Latest updates on our research, collaborations, and public impact.
August
Diogo Britto has presented his work on intergenerational mobility in Sharing Prosperity organized by the World Bank. He has also given lectures on the same topic in the UNU-Wider Summer School for early-career researchers.
July
The paper “Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence” co-authored by Paolo Pinotti, Diogo Britto, Breno Sampaio and Sonia Bhalotra has now appeared in print in the Review of Economic Studies.
September
Alexandre Fonseca has present his work on Conditional Cash Transfer and Social Mobility in Brazil (with D. Britto, P. Pinotti, B. Sampaio and L. Warwar) in one of the two country-focused sessions of the 7th World Bank/ODI Global/IFS Public Finance Conference held in London, UK, in September 2025
February
Prospera Lab is pleased to announce a new four-year institutional partnership with Brazil’s Ministry of Social Development and Assistance, Family and the Fight Against Hunger (MDS) to deepen the evaluation of the Cisterns Program.
The collaboration between Prospera and the Brazilian Ministry will focus on income and labor market effects, the program’s expansion in the Amazon region, and the long-term impacts of improved access to water on economic and social outcomes.
This month, Valor Econômico covered earlier findings showing that, following the installation of cisterns, a substantial share of beneficiary families reduced their reliance on Bolsa Família, alongside improvements in health outcomes and formal employment. Prospera’s previous study, Cisterns, Climate Adaptation, and Economic Development, is available for download on our website.
By advancing rigorous, data-driven evaluation of climate adaptation and social policy, Prospera Lab continues its mission of generating evidence to create pathways to prosperity.
January
The paper “Intergenerational Mobility in the Land of Inequality”, written by Prospera’s Alexandre Fonseca, Breno Sampaio, Diogo Britto, Lucas Warwar and Paolo Pinotti, has been accepted for publication at the Review of Economics and Statistics. In this work, the authors study income mobility in Brazil, a large developing country characterized by extreme inequality in socioeconomic conditions.
This work provides the first estimates of intergenerational mobility using tax income data for Brazil. By combining rich individual-level data from multiple large-scale administrative registries and household surveys, the authors find that income mobility in Brazil is much lower than comparable estimates for developed countries. A 10 percentile increase in parental income
rank is associated on average with a 5.5 percentile increase in child income rank, which indicates that children’s opportunities are deeply dependent on their parents’ socioeconomic status.
December
Alexandre Fonseca participated in the workshop Unlocking the Potential of Tax Administrative Data for tax abuse research, held at Charles University, in Prague. The event brought together researchers and policymakers to discuss how tax administrative data can be used to advance empirical research and strengthen public policy.
During the workshop, Alexandre presented research drawing on large-scale tax administrative records to shed light on key issues in taxation and economic policy. The presentation emphasized how detailed microdata, when properly governed and analyzed, can generate robust evidence to support better tax compliance strategies, more efficient revenue administration, and improved policy evaluation.
November
ProsperaLab took part in the 30th Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), one of the leading academic conferences in economics in Latin America.
The conference was organized by Breno Sampaio, together with Claudio Ferraz and Rafael Coutinho, bringing together researchers from across the region and beyond to discuss cutting-edge work in economics and public policy.
During the event, Diogo Britto presented the paper “Bolsa Familia and Social Mobility in Brazil in the UNU-WIDER special session and Alexandre Fonseca presented “Children´s Health Shocks, Parental Employment, and Investments in Care. The presentations generated valuable discussion and feedback from the academic community, contributing to Prosperalab’s broader agenda of evidence-based policy analysis.
October
Em parceria com a Opportunity Insights (Universidade de Harvard) e grupos de pesquisa que trabalham com a África, Índia, Espanha e Estados Unidos, temos o prazer de anunciar o lançamento do Atlas Global de Oportunidades.
The Atlas provides a global perspective on how the places where children grow up shape their income and opportunities in adulthood, offering open data to inform local public policies that help more children escape poverty.
📊 The Global Atlas complements the Brazilian Mobility Atlas – https://atlasmobilidadesocial.org.br/, developed in partnership with the Imds – Instituto Mobilidade e Desenvolvimento Social (https://imdsbrasil.org/), which presents more detailed socioeconomic and mobility data for Brazil.