Research

Work in progress

“US Border Wall and Organized Crime in Mexico”

Pre-PhD publications

“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.