The Central Banks use diffusion indexes (DIs) to synthesize information from proprietary surveys that complement official statistics generating real time proxies of the economically relevant variables. According to the evidence, the DIs closely follow the economic cycle reflected in those...

How do slums shape the economic and health dynamics of pandemics? An event-study analysis using millions of mobile phones in Brazil shows that residents of overcrowded slums engaged in less social distancing after the outbreak of COVID-19. We develop and calibrate a choice-theoretic equilibrium...

This paper investigates if the anti-scientific rhetoric of modern populists can induce followers to engage in risky behavior. We gather electoral information, in-person card transactions, and geo-localized mobile phone data for approximately 60 million devices in Brazil. After the president...