PhD dissertation

Drug Lords in STEM

Short abstract

Driven by the opioid epidemic, demand for illegal synthetic drugs in the United States has increased, transforming drug production in Mexico. This paper examines the transition from natural illicit drugs to synthetic alternatives and investigates how the resulting shift in labor demand affects the human capital of young individuals in high-exposure regions.

Drug-led development? Organized crime and local employment in Mexico

Short abstract

This paper looks at the impact of drug trafficking organizations on local employment structures in Mexican municipalities and commuting zones from 1990 to 2020. Using data from the Population and Economic Censuses, along with datasets on cartel presence identified from web content, I construct a panel of municipalities and economic sectors. The identification strategy employs difference-in-difference and synthetic control methods to assess the effects of drug trafficking organizations on employment by sector and occupation. Additionally, I estimate the extent to which these effects are driven by shifts in the legal sector versus increased labor demand in the illegal drug sector.

Image credit: Mallika Vora for the New Yorker

Growing Up Around Cartels: Salience of Criminal Careers and Youth’s Education Choices in Mexico

Violence at home; violence in school: drivers of school violence in schools in Bogotá with Oscar Díaz.

Other projects

Moral Force: Leaders’ Actions and Public Health Compliance in Crisis with L. Guillermo Woo-Mora, Maximo Ponce de León and Federico Daverio-Occhini.

Abstract

Charismatic leaders shape public sentiment and moral direction but can weaken institutions by prioritizing personal appeal over trust in government. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mexican president disregarded his administration’s stay-at-home guidelines. We analyze the impact of his actions on social distancing compliance using granular mobility and electoral data. A dynamic difference-in-difference design reveals increased mobility in pro-president areas, leading to 22% more COVID-19 cases and 30% more deaths. Our findings suggest the president’s example, rather than partisan differences, drove these effects, highlighting the critical need for leaders to align personal conduct with public policy.

Working paper

Embracing modernity pays: Cadastre modernization effects on local property tax collection with Emmanuel Chávez and Guillermo Woo-Mora. Funded by CAF Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the Mexican cadastre modernization program on local property tax revenue. We evaluate a comprehensive modernization initiative, which began in 2010 and included guidelines, technical assistance, and subsidies for local cadastres. Using panel data from 2000 to 2019 and a Difference-in-Differences approach, we find that municipalities adopting the program saw a 10% increase in property tax revenue within five years, rising to 30% after eight years. This effect varies significantly with local state capacity and the coordinating institution implementing the program. The program significantly enhances the state of local cadastres over the long term. Municipalities that adopt the program are more likely to invest in staff training, implement comprehensive cadastral management systems, and digitize their registries. Our results highlight the importance of local capacities and coordination in realizing the benefits of decentralization and modernization policies.

Working paper

Mitigating Poverty: Global Estimates of the Impact of Income Support during the Pandemic With Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez, George Gray Molina, and Eduardo Ortiz-Juarez. Pre-PhD

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the full welfare distributions from household surveys of 160 countries, covering 96.5 percent of the global population, to estimate the pandemic-induced increases in global poverty and provide information on the potential short-term effects of income-support programmes on mitigating such increases. Crucially, the analysis performs a large-scale simulation by combining the welfare distributions with the database of social protection measures of Gentilini et al. (2021) and estimates such effects from 72 actual income-support programmes planned or implemented across 41 countries. The paper reports three findings: First, the projection of additional extreme poverty, in the absence of income support, ranges between 117 million people under a distributive-neutral projection and 168 million people under a distributive-regressive projection —which may better reflect how the shock impacted poor and vulnerable households. Second, a simulation of the hypothetical effects of a temporary basic income with an investment of 0.5 percent of developing countries’ GDP, spread over six months, finds that this amount would mitigate to a large extent, at least temporarily, the increase in global poverty at both the $1.90- and $3.20-a-day thresholds, although poverty would still increase significantly in the poorest regions of the world. Third, the analysis of income-support programmes in 41 countries suggests that they may have mitigated, at least temporarily, the overall increase in poverty in upper-middle income countries but may have been insufficient to mitigate the increase in poverty at any poverty line in low-income countries. Income support likely mitigated 60 percent of the increase in poverty at the $3.20-a-day threshold and 20 percent at the $5.50-a-day threshold among lower-middle-income countries. This pattern is correlated with the amount of social assistance per capita payments made in each country