Research

-Fuel Prices, Gang Violence, and Its Effects on Children’s Health: Evidence from Mexico (Job Market paper- previous  version is titled “Effects of violent conflict on health: Evidence from Mexico’s fuel theft epidemic”)- Winner of the AIES Best Paper Award 2024

[Abstract] This paper estimates the effects of violence intensification on early-life health in settings with long-run exposure to organized crime. The empirical setting is Mexico’s illicit fuel-theft economy (huachicol). I exploit two sources of quasi-experimental variation in a difference-in-differences design: the fixed location of the national pipeline network and an unexpected 20% gasoline price increase in January 2017 that sharply increased fuel-theft profits and triggered violent territorial conflict along pipelines. The shock raised young male firearm homicides by about 50% in pipeline municipalities, amounting to roughly 2,800 additional deaths.

Despite this escalation, I find no deterioration in prenatal health, including birth weight, gestational age, miscarriages, or stillbirths. Instead, infant mortality declines by about 6% among boys, with gains concentrated in the first year of life.

I use two empirical strategies to study mechanisms. First, I show that stress-related maternal hospitalisations do not increase after the shock, consistent with adaptation to chronic exposure. Second, using a spatial difference-in-differences design, I document local economic spillovers: night-time light intensity increases by about 12% within 20 km of pipelines, affecting most of the population in treated municipalities. These income gains translate into improved postnatal conditions: infant hospitalisations fall by 13%.

-Presented at: GSSI-Sapienza workshop (L'Aquila, 2024), First PhD Workshop on Microeconomics (Essen, 2024), Gender and Economics 3rd Workshop (Luxembourg, 2024), 2nd CINCH-dggö Academy (Essen, 2024), EuHEA PhD & Supervisor Conference (Luzerne, 2024), AIES-Italian Health Economics Association Conference (Naples, 2024), SEHO (Zaragoza, 2025)