Papers

This paper provides new evidence on why men and women leaders make different choices. Exploiting Brazilian close elections, we show that female mayors responded differently to the COVID-19 crisis over the year 2020. Female mayors were less likely to close non-essential businesses early in the pandemic and female-led municipalities experienced higher mortality, while the reverse was true later on. We show that these findings can be rationalized by a simple political agency model in which politicians seek re-election and voters are gender biased. Consistent with this interpretation, the gender differences we find are driven exclusively by mayors facing re-election.

We document the long-term effects of weather-induced rural-to-urban migration on receiving cities’ labor and housing markets in Brazil, using historical drought patterns as a source of variation…

Using municipal-level data from Brazil during the pre-vaccination period of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper documents striking heterogeneity in mortality across cities…

This paper examines patterns of rural-urban migration in Latin America at relatively high levels of urbanization, where standard development-economics models predict that flows should slow or reverse…

We compare urbanization patterns across countries at different income levels and document a series of empirical regularities…

Births to child mothers — girls aged 10 to 14 — are undercounted. Using birth registries from 37 countries and census data from 73 countries, we show that contemporaneous census-based estimates of births to child mothers are significantly lower than registry counts, consistent with censuses counting only co-resident children. In contrast, censuses conducted a decade later for the same birth cohorts report more such births than earlier censuses and, in over 65% of country-censuses, more than the registries. We develop a model in which social stigma discourages disclosure among young mothers but fades over time, explaining why retrospective sources uncover births missed by contemporaneous ones.

We study the causal effect of reducing distance-related frictions with headquarters on branch outcomes in multi-unit firms in Brazil. Exploiting the introduction of new airline routes, we compare branches that gain a direct flight to their headquarters with otherwise similar branches in the same location that do not. In contrast to prior findings from high-income country settings, improved connectivity with headquarters lowers 12-month survival and, conditional on survival, reduces service and production employment. To interpret these results, we develop a model with three distance-dependent frictions: (i) internal coordination costs of delivering headquarters inputs to branches; (ii) client-service costs when serving markets without a local branch; and (iii) a moral-hazard friction whereby distance amplifies local managers’ incentives to over-hire. Consistent with the model’s predictions, survival declines are larger at closer branches, while employment reductions are concentrated at more distant branches and in firms with lower headquarters bandwidth. The model clarifies how the impact of reduced frictions with headquarters depends on pre-existing distortions and reconciles heterogeneous connectivity effects observed across developing- and high-income contexts.