Academic Publications
Academic Publications
Political Geography 100, 2023.
DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102778
ABSTRACT: Rising support for the radical right has become a hallmark of the current political landscape. A lot of attention has been devoted to the reasons influencing individual voting decisions, with some progress in understanding within-country variation in the vote. But these studies usually assume that perceptions coincide with objective reality. This article addresses this shortcoming, using quantitative text analysis and spatial econometrics to show that local narratives – sometimes more than contextual statistics – can drive spatial differences in the populist vote. Taking Spain as an example, I train a machine learning algorithm to determine the prevalence of given news topics across the national territory based on how many related articles local newspapers published on Twitter in the year before the last national election. I then use spatial econometric techniques to link these results to local divergences in support for the radical right party VOX. The analysis sheds some light onto the economic anxiety - cultural backlash - geography of discontent debate. The empirical evidence supports the notion that narratives about economic anxiety and regional gaps matter, but also shows that narratives about separatism played a key role in the rise of the radical right in Spain.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, 232 (2023).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01691-1
ABSTRACT: We designed and administered an online survey experiment to 444 educators in a large social sciences university in the United Kingdom to evaluate their perceptions on the effectiveness of online teaching methods. We find that a nudge, designed to inform educators about the benefits of online teaching, does not improve the personal evaluations of educators in our sample (ntreat = 142, ncontrol = 142) about this new mode of teaching. Overall, most respondents in our sample report being comfortable with online teaching methods and think this form of teaching can continue to have some positive impact. Nonetheless, they do not favour any further online transition away from traditional modes of teaching. Online teaching is largely perceived by a majority of these educators to negatively affect student well-being and their overall university experience. We call for more experimental research in higher educational settings to evaluate the role of edunudges in improving the uptake of online teaching tools.
(with Stephanie Rickard)
ABSTRACT: We study the long-run local effects of industrial mass layoffs and a place-based active labor market policy (ALMP) response: the European Globalization Adjustment Fund (EGF). Using newly geo-located data on layoffs across Spain (2002–2022) and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that layoffs cause persistent local unemployment and population decline. The EGF improves industrial hiring in the medium term but has limited spillovers to other sectors and no effect on long-run demographic trends. These results suggest that while place-based people policies offer targeted relief, reversing structural decline requires broader policy interventions.
ABSTRACT: Standard measures of poverty and income inequality often overlook how sharply the cost of living varies across places. To address this issue in the case of Spain, I develop a new public database of local consumer price indices tailored to the expenditure patterns of different income groups. Using these local CPIs to deflate household incomes between 2006 and 2022 reveals that national inflation adjustments understate inequality growth during the financial crisis and misrepresent poverty -- overestimating it in rural areas and underestimating its impact in larger cities. The findings highlight the importance of accounting for spatial variation in prices in poverty and inequality measurement, with clear policy implications.
(with Sabina Alkire, Nabamallika Dehingia, Niall Maher and Ricardo Nogales)
ABSTRACT: Climate hazards and multidimensional poverty reinforce each other but their interaction remains poorly understood. This paper addresses this by providing the first globally comparable subnational analysis of where multidimensional poverty and climate hazards overlap. To conduct this analysis, the 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index is combined with gridded data on four hazards (high heat, drought, floods, and air pollution) for 1657subnational regions in 108 developing countries. The results suggest a strong contemporaneous overlap between multidimensional poverty and climate hazard exposure. Approximately 78.8% of the multidimensional poor, representing 887 million people, live in regions exposed to climate hazards. More than half of poor people live in regions experiencing two or more hazards. An estimated 11 million people live in regions experiencing all four hazards simultaneously. The overlap is regionally concentrated; South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa together account for more than 700 million poor people living in regions experiencing climate hazard exposure. Forward-looking projections demonstrate that the countries with the highest rates of poverty today are the same countries expected to experience the greatest increase in exposure to extreme heat in the future. Three insights can be gathered from this analysis: subnational analysis can identify heterogeneity hidden at the national level, multidimensionally poor people’s exposure to multiple climate hazards is common globally, and future climate risks are distributed asymmetrically, with risks falling most heavily on countries where poor populations are most exposed. These findings highlight the urgency of integrating climate and poverty analyses to understand these mutually reinforcing phenomena.
(with Pedro Llanos-Paredes)
ABSTRACT: The 2000s commodities boom spurred a period of high economic growth across Latin America. In Peru, this ``super cycle'' was primarily driven by a surge in mining exports, which expanded by a factor of 7.5 between 2001 and 2013. This boom has been associated with poverty reduction in mining areas and with the creation of both direct and indirect employment opportunities. However, the quality of these mining-related jobs remains underexplored. In this paper, we employ the Alkire-Foster method to map individual employment conditions across Peru. Leveraging geographic and temporal variation in the production of different minerals driven by fluctuations in global prices, we estimate the causal effect of a local expansion of mining on quality of employment. Our findings show that the 2003-2013 commodities boom improved quality of employment in all its relevant dimensions (contracts, compensation, tenure, working hours, and affiliation to public healthcare), even if the magnitude of the effect was negligible. In addition, most of these improvements proved to be short-lived and faded once prices stabilized.
(with Stephanie Rickard)
ABSTRACT: Transformative political shifts, such as rising polarization, disillusionment with globalization, and the surge of radical parties, have been linked to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in advanced economies. We argue that the political effects of deindustrialization are shaped by public policy responses. Leveraging the geographic and temporal variation in job losses and active labor market support within a single country, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences model to compare electoral outcomes over time in municipalities with and without mass layoffs, and with and without generous re-training and re-employment programs for displaced workers. We find that incumbents gain votes in areas where layoffs are paired with generous active labor market programs, while radical left parties typically lose votes. We provide evidence that these political effects are driven, in part, by local labor market dynamics.
ABSTRACT: This paper revisits the classical question of whether unemployment shocks lead to radical voting. Using an instrumental-variable strategy, I provide evidence that unemployment shocks have generated political radicalization in Spain, with a causal relationship between different types of unemployment and support for radical parties. The analysis shows that increases in unemployment among first-time job seekers was responsible for a substantial part of the radical left's recent electoral success. Similarly, I find that unemployment among people who used to work in industry had a positive and significant effect on radical right support. However, unemployment is not inherently polarizing or will always lead to radical voting. Rather, it offers an opportunity for parties to develop populist narratives targeting specific subgroups of those worried by their economic futures. The findings highlight the importance of political supply in conditioning the effect of unemployment on radical voting.
ABSTRACT: Since at least the mid-2000s, young Spanish workers have encountered a paradox: despite having invested in university degrees, they report persistently low wages, a condition that appears exacerbated by recent economic crises. This paper investigates the evolution of wage inequality among university-educated individuals in Spain. The analysis reveals pronounced wage disparities by age, with older educated workers earning substantially more than their younger counterparts, even after controlling for labor market experience. Notably, these disparities predate the 2008 financial crisis, discarding it as a potential culprit. Within-group wage inequality has intensified over time, particularly among younger graduates, a trend that appears to be driven by an oversupply of tertiary-educated workers relative to the demand for high-skilled labor. The findings underscore the need for policies that address the economic challenges faced by younger generations, emphasizing the need to align educational outcomes with labor market demands.