Research

-Fuel Prices, Gang Violence, and Its Effects on Children’s Health: Evidence from Mexico (New version coming soon)- 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),  Max Plank workshop (Rostock, July), SASCA conference (Sassari, September), Health and Education workshop (Cagliari, September), SEEDS workshop (Sassari, December), Families and Child Development and Well-being workshop European Population Conference (Bologna, June)