Embedded Files
Published Papers
Published Papers
Trust, Violence, and Coca. 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). Conditionally Accepted. The Economic Journal
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.
The collapse of the Maya civilization (with Ola Olsson and Christian Isendahl). R&R. The Economic Journal
The collapse of the Maya civilization (with Ola Olsson and Christian Isendahl). R&R. The Economic Journal
In early states, ruling elites provided both productivity-enhancing public goods such as roads, water reservoirs and irrigation canals, as well as seemingly nonproductive monuments like statues or triumphal arches with inscribed messages glorifying the elite. The nature of this tradeoff, and its relation to productivity shocks, is not well understood. We examine this phenomenon in the Classic Maya civilization (c. 250-950 CE) where city-state elites chose between investing in essential water management infrastructure (reservoirs, canals) and monuments serving as a vehicle for dominant elite propaganda. We analyze information from 870 dated monuments from 110 settlements. Correlating this dataset with a proxy record for temporal variations in annual rainfall, we find--perhaps counter-intuitively--that monument construction activity was more intense during drought years. Furthermore, a text analysis of 2.2 million words from deciphered hieroglyphic inscriptions on monuments shows higher frequencies of terms associated with war or violent conflict during periods of drought. We propose that in the Classic Maya political setting of numerous small city-states, monument construction functioned as an instrument of costly signalling to demonstrate state capacity, designed to attract labor for future control of revenue.
Bound to the Land: Slavery, Sharecropping, and the Roots of Black Economic Disadvantage (under review)
This paper uncovers a mechanism through which slavery shaped long-run Black economic
development in the U.S. South: counties historically most reliant on enslaved labor exhibit lower incarceration rates for African Americans after abolition. Using full-count Census records from 1850–1940, I show that this pattern reflects a labor-market mechanism. Where agricultural
production remained dependent on Black labor, planters had incentives to shield workers from
imprisonment and instead relied on coercive labor arrangements such as sharecropping and tenancy, suppressing Black land ownership and human capital accumulation across generations. By contrast, in areas where Black labor was less essential, incarceration emerged as a primary instrument of racial control. To identify causality, I exploit shocks that exogenously reduced agricultural labor demand: the Boll Weevil infestation, the Mississippi River floods, the introduction of agricultural experiment
stations, and the diffusion of tractors. Consistent with the proposed mechanism, declines in labor
demand increased Black incarceration, while White incarceration rates remained largely unaffected.
(Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, 2023)
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.
Pipeline
The Vietnam War in Black and White
Natural resources and conflict: new dataset
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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