2026 Theses Doctoral

Essays on Technology, Growth, and Financing in Developing Economies

Velloso, Bruno Costa Mattos

This dissertation comprises three essays examining how technology adoption, labor market policy, and financial market structure shape firm outcomes and economic growth in developing economies, with a particular focus on Brazil.

The first chapter examines the supply-side effects of e-commerce expansion using a novel dataset linking web-scraped seller data from Mercado Libre, Brazil’s largest e-commerce platform, to administrative employer-employee records and municipal GDP data (2014–2021). Measuring exposure as seller-origin platform intensity—Gross Merchandise Value generated by sellers located in each municipality—and exploiting variation generated by Constitutional Amendment 87/2015, I find negative effects on local formal-sector activity: municipalities with higher treatment exposure experience lower GDP and value-added growth, with larger declines in directly impacted tradable sectors. Sector-level regressions show pressure on wages and on lower-education employment groups, together with a decline in the number of firms, pointing to firm exit as a central mechanism. Firm-level heterogeneity reinforces this pattern: small, low-wage, and lower-skill firms bear most losses, while larger firms are relatively insulated. On-platform results show that higher local e-commerce growth does not induce incumbent products to improve quality; instead, prices decline and quality indicators weaken, consistent with selection and rising concentration rather than within-product upgrading.

The second chapter examines how minimum wage increases affect firm upgrading decisions. Exploiting firm-level variation in the bite of Brazil’s national minimum wage—measured by a cost of compliance measure—within industry-state-year cells, we examine effects on skill composition, importing, exporting, technology licensing, and patenting. We find that firms facing higher compliance costs respond by increasing the educational attainment and skill content of their workforce, importing more (including both capital goods and intermediate inputs), and acquiring more technology licenses, with suggestive evidence that they file more patents. We find mostly no significant effects on exports. These results are robust in both short- and long-difference specifications. The pattern is consistent with skill-capital complementarity: by raising the cost of low-skilled labor, minimum wages induce firms to shift toward more skilled workers, and because skilled labor and capital are complementary, firms simultaneously upgrade their capital and technology inputs.

The third chapter investigates how the institutional structure of the corporate bond market affects the transmission of monetary policy to credit spreads. Using a unique bond-level dataset with daily pricing data from 1997–2020, I show that corporate bond spreads respond systematically differently to high-frequency-identified monetary shocks in the pre-2008 versus post-2008 period, with markedly less sensitivity in the later period. Meanwhile, equity prices of the same firms have become more sensitive, suggesting that the attenuation is specific to the corporate bond market rather than reflecting a general change in macroeconomic passthrough. I further show that the Federal Reserve’s corporate bond purchase program generated strong and persistent cross-sectional spread effects. Motivated by these findings, I develop a partial-equilibrium preferred-habitat model in which the transmission of risk-free-rate shocks to credit spreads is decreasing in the spread-elasticity of buyers, providing a theoretical framework for understanding how the shift from inelastic buy-and-hold investors toward more elastic mutual funds and ETFs has altered monetary policy transmission through corporate bond markets.