Embedded Files
Job Market Paper
The Roots of the Race Gap in Incarceration in the U.S.
This paper shows that the need for labor after the abolition of slavery kept incarceration rates low for African Americans, while incarceration increased in labor-scarce areas. This helps explaining the origins of the race gap in incarceration. New forms of labor coercion, such as sharecropping and tenancy, emerged in former slave-reliant counties. A causal interpretation comes from exploiting exogenous shocks to the demand for labor: i) the arrival of the cotton pest, ii) the introduction of agricultural colleges, iii) the Mississippi River floods, and iv) the adoption of tractors. Consistent with this finding, I show that arrests for African Americans increased before cotton harvesting.
(Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, 2023)
Published Papers
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
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)
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.
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
Work in Progress
Mined land: Natural resources and conflict
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.
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
Intergenerational Effects of Slavery: Following the Children of Slaves in the US
Migration and Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration
Media and Migration: The Role of the Chicago Defender on the Great Migration
Redlining and long-term effects on African American communities in the US
Policy Writing
Policy Writing
Economic valuation of the marine protected areas subsystem in Colombia: an analysis for Policy makers using a multi-service and multi-agent approach.
Economic valuation of marine protected areas from the perspective of local users: conciliating quantitative-individual with qualitative-collective approaches.
Indigenous community, Colombian Amazon, 2017.
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