Pinto has a series of papers on the economics of human capital accumulation of early childhood interventions and policy evaluations. His research focuses on modeling, inference, cost-benefit analysis, external validity and treatment effect estimation of social experiments. Among the experiments he has analyzed are the Perry Pre-school Intervention, High/Scope Comparison Study, Abecedarian Project, Nurse-Family Partnership, Moving to Opportunity, and Primeira Infancia Melhor (in Brazil). Pinto also studies the use causality and the use of revealed preference analysis to identify treatment effects in choice model with multiple choices and heterogeneous agents. His work has been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica and Science.