About
Alan Leal is an economist working on regional economics, international trade, and environmental economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Economic Theory from the University of São Paulo (2025), an M.Sc. in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (2020), and a B.A. in Economics from the Federal University of Viçosa (2017).
His research combines computable general equilibrium, game theory, input-output analysis, spatial econometrics, dynamic panels, time series, and staggered difference-in-differences. His doctoral dissertation studied the political economy of Brazil’s land-intensive exports and their relation to deforestation.
He is a senior project specialist at FGV Projetos and the founder of Theta Lab, an applied economics consultancy. He maintains open-source packages in R, Julia, Stata, and MATLAB.
Experience
- FGV Projetos
- Reconciliation of the accounting, financial, and budget accounts of the State of Rio de Janeiro, for the State Finance Secretariat (SEFAZ/RJ).
- State Gas Plan for Rio de Janeiro, for the State Chief of Staff’s Office.
- Theta Lab
- Meridiana: economic and legal analysis of Law 15,526 of 2026, which reformed the legal framework for rural insurance, to support its regulation by the National Monetary Council (CMN) and the Superintendence of Private Insurance (SUSEP).
- Conservation International: barriers to access to Pronaf, policy briefs, stakeholder interviews, and engagement with the Ministry of Agrarian Development on the Plano Safra; rural credit in Tocantins from Plano Safra 2021/22 to 2025/26.
- Climate Policy Initiative / PUC-Rio
- Rural credit and smallholder access: policy research and engagement with farmers, organizations, funders, and government.
- Represented CPI in the technical group on the integration of rural credit and insurance of the Ministry of Agriculture’s thematic chamber on agricultural risk management.
- Global Intelligence and Analytics
- Antidumping analysis, conducted by SECEX/MDIC, of polyester yarn imported from China.
- Domestic e-commerce under Law 14,902 of 2024.
- Sectoral impacts of the income tax exemption for individuals earning less than R$5,000 per month (Law 15,270 of 2025).
- Inter-American Development Bank
- Evaluation of federal tax and financial subsidies with the Ministry of Planning and Budget.
- Cost-benefit analysis of a policy-based loan for the Ministry of Women.
- Tocantins Mais Sustentável loan, with tourism, agriculture, environment, technical assistance, and highway components.
- Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas (FIPE)
- Economic impact of PROADI-SUS on GDP and employment.
- Regional market intelligence for hearing aid devices.
- Indicators for the first Women’s Policy Plan of the State of São Paulo.
- Instituto Talanoa
- Brazil’s OECD accession from a climate and environmental perspective.
- Federal University of Minas Gerais / Belo Horizonte City Hall
- Update of the Belo Horizonte real estate valuation model with spatial econometrics and machine learning.
Teaching
- Econometrics: causal inference
- Introduction to calculus
- Calculus
Skills
- Programming
- R, Python, and Julia (advanced); Stata; MATLAB
- Geospatial
- QGIS, ArcMap, and the geospatial libraries of R, Python, and Julia
- Methods
- Panel data, panel VAR, time series, spatial econometrics, CGE models, input-output analysis, game theory
- Languages
- Portuguese (native), English (fluent)
Contact
- prof@alanleal-econ.com
- ORCID
- 0000-0002-1141-7747
- Lattes
- lattes.cnpq.br/3617254988420915
- GitHub
- alanleal-econ
- alanmarquesleal
- Bluesky
- alanleal-econ.com