Research

Work in progress

From Fields to Ballots: Droughts and Electoral Shifts in Brazil

Preliminary draft available upon request

Climate change is expected to intensify the frequency and severity of droughts in developing countries, where rural livelihoods remain highly dependent on rainfed agriculture. This paper examines how growing-season droughts shape voting behavior in Brazil, a large developing democracy characterized by high climate vulnerability, deep agrarian inequalities, and polarized environmental politics.

Combining high-resolution weather data with a panel of ideology- and environment-weighted vote shares for all presidential elections between 2002 and 2022, I exploit within-municipality variation in hydrological stress aligned with crop-specific growing seasons. I show that drier growing seasons systematically reduce support for green and left-leaning coalitions.

Mechanism analyses indicate that these effects operate through declines in agricultural revenue per hectare, while off-season droughts have little explanatory power. Heterogeneity analyses further reveal stronger electoral penalties in smallholder-dominated areas and substantially weaker reactions in agribusiness regions, with social protection, rural organization, and income diversification mitigating these effects.

Awards

• Wicksell Prize, EPCS Conference, 2026

• Best Poster Award, ICDE Conference, 2025

Presentations

• Oral presentation, German Development Economics Conference, Kiel Institute for the World Economy

• Oral presentation, Workshop “Climate Change: Lessons from the Past and Contemporary Challenges” Aix-Marseille School of Economics

• Oral presentation, AFÉPOP Annual Conference
  Bureau d’économie théorique et appliquée (BETA), Strasbourg

• Oral presentation, Environmental Economics: A Focus on Natural Resources (EENR)
  University of Orléans

• Poster presentation, Doctorissimes 2026
  Paris School of Economics / Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

• Oral presentation, 53rd Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society (EPCS)
  Complutense University of Madrid

• Oral presentation, SDOSE Economics PhD Day
  LEDa, Paris Dauphine–PSL / CERNA, Mines Paris–PSL

• Oral presentation, Göttingen Workshop on Ibero-American Development
  Ibero-America Institute for Economic Research, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

• Poster presentation, International Conference on Development Economics (ICDE)
  Université Paris Nanterre / EconomiX (UMR 7235)

Floods and Local Electoral Behavior in Brazil

Ongoing

This project examines how highly localized exposure to floods affects electoral behavior and political accountability in Brazil. Unlike slow-moving and spatially diffuse shocks such as droughts, floods are sudden and geographically concentrated, allowing electoral responses to be studied at a particularly fine spatial scale.

I combine geocoded polling-station electoral results with satellite-based flood footprints from the Global Flood Database. The resulting panel contains approximately 276,000 polling station–election observations for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 municipal elections, with information on candidate identities, party affiliations, incumbency, vote counts, and turnout. Polling stations are matched to flood events using direct exposure and several distance-based measures.

The empirical analysis exploits differences in flood exposure across polling stations within the same municipality to estimate effects on incumbent support and turnout. Combining these satellite-based measures with administrative records from Brazil’s Atlas Digital de Desastres makes it possible to investigate heterogeneity by flood severity, timing, damages, emergency declarations, and public assistance.

Local Political Representation and Land Conflicts in Brazil

Ongoing

This project studies whether the local political representation of landed and agricultural interests affects rural conflict in Brazil. Although mayors do not formally allocate land or grant property titles, local governments can shape land-use dynamics, environmental enforcement, access to public resources, and the local implementation of higher-level policies.

Using close mayoral elections between 2000 and 2020, I adopt a regression discontinuity design comparing municipalities where candidates more or less closely connected to landed and agricultural interests narrowly won or lost. These connections are measured using candidate occupations, asset declarations and campaign-finance records.

The analysis builds on harmonized candidate-level electoral data covering approximately 31,000 single-round mayoral elections. The empirical design links electoral information to event-level records compiled by the Comissão Pastoral da Terra, which document rural conflicts, the actors involved, and the communities affected across Brazilian municipalities.

Local Representation, Weather Shocks and Violence in Mali

Joint with Marion Mercier Ongoing

This paper examines how the ethnic composition of communal councils shapes the relationship between weather shocks and local violence in Mali. We combine information on council members elected in the 2004 municipal elections with growing-season drought exposure and geocoded conflict events over 2005–2022.