Working Papers:
Abstract: Can access to health services mitigate the impacts of natural disasters in developing countries? This paper documents the health consequences of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon and examines whether access to public healthcare can mitigate potential adverse effects. I link comprehensive hospitalization and mortality records with satellite information on fire locations and wind patterns to identify the causal impact of forest fires on health outcomes for individuals across all age groups. Upwind fires increase hospital admissions for infants and children due to respiratory and circulatory diseases, as well as child and adult mortality. These effects are substantially more negative for municipalities with limited access to public healthcare services, particularly those with few community health centers. The findings suggest an essential role for healthcare delivery in mitigating the impacts of climate change.
Cash and Care: Evaluating the Role of Financial Support and Health Requirements on Birth Outcomes (with Cecilia Machado and Valdemar Pinho Neto)
R&R - Journal of Development Economics
Abstract: Prenatal care and financial support for pregnant women are common in high-income countries, but such initiatives are less prevalent and underexplored in developing nations. This study assesses the effects of a major cash transfer program (Bolsa Família) in Brazil that required prenatal care for benefit eligibility. Leveraging individual-level administrative data from the program Bolsa Família and the Brazilian Ministry of Health, we exploit variation in women’s stages of pregnancy at the time of program implementation to estimate its impact. The program significantly reduced low birth weight and preterm births while increasing timely initiation of prenatal care. These findings suggest that the combination of improved prenatal care and additional financial support plays a pivotal role in enhancing birth outcomes.
Book Chapters:
Returns to education, intergenerational mobility, and inequality trends in Brazil (with Marcelo Neri), in Marcelo Neri (org.), Shifts in Brazilian income distribution and wellbeing in the 21st century, FGV Editora, 2024.
Abstract: Education-related changes are often argued as the main reasons for changes in earnings distribution. However, omitted variable and measurement error biases possibly affect econometric estimates of these effects. Brazil experienced a sharp fall of individual labour income inequality between 1996 and 2014. Coincidentally, in the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) there are special supplements on family background in these two years that allow us to better address the role played by falling education returns. This paper takes advantage of this information to provide new estimates of the level and evolution of the returns to education in Brazil using variable premiums by education level, quantile regressions, and pseudo panels. Regarding measurement error, the empirical strategy is to make use of the information of who responded to the PNAD questionnaire but controlling for availability biases. We find evidence of attenuation bias which reduces mean returns from education between 14 and 31.5 per cent. On the other hand, omitting parents’ education information also accounting for selectivity issues reduces the premium estimates by 24 per cent. Perhaps more importantly, the fall of education premium is heavily underestimated when we do not take family background into account. The highest fall of returns occurred in intermediary levels of education and income. Cohort effects also show that the reduction in the educational premium has been going on for several generations. Finally, we assess how parents’ education affects the educational outcomes of their children and how the intergenerational mobility of education has evolved over the last years. We find a reduction on the intergenerational persistence of education from 0.7 to 0.47 between 1996 and 2014. Cohort effects regarding intergenerational mobility also show that the fall in the persistence of education is also stronger for younger cohorts, which coincides with the fall of education premiums.
Previous UNU-WIDER Working Paper
Work in Progress:
Burning Votes? Electoral Consequences of Fires and Air Pollution in the Brazilian Amazon (with Claudio Ferraz)
Although there is a vast literature that studies how political economy can affect environmental outcomes, evidence of how environmental deterioration can impact local politics is still scarce. In this paper, we study the impacts of fires in the Brazilian Amazon on electoral performance. We combine satellite data on fires and wind direction with administrative data on municipal elections at the polling station level to assess whether voters punish incumbent mayors running for reelection in locations adversely affected by fires before the elections. The empirical strategy explores exogenous variation in wind direction at the time of fire detection to estimate the differential effects of fires that generated more air pollution due to the direction in which the wind was blowing when they took place. We find that upwind fires significantly decrease incumbents' vote shares. The effects are robust across different specifications and are more adverse for places with lower educational levels, lower income, and more urbanized.