Blog: Vodou Economics

Draft - September 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 smuggling routes northward to Colombia and through the Caribbean. Using Puerto Rico, the Caribbean territory with the best data coverage and one of the areas most affected by the trafficking surge, and a synthetic control constructed from US states, which report from the same data source and 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.

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.   

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.

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.

Coming soon.