Mayara Felix is an economist who specializes in economic development and international trade. She studies policies intended to improve market efficiency in developing countries, such as import tariff reductions, free trade agreements, and outsourcing. A core theme in Felix's work is firms' response to these policies and their implications to competition. She focuses primarily on Latin America, with additional work in Indonesia.
Felix's research in Brazil found that import tariff reductions can increase labor market concentration and reduce wages without increasing firms' market power over workers. She also showed that outsourcing can boost formal employment, especially among young workers, despite displacing older workers and reducing their earnings. In Indonesia, Felix and colleagues demonstrated that improving corporate tax administration can increase tax revenues at low implementation cost.
Her ongoing projects include analyzing import tariff-quotas in Colombia and a field experiment on wage transparency in Brazil.
Professor Felix holds PhD in Economics from MIT and a BA from Mount Holyoke College. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the Yale Economic Growth Center, and an Invited Researcher at J-PAL Latin America. Prior to joining Yale, Prof Felix spent a year as an IES postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and another year as a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.