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Affirmative action in Brazil’s higher education systemEvidence from Brazil shows how affirmative action students in the higher education system adjust their behaviour to catch up with initially higher...
Rodrigo is a Research Associate at UNU-WIDER, and his research interests are Development Economics, Economics of Education, and Labor Economics.
His leading research focuses on the impact of education on a wide range of outcomes and uses different methods. During his Ph.D., he studied how education and labor market structure explain the evolution of Brazil's regional inequality between 1970 and 2010. After the Ph.D., his research focused on the impact of vocational training, affirmative action policies, and evaluating other educational or labor policies. Recently he started projects involving tax-and-benefit microsimulation methods in selected African countries and the long-run impacts of socio-economic shocks.
He also has at least five years of experience leading research teams in Brazilian Universities, one year of experience leading a research team in the Brazilian private sector. Currently, he coordinates research and technical assistance activities in Mozambique and Tanzania in collaboration with UNU-WIDER colleagues and leads the UNU-WIDER seminar series.
Evidence from Brazil shows how affirmative action students in the higher education system adjust their behaviour to catch up with initially higher...
Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing...
Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university in Brazil that splits students into two classes, we apply a regression discontinuity design to study the effect of class allocation on academic performance and...
We examine the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated tax-benefit measures in seven sub-Saharan African countries, focusing on the onset of the crisis.We evaluate impacts on disposable incomes, considering variations across...
This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania Mainland. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs...
This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs. It...
This paper investigates the impact of the Science without Borders (Ciência sem Fronteiras – CSF) programme on participants’ post-graduation enrolment, employment, and entrepreneurship. The programme was launched in 2011 to increase students’ human...
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enacted tax and social protection measures to help mitigate the economic hardship faced by individuals and households. This experience underscores the need to better understand the impact of...
Designing and implementing public policies requires caution to guarantee the best use of scarce resources, especially in middle- and lower-income...
This paper studies the unintended long-run effects of a permanent agricultural shock led by agro-terrorism in Brazil on the education and labour market. We explore the witches' broom outbreak in cocoa farms in the world's second most important cocoa...
View the latest TAZMOD country report here. This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the...
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. It describes the different tax-benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and...
Affirmative action in higher education may lead to mismatch, a situation where students benefiting from preferential admission struggle with their college-level work because of poor pre-college academic preparation. In the United States, those...
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that African tax and social-benefit systems are currently ill-equipped to protect households from sudden income losses...
The number of people living in poverty around the world is estimated to have increased by half a billion people due to the COVID-19 crisis. The...
In summer 2020 the SOUTHMOD team set out, with partners, to analyse the impact of government policies on protecting households from getting poorer and...
This paper analyses the distributional effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and related tax-benefit measures in 2020 in a cross-country comparative perspective for five African countries: Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. We first estimate...
This note sets out two different methods on how to adjust incomes in the microdata underlying the standard SOUTHMOD models to reflect a sudden shock, in this case the COVID-19 shock, as done in the accompanying working paper by Lastunen et al. (2021)...
This technical note presents a modelling approach used in Lastunen et al. (2021) where tax and benefit policies are scaled to reflect their actual duration during a single calendar year. It can be applied to tax-benefit microsimulation models...
Peers play an essential role in cognitive and non-cognitive skills formation. Ordinal rank may also change incentives and environment, impacting students’ efforts. Using two rich administrative data sets and a rule of admission at one top university...
Using admission lotteries and registry data linking labour market outcomes, we study the effect of a vocational training programme focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. The intensive programme is an 18-month classroom training coupled with...
The purpose of this article is to provide new evidence about the sources of regional income inequalities in Brazil along the wage distribution, taking into account the regional differentials in purchasing power. We use a unique and recent regional...
Can students’ rank in the ability distribution of their class impact their academic achievement? We aim to answer this question using a discontinuity generated by a rule for the distribution of students between classes at a prestigious Brazilian...