WORKING PAPERS
WORKING PAPERS
Drug trafficking and the homicide epidemic in the Caribbean Basin
Blog: Vodou Economics
Draft - July 2025
Most of the world's highest homicide rates are found in the Caribbean basin. Common explanations for the region's violence—such as inequality and long-standing culture—fail to explain the explosive growth of violence in recent decades. This paper examines the role of drug trafficking, a leading explanation among law enforcement but one that is difficult to establish causally due to the illicit and covert nature of the trade. I leverage an exogenous shock to drug trafficking: the 1973 Chilean coup, which abruptly redirected trafficking routes northward to Colombia and through the Caribbean. Using Puerto Rico, the Caribbean territory with the best data coverage, and a synthetic control constructed from US states—which share federal gun laws and other policies affecting violence—I estimate that the shock caused a 50% increase in homicides. Evidence from other parts of the region supports drug trafficking as the key driver of the Caribbean's extraordinarily high levels of violence.
Puerto Rico before the American century: Trade and development under late Spanish rule, (with John Devereux), book chapter prepared for Roots of Underdevelopment: A New Economic (and Political) History of Latin America and the Caribbean (Volume 2), edited by Felipe Valencia Caicedo
Draft available upon request
Abstract: This chapter examines Puerto Rico's economic development under late Spanish rule, providing new series on the volume of exports and imports, terms of trade, and gross domestic product (GDP) for the 19th century. Puerto Rico experienced essentially no growth in per capita exports for most of the 19th century. Material living standards improved early on, but they stagnated from the late 1830s. Our results support the conclusion that Puerto Rico was a poor, stagnant economy in the 19th century and conflicts with any romanticization of Puerto Rico prior to US rule. By pushing the data analysis forward, and connecting it to recent studies, we also firmly establish that US annexation in 1898 is the dividing line between stagnation and growth, with continued increases in GDP per capita and the structural transformations associated with modern economic growth beginning in the early 20th century.
The decline of child stunting in 122 countries: A systematic review of child growth studies since the nineteenth century (with Eric Schneider, Juliana Jaramillo-Echeverri, et al.)
Draft - July 2024
Child stunting, a measure of malnutrition, is a major global health challenge affecting 148.1 million children in 2022. Global stunting rates have fallen since the 1980s, but trends before the mid-1980s are unclear including whether child stunting was previously prevalent in current high-income countries (HICs). We conducted a systematic review of child growth studies before 1990 to reconstruct historical child stunting rates. We found 923 child growth studies covering 122 countries. Many current HICs had high levels of child stunting in the early twentieth century similar to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) today. However, there was heterogeneity: stunting rates were low in Scandinavia, the European settler colonies and in the Caribbean, higher in Western Europe and very high in Japan and South Korea. Child stunting declined across the twentieth century. The high stunting rates and subsequent reduction of stunting in HICs suggest that current HICs provide lessons for eradicating child stunting and that all LMICs can eliminate stunting.
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Migration in the early 20th century Caribbean: Evidence from Dominican residency permits (with Craig Palsson)
This project sheds light on immigration to less developed countries by introducing a uniquely large and detailed microdata set compiled by digitizing all residency permit applications submitted to the Dominican Republic from 1940 to 1954. In contrast to the primary receiving countries in the Americas, the Dominican Republic attracted immigrants predominantly from neighboring Haiti and nearby islands in the Caribbean rather than from Europe. The foreign-born population of the Dominican Republic at mid-century closely matches that of the rest of the Spanish circum-Caribbean in terms of volume, share of the total population, and percentages coming from the Americas and bordering countries, respectively. In this sense, studying immigration to the Dominican Republic contributes to our understanding of immigration to the region more generally. The applications include detailed demographic and economic data, as well as place of departure and date and port of entry. We will track occupational and geographic mobility over time by linking to renewal applications to study policies that restricted the entry and mobility of Haitians.
European immigrants and wealth accumulation in the United States
Coming soon.
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
Narrow paths out of poverty and educational demand: Evidence from Dominican baseball (with Craig Palsson), Economic Development and Cultural Change, forthcoming
A comment on "Height and standard of living in Puerto Rico from the Spanish Enlightenment to annexation by the United States , 1770-1924 (with John Devereux), Economics and Human Biology, 2024
Public health departments and the mortality transition in Latin America: Evidence from Puerto Rico, Journal of Development Economics, 2023
Blog: Long-Run Health Matters
Colonial roads and regional inequality, Journal of Urban Economics, 2022
Spatial population trends and economic development in Puerto Rico, 1765-2010, European Review of Economic History, 2021
Economic development in Puerto Rico after US annexation: Anthropometric evidence, Economics & Human Biology, 2020
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
"Foreign (aid) in a domestic sense: Public health in an unincorporated territory." In Rosolino Candela, Kristen Collins, and Christopher Coyne (Eds.), Market Process and Market Order: From Human Action, But Not of Human Design. Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.
The economic development of Puerto Rico after United States annexation (dissertation summary), Journal of Economic History, 2022
Review of César Ayala and Laird Bergad’s “Agrarian Puerto Rico: Reconsidering Rural Economy and Society, 1899-1940,” Journal of Economic History, 2021