Alvaro Calderon

Hi! I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University. My primary fields are development, economic history, and political economics. My research focuses on the role of property rights protection, transportation, and political voice in economic development.

I am on the 2026-2027 academic job market.

My CV is here, and you can contact me at acald@stanford.edu.

Committee:

Ran Abramitzky (primary) Melanie Morten

ranabr@stanford.edu melanie.morten@stanford.edu

Vicky Fouka

vfouka@stanford.edu

Research Interests: Development Economics, Political Economy, Economic History, Labor Economics

Job Market Paper

Does Access to International Markets Increase Conflict? Evidence from Peru [LINK]

Transport infrastructure in developing countries is often built to promote access to international trade. In fragile states prone to civil violence, however, the potential benefits could be offset if access to foreign markets reshapes patterns of social unrest. This paper investigates the short- and long-term consequences of changes in foreign market access on social conflict and related institutional responses. To answer this question, it examines a major railroad project that connected Peru’s hinterland to the world economy during the 19th century. Using a differences-in-differences strategy that exploits spatial and temporal variation in railroad expansion and a novel dataset documenting rural conflicts and land theft between 1866 and 1946, I show that a decrease in travel costs to international ports led to a large and sustained increase in civil violence and land theft over several decades. This in turn is associated with a larger demand for land demarcation, which was met through the creation of communal property organizations. The results are consistent with transport investments expanding international trade, market production, and land values. The increased demand for land, combined with weak property protection due to the lack of registration systems, account for the rise in land theft and violence. The paper provides unique empirical evidence of the complementarity between good institutions and transportation policy, in this case, between property registration and investments in railroads, and provides a rationale for recent efforts to expand states' capacity to register land.

Publications

Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights (with Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini), Review of Economic Studies, 90(1), January 2023, pp. 165-200. [LINK]

Working Papers

The Enduring Effects of Disenfranchisement: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Peru [LINK]

(with Christopher Carter)

We study how exclusion from the franchise shapes the presence of the state and, in turn, ethnic identity. We study this question in the context of Peru, where an electoral reform in 1896 restricted voting to literate citizens, effectively disenfranchising the country's large Amerindian majority until 1979. To answer this question, we assemble a comprehensive dataset of public service provision in a new district panel covering 1866–2019. Using differences-in-differences designs around both reforms, we find that districts losing political weight received weaker protection of land and labor rights, less transport infrastructure, and experienced slower literacy growth; re-enfranchisement reversed these patterns. Using a historical persistence regression and a large set of indicators on most dimensions of state presence, we also document that a district's electoral weight during 1896–1978 still predicts both the level and the quality of public service provision today. These same districts are where indigenous languages, identification and practices persisted most, a pattern that is driven by state presence. Had districts retained the political weight they would have held absent the 1896 reform, Peru's ethnic segregation would fall strongly, placing it alongside countries such as Switzerland or Bolivia. State presence, ethnic identity and the segregation of ethnic groups are to a great extent an outcome of the institutions governing who can make claims on the state.

Works in Progress

Land Demarcation under Weak State Capacity: The Effect of Peasant Communities on Agricultural Development [Slides]

I study the effects of Peru's main land demarcation policy on agricultural productivity. The policy operated through transforming villages into peasant communities, organizations that allowed the demarcation and registration of land at the communal or village level. While the creation of peasant communities facilitated the protection of property rights, they also precluded their members from selling, renting, and transferring land to outsiders due to the Peruvian governments' inability to regulate transactions and its ultimate goals of avoiding land conflicts. Conceptually, these two features suggest that the expansion of communities can have ambiguous effects on productivity. By protecting property rights, they allowed for more investment and optimal production choices. On the other hand, they also restricted the entry of capital and knowledge into agriculture. To explore these hypotheses, I collect novel datasets on these communities' expansion over the 20th century, measures of insecure property rights, and digitize the 1972 agricultural census to measure land yields and rural labor productivity. My empirical strategy compares places with early versus late adoption. I find evidence consistent with both channels: in places where property rights on land were not disputed, incorporation of communities led to lower yields and rural labor productivity. In places where land was disputed, I observe large increases in output per capita. To establish causality, we document that these differences did not exist in the 19th century nor in the 2010s, by which time the policy was present in the entire country. In addition, using a historical instrument predicting the early creation of communities, we find qualitatively similar effects. In terms of mechanisms, we document that the adoption of new agricultural technologies show similar patterns, highlighting the role of misallocation in driving out capital and better technologies. Overall, our findings suggest that low state capacity decreased the beneficial effects of land demarcation by 18%, implying that Peru's agricultural productivity would have been 7% larger if the constraints on transactions had been released. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the effects of land policy in the developing world when weak state capacity imposes constraints on the kind of policies that can be implemented.

Highway Blockades (with Hiroshi Toma)

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