Publications

Judicial subversion: The effects of political power on court outcomes. Journal of Public Economics, 217 (2023). (with Henrik Sigstad).

Are politicians in power treated more leniently in court? We show that Brazilian mayoral candidates charged with misconduct are 65 percent less likely to be convicted if they narrowly win the election. Politicians play no direct role in the judges’ careers, suggesting that formal independence does not completely insulate the judiciary from political influence. The effect is driven by districts with few judges and by judges with higher career instability.

Education for Control and Liberation in Africa and among the Black Diaspora. Comparative Education Review, vol. 67, n. 4 (2023). (with Dozie Okoye, Shourya Sen, and Leonard Wantchekon). [accepted version]

We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted to restrict educational supply for social control, the strength of the demand—and the accompanying pedagogical, organizational, and political innovations—illustrates the power of education to empower marginalized communities. Through reviewing work in economics, history, and political science, we highlight the transformative effects of formal education in Black communities as well as the centrality of Black people in demanding access to higher education and innovating new political ideas and pedagogies that saw education as a force for liberation. Governments and citizens must continue to work to correct the inherited distortions in the supply of education in Black communities in Africa as well as in the diaspora.

Working papers

African Slavery and the Reckoning of Brazil. (with Nuno Palma). Submitted. [latest version: October 2025] [CEPR] [Lewis Lab]

More enslaved Africans disembarked in Brazil than in any other country in the New World. Using new archival data, we build real wage and slave price series for Brazil covering 1574–1920. Wages initially matched those in Europe but fell as the slave trade expanded, only recovering when the trade ended and slave prices rose. We develop a directed technical change model with slave tasks to explain this finding. We also estimate a large, positive causal effect of slave trade prohibition on wages, consistent with our model. Post-prohibition, there was technological change towards free labor and concentration of slave labor in high-disamenity occupations.

Persuading judges or voters? The role of lawsuits in elections. (with Moya Chin and Henrik Sigstad). Submitted. [latest version: March 2025]

What role do lawsuits play in elections? We document that 30 percent of Brazilian mayoral candidates are involved in election-related lawsuits and that they spend 11 percent of their campaign funds on lawyers. Candidates filing lawsuits rarely succeed in disqualifying opponents or annulling elections. Instead, the true motivation might be to influence voters: Most lawsuits are filed right before the election, and candidates feature the lawsuits in their media campaigns. Motivated by these findings, we estimate the causal effect of lawsuits on polling data and can rule out large effects on voters.

Old But Gold: Historical Pathways and Path Dependence. (with Diogo Baerlocher, Diego Firmino, Eustáquio Reis, and Henrique Veras). Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Urban Economics. [latest version: January 2025]

Following the discovery of gold in 1694 in Brazil, pathways were constructed to connect coastal settlements to mining regions in the unpopulated interior. While these pathways initially facilitated the creation of road towns, their influence faded by the late nineteenth century. With the mid-twentieth-century demographic and industrial transition, regions with higher historical road density experienced renewed population growth and greater migrant inflows. We argue that this resurgence reflects the role of road towns in fostering early urbanization and structural transformation. Using an extended Rosen-Roback-Glaeser framework, we estimate strong agglomeration spillovers, suggesting that Brazil’s spatial economy exhibits multiple steady states and historical path dependence.

Maroon Communities: Cultural Transmission and Local Development in Brazil. [presentation at the Brazilian Econometric Society, invited special session “Institutions and Cultural Evolution,” Natal 2024]

(Subsumes earlier paper: Slave resistance, cultural transmission, and Brazil’s long-run economic development)

Estimating a Behavioral New Keynesian Model. (with Joaquim Andrade and Pedro Cordeiro). [latest version: December 2019]

This paper analyzes identification issues of a behavorial New Keynesian model and estimates it using likelihood-based and limited-information methods with identification-robust confidence sets. The model presents some of the same difficulties that exist in simple benchmark DSGE models, but the analytical solution is able to indicate in what conditions the cognitive discounting parameter (attention to the future) can be identified and the robust estimation methods is able to confirm its importance for explaining the proposed behavioral model.

Work in progress

Les Agoudas: Pre-colonial business networks and intergenerational mobility of liberated returnees. (with Leonard Wantchekon).

Wage Inequality in Brazil, 1574–1920. (with Nuno Palma).

How a Nation is Born: Reconstructing Four Centuries of Brazilian Economic Growth. (with Nuno Palma).

Geography, slavery, and income: A spatial equilibrium approach. (with Eustáquio Reis). [version presented at the RIDGE Economic History Workshop, Montevideo 2019]

Book chapters

Acesso à terra, escolha ocupacional e o diferencial de produtividade agrícola entre pequenos produtores. 2016. In: J.E.R. Vieira Filho and J.G. Gasques, ed., Agricultura, transformação produtiva e sustentabilidade. Brasília: IPEA.

Policy work

Decent Work Guided by Data, Smartlab Observatories. (Safety and health, child labor, human trafficking and slave labor, diversity and equal opportunity). (with Federal Labor Prosecution Office of Brazil and ILO).

Development without Deforestation. Policy in Focus, n. 29, 2014. UNDP/International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth. (Specialist Guest Editor with Carlos Castro). Also in Portuguese.

Structured demand and smallholder farmers in Brazil. 2013. Brasília: International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) and WFP Centre of Excellence Against Hunger. (with IPC-IG and WFP teams). Also in Portuguese.

Innovation and Global to Local Energy Governance. 2013. In: T. Cadman, ed., Climate change and global policy regimes: towards institutional legitimacy. International Political Economy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. (with Guilherme Gonçalves).

Empresas de base tecnológica induzidas e espontâneas na região metropolitana de Campinas: limitações, potencialidades e relações com o espaço geográfico. Parcerias Estratégicas, vol. 29, n. 14 (2009).

Os significados da permanência no campo: vozes da juventude rural organizada. 2016. In: Silva and Botelho, ed., Dimensões da experiência juvenil brasileira e novos desafios às políticas públicas. Brasília: IPEA. (with IPEA team).