Working Papers

This paper presents new econometric tools to unpack the treatment effect heterogeneity of punishing misdemeanor offenses on time-to-recidivism. We show how one can identify, estimate, and make inferences on the distributional, quantile, and average marginal treatment effects in setups where the treatment selection is endogenous and the outcome of interest, usually a duration variable, is potentially right-censored. We explore our proposed econometric methodology to evaluate the effect of fines and community service sentences as a form of punishment on time-to-recidivism in the State of São Paulo, Brazil, between 2010 and 2019, leveraging the as-if random assignment of judges to cases. Our results highlight substantial treatment effect heterogeneity that other tools are not meant to capture. For instance, we find that people who most judges would punish take longer to recidivate as a consequence of the punishment, while people who would be punished only by strict judges recidivate at an earlier date than if they were not punished. This result suggests that designing sentencing guidelines that encourage strict judges to become more lenient could reduce recidivism.

Presented at Brown University, University of Chicago, Yale University, LACEA-LAMES 2023, Workshop on the Econ of Crime for Junior Scholars.

This paper identifies the probability of causation when there is sample selection. We show that the probability of causation is partially identified for individuals who are always observed regardless of treatment status and derive sharp bounds under three increasingly restrictive sets of assumptions. The first set imposes an exogenous treatment and a monotone sample selection mechanism. To tighten these bounds, the second set also imposes the monotone treatment response assumption, while the third set additionally imposes a stochastic dominance assumption. Finally, we use experimental data from the Colombian job training program Jóvenes en Acción to empirically illustrate our approach's usefulness. We find that, among women who are always employed regardless of treatment, at least 12% and at most 19% transition to the formal labor market because of this training program.

Presented at FGV-Rio, State University of New York - Albany, NY Camp Econometrics, Federal University of Paraiba.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of information disclosure on price-quality relationship in the private school market in Brazil. We use the disclosure policy on scores of an exit exam in Brazil (ENEM) that took place in 2006. We construct a novel longitudinal data set on private schools that includes information on ENEM average scores in the years before and after its publication and on tuition fees for all years. We show that the correlation between test scores and price significantly becomes positive after the publication and increases over the years. Furthermore, this correlation becomes stronger for schools whose quality was noisily perceived previously.

Presented at the 36th Meeting of the Brazilian Econometric Society (2014), the VII Encontro CAEN-EPGE de Políticas Públicas e Crescimento Econômico (2015), the 20th Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (2015).