Working in Progress

Papers Under Review 

Localization Economies and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Football Teams in São Paulo, Brazil (with Brad Humphreys) [WP Link]

Agglomeration economies clearly affect firms in urban areas. Interestingly, the existing literature on outcomes in professional sports largely ignores localization economies. We explore the variation in team productivity and the agglomeration of teams across leagues and cities in Campeonato Paulista an annual football competition played by teams in São Paulo state in Brazil. Our results show that localization and urbanization positively affect team success. These results help to shed more light on why teams in larger cities continuously enjoy more success than those isolated in smaller markets.

Assessing production structures in Brazil with time varying graphs (with Hernane Pereira, Luiz Ribeiro, Eder Pereira, Roberto Monteiro, and Valter de Senna) - Revisions requested at International Regional Science Review

This paper uses time varying graphs to evaluate the Brazilian production structures, assessing the relationship across economic sectors overtime given important macroeconomic shocks in the country. We use the annual Brazilian input-output matrices from the World Input–Output Database for the period 1995–2011. Our results show possible positive impacts of macroeconomic policies and higher commodity prices on increased network connectivity between 2002 and 2003, the negative influence of the 2008 crisis resulting in decreased network connectivity, and the intensification of the connectivity of the food, petrochemical and metals, and machinery sectors. These results provide insights on how potential macroeconomic exogenous shocks and policies propagates through the national production structure. 

Do Businesses ``Vote with their Feet" Too? Examining Firm Mobility in Response to Hurricane Risk (with Rushaine Goulbourne and Amanda Ross) - Revisions requested at Annals of Regional Science

Do firms sort in response to hurricane risk? We expand upon standard models of Tiebout sorting for households and explore the effect of hurricanes on firm mobility. Specifically, we examine if firms are more likely to move after experiencing category 3 or higher strength hurricane winds. Using the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) data for Florida, we find that hurricanes are associated with an increase in the likelihood an establishment moves, especially within the state of Florida. Firms are more likely to move into Florida after a hurricane than out of Florida, suggesting that firms take advantage of reduced prices and/or government aid programs. We also find that moves occur within a year of the hurricane and that capital intensive firms are more likely to move after a hurricane than labor intensive firms. Our findings are important for policy makers because the movement of establishments following a hurricane may have long-run economic impacts on the areas that experience these disasters. 

Determinants of Covid-19 Vaccinations in Florida (with John Shannon, Roxana Ruiz Rodriguez*, and Juan Sayago) -  Revisions requested at Review of Regional Studies

This paper explores the determinants of Covid-19 vaccination in Florida focusing on demographic, economic and political preferences. Using data from vaccine intake for Floridians between January and June of 2020, we explore the spatial variation on Covid-19 vaccination patterns and regional characteristics to analyze the main features associated with vaccine intake. Our data allow us to explore differential effects for vaccination pattern across population subgroups according to gender, race and ethnicity, and age. Our results show that political preference has the largest effect on vaccination pattern and that this effect was persistent over time and across subpopulation groups.

Working Papers / Work in Progress

An Examination of of Small Business Resiliency Under Significant Negative Economic Shock (with Zoey Reed-Spitzer*, Tom Smythe, Shelton Weeks)

Tax Incentives and Local Business Ownership: Evidence from the Florida Enterprise Zone Program (with Jamie Pavlik and Juan Sayago)  

The Effects of Dollar General Opening on Next Door Firms (Amelia Biehl and Juan Sayago)

Covid-19 shocks and Mitigation Policies: an input-output analysis for Southwest Florida (with Caroline Welter*, Daniel Centurião*, and Fernando S. Perobelli)

The Economic Geography of American Artists, Postbellum to World War II (with Sara Mitchel and Lukas Kuld)

The Economics of Hurricane Impacts in Florida (with Rushaine Goulbourne and Amanda Ross)

Identification and Concentration of Same-Sex Households (with Mia Goodnature, Adam Nowak and Patrick Smith)

Unpublished Manuscripts 

Does Corruption Impact the Informal-Formal Sector Wage Gap? Evidence from Brazil (with Jamie Bologna) [WP link]

This paper investigates the relationship between political corruption and the informal-formal sector income gap. We focus on a sample of 476 randomly selected municipalities in Brazil, and combine individual level Census data with measures of municipal corruption. We first document the upward pressure corruption puts on the informal-formal income gap. We then utilize a measure of mismanagement by governmental officials as an instrument for corruption to show that these results are robust to plausibly exogenous variation in corruption. When disaggregating the results, we show that the effect of corruption is heterogeneous across industries, with a significant impact on the construction industry in particular.