Research

Job Market Paper

When Organized Crime Moves In: Economic and Human Capital Disruption (with Andrea Bocchino)

This paper studies how the externalities of organized crime affect local communities and human capital formation. Identifying these effects is challenging because crime is endogenous to local conditions. We address this by studying Ecuador, where criminal organizations from neighbouring countries rapidly established a new cocaine export route, driven by global supply and demand pressures. To identify causal effects, we exploit variation in exposure to drug export activities based on proximity to areas prone to cocaine smuggling and apply a difference-in-differences design. In crime-affected areas, school dropout rates increased among children at critical schooling stages, namely the end of primary education and the early years of secondary school. Among students aged 15–18, who represent a positively selected group still enrolled in upper secondary education, we find no evidence of increased dropout. However, adolescents in this age group who were already out of school before the crime surge exhibit a marked rise in risky behaviours, reflected in higher homicide victimization and earlier pregnancies. We also document severe economic disruption: household income fell by nearly 30%, driven mainly by a decline in informal employment. Declining earnings are a key mechanism linking crime exposure to dropout. These findings show that the externalities of organized crime impose persistent social costs, deepening inequality and undermining human capital development.

Working papers

Exam Luck and Human Capital Accumulation (with Catalina Franco) [Working paper available on SSRN]

Reject & Resubmit, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics

We show that subtle standardized test design features shape long-term educational trajectories. Exploiting random variation in correct answer placement in a Colombian college entrance exam, we find that students are 5% less likely to answer correctly when the correct option appears last. This seemingly minor pattern is economically consequential: “unlucky” booklets with more Ds in math lower overall scores by 0.011 SD and first-choice admissions by 3%, diverting marginal students from a selective public university into lower-return vocational programs. The mechanism is consistent with students overlooking options at the bottom of the list when scanning answers sequentially under time pressure.

Work in progress

Across and Within-Household Inequality in Norway (with Aline Bütikofer, Pedro Carneiro and Kjell Salvanes)

This paper examines the evolution of earnings and educational inequality across Norwegian cohorts born between 1955 and 1980, focusing on within- and between-family dynamics focusing on differences across siblings. We find that women’s earnings inequality declined from the mid-1970s onward, largely due to greater convergence within families, while men’s earnings inequality remained stable. Educational inequality, by contrast, fell for both genders as siblings’ years of schooling converged. Evidence suggests that smaller family sizes and increased parental investments, especially in daughters’ education, drove these shifts, with higher educational attainment reinforcing women’s attachment to full-time employment. Our results underscore the central role of within-family changes in reducing inequality, even as gendered disparities in labor market outcomes persist.

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