Research
My research uses natural experiments and policy reforms to investigate the effects of harmful traditional practices such as female genital cutting, abduction, or child marriage on human capital investments and marriage market outcomes. I am also interested in understanding the link between social capital at the neighborhood level, the provision of informal guardianship, and the prevalence of crime in contexts where the capacity of the state to enforce the law is limited. I am an advocate of evidence-informed policymaking and I have been involved (and continue to participate) in the impact evaluation of several social policies in low- and middle-income countries.
Publications:
Long-Lasting Effects of Communist Indoctrination in School: Evidence from Poland (with Joan Costa-Font and Anna Nicinska).
Forthcoming at the European Economic Review. Previously published as an IZA DP No. 13944.
Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions: Evidence from the Rise of the Pentecostal Church in Chile (With Andrés Barrios).
Forthcoming at the Journal of Labor Economics. Latest draft available here. Previously published as a CEP Discussion Paper.
Female Genital Cutting and Education: Causal Evidence from Senegal (With Edgar Salgado-Chavez).
World Bank Economic Review, Volume 37(1), pages 74-92, February 2023. Winner of the award I Premio Nada es Gratis to Job Market Papers in Economics.
Aiming high and falling low: The SADA-Northern Ghana Millennium Village Project (with Edoardo Masset and Arnab Acharya)
Journal of Development Economics, Volume 143, March 2020.
The Lasting Effects of Natural Disasters on Property Crime: Evidence from the 2010 Chilean Earthquake
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Volume 175, Pages 114-154, July 2020.
Sensitivity matters. Comparing the use of multiple indicators and of a multidimensional poverty index in the evaluation of a poverty eradication program (with Edoardo Masset)
World Development, Volume 137, January 2021.
Child marriage and Infant Mortality: Evidence from Ethiopia
Journal of Population Economics, Volume 35, pages 163–1223, 2022. Accepted paper available here.
Winner of the FEDEA award "Best paper in health economics presented at the 2018 annual meeting of the Spanish Association of Health Economists by a young researcher".
Mobile Phone Signal and Economic Performance: Evidence from the Network Expansion in Myanmar (with Riccardo Ciacci and Ayesha Zainudeen).
International Migration Review, Volume 56(2), pages 594–614, 2022. Accepted paper available here.
Primary Elections and Electoral Outcomes (with Riccardo Ciacci, Ana García Hernández, Laura Gismera and Antonio Nuñez Partido)
SERIES - Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Volume 13, pages 363–396, June 2022.
Cognitive Skills and Intra-household Allocation of Schooling (with Edoardo Masset)
Journal of Demographic Economics, published online October, 2022. Accepted paper available here. Previously published at the Working Paper series of the Department of Economics at the University of Sussex.
Age at Marriage and Divorce: Evidence from a Policy Reform in China (with Berkay Ozcan).
Accepted at Review of Economics of the Household. Previously published at the Working Paper series of the Department of Social Policy at LSE.
The Institutional Origins of Vaccines Distrust: Evidence from Former-Communist Countries (with Joan Costa-Font and Anna Nicinska).
Accepted at PLOS One.
Other completed papers:
Specialized Courts and Domestic Violence: Evidence from Spain (with Marta Martinez Matute, and Carmen Villa).
R&R at the Journal of Public Economics. Latest draft available here. Previously published as an IZA Working Paper.
Ideological Alignment and Evidence-Based Policy Adoption (with Pedro Rey Biel, Berkay Ozcan, Ángel Martínez, Marcel Jansen and Toni Roldan).
Under review. Working paper coming soon.
The Economics of Abduction Marriage: Evidence from Ethiopia (with Lindsey Novak).
Under review.
Selected work in progress:
The economics of bride kidnapping (with Lindsey Novak).
FGC and access to technology (with Riccardo Ciacci and Daniel Pérez Parra).
Neighborhood and Crime (various papers with Andres Barrios, and Daniel Pérez Parra).
Disasters and Tightness of Social Norms: The Case of Female Genital Cutting (FGC) (with John Egyir, and Marianna Battaglia).
A list of my pre-PhD publications, mostly in development studies and epidemiology journals, is available in my CV.