Education and Long-Term Development in Brazil

Date: 

Wednesday, March 13, 2019, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050, 1730 Cambridge Street

Soares HeadshotSpeaker: Rodrigo R. Soares, Lemann Professor of Brazilian Public Policy and International and Public Affairs, Affiliated Professor of Economics, Columbia University - PhD University of Chicago, MA PUC-Rio, BA UFMG

Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government at Harvard University and the Faculty Chair of the Brazil Studies Program

The talk will discuss the results of a project that looked at the historical experience of state-sponsored settlements in the turn from the 19th to the 20th century in state of São Paulo to shed light on the role of education as a determinant of long-run development across municipalities in Brazil.

Rodrigo R. Soares is Lemann Professor of Brazilian Public Policy and International and Public Affairs and Affiliated Professor of Economics at Columbia University. His research centers on development economics, ranging from health and demographic economics, to crime, labor economics, and history and institutions. His work has appeared in various scientific journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Public Economics, and Journal of Development Economics, among various others. Before joining Columbia, Rodrigo taught at the Sao Paulo School of Economics-FGV, PUC-Rio, the University of Maryland, and the Harvard School of Public Health.

In 2006, he was awarded the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best paper published in the field of Health Economics. Rodrigo is research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Germany), research affiliate at J-PAL Latin America, and associate editor of the Journal of Human Capital, of the Journal of Demographic Economics, and of the IZA Journal of Development & Migration. He is also an honorary member of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association. Rodrigo has acted as a consultant for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and state governments in Brazil on issues related to crime and violence, health, and development. He received his PhD in Economics under the guidance of Gary S. Becker at the University of Chicago in 2002.