Juan Felipe Ladino

I'm an Economics PhD student at Stockholm University. I hold a Master's degree in Economics and Economics of Public Policy from Universidad del Rosario. 

My research interests include: 

Working papers

A long-established approach to management in government has been the transmission of information up a hierarchy, centralized decision-making by senior management, and corresponding centralized accountability; colloquially known as "command and control". This paper examines the effectiveness of a centralized accountability system implemented at scale in Punjab, Pakistan for six years. The scheme automatically identified poorly performing schools and jurisdictions for the attention of central management. We find that flagging of schools and corresponding de facto punishments had no impact on school or student outcomes. We use detailed data on key elements of the education production function to show that command and control approaches to managing the general public sector do not induce bureaucratic action towards improvements in government performance.

Articles

Pre-announced policies often generate unintended consequences due to individuals’ acting to take advantage of the policy conditions. Little is known about  the extent to which unintended consequences from the early announcement of a policy can be larger than the implementation effect, especially in contexts of weak state capacity. We use detailed 1 km grid square data on coca cultivation to estimate the net effect of the announcement and implementation of coca crop substitution payments in Colombia. Our fine-grain data also enable us to estimate geographical spillovers of the program to non-targeted neighboring areas. Using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we find that program recipients reduced coca acreage. Surprisingly, the reduction in neighboring grid areas is of a similar magnitude. However, the effectiveness was reduced by half, because farmers increased coca cultivation in order to be eligible for the program after the announcement and before implementation. But the policy’s net effect is negative: due to weak state capacity, the program could not be implemented in every region of the country. 

Work in progress