Working Papers:
"Conflict and Gender: Female Mayors in Colombia." October 2020 (SSRN link).
Abstract: Are female-led communities differentially affected by conflict? In this paper, I examine this question in the context of the Colombian conflict of the second half of the XX-th century. I exploit close races for the mayor’s office where a woman was involved and find that municipalities where a female mayor was (narrowly) elected experienced a decrease in guerrilla attacks. This effect amounts to 60% of the average incidence during the sample period, and is robust throughout a wide series of specifications. Surprisingly, I find that the decline is not driven by ideological factors and cannot be explained solely by the partisan affiliation of either the elected mayor or the runner-up. Finally, I find suggestive evidence pointing towards negotiation skills as the main explanation behind the effect.
"Campaign Finance, Voters Mobilization and Public Procurement" with Oskar Nupia. August 2020 (Accepted at Social Choice and Welfare - pre-print version here).
Abstract: We build a political competition model with rational expressive citizens, and contract- induced campaign contributors to analyze the welfare effect of campaign finance poli- cies. Rather than assuming that parties spend campaign contributions on advertising— as usual in this literature, we consider parties that spend their contributions mobilizing their supporters during the election day. We measure the social cost of contributions in terms of the loss of quality of public projects— delivered by contributors. This framework has major consequences on the welfare evaluation of campaign finance policies and, unlike previous literature, predicts a higher level of responsiveness of social welfare to the different policies. We find that subsidizing campaigns with public funds while simultaneously banning contributions is welfare-improving for citizens (but not necessarily for contributors) if the parties’ mobilization technology is not productive enough. We also establish the conditions (on said technology) that allow for non-matching subsidies with limited contributions to be Pareto improving. More novel, we show that imposing a lump-sum tax on contributions (levied either on parties or contributors) while simultaneously investing these revenues back into public projects is also a Pareto improving policy (both by itself and combined with limited contributions). Notably, these taxation results hold regardless of the parties’ mobilization productivity.
Pre-doctoral research:
Politics and reconciliation: A critical juncture for state building in Colombia in Motion 2010 - 2013 - 2016, Castano, LM (comp), Bogotá, Ediciones Uniandes. With Leopoldo Fergusson and Andres Moya.
(Link to working paper version here)