Melissa Rubio-Ramos




 Job Market Paper

From Plantations to Prisons: The Legacy of Slavery on Black Incarceration in the US 


This paper documents the emergence of a race gap in incarceration after the abolition of slavery in the US counties that relied more on slave labor. Namely, more African Americans were incarcerated, with no comparable effects for Whites. An increase of 10% in a county's reliance on slavery raises its Black incarceration rates by 1.8 per 1,000. This effect is furthermore associated with an increased use of prison labor. Consistent with this finding, I show that arrests increase before cotton harvesting and incarceration declines after exogenous shocks that decrease the demand for labor. I find no evidence for supply-side mechanisms that would indicate any greater propensity for former slaves to commit more crimes.

(Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, 2023)


Published Papers

Trust, Violence, and Coca. Forthcoming Journal of Development Economics (2024)


How does violence affect social capital? I argue that its impact depends on two factors: i) the ability to identify the perpetrating group, and ii) the intensity of the

violence. These factors help to reconcile the seemingly contradictory effects of violence on social capital presented in the literature. I study this question in the context of

Colombia by exploiting changes in violence attributed to cross-border shocks on coca markets in neighboring countries interacted with a novel index of suitability for coca

cultivation. This index uses satellite data from ecological conditions for growing coca. I document that violence has a negative effect on social capital measures such as trust,

participation in community organizations, and cooperation. Notably, this effect is stronger when it is not possible to identify the enemy. The results are robust to a

large number of controls that account for potential confounders. In particular, I show evidence that this effect is not related to the presence of drug cartels in Colombia during the Escobar and Cali era.


Working Papers

Murphy’s Law or Luck of the Irish?

Disparate Treatment of the Irish in 19th Century Courts (with Anna Bindler

, Randi Hjalmarsson and Stephen Machin)

Link

Using data on 100 years of 19th century criminal trials at London’s Old Bailey, this paper offers clear evidence of disparate treatment of Irish-named defendants and victims by English juries. We measure surname Irishness and Englishness using place of birth in the 1881 census. Irish-named defendants are 11% less likely to plea, 3% more likely to be convicted by the jury, and 16% less likely to receive a jury recommendation for mercy. These disparities are: (i) largest for violent crimes and for defendants with more distinctive Irish surnames; (ii) robust

to case characteristic controls and proxies for signals associated with Irish surnames (social class, Irish county of origin, criminality); (iii) particularly visible for Irish defendants in cases

with English victims; and (iv) spill-over onto English-named defendants with Irish codefendants. Disparate treatment is first visible in the 1830s, after which it grows, then persists through to the end of the century. In particular, the gap in jury conviction rates became larger during the twenty years after the Irish Potato Famine-induced migration to London. We do not

find evidence, however, that the first bombing campaign of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (in 1867 and the 1880s) further exacerbated these disparities. 

Comparing Labor Market Risk Across Developing Countries (with William Maloney)

This paper generates comparable measures of labor market risk across the development process from repeated cross sections of labor market surveys, and identifies patterns across demographic and employment categories. It identifies a striking and very significant negative correlation between risk and the level of development. Developing country workers do seem to face more risk. It finds little evidence of differences across demographic or job categories. On average, women appear to face slightly less risk and the self-employed roughly the same as salaried males. The downward gradient seems partly a general phenomenon, but also reflects greater labor market risk among the self-employed and lower female labor market participation.

Work in Progress

Mined land: Natural resources and conflict 

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of mining on conflict. Most of the available literature uses resource discoveries as random events, however, discover are not necessarily a pure result of nature, they are likely to be related with geographic and institutional characteristics that might also affect the levels of conflict, and therefore estimates can be biased. I overcome this limitation by using an exogenous source of variation in the mineral discoveries. My identification strategy uses the fact that villages where minerals were discovered constitute the treatment group while villages with drilling but no discovery are the control group. Furthermore, this article provides evidence of an additional mechanism explaining the relationship between mining and conflict: forced displacement because of competition for land. 

The collapse of the Maya civilization (with Ola Olsson)

What factors explain the collapse of the Maya civilization? While the collapse of the Maya society has been an issue of ongoing debate, little is known about the economic reasons behind it. In this paper, we estimate the effect of extreme weather conditions on the construction of monuments. We take advantage of rich paleontological data on weather conditions during the Maya era which can be linked to archaeological data on the location of monuments and the occurrence of wars. To shed light on potential mechanisms, we study heterogeneity along with the suitability for growing maize – the main crop of the Maya civilization. In addition, we use g

Pipeline

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Policy Writing

Indigenous community, Colombian Amazon, 2017.