Research

Publications

Better together? Student's benefits of educational market integration, (with Claudio Allende and Juan Luksic), Forthcoming, Journal of Development Economics 

The direct and spillover effects of a mental health program for disruptive students, (with Clément de Chaisemartin), Journal of Labor Economics 41 (3), 729-769

Health effects of increasing income for the elderly: evidence from a Chilean pension program, (with Enrico Minglio, Pablo Navarrete H. and Gonzalo Navarrete  H.),  American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 15.1 (2023): 370-393.  

Behind the veil: the effect of banning the Islamic veil in schools (with Éric Maurin), Economic Policy 38. 113 (2023): 63-98.

Unleashing Waste-Pickers’ Potential: Supporting Recycling Cooperatives in Santiago de Chile (with Pablo Navarrete-Hernandez), World Development, Volume 101, 2018, Pages 293-310. 


Working Papers 

“The Effects of Homeownership Assistance on Labor Supply” 

Award: Winner of the Habitat and Urban Development Competition, Development Bank of Latin America, 2016. 

Secure housing tenure is often thought to be a means of escaping poverty traps. Accordingly, policies that heavily subsidize private-market homeownership for low-income households are becoming part of the developing world landscape. To estimate the effect of this intervention type on the employment of beneficiaries, I implement a regression discontinuity design exploiting individual-level administrative data from a Chilean program that uses an arbitrary threshold to allocate homeownership vouchers. For the average user, the voucher represents approximately 5.1 years of salary and covers 97 percent of the total price of the purchased house. I present three main findings. First, receiving a voucher does not have an effect on the employment levels of heads of households, but it reduces the employment levels of their children. Second, children in new-homeowner households are more likely to be enrolled in full-time education, which may explain the decrease in their employment. Third, residential stability, residential area quality, and proximity to employment hubs do not seem to play any role in these findings. Results in this paper suggest that subsidized private-market homeownership could be an effective way to mitigate the intergenerational transmission of poverty.



Research in Progress

"Supporting Small Firms During a Pandemic: The Effect of Covid-19 Loans on Borrowing, Defaults and Formal Job Destruction'' (joint work with Diego Solorzano)