Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a home-grown ubiquitously-retailed alternative to fossil fuels in light road transportation: ethanol from sugar cane. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the uptake of flexible-fuel vehicles (FFVs) has been tremendous. Five years after their...

It has been proposed that lower NOx emission fuels such as ethanol can mitigate air pollution from vehicles burning oil-based hydrocarbons. Yet, existing modeling and laboratory studies, even those seeking to simulate the same environment, vary in their predictions of how gasoline/ethanol blends...

Despite ethanol's penetration into urban transportation, observational evidence quantifying the consequence for the atmospheric particulate burden during actual, not hypothetical, fuel-fleet shifts, has been lacking. Here we analyze aerosol, meteorological, traffic, and consumer behavior data...

I begin by fitting traditional gravity equations to document that regional flows in the Brazilian cement industry exhibit gravity-like structure, with cement trade decaying sharply in distance traveled. I then show that this large distance effect owes to firms' strategic behavior over and above...

As much of the world goes searching for alternative sources of energy to oil, Brazil's three-decade experience in developing a successful substitute for gasoline merits attention. Brazil is the only sizable economy to date to have developed a ubiquitously distributed alternative to oil-based...