Holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from the School of Economics and Business Administration of the University of São Paulo (FEA-USP), an M.Sc. in Economics from Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo (FGV-USP), and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Toulouse. He is a non-resident research associate at the Center on the Politics of Development.
His work aims to understand political representation in developing countries, which includes party organization, retrospective voting, quota policies, clientelism, and public security, in addition to work on media influence. Part of his dissertation was published in the American Journal of Political Science.