Dissertation Title: Coffee Culture: Three Essays on the Political Economy and Development of Brazil in the Early Twentieth Century.
The essays are:
Coffee, Immigrants and Growth
How does an agricultural commodity affect development? Exporting commodities have generally been thought of as curses. I argue that the late nineteenth century coffee boom in Southeast Brazil triggered a mass European migration and transformed the local economy into a commercial society, both of which contributed to local development. I find that immigration left a local legacy of higher incomes, better public goods provision and higher quality fiscal governance, and that coffee affected development indirectly through its impact on immigration.
Ideas and Policy-Making in Early Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil
How do ideas affect development? This papers uses Dani Rodrik's (2014) framework to explain how the popularization of liberal ideas changed the political equilibrium in nineteenth-century Brazil. The rise of liberal ideology led to the implementation of market-preserving federalism in 1891 and thereafter states had fiscal autonomy to finance local projects. In São Paulo, the self-financing feature of federalist constitution allowed local elites coordinate and solve collective action problems that before had been politically unfeasible. I argue that the new political economy of the coffee state of São Paulo at the turn of the century relaxed economic constraints on local actors and allowed for greater cooperation, exchange and eventually economic development. In the paper, I explore two policy examples under the Rodrik framework: immigration subsidization and coffee valorization.
Immigrant Nationality and Human Capital Formation in Brazil
Published Work:
Brazil’s Long Divergence
The Annual Proceedings of the Wealth and Well-Being of Nations 2012-2013