Unfortunately, not all of my projects have been successful, but they may still be of interest if you're exploring similar topics. If so, feel free to reach out—I’d be happy to share more details about what I did and why I decided to leave them as permanent working papers.
Sustainability Performance and Stock Returns in Brazil
Summary: We use ten years of data, from 2005-2016, to estimate the effect on stock returns of being included or excluded from the sustainability index (ISE) of São Paulo Stock Exchange (BM&F Bovespa). We also test for the effect of, once included in the ISE, a company releasing publicly the answers to the questionnaires used to define the components of the index. We employ an event study. We do not find robust evidence of a positive impact neither for being included in the index, nor for being excluded from it. Also, the release of questionnaires by the components of the ISE seems not to present any major effect too, though we find some evidence of a delayed significant effect. Our results suggest that sustainability performance understood in a broader sense as in the ISE does not seem to have an effect on the financial performance of Brazilian firms.
Additional work I developed during my master.
Geological Disasters and Growth: Evidence from Volcanic Eruptions
Summary: I study the GDP growth impacts of geological disasters by focusing on volcanic eruptions. Despite their ubiquity, geological disasters, in particular volcanic eruptions, have not been as extensively studied as climatic disasters in the economics literature. Results are mostly null across different specifications. I use more granular data than previous studies in the growth impacts of natural disasters literature.
Ph.D. second year paper.
Motivation Towards the Environment and Green Jobs
Summary: We examine if manufacturing plant openings by energy transition firms in the U.S. affect local environmental attitudes, in particular by altering communities’ intrinsic motivation towards the environment. Theoretically, the direction of the effect is ambiguous: such openings could either crowd in or crowd out environmental motivation. If place-based industrial policy has the potential to shift environmental preferences, its motivational impacts should be taken into account in the political economy and design of environmental interventions. We analyze the arrival of firms producing batteries, electric vehicle, biofuels and green hydrogen and components for wind and solar energy. We identify revealed environmental preferences through costly real-world behavior: voting outcomes and household adoption of solar panels. Identifying the causal effect of plant openings is empirically challenging, as locations that attract such firms differ in both observable and unobservable ways from those that do not. To address this, we use synthetic control methods and a donor pool of locations experiencing openings of non-green manufacturing firms. We find no consistent evidence that the establishment of green manufacturing plants significantly alters community-level environmental motivations and attitudes, although the results are imprecise.
Third chapter of my Ph.D. dissertation.