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Welcome! I am a PhD student at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy and a Fellow at the Jain Family Institute. My primary research interests are centered on labour economics, student debt, inequality, 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 current work spans different subject areas and geographies, covering both the US and Portugal. Together with my advisor, Carol Graham, 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. Another article in Economica (with two other co-authors) assesses the causal well-being impact of recent US presidential elections, and on Social Science & Medicine we assess the particularly low well-being and health status of prime age men who drop out of the labour force. Currently, we are estimating some of the consequences of the ongoing pandemic on mental health and drug overdoses. 

My dissertation uses 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. Subsequent to my dissertation and still using Portuguese data, I have some preliminary projects I plan to implement:
(i) Assessing how labor market concentration influences the effect of recent policy choices (minimum wage, changes in fixed-term contract laws).
(ii) Using a quasi-experimental design based on a business registration reform to assess the effect on labor market concentration and on worker wages.
(iii) Analyzing the effect of the enactment of a residence-by-investment law on the financial flows to tax havens.
(iv) Quantifying labor market hysteresis after the financial crisis and the pandemic-induced recession;
(v) Conducting an impact evaluation on the wage effects of a reform lowering the income taxes for labor market entrants aged 26 or less.

At the Jain Family Institute, together with Marshall Steinbaum, we have focused on higher education finance and labor markets. Within the scope of the former set of projects, we have just published a paper (at Labour Economics) on the long-term consequences of the Great Recession on student debt outcomes; we are in the initial stages of analyzing the impact of several pandemic-era policies on student debt and other credit outcomes. On the latter, along with other co-authors, we have a forthcoming paper at Research in Labor Economics establishing stylized facts about franchising labor markets and their relation to the vertical restraints that franchisors use to limit the autonomy of franchisees; we have a follow-up paper currently under review at The Review of Economics and Statistics, where we use a quasi-experimental approach to obtain causal estimates of the effect of one of those restraints (no-poaches) on franchise worker wages. On a separate project with a different research team, we are also investigating the effects of hospital mergers on medical debt. 

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.