Research

I'm interested in Economics of corruption, Financial economics, Political economy, Causal inference, Economics of education, among others. But any interesting research question, regardless of the field, is worth pursuing for me.

Immunizing the Economy: A Causal Discussion on Vaccination and Economic Recovery

Sánchez Pazmiño, D. H. (2022). Immunizing the Economy: A Causality Discussion on Vaccines and Economic Recovery. X-Pedientes Económicos, 6(14), 65–82.

  • Published in the January-April 2022 issue of X-Pedientes Económicos, the academic journal of Ecuador's top regulatory institution Superintendencia de Compañías, Valores y Seguros, indexed by RePEc.

  • I implement a TWFE difference-in-differences estimator to investigate a potential causal effect of vaccination on business creation. I find an ATE of about 25%, with little evidence of differential prior-trends. Provinces in Ecuador which are apparently more resistant to vaccination see about 25% less business creation than their counterparts. I also discuss potentially better estimation methodologies for this causal effect.

  • I posted my source code for the paper in two GitHub repositories, one with the actual document's source code and another with the source code for the preliminary analysis done, which was also posted in RPubs.

Honesty by Convenience: Corruption Tolerance in Ecuador (2021)

Dedicated to the memory of Jorge Pazmiño (1941-2021)

Awarded best USFQ undergraduate thesis for the Fall 2021 semester

Submitted to the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Review

Second Version PDF

  • Bachelor's Thesis presented as the capstone project for the obtainment of the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Economics from USFQ. Supervised by Santiago José Gangotena, Ph.D.

  • Between 2014 and 2016, the percentage of voting-age Ecuadorian citizens who believed a bribe is justified greatly increased. I investigate why using binary outcome survey-weighted models with the data from the AmericasBarometer survey by the Latin American Public Opinion Project.

  • It is determined that part of the increase might be due to a sharp decrease in the popularity of President Rafael Correa's regime as well as an increase in the people who identify with the political right wing, perhaps proxying further discontent with the regime in place.

  • People who were either employed or outside the labor force increased their corruption tolerance significantly relative to those unemployed. It is possible that those who are unemployed will start justifying corruption much more after 2021 as their unemployment spells increase.

  • Both the data analysis and the prose for the paper were done using R with Rstudio, in order to ensure best reproducibility. I published my complete code in two GitHub repositories as well as in RPubs.

  • Here you can find the original version of the paper, as uploaded to USFQ's repository and also with an abstract in Spanish. The full Spanish version of the work will be made available soon.


hbc-website.pdf

Analysis of Ecuadorian Superior Education: Evidence from Universidad San Francisco de Quito (2018)

Original title in Spanish: Análisis de la Educación Superior Ecuatoriana

analisis_usfq.pdf

  • The term paper for the Statistics II course in USFQ, written in collaboration with Alejandra Marchán.

  • Involved administering a physical survey to over 200 USFQ students which asked about study habits, financial assistance, scholarships, among others.

  • The paper used two-way ANOVA and regression analysis to determine correlations of high study-hours with educational background and other student characteristics.

  • Used Minitab and Microsoft Excel for data wrangling, analysis and management of survey responses.

  • Originally presented in Spanish but a preliminary English version as well as the data is available to those interested (see my contact information).