Sebastiao Oliveira

I am a PhD student in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

I study how uncertainty affects firm investment, innovation, and product-market decisions; how financing constraints shape the transmission of monetary policy to the corporate sector; and how corporate and sovereign debt structures interact with the transmission of economic shocks.

I previously participated in the Chicago Fed Graduate Student Visitor Program (Finance team) during the Fall of 2025, and I was a Dissertation Fellow at the Federal Reserve Board (Capital Markets Section) during the Summer of 2025.

Research Interests: corporate finance, international finance, and monetary policy.

You can find my CV here.

Email: so28@illinois.edu

Working Papers

Product Life Cycle Heterogeneity in the Transmission of Uncertainty

The Impact of Monetary Policy on Venture Capital Finance, with Jose Carlos Abreu and Eduardo Marinho.

The Equity Constraint Channel of Monetary Policy, with Heitor Almeida, Timothy Johnson, and Yucheng Zhou.

Presented at the 2025 WFA.

Local Currency Debt and Sovereign Rollover Risk, with Jaewon Choi, Jay Rafi, and Josef Zechner.

The Effect of U.S. Monetary Policy on Foreign Firms: Does Debt Maturity Matter?, with Jay Rafi and Pedro Simon.

Revised and Resubmitted, Journal of International Economics

Do Exchange Rate Shocks Affect Firms' Production Capacity? The Working Capital Channel

Brems Award for Best Third Year Paper, University of Illinois.

Market Expectations and the Credibility of Monetary Policy, with Pedro Simon.

Publications

How Different is the Brazilian Political System? A Comparative Study (2022), with Odilon Camara and Luciano de Castro. E-Legis 37: 7-37. Media: Exame, Estadão, O Globo

Work in Progress

Auction Design via Market Feedback and the Implications for Takeover Premia, with Dan Bernhardt and Tingjun Liu.
Evaluating the Effects of Interest Rate Regulation on Credit Card Markets: Evidence from Brazil, with Christiano Arrigoni, Angela Patino and Thiago Trafane.