Miguel Ruiz

Ph.D. Economics

War and internal displacement [pdf on request]

This paper studies how war displaces people geographically and over time. I develop a network model that exploits data with exact geographical coordinates and large spacetime variation during the war against ISIL between 2014 and 2017 in Iraq. I find the highest concentration of displaced people within two miles of conflict, decreasing with distance and time, and disappearing beyond forty miles. People choose locations in highly populated areas within five miles of a main road. Areas with more diversity host more displaced people relative to areas with a clear ethno-religious majority.

Wartime rape in Rwanda: The Genocide’s impact on HIV levels

This paper finds empirical evidence of wartime rape during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. I use HIV data from a decade after the genocide as a measure of the prevalence of rape to find that HIV levels in 2005 can be explained by the intensity of the genocide in the different Rwandan districts. The findings document both the prevalence of rape— usually stigmatized and hard to measure— and its dire lasting effects on the Rwandan population long after the crimes were committed. To establish causality, I exploit the exogenous variation in the accessibility to households during the genocide to construct an IV estimator. I measure accessibility in terms of the distance from these households to the main roads, the rainfall over those roads during the genocide, and terrain ruggedness.

Bilingual Education: Experience from Madrid

Bilingual education programs promote students’ language proficiency and communicative competence in a language other than their own. Nowadays, bilingual programs are present worldwide, responding to an increasing demand partially driven by the potential personal and economic benefits from being proficient in a foreign language. However, bilingual education increases the difficulty of learning academic content due to classroom instruction in a non-native language. To measure the importance of this effect, I utilize standardized test data and the Spanish-English bilingual program in Madrid. The findings show a small but significant negative impact of the program on the performance of students in English-taught content. The negative effect is stronger around the median of the student’s ability distribution.