Published papers:
Public good or public bad? Nation-building and Indigenous institutions, with Eduardo Hidalgo, Nayeli Salgado, and Sotiris Kampanelis. accepted at Journal of Development Economics: While existing evidence shows that nation-building policies unify societies, little is known about how and what makes some societal groups to resist them. We examine this in the context of the post-Mexican Revolution (1920s-1950s), when the new state implemented a nation-building policy to eliminate Indigenous cultures and identities by increasing connectivity via transport infrastructure. In a difference-in-differences design, we leverage heterogeneity in the exposure to pre-colonial political centralisation as a proxy for the ability of Indigenous populations in mobilising to resist national integration. We find that the expansion of transport infrastructure was lower in municipalities with a stronger efficacy of Indigenous mobilisation. We demonstrate that this underprovision of public goods can be partly explained by Indigenous identity preservation and high abilities for collective actions..
Pre-colonial institutions and economic development in Latin America: Evidence from a new ethnic homeland dataset, with Sotiris Kampanelis. accepted at Economics Letters. This paper examines the effects of pre-colonial institutions on economic development in Latin America using historical ethnic homelands as the unit of analysis. We construct a newly digitised and georeferenced map of 257 ethnic homelands. Our results show a strong and positive relationship between pre-colonial institutions and contemporary economic development. Beyond the role of pre-existing institutions, our dataset provides a foundation for future research on long-run development in Latin America.
Lynching and Economic Opportunities: Evidence from the US South, with Sotiris Kampanelis, 2024. (KYKLOS): This paper examines the impact of historical lynching on the economic opportunities of Black individuals today. Our results indicate that past lynchings have an adverse effect on the current economic opportunities of Black people, likely arising from persistent racial prejudice dating back to the early 20th century. We emphasize the importance of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and population mixing in the US South post-1880, which led to heightened competition among racial groups for economic, social, and political prominence, ultimately resulting in a surge of lynchings. Our findings survive a series of robustness checks.
On the economic effects of indigenous institutions: Evidence from Mexico , 2020. (Journal of Development Economics). Paper awarded the Sir Alec Cairncross Prize for best paper submitted by a young economist: While Indigenous institutions affect policy outcomes and, consequently, economic development, our understanding of this association is as yet unclear. This paper examines this relationship using land reform in Mexico as a case study. Between 1917 and 1992, the rights to 16 million hectares of ancestral land were transferred to the Indigenous population in the form of land plots known as Comunidades Agrarias. By exploiting novel panel data for 13,600+ municipality-census observations, I find that ancestral land redistribution was more successful in municipalities with more complex Indigenous institutions. I hypothesise that centralised societies would have been more politically cohesive and therefore better able to coordinate collective actions against the state. The economic gains of the restoration policy were mainly found in the area of education.
Pre-colonial institutions and socioeconomic development: The case of Latin America, with Luis Angeles. January 2017. (Journal of Development Economics): We study the effects of pre-colonial institutions on present-day socioeconomic outcomes for Latin America. Our thesis is that more advanced pre-colonial institutions relate to better socioeconomic outcomes today. We advance that pre-colonial institutions survived to our days thanks to the existence of largely self-governed Amerindian communities in rural Latin America. Amerindians groups with more advanced institutional capacity would have been able to organize and defend their interests in front of national governments; leading to better development outcomes for themselves and for the population at large. We test our thesis with a dataset of 324 sub-national administrative units covering all mainland Latin American countries. Our extensive range of controls covers factors such as climate, location, natural resources, colonial activities and pre-colonial characteristics – plus country fixed effects. Results strongly support our thesis.
Other publications:
Enhancing Health Through Access to Nature: How Effective are Interventions in Woodlands in Deprived Urban Communities? A Quasi-experimental Study in Scotland, UK, with Alastair H. Leyland, Andrew Briggs, Richard Mitchell, and others. 2019. (Sustainability).
Health impacts of environmental and social interventions designed to increase deprived communities’ access to urban woodlands: A quasi-experimental study, with Alastair H. Leyland, Andrew Briggs, Richard Mitchell, and others. 2019. (Public Health Research).
Working Papers:
Songlines, with Sotiris Kampanelis and Yannis M. Ioannides : This study examines the hypothesis that Europeans' adoption of Indigenous knowledge during colonisation was pivotal in shaping economic development in the long-run. We use the case of Australia, where Aboriginal knowledge of the landscape was critical to colonial exploration and settlement. To quantify the effects of this knowledge, we construct a newly digitised and georeferenced dataset of trade routes created by Aboriginal people based on oral traditions, known as Songlines. Our results indicate that Songlines are strongly associated with current economic activity as measured by satellite light density at night and, alternatively, population density. As a counterfactual, we construct Natural Routes—environmentally optimal travel paths—and show that Songlines dominate them in predicting colonial exploration routes, early settlements, and modern economic activity. We attribute this association to path dependence and agglomeration effects that emanate from the transport infrastructure built by Europeans roughly along the Songlines, which have induced agglomeration of economic activity.
Violence and Ethnic Identity, with Eduardo Hidalgo and Sotiris Kampanelis: This paper examines the consequences of violence on ethnic identity. To explore this, we use the Shining Path conflict in Peru as a natural experiment. The Shining Path insurgency was one of the most violent in 20th-century Latin America, resulting in over 70,000 deaths and extensive atrocities, including torture, rape, and mass displacement. The insurgency arose from an extremist revolutionary ideology in rural areas that demanded class identity over any other identity affiliation, causing Indigenous populations to bear 75% of the victims. Leveraging individual-level ethnic identity data and violent event-level data from 1958 to 1992, we implement a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits quasi-random variation in exposure to violence across individuals at different stages of their ethnic identity formation. Our findings indicate that individuals exposed to violent conflict during their crucial formative years of ethnic identity are significantly less likely to identify as Indigenous or to speak an Indigenous language as their mother tongue compared to those whose ethnic identity has been largely established. We attribute these results to own-ethnic group violence, which weakens incentives to maintain Indigenous identity.
Socially disadvantaged ethnic groups and distributive politics: Evidence from Bolivia, with Patrick Allmis and Vangjel Bita: This study examines whether socially disadvantaged ethnic groups practise favouritism when they reach national power. We use the case of Bolivia, where Evo Morales, a member of the traditionally disadvantaged Indigenous Aymara, became the first Indigenous president in 2005. We develop a theoretical framework to uncover the necessary conditions for favouritism. The incentives to practise favouritism vary according to the income and size of an ethnic group. In municipalities with higher incomes or relatively few Aymaras, favouritism is more likely. We investigate whether different forms of favouritism occur using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and a first difference estimator. Our empirical results show no evidence of favouritism towards Aymaras at the national level. However, we do find evidence for favouritism in high-income areas or where few Aymara live. Ethnic groups thus differ in how much they tend to practise favouritism and how much they suffer when others do so.