On-going Research

Concrete Interests: Paramilitary City-Building in Rio de Janeiro

How do armed groups reshape cities? This article argues that Rio de Janeiro’s milícias—paramilitary organizations, frequently led by current and former security officers—govern territory through “build-to-hold” urbanization. Rather than simply extracting rents, milícias construct informal housing to expand captive populations that generate recurring income, electoral leverage, and political protection. Combining geospatial data on territorial control with satellite-derived measures of urban development from 2016–2023, I use staggered difference-in-differences estimators to show that milícia entry causes sustained increases in building density and height. These effects are absent in gang-controlled areas and persist in territories transitioning from gangs to milícias, indicating that densification is specific to the milícia governance model. I further show that increased construction does not increase formal housing prices or transaction activity, consistent with a system in which armed actors retain control over housing assets rather than integrating them into formal markets. The findings demonstrate how criminal organizations actively produce urban space in ways that entrench coercive authority and blur the boundary between criminal governance and state power.

Rest Your Trigger Finger: How Governance over Illegal Markets Promotes Welfare

With Gabriel Feltran

Examines how the consolidation of criminal governance by the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) reshaped illicit markets and coincided with a sustained decline in homicide in São Paulo beginning in the early 2000s. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, internal documents seized by law enforcement, and newly assembled city-level data, argues that the PCC institutionalized governance functions typically associated with the state: monopolizing coercion, providing informal dispute resolution, and regulating drug markets through bureaucratic coordination. The diffusion of these institutions is associated with sharp and demographically concentrated declines in homicide, particularly among young men in peripheral neighborhoods.

Houses for the People, Power for the Gangs: Criminal Capture of Social Housing in Brazil

With Eduardo Mello, Daniel Rio Tinto, Lucas Borba, and Dani Nedal

Social housing policies aim to decrease inequality by expanding access to secure property rights for low-income families. Argues that large-scale social housing can generate territories of opportunity for criminal organizations when the state's distributive capacity outpaces its coercive capacity. Exploits population thresholds governing Brazil's Minha Casa, Minha Vida program and homicide data for all 5,570 municipalities in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. Municipalities assigned more housing units experience higher homicide rates, with effects concentrated among demographic groups disproportionately exposed to organized criminal violence.

Homicide and Power Regimes: Four Propositions Toward an Integrative Sociological Theory of Lethal Violence

With Gabriel Feltran

Proposes a framework bridging long-term civilizational theories of violence decline and short-term multivariable models by conceptualizing every homicide rate as the sum of Organized Lethal Violence (OLV) and Interpersonal Lethal Violence (ILV). Tested against local, national, and cross-national datasets from low-homicide settings (United States, Europe) and high-homicide contexts (Latin America, Chicago, Baltimore). Finds that hegemonic power regimes — state or not — suppress homicide, whereas contested regimes generate surges in OLV.

How Much Can We Understand about Homicide Dynamics by Looking at Victims' Profiles?

With Gabriel Feltran

Reinterprets a central empirical regularity in homicide research: the strong association between homicide rates and the proportion of male victims. Rather than reflecting demographic composition alone, argues this pattern captures unequal exposure to violent illicit markets. Using individual-level homicide microdata from Brazil, Colombia, the United States, and French overseas departments, shows that higher homicide rates are systematically associated with a concentration of victims who are young, male, racialized, and socioeconomically disadvantaged — indicative of organized criminal violence.

The Cost of Gold: Commodity Shocks and Violence Against Peasants in Brazil

With Sofia Amaral and Daniel Rio Tinto

Commodity booms can generate economic gains and social costs at once, particularly where institutions are weak. This paper provides evidence that gold-price shocks raise violence and agrarian conflict in the Brazilian Amazon, and that they do so by expanding gold extraction itself. We build a shift-share (Bartik) design---interpretable as a continuous difference-in-differences---that combines pre-sample municipal exposure to mining with international gold prices and exchange-rate variation, together with satellite-based measures of mining activity. Exogenous increases in gold profitability expand artisanal (garimpo) and overall gold mining, and this expansion raises homicide rates, the number of agrarian conflicts, and the number of peasant families in conflict, with the largest and most precisely estimated homicide effects borne by Black and mixed-race populations. The effects are concentrated in municipalities with exploitable gold endowments and differ across extraction regimes: garimpo mining maps onto lethal violence, while broader gold-mining activity maps onto land conflict. We find no comparable effects for industrial extraction, and evidence that official homicide counts understate the true mortality burden of mining expansion. The findings challenge the view that formalization and property rights alone can mitigate the social costs of extractive booms, and point to entrenched criminal landscapes that benefit from state inaction.

A Novel Method to Estimate Floating Populations in Dense Urban Contexts, with Applications to Cellphone Theft in São Paulo

With João Luiz Becker, Jonathan P. Correia, Eduardo Francisco, Roberto Speicys

Proposes a methodological framework based on spatial statistics and heterogeneous data fusion to compare spatial patterns of crime concentration when rates are normalized by resident population versus dynamic floating population. Using georeferenced cell phone theft data, shows that central areas of São Paulo observe less relative crime than peripheral areas once floating population is accounted for — reversing the pattern observed using census denominators.

Cracking Down on Crack-Land: Assessing the Impacts of Thirty Years of Failed Policies

With Alei Santos, Juliana Camargo, and others

Downtown São Paulo has hosted a large-scale open drug scene since the 1990s and the beginning of the crack epidemic. Studies the urban, social, and economic consequences of this sustained policy failure.

Full-Day Schooling and Life Trajectories: Impact Evaluations

With Alei Santos, Augusto Alves

The State of São Paulo has implemented a large-scale program to expand the supply of full-day schools. Analyzes its impacts on students and their families, looking at outcomes related to education, health, labor market participation, and criminal involvement.

Randomised Impact Evaluation of a CBT-Based Primary School Program (SEJA) on Crime and Human Capital Formation

With Eduardo Mello and Juliana Camargo · Funded by IPA P&R, FGV-RPCAP