/49 and Sao Paulo School of Economics Working Paper No. 562
This paper investigates the impacts of studying abroad by examining the effects of the Science without Borders (Ciência sem Fronteiras - CSF) program in Brazil. The program was launched in 2011 to promote student and professional exchange in the STEM fields through a substantial increase in the supply of scholarships for Brazilians to carry out part of their undergraduate studies abroad. Our empirical strategy exploits variation in the approval rate across CSF selection calls for the same destination country and year to create an instrumental variable. We combine seventeen public and private administrative records to track the post-university outcomes of CSF candidates. The main results suggest that the program did not achieve its goals. It had a negative impact on postgraduate education enrollment, and on the probability of having a formal job. We find no impacts on wages and on being a firm owner or partner. We provide additional evidence that approved candidates take more time to graduate, which may imply in less labor market experience and also graduating during a recession.
Media coverage: Folha de São Paulo and Gazeta do Povo. Other: Twitter.
Exports, Labor Markets, and the Environment: Evidence from Brazil (with Carlos Góes, Gabriel Lara Ibarra and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series 11172
What is the environmental impact of exports? Focusing on 2000–20, this paper combines customs, administrative, and census microdata to estimate employment elasticities with respect to exports. The findings show that municipalities that faced increased exports experienced faster growth in formal employment. The elasticities were 0.25 on impact, peaked at 0.4, and remained positive and significant even 10 years after the shock, pointing to a long and protracted labor market adjustment. In the long run, informal employment responds negatively to export shocks. Using a granular taxonomy for economic activities based on their environmental impact, the paper documents that environmentally risky activities have a larger share of employment than environmentally sustainable ones, and that the relationship between these activities and exports is nuanced. Over the short run, environmentally risky employment responds more strongly to exports relative to environmentally sustainable employment. However, over the long run, this pattern reverses, as the impact of exports on environmentally sustainable employment is more persistent.
Media coverage: Valor Econômico. Other: Let's Talk Development.
May I calculate your taxes? The Effect of Bookkeeping on Tax Compliance Under a Simplified Regime (with Rosangela Bando, José Martinez Carrasco and Ana Lúcia Dezolt), IDB Working Paper Series N° IDB-WP-01211
Many countries worldwide face significant misreporting in tax declarations. Misreporting leads to undesired low revenue and economic distortions. This paper discusses the extent to which the residual bookkeeping burden faced by small firms in simplified regimes influence tax declaration. A randomized control trial among 1,500 irregular firms in Piauí, Brazil showed that adding the tax amount due and records on transactions to a warning notification improved compliance from 0 to 21 percent and increased the reported revenue in 39 percent. Firms without an accountant were less likely to regularize their status without the added information. These findings suggest the use of third party information to support voluntary compliance may present an opportunity for digital services to improve tax revenue services.
More Information, Lower Price? Access to Market-based Reference Prices and Gains in Public Procurement Efficiency (with José Martinez Carrasco and Ana Lúcia Dezolt), IDB Working Paper Series N° IDB-WP-1441
This paper examines the impacts of providing market-based reference prices on public procurement efficiency. We study the case of the State Secretariat of Health (SES) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and the algorithm developed by the local tax administration to calculate representative reference prices for pharmaceutical products. The reference prices are calculated based on the electronic invoice data relative to the universe of local business-to-business transactions. We find that providing this information to SES procurement officers has led to a significant reduction in purchase unit prices. The effects are entirely driven by products characterized by a higher ex-ante unit price, a smaller number of suppliers, and purchased by a smaller number of public institutions. The gains in efficiency are attributed to the use of up-to-date market information, which is particularly useful for products where information asymmetry is more likely to exist between procurement officers and private providers.
Media coverage: Zero Hora.
The value of data: an estimate of the cost of not updating the Brazilian CPI (with Ricardo Campante Vale and Gabriel Lara Ibarra), World Bank Poverty and Equity Notes - September 2023
This note estimates the impact of postponing Brazil’s household budget survey (Pesquisa de Orçamentos Familiares, POF) on updates to the national consumer price index (CPI). The CPI’s basket categories and their weights are revised whenever a new POF is implemented. Since 1987/88, the POF has been fielded every 6.25 years. Although the survey is costly, delaying it can lead to inflation mismeasurement, with downstream fiscal and distributional consequences. These include potential welfare effects for salaried workers whose wages are indexed to inflation and higher government spending on pensions, which are also inflation-indexed. In this note, we construct counterfactual CPIs under two scenarios: (i) the January 2012 CPI update does not occur, and (ii) the January 2020 CPI update does not occur. Comparing observed and counterfactual CPI paths allows us to estimate the additional pension outlays the federal government would incur due to delayed updates.
Poverty and Inequality Implications of Fiscal Policies: the case of Brazil (with Gabriel Lara Ibarra, Ricardo Campante Vale and Maynor Cabrera), World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series 10495
This paper investigates the impacts of the Brazilian fiscal system on poverty and inequality, with a focus on the effects on vulnerable populations. Leveraging a broadly applied and accepted methodology and several household surveys and administrative data, the paper shows that Brazilian fiscal policies in 2019 were typically poverty- and inequality-reducing, but with a large heterogeneity in the effectiveness of fiscal tools. The poverty impacts of fiscal policies increased over time due to direct transfers. Income inequality reduction is among the highest in a comparable set of middle-income countries, yet the post-fiscal Gini is still high at 0.521. The results indicate that elderly people are the largest beneficiaries of the fiscal system and households with children experience a smaller decline in poverty from government transfers compared to those with no children. At the individual level, the findings also show that children and young adolescents (ages 0–15) were made poorer after taxes and transfers, which suggests that Brazilian fiscal policies in 2019 also increased poverty rates for some population groups. These findings contribute to provide a comprehensive overview of the fiscal system in Brazil and have wide-ranging consequences for the formulation of public policies.
Media coverage: Valor Econômico and Estadão. Other: GlobalDev (English, French and Spanish), World Bank (Portuguese) and Twitter.
Work in Progress
The impacts of a massive campus construction: evidence from Brazil (with André Portela Souza)
This paper examines the downstream impacts of opening new tertiary campuses by studying the effects of a wide-reaching higher education (HE) expansion that took place in Brazil between 2001 and 2019. Our empirical strategy leverages novel administrative data on campuses starting years to exploit variation coming from their staggered roll-out across microregions over time. We combine multiple public administrative records to track educational outcomes at the secondary, tertiary and postgraduate levels. Our main findings suggest that the overall HE gross enrollment and graduation rates increased in response to the shock. The results also indicate that the intervention may have crowded out other Brazilian educational policies not only at the tertiary level but also at other levels. In particular, we find that the federal expansion crowded out state schools at the secondary level and private institutions at the postgraduate level. It also seemingly contributed to a reduction in the number of PROUNI and FIES beneficiaries in hosting microregions. This suggests that policymakers should consider the interrelations between different educational policies and coordinate actions when deciding on how to expand higher education. Our findings also show that, if any, the microregion-level average effects on the formal labor market, number of business created yearly and patent deposits may take more than ten years to materialize.
What is the future of the Brazilian labor force? Evidence from a decade of labor market transitions (with Gabriel Lara Ibarra and Daniel Duque)
This paper studies the labor market transitions in Brazil during the decade 2012-2022 and documents a series of new facts about these transitions covering both the formal and informal sectors. We take advantage of the rotating scheme of the national household survey (PNAD-C) to build a pseudo-panel of workers that enter the survey in the second quarter of a given year between 2012 and 2021, and who are then reinterviewed one year later. Our main findings indicate that informality remains a very important characteristic of the Brazilian labor market, as most of those who lost their jobs in the last decade were informal workers (58 percent) and most of those who were unemployed or out of the labor force and found a job did so in the informal sector (61 percent). Trends relative to the job exit rates in the informal sector were exacerbated by the pandemic in 2019-2020, but neither the 2015-2016 economic crisis nor the 2017 labor reform have seemingly affected them. Our results also indicate that the gender gaps both in terms of the job entry and exit rates have narrowed in the last decade, while the gaps relative to job exit rates between low-educated and more educated individuals have widened. We additionally document that the urban-rural differential has reduced over the last decade. The racial gaps, in contrast, have been mostly unchanged.
Main Publications
Evaluating the Impact of Physicians's Provision on Primary Healthcare: evidence from Brazil's More Doctors Program (with Luiz Felipe Fontes and Paulo Jacinto) - Health Economics, 2018.
This study aims to evaluate the More Doctors Program (Programa Mais Médicos) in terms of the provision of physicians, presenting estimates of its impact on hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. The differences-in-differences method was used with propensity score matching (double difference matching), using 3 specifications, a falsification test, and also a dynamic endogeneity test to confirm the robustness of the results. For the application of this methodology, a panel of municipal data was constructed covering several variables related to socioeconomic, demographic, and public health infrastructure characteristics in the cities for the period from 2010 to 2016. The results show a significant reduction in hospital admissions in treated municipalities with an increasing and perceptible effect in the second year of the program.
Brazil's Simplified Tax Regime and the longevity of Brazilian manufacturing companies: a survival analysis based on RAIS microdata (with Maurício Saraiva, Adelar Fochezatto and Marco Tulio França) - EconomiA, 2018.
The article aims to analyze the effects of the Brazilian Simplified Tax Regime (Simples Nacional) on the longevity of manufacturing microenterprises, contributing to the current debate on the expansion of the program. Based on the RAIS (Relação Anual de Informações Sociais) microdata comprising the period between 2007–2013, a sample of manufacturing establishments, homogeneous in their economic structure, was selected and divided into two groups — those who opted for the program and those who did not. The Survival Analysis technique and the Propensity Score Matching made it possible to identify that the establishments opting for Simples Nacional that were created in 2007 had a 30% lower chance of mortality than the companies not opting for it. Another main result was the indication that separating manufacturing establishments by level of technology-intensiveness the Simplified Regime had a differentiated impact among the groups, with only the manufacturing establishments of low and medium-low technology-intensiveness sectors being affected.
Op-eds (English)
The environmental impacts of export booms in Brazil - Let's Talk Development, August 19, 2025 (with Carlos Góes, Gabriel Lara Ibarra and Gladys Lopez-Acevedo)
Doing more with the same: restructuring public finances to support the poor in our cash-strapped era - GlobalDev, November 22, 2023 (with Gabriel Lara Ibarra)
Op-eds (Portuguese)
Novas linhas de pobreza do Banco Mundial - Valor Econômico, June 27, 2025 (with Hugo Ñopo)
Os impactos do Acordo UE-Mercosul na economia brasileira - Folha de São Paulo, December 16, 2024 (with Shireen Mahdi, Hugo Ñopo and Cornelius Fleischhaker)
Inclusão digital para combater a pobreza no Brasil - Folha de São Paulo, October 7, 2024 (with Shireen Mahdi, Hugo Ñopo and Cornelius Fleischhaker)
Empregos de qualidade: o caminho para o Brasil vencer a pobreza - Folha de São Paulo, October 16, 2023 (with Shireen Mahdi and Gabriel Lara Ibarra)
Reforma tributária: atenção para o tema da desigualdade - Folha de São Paulo, September 4, 2023 (with Shireen Mahdi and Gabriel Lara Ibarra)