“The Hidden Cost of Terror-Driven repatriations: Maternal-Infant Health and the
1930s Mexican Repatriation Campaign” joint with Jesse McDevitt-Irwin. (Draft available upon request)
In this paper we study how the fierce deportation campaigns against Mexicans in the American Southwest during the 1930s affected the maternal-infant health of Mexicans that were not deported. We use Childhood Sex Ratios (CSR) as a proxy for maternal-infant health, which makes use of the fact that male kids are more frail than female up until 2 years of age. We use individual level data to estimate the probability that a kid is female depending on the year and whether their parents are of Mexican heritage. Our preliminary results suggest an increase in the likelihood of being female by almost 0.37 percentage points, which represents almost twice the infant-maternal health gap faced by Mexicans before the deportation campaign. This result seems to be driven by rural counties and by children of Mexican born parents, rather than by children of US born parents of Mexican heritage.
"Crossed by the Border: Economic Assimilation of Mexican Involuntary Migrants" (Draft available upon request)
Inter-country conflicts usually lead to annexations and occupations, yet we don’t know much about how the populations that get absorbed assimilate both socially and in the labor market. This paper studies the economic and social outcomes of Mexicans that were absorbed by the US annexation of the American Southwest in the mid 19th century. I find achievement gaps in the labor market that get passed along to their children, as well as low intermarriage rates. These gaps are much bigger than the gaps observed for Latin American migrants and free Black Americans. One of the main drivers of these differences seems to be geography, since adding state X year fixed effects greatly reduces them.
“Acquisitions and Relational Management Practices”, joint with Ameet Morjaria, Michael Powell, and Rocco Macchiavello.
Well-functioning markets allocate assets to owners that improve firms’ management and perfor- mance. We study the effects of ownership changes on coffee mills in Rwanda – an industry in which managing relationships with farmers and seasonal workers is important and that has seen many ownership changes in recent years. We combine administrative data, a survey panel of mills and an original survey of acquirers that allows us to construct acquirer-specific and target-specific control groups. A difference-in-differences design reveals that ownership changes do not improve perfor- mance unless the mill is acquired by a foreign firm. Our preferred interpretation – supported by detailed survey evidence that considers alternative hypotheses – is that foreign firms successfully implement management changes in key operational areas. Upon acquisition, both domestic and foreign owned mills attempt to implement similar changes, but domestic firms face resistance from workers and farmers. Domestic owners have relationships with their local communities, which can create opportunities to establish new mills and acquire existing ones. However, these same rela- tionships create pressure to maintain status-quo relational arrangements, which makes it harder to implement managerial changes
“US Border Wall and Organized Crime in Mexico”
Violence related to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has dramatically escalated in Mexico since 2007. However, beyond the increase in the nation-wide homicide rate lies a huge time and spatial variation across Mexico’s 2,456 municipalities. One potential source of such heterogeneity is how valuable it is for DTOs to control a municipality for drug trafficking purposes. Using the expansion of the US-Mexico border wall that resulted from the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and leveraging the fact that it made trafficking drugs into the US more difficult, I study changes in the value of the municipalities shifted violence in Mexico. Using a TWFE estimator, I observe that municipalities whose closest border municipality get a wall segment see a decrease of 0.35 (44% with respect to the mean) in their homicide rate. The effect is concentrated in municipalities with DTO presence by 2005 and it seems to be present for at least 5 years.
“Gender Stereotypes in Job Advertisements: What Do They Imply for the Gender Salary Gap?” with Raymundo Campos, Eva Arceo, and Raquel Badillo. (Journal of Labor Research, 2022, vol. 43, issue 1, No 3, 65-102)
Gender stereotypes, the assumptions concerning appropriate social roles for men and women, permeate the labor market. Analyzing information from over 2.5 million job advertisements on three different employment search websites in Mexico, exploiting approximately 235,00 that are explicitly gender-targeted, we find evidence that advertisements seeking “communal” characteristics, stereotypically associated with women, specify lower salaries than those seeking “agentic” characteristics, stereotypically associated with men. Given the use of gender-targeted advertisements in Mexico, we use a random forest algorithm to predict whether non-targeted ads are in fact directed toward men or women, based on the language they use. We find that the non-targeted ads for which we predict gender show larger salary gaps (8–35 percent) than explicitly gender-targeted ads (0–13 percent). If women are segregated into occupations deemed appropriate for their gender, this pay gap between jobs requiring communal versus agentic characteristics translates into a gender pay gap in the labor market.
“Big Data, Google, and Unemployment” (Spanish) with Raymundo Campos Vázquez. (Estudios Económicos 9-vol. 35, no. 1, January-June, 2020)
We use Google Trends data for employment opportunities related queries in order to nowcast the unemployment rate in Mexico. We begin by discussing the literature related to big data and nowcasting in which user generated data is used to forecast unemployment. Afterwards, we explain the basics of several machine learning algorithms. Finally, we implement such algorithms in order to find the best model to predict unemployment using both Google Trends queries and unemployment lags.
“The Status of Mexico’s Economic Science” (Spanish). Coauthored with Raymundo Campos Vázquez. (El Trimestre Económico vol. 85-340)
We study both the authors and subjects discussed in Mexico’s six main economic journals from 2000 to 2017. We study how the presence of female authors has evolved in Mexican economic journals and, also, the interactions among scholars from different institutions using network analysis. On the other hand, we use text analysis on the abstracts to determine if certain keywords related to Mexico’s main economic problems or vulnerable groups were mentioned.