I’m a PhD candidate in Economics and a PhD Fellow at the Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality at UBC. My research focuses on labor markets in developing countries, with an emphasis on informality, gender, and job amenities.

My job market paper disentangles the role of formal employment opportunities from workers’ decisions to formalize in explaining persistent informality. I show that opportunities to formalize are limited, but most workers formalize when given one, while wages and job amenities shape take-up across workers and workplaces. My broader research examines how labor-market institutions and firms shape employment and gender inequality, including flexible work arrangements, mobility across the public–private employment margin, workplace gender norms, and digital and AI-enabled tools for informal workers.

I expect to graduate in 2027 and am on the 2026–2027 job market.

Sorting into (In)formality: Job Offers and Worker Preferences (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: In developing countries, many workers remain informally employed despite the protections associated with formal employment. Understanding whether informality persists because opportunities to enter formal employment are limited or because workers choose not to formalize when given the opportunity is important for the design of labor-market policy. This paper studies these two margins of sorting into formality: opportunities to formalize and workers’ preferences over formal employment. I exploit Brazilian labor inspections that require firms to register workers already employed informally, creating a formalization opportunity within an existing employment relationship. Most workers formalize: within six months, new formal hires correspond to 78% of informal men and 68% of informal women detected by inspectors. Conditional on this opportunity, men and women respond similarly to the formal wage premium, while non-wage job attributes generate greater heterogeneity across genders and workplaces. A complementary survey experiment confirms that most workers choose formal employment when offered and shows that take-up rises sharply when formalization does not reduce take-home pay. Finally, I combine inspection-based take-up with informal-to-formal transitions in the broader labor market and find that comparable formalization opportunities arise substantially less frequently than workers accept them. The findings point to limited formal-job availability as an important source of persistent informality, while wages, amenities, and the informal outside option shape workers’ decisions once an opportunity to formalize arises.

Managers and the Transmission of Gender Norms and Practices

Abstract: This paper studies how managers’ gender attitudes shape workplace practices and culture. Using data from a multinational firm operating in over 100 countries, we leverage cross-country manager rotations to identify the effects of male managers’ gender attitudes on gender pay gaps within teams. Managers from countries with one standard deviation more progressive gender attitudes reduce the pay gap by 5 percentage points (18% of the baseline gap), half of which is driven by women being promoted. These effects are strongest in conservative countries. They persist even after managers rotate out, in part because they influence the practices and attitudes of local managers, including peers who interact with them but are not under the direct purview of foreign managers.

Labor Market Flexibility and Gender Heterogeneity in Labor Allocation

Abstract: Does greater flexibility create job opportunities and improve labor allocation? This paper examines how firms and workers respond to a labor market flexibility shock in a setting characterized by high regulation costs. Focusing on the Brazilian labor market, I leverage linked formal employer-employee data to analyze the impacts of the 2017 Labor Reform, a policy that removed constraints on flexible work schedules. I show that this policy change led to an increase in job opportunities and employment, especially in part-time positions. Notably, women experienced greater employment gains. At the state level, I observe that while the reform did not significantly impact unemployment rates, it contributed to reduce informality, which accounted for 40% of the workforce in 2016. Gender-specific analysis indicates that this effect is primarily driven by women transitioning from informal to formal employment within the private sector in the short run, followed by both women and men in the state-level economy in the medium run. These findings underscore the interaction between labor market flexibility and gender disparities, underscoring the potential of such reforms to reconfigure employment allocation. The case of the Brazilian reform offers a more nuanced perspective when informality is considered.

Coaching the Match: Experimental Evidence from Chatbot Assistance and AI Augmentation in Mozambique’s Gig Economy

Abstract: This project studies whether digital capability-building and AI-enabled tools can improve labor-market outcomes for workers in Mozambique. In partnership with Biscate, a digital platform for informal service work, we design a three-arm randomized controlled trial comparing the status quo with a WhatsApp-based training program and a version augmented with AI tools for pricing, invoicing, marketing, and worker–client communication. The experiment examines whether these interventions reduce information, behavioral, and matching frictions, improving job completion, earnings, and worker retention, with particular attention to heterogeneous effects by gender.

Bargaining across the Public–Private Margin: Unions, Gender Gaps, and Economic Mobility

Abstract: This project studies how the expansion of public-sector employment across Brazilian local labor markets shapes worker mobility and gender gaps. I exploit variation in public-sector job growth and in the substitutability of occupations across the public and private sectors. Motivated by the higher propensity of women to transition into public employment, I examine whether differences in job amenities and employment protection contribute to gender differences in public–private sector mobility. More broadly, the project sheds light on how the public sector shapes labor-market opportunities and the allocation of workers across sectors, and how these effects differ by gender.

Assimilation Policy and Indigenous Political Institutions: Evidence from American Indian Constitutions

Abstract: This project studies how assimilation policies targeting American Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries affected individualism, ethnic identity, and attitudes towards the U.S. government, as measured through the clauses and language used in over 350 newly digitised tribal constitutions and charters. We first demonstrate that there is meaningful variation in the types of clauses (e.g., blood quantum or residence restrictions on membership) and language (e.g., emphasising the “tribe” or the “individual”) across constitutions. We then examine how tribal characteristics and historical exposure to government policies – such as Indian schools and land allotment – affected constitutional features. Finally, we employ natural language processing techniques to measure the extent to which these characteristics affected trust and cooperation with the U.S. government during the Indian New Deal, as measured by semantic similarity between constitutions written in the 1930s and a ‘model’ constitution distributed by the Indian Office at the time. This project contributes to our understanding of how assimilation policies influenced Indigenous institutional development and political culture, highlighting the long-term effects of government intervention on tribal sovereignty, collective identity, and intergovernmental relations in American Indian Nations.

Stone Centre on Wealth and Income Inequality Fellowship, UBC 2025–2027

Erwin Diewert Graduate Prize in Applied Economics, UBC 2023

Four Year Doctoral Fellowship (4YF), UBC 2021–2025

Tuition Fellowship for Graduate Studies, Universidad de San Andrés 2019

TA, University of British Columbia, Vancouver School of Economics 2022–2025

• Undergraduate: Poverty and Inequality, Principles of Macroeconomics (Head TA), Data in Economics, Economics of the Environment, Sex & Gender in the Economy

TA, Universidad de San Andrés, Economics Department 2020

• Graduate: Econometrics, Big Data
• Undergraduate: Principles of Microeconomics, Econometrics

TA, Universidad del Pacífico, Economics Department 2017–2021

• Undergraduate: Econometrics, Microeconomics I