Department of Anthropology
Henrique Assi Hernandes was born in Santo André, near São Paulo, Brazil, and was raised in Brasília, the Federal Capital, where he developed a keen interest in understanding topics related to society, language, and culture. He returned to his home state to study at the University of São Paulo (USP), where he pursued a bachelor’s degree with a teaching certificate in Social Sciences.
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Department of History
Erika Vieira was born and raised in Porto Velho, the capital city of Rondônia, a state in the northwest of Brazil. She holds a bachelor’s degree in History from the Federal University of Rondônia and a master’s degree from the same institution in the History of the Amazon. Her academic work has been deeply rooted in exploring the racialized experiences of minority workers in the Amazon, as reflected in her first research project and undergraduate thesis.
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Department of Economics
His research interests lie in Applied Economics, focusing on topics related to Politics, Labour, Development and Urban Economics. He holds master's and bachelor's degrees in Economics from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Department of Economics
“Neighborhood Intervention, Crime, and School Achievement: Evidence from Football Fields Construction in Fortaleza, Brazil”
Research Activities: In July 2014, Fortaleza started a citywide large-scale urban renewal project focused on disadvantaged neighborhoods with high shares of young adults. The program builds football fields, invests in citizenship formation through football lessons, and improves the nearby infrastructure with a playground, street lighting, and sidewalk. This study uses a difference-in-differences design to provide the causal effects of this neighborhood intervention on violent crime and students’ performance.
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Department of Economics
I was involved in a research project about Brazil that resulted in the paper, “How Different Is the Brazilian Political System? A Comparative Study,” coauthored with Luciano de Castro and Odilon Camara. This paper provides an up-to-date comparison of Brazil’s political system with that of 33 other countries. We show that Brazil is an outlier with respect to the number of effective parties, the total government budget allocated to the legislative branch, and the public funding allocated to political parties.
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Department of Psychology
I have been involved in two research projects that I intend to further expand to conduct cross-cultural research involving the United States and Brazil. More specifically, these projects aim to identify scientists in different fields of knowledge and investigate gender differences in the predictors of creative achievement. Thus far, I reviewed the literature on personality and creativity/creative achievement, which helped elaborate the research proposal and set up the study to collect the data. I have also analyzed secondary data within the scope of these projects to gather insights that will inform the next steps of my research. The results of the data analysis I conducted will be presented at the department’s seminar (i.e., brownbag) this semester.
Department of History, Migrants and the Brazilian Boom-City: Manaus from 1892 to 1940
This research focuses on ordinary mobile individuals as pivotal agents in urban development in the Amazon between 1892 and 1940. Despite the valuable contributions of economic studies of commodity booms, it argues that understanding Manaus as the most important urban center of the Brazilian Amazon demands a careful assessment of the ways in which migrants developed their livelihoods there, alongside the impact of the commodity booms and government interventions.
Department of Economics, The Direct and Indirect Effects of Credit Shocks to Exporters and Importers
This paper will investigate the direct and indirect effects of credit supply shocks on exports and importers in Brazil. Using a combination of several unique databases provided by the Central Bank of Brazil, we will estimate the direct impact of access to credit on Brazilian exports and imports. Furthermore, we will study how these shocks propagate through the economy using firms’ production networks.
Department in History
This research explores family law in 20th century Brazil from the perspective of women’s rights. Women and men – as wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons – have precise, albeit changing legal roles, which depend upon contingent discussions about the social construction of gender, sexuality, masculinity and femininity. Across time, for instance, women in Brazil gained the right to vote (1932); the right to seek and accept job offers without prior consent from their husbands (1962); the right to divorce (1977); ...
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Department of Economics
Marcelo is an incoming economics PhD candidate, where he intends to develop research in applied microeconomics. He is interested in topics of public policy in development and labor economics, and particularly as they pertain to developing countries. He holds a Master’s of Science in Policy Economics degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor’s of Business Administration degree from Villanova University, where he majored in economics and finance. Before starting his PhD studies, he was working as an analyst at the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB) in Brasilia and Porto Alegre. He worked in both monetary policy and banking supervision during his five years at the BCB. The Werner Baer Fellowship will fund his first year in the PhD program as well as his first summer, when he plans to start working as an RA or a TA and begin narrowing down his research interests.
Department of Political Science, How Do Voters Use Information? Revealed Corruption and Electoral Accountability in Brazil
Access to information is a key component of democracy, it allows citizens to monitor politicians’ performance in office and elect those that represent their interests better. However, research on the impact of performance information on citizens’ ability to hold politicians accountable offers mixed results. In the case of corruption, while information about malfeasance often leads voters to punish corrupt politicians in elections, sometimes they fail to do so even when credible information is available. Most of the literature attributes this to features of the information itself or the context in which it is distributed. In my dissertation, I use data from an anti-corruption program in Brazil to focus on how voters engage with information about politicians’ performance.
Department of Anthropology, Sexual Celestial Citizens: LGBTQ Pentecostal Christians in an Uncertain Brazil
This project analyzes the growth of LGBTQ Pentecostal churches in Brazil by examining the ways these churches work to produce modern LGBTQ citizen-subjects and the ways congregants of these churches navigate church teachings in their everyday lives. Through participant-observation, digital ethnography, and life history interviews, I explore the combination of LGBTQ rights discourses with what Pentecostals call “cidadania celestial” (celestial or heavenly citizenship) in the production of contemporary LGBTQ Brazilian citizen-subjectivities.
Department of Economics
Department of Political Science
My research focuses on elections, vote buying, public opinion, and voter education. I have a regional focus in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on Brazil. My dissertation project examines citizen attitudes toward clientelism, the exchange of goods and services for political support. I argue that there are many the term clientelism encompasses a wide variety of behaviors, each of which may be viewed differently by the general public.
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Department of Economics
A Ph.D. Candidate in Economics Gustavo graduated in 2012 from the Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto with a B.Sc. in Economics. Gustavo primary fields of research include corporate finance and banking, international finance, and macroeconomics. His research deals primarily with the effects of financial crises on employment and investment, paying special attention to the role played by the interconnections between firms and banks. Gustavo exploits historical and present-day evidence for both emerging and advanced economies in his research. His papers are mostly focused on the two most important economic crises faced in modern history: The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008-2010.
Department of History
Based on extensive research in Brazilian archives, Thais’ dissertation examines the urban history of the Brazilian Amazon in the twentieth century. The Amazon region has largely been the focus of economic historians, studying national and global commodity booms. Despite the valuable contributions brought by these analyses, the intersections of social, urban and environmental processes taking place within the Amazon are consistently overlooked in these studies.
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Department of Economics
School of Social Work
Lenore is an applied researcher, whose research focuses on social policy and program evaluation, and issues related to gender disparities in labor, health, and migration. In Brazil, Lenore has researched extensively the experience of low-income women in the informal economy, focusing on issues related to decent work, social policy, and family well-being. Lenore’s doctoral dissertation, The Work/Family Experience in The Informal Labor Market: Evidence from Informally Employed Mothers in Brazil, set forth an in-depth qualitative analysis of low-income working motherhood in the informal economy.
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Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
I worked in the financial sector in São Paulo between 2010 and 2012 at Fundamento Asset Management and Schroders Asset Management. In 2012 I changed my area of activity when I joined the Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas (FIPE) for a consultancy project on the economic evaluation of transportation investments by the government of São Paulo. As Ph.D. student I worked as Research Assistant for the Brazilian Studies Association, the Regional Economics Application Laboratory (REAL) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
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Department of Economics
During this first year of the PhD program at the University of Illinois, Guilherme successfully completed the program’s required coursework in Microeconomic Theory, Macroeconomic Theory and Econometric Analysis. Meanwhile, he also continued to provide research assistantship to the “Grupo de Avaliação de Políticas Públicas e Econômicas” (GAPPE) in projects related with Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconometrics. GAPPE is a research group dedicated to the evaluation of the social impacts of economic and public policies based in the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), in Recife – Brazil.
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