Claudio Ferraz

Chapter 2 empirically examines how labor-saving technological change in agriculture affects labor reallocation across sectors in economies with sizable informal sectors, and how labor regulations enforcement shapes this process. To identify the causal effect, I exploit the 2003 legalization of genetically modified (GM) soybeans in Brazil and cross-municipality variation in potential yield gains. Between 2000 and 2010, municipalities with greater potential productivity gains from GM soy experienced larger reallocation of labor from agriculture to formal manufacturing, accompanied by declines in informal manufacturing employment. Further analysis of heterogeneous effects by interacting the GM soybean shock with enforcement capacity shows that the reallocation is significantly less pronounced in areas with stricter enforcement of labor regulations. In Chapter 3, I develop and calibrate a two-sector general equilibrium model that qualitatively replicates the empirical findings from Chapter 2. Agricultural production is modeled using a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) function that allows for differential technological progress of labor and land, capturing the factor-biased nature of GM soy. The manufacturing sector features heterogeneous firms that self-select into being formal or informal. Counterfactual exercises show that intensifying enforcement to halve manufacturing informality reduces labor reallocations to manufacturing by 4.5%. Additional simulations suggest that lowering entry and fixed costs for formal firms promotes labor movement into manufacturing while reducing informality.Chapter 4 analyzes how structural changes in the global input-output networks have influenced economic growth across countries at different stages of development. We find that shifts in global supply chains between 1965 and 2000 benefited developing countries while disadvantaging advanced economies. Counterfactual analysis shows that, without these changes, TFP growth would have been 26.6% and 9.7% lower in China and India, and 4.0% and 16.8% higher in the US and Australia. We further demonstrate that a simple statistic, the domestic intermediate input cost share, effectively captures how global networks amplify productivity shocks. Our findings highlight the importance of supply chain integration and the use of intermediate inputs for economic growth.

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This dissertation explores how local leadership, colonial legacies, and institutional reforms shape economic and social outcomes. Each chapter examines a different context where governance plays a central role in long-term development and inequality.In Chapter 2, I study whether female leadership can reduce violence in civil conflict. Focusing on the Colombian armed conflict, I combine local election outcomes with novel data on the gender of guerrilla commanders to show that electing a female mayor reduces conflict violence by 60%, that guerrilla units led by women are less likely to engage in violence, and that having female leaders on both sides further reinforces de-escalation. I document a gender gap in preferences for peace over violence as the primary mechanism behind these results, and formalize this mechanism in a simple theoretical model.In Chapter 3, I examine the long-run effects of Spanish colonization in the U.S. Southwest. I construct a new dataset on the location of Spanish Missions and link it to both historical and modern economic outcomes. Counties closer to missions show persistently higher income, urbanization, and education—patterns that are driven by early advantages in agricultural productivity and skilled labor. To address endogeneity concerns, I use two complementary strategies based on planned-but-unbuilt Missions and an instrumental variable. The evidence suggests that Missions gave counties an early lead in structural transformation, with timely access to infrastructure, particularly railroads, facilitating the shift from agriculture to manufacturing and services.Finally, Chapter 4 examines the Usos y Costumbres (UC) reform in Mexico, which enabled Indigenous municipalities to adopt customary governance. Using administrative data and an event-study design, I show that UC adoption increased household income inequality by 10%, driven by rising gaps between villages within municipalities. The effect was strongest where UC governments enforced rules through sanctions and collective agriculture, pointing to a rise in political and institutional inequality as the underlying mechanism.Taken together, this dissertation shows that leadership and institutional design are central to understanding not only patterns of governance, but also the unequal distribution of development outcomes across space and communities.

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This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Crime and Conflict. The first essay examines the effects of prisoner releases on community crime rates. The second evaluates a truce agreement between criminal organizations and its impact on small firms. The final chapter investigates the historical roots of religious violence in Africa. Chapter 2 provides estimates of criminal spillovers from released offenders to their neighbors. Leveraging a mass pardon in Ecuador, it shows that the release of an offender leads to increased criminal participation of people in their communities. The rise in criminal activity is nearly evenly divided between first-time offenders and individuals with prior criminal experience. The essay emphasizes the significance of social connections, particularly family networks, in facilitating the transmission of criminal behavior. Importantly, it also demonstrates that access to job training programs during incarceration can help mitigate these adverse spillovers. Chapter 3 examines the impact of a truce agreement between El Salvador's major gangs on the behavior of firms. The chapter demonstrates that the truce led to a reduction in aggregate violence in contested territories, resulting in a decline in firm size. It develops a theoretical model and uses data from a victimization survey to argue that this contraction is driven by gangs reallocating their efforts from inter-gang conflict toward the extortion of local businesses. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between colonial missionary activity in Africa and contemporary conflict and social unrest. It finds that districts with historical exposure to Christian missions are more likely to experience conflict in the twenty-first century. The chapter presents evidence that missionary presence increased religious fractionalization in the areas where they operated, which is associated with higher levels of unrest. This relationship is especially pronounced for events involving religiously affiliated actors or featuring a religious dimension.

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In Chapter 2, I document the health consequences of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon and examine whether access to public healthcare can mitigate potential adverse effects. I link comprehensive hospitalization and mortality records with satellite information on fire locations and wind patterns to identify the causal impact of fires on health for individuals across all age groups. I find that upwind fires increase hospital admissions for infants and children, which is driven by respiratory and circulatory diseases, as well as child and adult mortality. Access to public healthcare services, particularly community health centers and clinical doctors, strongly mitigates the effects, suggesting an essential role for healthcare delivery in mitigating the impacts of climate change.In Chapter 3, we study the impacts of fires in the Brazilian Amazon on electoral performance. We combine satellite data on fires and wind direction with administrative data on municipal elections at the polling station level to assess whether voters punish incumbent mayors running for reelection in locations adversely affected by fires before the elections. The empirical strategy explores exogenous variation in wind direction at the time of fire detection to estimate the differential effects of fires that generated more air pollution due to the direction in which the wind was blowing when they took place. We find that upwind fires significantly decrease incumbents' vote shares. The effects are robust across different specifications and are more adverse for places with lower educational levels, lower income, and more urbanized. Chapter 4 evaluates the impacts of a large cash transfer program in Brazil in which prenatal care was required for benefit receipt. Using administrative data from the program and the Brazilian Ministry of Health, we compare women at different stages of pregnancy when the program was implemented to identify the degree to which additional income and access to prenatal care affected birth outcomes and prenatal care utilization. We find that the benefit reduced the incidence of low birth weight, preterm births, and the likelihood of starting prenatal care late. Better prenatal care, in combination with the additional income, appears to drive improvements in birth outcomes.

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Chapters 2 and 3 analyze a place-based policy that reduced the effects of lowering lethal violence at the neighborhood level for several years in some of the most violent neighborhoods on earth. Chapter 2 discusses how this reduction affects short-run learning gains, employment, and incarceration for treated individuals in their early adulthood. The policy increases human capital for students in the short run. Fewer disruptions in the school routine, less student absenteeism, and a safer environment \textit{within} school drive these results. Moreover, younger individuals have a substantially lower likelihood of being incarcerated later. Chapter 3 evaluates the spatial spillover induced by the policy. I find that the program decreased homicides and police killings in treated areas and did not cause crime displacement to other places in Rio de Janeiro. There is suggestive evidence of crime migration to areas in Rio's metropolitan region and the state's countryside.In Chapter 4, I investigate how localized heat stress affects vulnerable populations \emph{within} the city of Rio de Janeiro. It is known that temperature shocks increase mortality, and the link is primarily via human physiology. However, most of this evidence comes from cross-city and epidemiological studies in developed countries. This chapter examines the heat-mortality relationship at a fine-grained level within Rio de Janeiro. We rely on novel satellite imagery sources on temperature and administrative health records at the individual level to build a neighborhood-by-month panel over 14 years. Heat stress increases all-cause mortality in individuals aged 60 years or older but does not affect other age groups. In particular, we find that hot days in a typical month in Rio account for 2\% of cardiovascular deaths in the population 60+. Access to preventive health care can attenuate the marginal effect of temperature on these deaths. We conclude that temperature shocks are localized within cities, implying that remedial policies should also be localized.

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