In my dissertation research, I examine the impacts of social security regulation on retirement behavior of Brazilian workers. My empirical analysis uses data from household surveys and censuses to estimate the effect of individual characteristics and social security financial incentives on worker's retirement probabilities. I show that the Brazilian public pension system creates incentives for early retirement, especially to the better-off population. I also observed that married individuals respond similarly to their own financial incentives measures but respond asymmetrically to the spouse's variables.

Since 2004 I have been working along with Cassio Turra on the project Macroeconomic Demography of Intergenerational Transfers . The project is a collaborative international effort led by the Population and Health Studies Program (East-West Center at the University of Hawaii) and the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging (University of California at Berkeley). This project is developing new methods for measuring aggregate intergenerational transfers; construct historical estimates and projections of intergenerational transfers in varying social, economic and policy contexts. An international team is drawn from the U.S., France, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia.

From 2001 to 2004 I worked as a research assistant for Professor John Wilmoth (University of California, Berkeley) and Professor Kenneth Hill (Johns Hopkins University) on the project Adult Mortality in Developing Countries . The research has focused on both substantive and methodological issues for measuring adult mortality in developing countries and on levels, trends and patterns of such mortality.