Projects

This is a list of projects I have done over the years.

1. ideal4all.com

A project that was made in order to create a point based system to measure building accessibility score to create positive incentives for architects to design for everyone.

1. Auto-applier

An internship autoapplier that aimes to automate the process of applying to internships by customizing resume and coverletter for every internship description. The goal is to use NLP in order to filter relevant words from job description and use the same words in resume. While customizing a cover letter template.

1. Decision memo: Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights, Brazil, and Ministry Data Scientists

project

“Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil” by Ferrara, Chong, and Duryea (2012) is a research paper that aimed to find the effect of soap operas on fertility in Brazil. We are interested in the effect of TV culture on family planning due to female characters communicating that freedom and career advancement can be achieved by having lower numbers of children. In the paper, the author expressed that people in the lower income strata display a greater reduction in fertility, suggesting that the effect of soap operas might not be the same for all cities as they differ in various cultural, economical and social aspects. As soap operas are nationalized, we propose that we can promote better family planning policies by calculating the local city level effect of the soap operas and thus, transmit soap operas to specific states as a low cost intervention to improve birth control in the country. We extend this study by comparing post-treatment birthrates in an AMC (Minimally Comparable Area) region that is in Cuiabá, a city in southern Brazil. We propose that we can better estimate the effect of Globo coverage on fertility decline using a Synthetic Control Method for this region because it evens out time-dependent variables, local area effects, and civil unrest in the country (that is unaccounted for in the original study). The original study identifies soap operas’ effect at the national level without accounting for regional differences. We found that economic and education variables display low standard errors signifying that they are effective at accounting for regional differences. Our synthetic control model found that the effect of Globo soap operas on fertility rates in Cuiabá is approximately -12%, suggesting that the negative effect of soap operas might have been exacerbated in low-income and undereducated areas. Thus, we recommend that the effect on behaviors of content transmitted in popular media, such as soap operas, is further investigated and leveraged to conduct low-cost high-impact public policies.

1. Exploratory Agent based model for time decay in hyperinflation

We used an agent based model in order to model the effect of quantitative easing on the consumer price index, luxury product index and the probability of hyperinflation. We answer the questions whether purchase of riskier assets will decrease the risk of hyperinflation. The purpose of the paper is to move away from a GDP perspective that is usually hold for central banks and recommend a new model where we optimize for income adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI).