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Joao Paulo Pessoa.

Joao Paulo Pessoa

Associate

Expertise: International Trade, Applied Micro

Email:
joaopaulocnpessoa@gmail.com
Connect:
Twitter
Website
Links:
CEP Trade
EESP

Biography

Professor Joao Paulo Pessoa is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Sao Paulo School of Economics ? FGV and an Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance. He received his PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, and his research focuses on international trade, labour markets, and environmental economics.

Current areas of research include:

  • International trade: we conduct an RCT to understand the effects of export promotion
  • Environmental Economics: we study how climate barriers affect democratic participation
  • Innovation: we study the impacts of compulsory license on innovation

Publications

Blog
The end of the Amazon soy moratorium will accelerate deforestation

Rules preventing the purchase of soy grown on land cleared after 2008 slowed deforestation in the Amazon and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. But now pressure is mounting in Brazil for the rules to be loosened. Rhamon T... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa

28 November 2025

Journal article
Natural gas vehicles: consequences for fuel markets and the environment

Policies to adopt cleaner fuels have become increasingly important, but their impacts on incumbent fuel prices and resulting greenhouse gas emissions remain unclear. We use a panel dataset on weekly prices at the gas sta... Read more...

Roberto Amaral-Santos, Ariaster Chimeli and Joao Paulo Pessoa

16 October 2025

Journal article
Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

The Pele Act banned non-compete agreements in Brazilian football in 1998. We explore this policy change to study how non-competes affect the labour market. The Act changed the wage profile heterogeneously, reducing young... Read more...

Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek

07 October 2025

Journal article
The deforestation effects of trade and agricultural productivity in Brazil

This paper quantifies the relative footprint of trade and agricultural productivity on deforestation across Brazilian municipalities between 2000 and 2017. Using remote-sensing data, we identify distinct effects of these... Read more...

Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa

01 March 2024

Blog
Brazil's comparative advantage in soybean production triggered deforestation

In today's globalised world, technology and trade are key driving forces shaping agricultural markets worldwide. Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa delve into the intricate relationship between trade an... Read more...

Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa

26 January 2024

Blog
Brazil's comparative advantage in soybean production triggered deforestation

Tropical ecosystems house an immense biomass, which makes it imperative to understand how they are affected by technology and trade. Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa examine the Brazilian rainforest's... Read more...

Igor Carreira, Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa

12 September 2023

Journal article
Globalization, trade imbalances, and labor market adjustment

We argue that modeling trade imbalances is crucial for understanding transitional dynamics in response to globalization shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multicountry, multisector model of trade with t... Read more...

Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles and Sharon Traiberman

02 January 2023

Journal article
The impact of climate change on risk and return in Indian agriculture

We investigate the extent to which climate change will result in insurable and uninsurable losses for farmers in India. Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns may increase the volatility of farmers' yields, le... Read more...

Francisco Costa, Fabien Forge, Jason Garred and Joao Paulo Pessoa

28 December 2022

Journal article
The West's teeth: IMF conditionality during the Cold War

Did the International Monetary Fund (IMF) play a role in the United States and its Western allies efforts to contain the advance of communism during the Cold War? To answer this question, we construct a new database cont... Read more...

Ariel Akerman, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Leonardo Weller

01 July 2022

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
In brief... How Pele changed Brazilian football

A ban on non-compete agreements in Brazilian football led to an increased lifetime income for players. But as research by Bernardo Guimaraes, Jo?o Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek reveals, it was older players who gaine... Read more...

Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek

22 February 2022

Blog
The beautiful gain: what can Brazilian football tell us about the effect of non-compete clauses on wages?

With the 1998 Pele Law eliminating transfer fees for players whose contracts had expired, Brazilian football provides an ideal setting to test the effect of non-compete agreements on wages. This analysis reveals that old... Read more...

Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek

08 June 2021

Journal article
Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: the UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000?2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors... Read more...

Josh De Lyon and Joao Paulo Pessoa

01 April 2021

CEP discussion papers
Globalization, trade imbalances and labor market adjustment

We study the role of global trade imbalances in shaping the adjustment dynamics in response to trade shocks. We build and estimate a general equilibrium, multi-country, multi-sector model of trade with two key ingredient... Read more...

Rafael Dix-Carneiro, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Ricardo Reyes-Heroles and Sharon Traiberman

22 March 2021

CEP discussion papers
Non-compete agreements, wages and efficiency: theory and evidence from Brazilian football

We propose a model to study non-compete agreements and evaluate their quantitative effects. We explore an exogenous policy change that removed non-compete clauses in the market for Brazilian footballers, the Pele Act of ... Read more...

Bernardo Guimaraes, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Vladimir Ponczek

08 March 2021

CEP discussion papers
Worker and firm responses to trade shocks: the UK-China case

We exploit the recent surge in Chinese export growth to study the effects of a trade shock on workers and firms in a foreign market, the UK, in the period 2000-2007. We find that individuals initially employed in sectors... Read more...

Josh De Lyon and Joao Paulo Pessoa

11 January 2021

Journal article
Winners and losers from China's ascension in international trade: a structural approach

This paper employs a unified theoretical framework to estimate the effect of changes within China on the Brazilian and World's economy. Based on the Ricardian model of trade of Costinot et al. (2012), we perform counterf... Read more...

Francisco Costa and Joao Paulo Pessoa

25 March 2020

Journal article
Flex cars and competition in fuel retail markets

We study how the diffusion of flex (bi-fuel) cars affected competition on ethanol and gasoline retail markets. We propose a model of price competition in which the two fuels become closer substitutes as flex cars penetra... Read more...

Juliano Assuncao, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Leonardo Rezende

01 March 2019

Journal article
The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects

This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit in the medium to long run, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers.We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many countries and sectors and trad... Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Hanwei Huang, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen

01 October 2017

CEP discussion papers
The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects

This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many countries and sectors and trade in intermediates, as in... Read more...

Swati Dhingra, Hanwei Huang, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen

21 April 2017

Journal article
Winners and losers from a commodities-for-manufactures trade boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winne... Read more...

Francisco Costa, Jason Garred and Joao Paulo Pessoa

01 September 2016

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
China shock: the impact on trade and incomes

Is US presidential candidate Donald Trump right when he claims that the Chinese are causing serious damage to American workers? Research by Jo?o Paulo Pessoa analyses the impact of the recent massive increase in China?s ... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa

09 June 2016

CEP discussion papers
International competition and labor market adjustment

How does welfare change in the short- and long-run in high wage countries when integrating with low wage economies like China? Even if consumers benefit from lower prices, there can be significant welfare losses from inc... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa

08 March 2016

CEP discussion papers
Winners and losers from a commodities-for-manufactures trade boom

A recent boom in commodities-for-manufactures trade between China and other developing countries has led to much concern about the losers from rising import competition in manufacturing, but little attention on the winne... Read more...

Francisco Costa, Jason Garred and Joao Paulo Pessoa

23 May 2014

Policy analysis
Brexit or Fixit? The Trade and Welfare Effects of Leaving the European Union

Since a speech by the Prime Minister in January 2013 , the Conservative party has been committed to holding a referendum on the UK?s membership of the European Union (EU) in 2017. So this is a good moment to consider wha... Read more...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Joao Paulo Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen

16 May 2014

Journal article
The UK productivity and jobs puzzle: does the answer lie in wage flexibility?

UK GDP per worker fell by almost 4% in the five years following Lehman's collapse in 2008, something unprecedented in post‐war history. A possible reason for poor productivity is low growth in the effective capital... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen

01 May 2014

CEP discussion papers
Flex cars and competition in ethanol and gasoline retail markets

In Brazil, gasoline and ethanol coexist as automotive fuels and are becoming closer substitutes as flex cars become more widely adopted. We employ this source of variation in a large panel of weekly prices at the station... Read more...

Juliano Assuncao, Joao Paulo Pessoa and Leonardo Rezende

13 December 2013

CentrePiece - The magazine of the Centre for Economic Performance
Wage growth and productivity growth: the myth and reality of 'decoupling'

Employees in the UK are not being denied their fair share of economic growth, according to research by Jo?o Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen. Their investigation of claims that wage growth has become `decoupled? from pro... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen

10 December 2013

CEP discussion papers
Decoupling of wage growth and productivity growth? Myth and reality

It is widely believed that in the US wage growth has fallen massively behind productivity growth. Recently, it has also been suggested that the UK is starting to follow the same path. Analysts point to the much faster gr... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen

31 October 2013

CEP reports
The UK productivity and jobs puzzle: does the answer lie in labour market flexibility?

GDP per worker fell for the five years after 2008 which is unprecedented in post war UK history. In this paper we argue that ?capital shallowing? (i.e. the fall in the capital-labour ratio) could be the main reason for t... Read more...

Joao Paulo Pessoa and John Van Reenen

05 June 2013

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