Publications
- Spillover Effects of the Venezuelan Crisis: Migration Impacts in Colombia (with Valerie Mueller and Christian Gomez). Forthcoming in Oxford Economic Papers.
variables approach to account for the selection of immigrants into locations with more or less desirable employment conditions and amenities. Conservative estimates indicate a 1-percent increase in immigration from Venezuela causes a 3-percent average wage decline in host communities. Focusing on the immigration of the Venezuelan-born alone, wage effects rise to 5 percent, increasing poverty rates 2 percentage points. A dual-pronged approach is warranted to promote the economic assimilation of Venezuelans while protecting the job security of Colombians.
- Extreme Weather and Poverty Risk: Evidence from Multiple Shocks in Mozambique (with Javier Baez and Chiyu Niu). Forthcoming in Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.
Experiencing a cyclone, flood, or drought leads to a drop of up to 25-30 percent in per capita food consumption and around 0.4 fewer meals per day per person. Poverty increased by 12 and 17.5 percentage points in two of the three events analyzed. Human capital accumulation, as measured by school participation and morbidity, is disrupted. Households follow risk-coping strategies, such as increasing the labor supply of their children or selling assets, which entail partial protection in the aftermath of the shock at the cost of lower income growth in the future. In disentangling the channels, the paper shows that maize prices exhibit higher volatility in food markets that are spatially close to the most affected areas. The results are robust to several robustness checks,
including analysis of bias from selective migration, and indicate that household welfare and economic mobility in low-income environments are constrained by uninsured weather risks.
Disasters can have long lasting effects, but understanding the breadth, variety and longevity of their effects can be challenging. This paper examines the long term effects and subsequent intergenerational transmission of exposure in childhood to the natural disasters that have occurred in Latin America in the last 100 years. The identification strategy exploits the exogenous variation in geographic location, timing and exposure of different birth cohorts to natural disasters. This study measures individuals' exposure to each disaster based on their geographic location at birth to avoid any bias in the estimates due to possible selective migration caused by each disaster. The main results indicate that children in utero and young children are the most vulnerable to natural disasters and suffer the most long-lasting negative effects. These effects include less human capital accumulation, worse health and fewer assets when they are adults. Effects are found to have a non-linear relationship with the level of development of each country. Furthermore, the results provide evidence of the intergenerational transmission of shocks, indicating that children born to mothers who had been exposed to natural disasters also have less education and increased child labor.
Over
the past years, a greater number of studies has been conducted to
evaluate and measure the impacts of shocks in early childhood.
Additionally, there has been a growing concern among economists and
policy makers about how negative conditions experienced early in life
may have persistent effects or long lasting effects. In this context,
the present investigation estimates the long-run effects of shocks in
early childhood and their intergenerational transmission. In
particular, we estimate the long-run effects of the 1970 Ancash
earthquake on human capital accumulation for the affected and
subsequent generations 37 years after the shock. We exploit the
localized nature of the earthquake and the exogenous timing of this
event to capture a child’s exposure and identify the effect of the
earthquake on welfare. The main finding of this paper shows that in
utero males exposed to the earthquake completed on average 0.5 years
less schooling than their unaffected cohorts, while exposed females
completed 0.8 years less schooling. Surprisingly, children whose
mothers were affected at birth by the earthquake have 0.4 less years of
education while those whose fathers were affected by the earthquake at
birth suffer no effects on their educational achievement. The
evaluation of other outcomes also suggests that the level of welfare of
affected individuals was negatively impacted in the long run.
- Heat Exposure and Youth Migration in Central America and the Caribbean (with Javier Baez, Valerie Mueller and Chiyu Niu). Forthcoming in The American Economic Review (P&P)
Evidence
documenting the linkages between migration and climate at regional
scale is limited. Knowledge on the matter is particularly important for
Central America and the Caribbean, a region of the world characterized
by exceptionally high (internal and international) migration rates and
substantial exposure to disasters. We link individual-level information
from multiple censuses for seven countries with georeferenced climate
data at the province level to measure the impact of heat exposure on
internal mobility. Our results imply that a 1-standard deviation
increase in heat would affect the lives of 7,314 and 1,578 unskilled,
young (15-25) women and men, respectively. The total effect is slightly
smaller than observed in our previous work which focuses on
displacement from droughts and hurricanes, but could increase with
climate change. Of notable importance is youth facing heat waves are
more likely to respond by moving to urban centers than when exposed to
disasters endemic to the region. Additional research is warranted over
the welfare implications of these choices in the long term and the
interventions available to minimize distress migration.
- Droughts augment youth migration in Northern Latin America and the Caribbean (with Javier Baez, Valerie Mueller and Chiyu Niu). Published in Climate Change
While
evidence on the linkages between migration and climate is starting to
emerge, the subject remains largely under-researched at regional scale.
Knowledge on the matter is particularly important for Northern Latin
America and the Caribbean, a region of the world characterized by
exceptionally high migration rates and substantial exposure to natural
hazards. We link individual-level information from multiple censuses
for eight countries in the region with natural disaster indicators
constructed from georeferenced climate data at the province level to
measure the impact of droughts and hurricanes on internal mobility. We
find that younger individuals are more likely to migrate in response to
these disasters, especially when confronted with droughts. Youth
exhibit a stronger inclination towards relocating to rural and small
town settings, motivated possibly by opportunities for nearby off-farm
employment and financing limitations for urban transport and living
expenses. Migration decisions are mediated by national institutional
arrangements. These findings highlight the importance of social
protection and regional planning policies to reduce the vulnerability
of youth to droughts in the future and secure their economic
integration.
This
paper addresses an important source of variation within democracies —
the degree of institutionalization. The concept of institutionalization
describes the extent to which politics takes place, and is believed to
take place, via formal political institutions. Countries vary in their
degree of institutionalization, hence, in the degree to which political
actors pursue their goals via conventional politics or via “alternative
political technologies”. This paper postulates that if politics is
conducted largely outside of formal channels, the structure of the
formal channels should not matter much as a determinant of policy
outcomes. To address this issue this paper proposes a new index of
institutionalization and with it revisits seminal work regarding the
impact of constitutions on public spending. The findings show that the
effect of constitutional rules on policy outcomes is conditional on the
degree of institutionalization.
We
approach the problems of measuring the dimensionality of welfare and
that of identifying the multidimensionally poor, by first finding the
poor using the original space of attributes, and then reducing the
welfare space. The starting point is the notion that the `poor'
constitutes a group of individuals that are essentially different from
the `non-poor' in a truly multidimensional framework. Once this group
has been identified through a clustering procedure, we propose reducing
the dimension of the original welfare space using recent blinding
methods for variable selection. We implement our approach to the case
of Latin America based on the Gallup World Poll, which contains ample
information on many dimensions of welfare.
This
chapter reviews recent methods to quantify the dimensionality of
welfare and its relation to deprivation. We discuss two alternative
strategies based on factor analytic methods and on variable selection
after cluster analysis. Unlike latent variable methods, variable
selection strategies are immediate to interpret and resample, since
they choose variables originally in the data set. The advantages and
disadvantages of both strategies are discussed as well as some recent
empirical applications of these methods. The methods discussed in this
chapter are shown to be able to summarize an initially large list of
variables into a few new variables (as in factor analytic methods) or a
subset of the original ones (as in feature selection / cluster
methods), that can serve the purpose of characterizing the poor. These
methods can assist the conceptual search for relevant dimensions of
welfare, or provide confirmatory analysis of alternative, likely
multidisciplinary studies aimed at isolating relevant factors for
poverty analysis.
Working PapersWhen
shocks such as natural disasters occur in early childhood, they can
have lasting health and economic effects on the lives of the affected
kids that can be transmitted to the next generation. This paper uses
household survey data from Tanzania to estimate the short and long term
effects of exposure to the Tanzania Flood of 1993 on the health of
young victims and to show their intergenerational transmission. The
identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the disaster's
geographic extent, timing, and the exposure of different birth cohorts
to the disaster. The children exposed to the flood have lower
height-for-age Z-scores three years after the shock, with bigger
effects for girls than for boys. Women who were less than 18 years old
during the flood experienced negative impacts even 12 years after the
flood. The kids of women affected before their 18th year have lower
height-for-age Z-scores, while the kids of the men affected before
their 18th year experience no effect on their height-for-age Z-scores.
One of the main mechanisms identified for the intergenerational
transmission of health effects is the poor performance of the affected
females in the marriage market. The effects are robust to code those
individuals who migrate as residents of the affected region at the time
of the flood.
This
is the first paper using household survey data from two countries
(Eritrea and Ethiopia) involved in an international war to measure a
conflict’s impact on children’s health in both nations. The
identification strategy uses event data to exploit exogenous variation
in the conflict’s geographic extent and timing and the exposure to the
fighting of different birth cohorts while in utero or early childhood.
War-exposed children in both countries have lower height-for-age
Z-scores, with the children in the war-instigating and losing country
(Eritrea) suffering more than the winning nation (Ethiopia). The paper
uniquely incorporates GPS information on the distance between survey
villages and conflict sites to more accurately measure a child’s war
exposure; results indicate negative impacts are 35-75% larger than if
exposure is measured at the imprecise region level. Effects are robust
to including region-specific time trends, alternative conflict exposure
measures, and addressing potential bias due to selective migration.
- Do social programs reduce poverty duration? An application for the Supplemental Security Income Program. Under Review.
This
paper evaluates the impact of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
program on poverty duration. We use a duration model to
estimate
how the program affects the hazard rate of leaving poverty. We
deal with the endogeneity problem in poverty duration models by
applying an instrumental variable approach. For a more robust
causality analysis, an instrument variable approach is used
to
determine the effect of the program on the probability of being poor and
also on income not related to the subsidy. The results
indicate
that the SSI program reduces poverty duration by 25.5%, increases
income not related to the subsidy and reduces the probability of being
poor. Our theoretical framework and our empirical results
suggest
that cash transfer programs are an
efficient
poverty alleviation policy for
breaking
the persistence of poverty traps.
- Life-Long Effects of Gestation during Ramadan: Evidence from Nigeria (with Seyed Karimi), in progress
We
use a different type of natural experiment, namely exposure to the
Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, in order to measure the scope of the
effects of malnutrition in utero. To uncover the effects in the
life-long range, we measure a wide array of adverse effects from birth
and childhood to school age and adulthood and examine health,
education, and labor market outcomes. Testing the wide range of
outcomes allows us to investigate both cognitive and physical channels
of adverse labor market effects of malnutrition in utero. A unique
feature of this paper is using a uniform socioeconomic context,
Nigeria, to measure the effects that are specific to the different
stages of the life. This property, which is missing in the related
literature, enables us to provide a complete and proportionate picture
of the consequences of Ramadan-induced malnutrition in utero.
- Medium term natural disasters effects: Household income, individual health and child schooling after the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane Season in Mexico (with Maria Cucagna), in progress
This
paper analyzes the medium term effects (5 years after the shock) of the
hurricanes on income poverty, health and schooling. In this paper, the
identification strategy uses household GPS information to compare those
households within the hurricanes’ trajectories with those households
outside of the trajectories. The fact that the hurricanes passed
through different states allows us to obtain a treatment group that it
is not necessarily related to one specific region, thus separating
region specifics from the effect of the hurricanes. I find that five
years after the hurricanes, exposed households are poorer, while
exposed individuals have a greater probability of disability or mental
health problems. Moreover, I find that school age children have lower
rates of school enrollment.
- Effects in the Long Run of the Salvadoran Civil War (with Pablo Acosta), in progress
This
paper studies how exposure to the Salvadoran armed conflict
subsequently affected the education of individuals exposed in utero.
The identification strategy of this paper compares the educational
performance of individuals born in the war-affected regions with that
of those that born in non-affected regions. We exploit the exogenous
variation in the conflict’s geographic extent and timing to identify
exposure to the fighting of different birth cohorts while in utero or
early childhood.
