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Welcome! I am a Junior Labour Market Economist at the OECD. Before that, I got my PhD at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy and was a Fellow at the Jain Family Institute. Prior to the beginning of my PhD, I worked at international organizations such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as in the public and private sector of my home country.

My primary research interests are centered on labour economics, inequality, student debt, subjective well-being, and illicit financial flows. This site contains my CV, as well as information about my publications, current research projects, and teaching experience.

My work spans different subject areas and geographies, covering both the US and Portugal. Together with my PhD advisor, I have analyzed race and income-based heterogeneities in subjective well-being markers, and how they map into premature mortality trends in the US (published by the Journal of Population Economics). We have also published in Science on how the factors that matter most for well-being depend on which dimension we are considering, and how well-being can matter for policy. In other articles, we assess the causal well-being impact of recent US presidential elections (at Economica), and illustrate the particularly low well-being and health status of prime age men who drop out of the labour force (at Social Science & Medicine). 

At the Jain Family Institute, we have focused on higher education finance and labor markets. We published a paper on the long-term consequences of the Great Recession on student debt outcomes (at Labour Economics) and we currently have a working paper on the effects of the student debt cancellation on borrower financial health and credit outcomes. We have a recently published paper establishing stylized facts about franchising labor markets and their relation to the vertical restraints that franchisors use to limit the autonomy of franchisees (at Research in Labor Economics ); in a follow-up paper, we use a quasi-experimental approach to obtain causal estimates of the effect of one of those restraints (no-poaches) on franchise worker wages (at The Review of Economics and Statistics). 

My dissertation used data from Portugal to assess topics related to inequality, social mobility, labor market concentration, and immigration. One chapter quantifies the trends in wage inequality and intra-generational wage mobility in Portugal, with particular attention to the top of the distribution. Another estimates the extent of wage discrimination that immigrants are subjected to, while also assessing if exogenous increases in competition led to a narrowing of the immigrant-native wage gap. Finally, I also assess the effect of labour market concentration on worker wages, job instability, mobility, and inequality. 

My  ongoing projects include the quantification of changes in the relative autonomy of franchisees with respect to franchisors; an investigation of the causal effects of hospital mergers on medical debt; the effects of non-competes on worker outcomes; and the effects of voluntary firm-level minimum wages.