Work in progress
The Effects of Protests on Political, Human Rights, and Social Attitudes (With Andrés Álvarez)
We investigate whether and how social protests affect political, human rights, and social individual attitudes. To do so, we exploit a natural experiment during the 2019 Colombian protests and use a differences-in-differences design with a unique panel of individuals that allows us to identify causal effects.
Campaign Contributions: To Buy Votes or to Mobilize Voters.
This study aims to analyze how parties negotiate the amount of campaign contributions with their interest groups and how decide to split it between mobilizing voters and vote-buying.
Heat and Voting (With Fernando Carriazo and Jorge Garcia).
A considerable body of literature has shown that heat affects individual behavior and decision-making. However, we have very limited knowledge about the impact of heat on voting decisions. Using municipal-level voting data for the 2016 Peace Plebiscite in Colombia ratifying the peace agreement between the state and the main guerrilla group and granular temperature information, we present evidence that heat impacts voting decisions. This type of election—closely contested and polarized—and the country's geographical location provide suitable conditions for analyzing this impact. We find that those municipalities exposed to unusually high temperatures on the day of the plebiscite demonstrated higher support for the peace agreement. This result was driven by municipalities with higher percentages of nonpartisan and undecided voters, as well as those with a higher proportion of young voters. The effect is also partially explained by the votes cast in municipalities with high exposure to violence, coca crops presence, and weak land property rights, elements that the Peace Agreement was intended to change. These results are consistent with the premise that heat stress triggers an emotional response among voters making them vote against the status quo.