In this paper, we estimate the effects of the introduction of a labor-saving technology in agriculture on violence, by examining the case of the adoption of genetically-modified soy seeds in Brazil. Previous literature has shown that this technological change leads to job displacement, increases in land conflicts and gender inequality. We show that the effects also spread to homicide rates, which increase significantly after the adoption of the modified soy seeds.

Whether the COVID-19 pandemic has changed fertility patterns is still an open question, as social isolation for long periods can impact the number of conceptions in many ways. We combine administrative data on all recent births in Brazil with daily data on individual location to estimate the relationship between the share of individuals staying close to their homes in each week and the number of conceptions in that same week, comparing municipalities with different social isolation patterns during the first semester of 2020. We find that conceptions unequivocally decline when social isolation increases. The effect is stronger for women who are between 21 and 25 years old and more educated, as well as for richer, larger, and more urban municipalities. COVID-19 is likely to change fertility across countries depending on the behavior of the population and on the lock-down measures implemented to fight the pandemic.

Previous studies have shown that the percentage of votes for Jair Messias Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential elections, at the municipal and state levels, is related to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of the number of deaths. We find the same effects at the intra-municipal level in the city of São Paulo. Using geolocation, we associate voting data with number of deaths for the 96 districts in the city. We analyze excess mortality to mitigate underreporting issues and to account for exogenous determinants of mortality, as well as control for age structure and several indicators of socioeconomic vulnerability. The results are significant and indicate the existence of a relationship between votes for Bolsonaro and deaths during the pandemic — between one and five additional deaths per 100k people for each percentage point of votes. Several robustness checks support our findings.

A rapidly expanding literature documents the detrimental effects of excessive cell phone use, particularly on mental health outcomes and attention. While nearly all studies focus on the adult population, many experts have used them to support phone bans in schools – partially in the hope that these might help reverse declining trends in standardized test scores dating from even before the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper provides first-hand evidence that phone restrictions in schools indeed causally boost K–12 learning outcomes. Leveraging the introduction of a policy that banned non-pedagogical uses of cell phones within schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we contrast schools that already had strict rules on phone use even before the policy (the control group) to all other schools (the treatment group), before and after the ban. We find that, 1.5 year after roll-out, (1) the prevalence of high-usage schools converged across groups; and (2) standardized test scores significantly increased in treatment schools, relative to control: in the former, students learned 0.06 s.d. more – enough to fully eliminate the baseline gap in test scores across groups.

This paper studies regional exposure designs that use commodity prices as instruments to study local effects of aggregate shocks. Unlike standard shift–share designs that leverage differential exposure to many shocks, the price–exposure relies on exogenous variation from a single shock, leading to challenges for both identification and inference. We motivate the design using a multi-sector labor model. Under the model and a potential outcomes framework, we characterize the 2SLS and TWFE estimands as weighted averages of region- and sector-specific effects plus contamination terms driven by the covariance structure of prices and by general-equilibrium output responses. We derive conditions under which these estimands have a clear causal interpretation and provide simple sensitivity analysis procedures for violations. Finally, we show that standard inference procedures suffer from an overrejection problem in price-exposure designs. We derive a new standard error estimator and show its desirable finite-sample properties through Monte Carlo simulations. In an application to gold mining and homicides in the Amazon, the price–exposure standard errors are roughly twice as large as conventional clustered standard errors, making the main effect statistically insignificant.

How do economic gains from globalization shape political preferences in developing countries? Although trade-related job loss has fueled political backlash in advanced economies, we know less about how positive trade shocks affect voter behavior. We study Brazil’s exposure to rising export demand and import competition from China between 2000 and 2010. Using a shift-share instrumental variable strategy, we show that export booms led to a rightward ideological shift in more exposed municipalities, while import shocks had no comparable political effect. We find evidence for a self-interest mechanism: export demand increased income and employment across the distribution and reduced reliance on social programs and support for redistribution-oriented political parties. We find no evidence of increased campaign funding or elite-driven supply-side change. In developing economies, trade liberalization can create political realignment by reducing the perceived need for state intervention.

A large literature documents that exposure to environmental toxins harms fetal development. This paper studies the Brazilian Amazon, where the expansion of smallscale gold mining releases mercury into river networks that supply predominantly poor, riverine, and Indigenous communities. My identification strategy exploits exogenous time variation stemming from the fluctuation of international gold prices, interacted with the distribution of geological gold deposits across municipalities. I then use the direction of river flows within water basins to identify the potentially treated populations as those that live in locations downstream from gold deposits. The results show a significant increase in birth anomalies and a small decrease in birthweight in treated populations when the price of gold increases, while there is no effect for populations living upstream from these locations.

In this paper, we estimate the the effects of trade on mortality in Brazilian municipalities, using data with the universe of deaths and the China shock as a natural experiment. We employ an instrumental variable shift-share approach to find that both exports and imports from China reduce mortality. With regards to mechanisms, we show that exports increase employment and household income, reducing povertyrelated deaths, such as malnutrition. Meanwhile, imports increase the employment rate among youngsters, increasing the opportunity cost of crime and reducing homicides.