Pretrial detention accounts for an important share of prison population worldwide and imposes detrimental consequences on defendants. We examine its impact on sentencing outcomes in Chile's criminal justice system, where plea bargaining has historically been a limited prosecution tool. Pretrial detention increases conviction probability from 53 to 76 percent. To assess the role of plea bargaining, we exploit a reform that expanded prosecutorial bargaining tools for robbery-related crimes. The impact of pretrial detention on conviction increased substantially for these crimes while remaining unchanged for others, confirming that expanding plea bargaining amplifies pretrial detention's effect.
Learning by playing: Experimental Evidence on Financial Education
AEA RCT Registry Field work
The Intergenerational Effects of Retirement Age
with Lars Hoogstra
Gender-based violence : evidence from a municipal program in Chile
Master Thesis (Advisors: Olivia Bertelli, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and Francisco Silva)
2020
I study the impact of a municipal program on gender-based violence in Chile. I exploit the fact that the implementation of the program is through “Centros de la Mujer” and only some municipalities have one. This allows to measure the effect of the program with a difference-in-difference approach including municipal and month fixed effects. The study concludes that in municipalities in which the program is implemented, all kinds of violence against women decrease 4.13%. Results suggest that the program reduces violent crimes (domestic violence, sexual abuses and rapes) for both women and men. The program has heterogeneous effects across age of victims and a 1-year delay since its implementation until results are observed.
La prisión preventiva y la ley de agenda corta en seguridad, El Mercurio, February 2025
Efecto de las cuarentenas en la delincuencia, Contrafactual, October 2020