Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Special Issue on Discrimination and Diversity (2024).
This paper investigates the long-term effects of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) on intimate partner violence (IPV). The identification relies on a novel historical dataset which uses the distance from municipalities to military camps during the war together with military camp sizes to proxy the impact of the war across eastern Paraguay. The likelihood of IPV occurring today is 5.54 percent higher than average in municipalities which were more heavily affected by the war. Consistent with relative improvements in female labour participation and human capital posing a threat to the male breadwinner role within the household, I present evidence that reducing the gender differences in the labour market and in human capital accumulation after the war increases the long term likelihood of IPV. As non-gender-based types of interpersonal violence are, in the long-run, unaffected, I conclude that gender norms caused by the war enabled IPV. I argue that female empowerment is a multifaceted phenomenon where some dimensions, in this case IPV, have greater influence than others.
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (2024).
This paper estimates the impact of particulate matter pollutants, measured by PM10 levels, on public healthcare costs for youth and older adult populations. To do this, we use administrative data from a large UK hospital and exploit spatial and temporal variation in PM10 levels. We find that patient enrolment increases when their neighbourhood experiences higher levels of PM10. Specifically, a standard deviation increase in PM10 levels increases the enrolment of patients age 60 years and older by 6.2%, and the enrolment of patients under 18 years of age by 3.1%. Using detailed costing information, we calculate that a standard deviation increase in PM10 increases public healthcare costs by £873, 985.20 per year.
Revise and resubmit requested by Applied Economics Letters.
This note examines whether for-profit management affects educational outcomes in Chile’s voucher system. Using administrative panel data for all voucher-subsidized primary schools from 2010 to 2014, we compare for-profit and nonprofit schools in terms of inputs and student performance. For-profit schools serve more disadvantaged students and rely on lower-cost inputs, such as less-qualified teachers, but they also provide more instructional hours and smaller classes. After controlling for student characteristics, a significant performance gap remains, but it is largely explained by differences in school inputs rather than by ownership form itself. These results suggest that for-profit management affects educational outcomes primarily through differences in input choices.
Revise and resubmit requested by Latin American Research Review (LARR).
The demographic consequences of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) remain among the most contested in Latin American history. While Reber (1988) argues that Paraguay lost only 8.7–18.5% of its pre-war population, Whigham & Potthast (1999) estimate losses as high as 60–69%. This article revisits these divergent claims by introducing newly digitized wartime military-administrative records from the Sección Nueva Encuadernación of the Archivo Nacional de Asunción, documenting draft-eligible males across 45 districts in late 1867 and early 1868. I link these records to the main surviving pre-war census benchmarks and reconstruct expected male populations through a transparent projection methodology using district-specific growth rates and adult-population shares when available, with explicit fallback assumptions otherwise. Across the 42 districts for which a usable projected denominator can be constructed, only 10,628 draft-eligible males aged twelve and older were observed against a projected male population of 100,692—implying that by late 1867 and early 1868 the Paraguayan state was identifying approximately one in nine projected males as effectively present and draft-eligible. This result is robust across alternative growth assumptions: under the Whigham & Potthast (1999) benchmark the observed share is 12.3%, and under the Reber (1988) rate 13.2%. Although these records do not constitute a direct mortality census—male absence may reflect death, active service elsewhere, imprisonment, desertion, or displacement—the level of late-war male scarcity they document is difficult to reconcile with low-loss interpretations of the conflict and instead aligns closely with high-loss scenarios, contributing both to the measurement of Paraguay's wartime demographic collapse and to broader debates on the long-run social consequences of extreme population shocks.
This paper presents evidence that trade exposure can shape gender labor-market inequality through a margin distinct from wages, namely the rate at which displaced women return to formal employment. Using twenty years of Argentine administrative panel data on 511,000 workers and a Bartik shift-share design at the province × industry × year cell, I estimate the differential effect of export exposure on log real wages and on log non-employment-spell duration. The wage interaction is null. The spell interaction is large and negative, with women's spells in highly exposed cells roughly 10 log points shorter, closing about half of the 22-log-point baseline gender gap. A simple two-sector search-and-matching framework offers a rationalization in which the female employment share in the directly exposed sector shapes which adjustment margin is most visible. Wage compression is the more visible signature where the share is large, and spell shortening where it is small, as in Argentine commodity-tradables. In such settings, reemployment dynamics may carry more of the gendered adjustment to trade than wage-setting.
We develop a three-layer architecture for bridging survey redesigns that expand the conceptual scope of measurement: deterministic harmonization of mechanically reconcilable changes, definition alignment that reconstructs the post-redesign classification rule from primitives, and overlap-anchored predictive backcasting combined with observed classifications through a hybrid composition rule. The architecture confines model dependence to the part of the historical series that the legacy instrument left structurally unclassified by design and makes the size of that block transparent. We demonstrate the architecture on the 2024Q4 redesign of Argentina’s Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, which replaces an employee-side proxy for labour formality with a dual-path framework including unit-level indicators for non-wage workers. The bridge expands the historically usable formality universe by 48.4%, anchoring 68.6% in observed classifications and 31.4% in calibrated GLM predictions. The legacy proxy lies 8 to 14 percentage points above the bridged series across 36 quarters; a decomposition shows that 97.9% of this gap is the mechanical consequence of concept expansion rather than a substantive finding about informality dynamics. The level shift is robust to predictive specification, classification rule, and sub-population, and within-overlap estimation uncertainty—propagated through household-clustered bootstrap bands averaging 3.7 pp—is substantially smaller than the gap. The architecture is portable to other survey redesigns that introduce new conceptual content under approximately stable predictive structure.
We provide causal evidence on the marginal propensity to repay debt (MPRD) of older adults. Our aim is to disentangle arguments from the literature explaining the slow draw down of wealth by older adults (that richer individuals are incentivised to increase wealth, and thus have a higher MPRD), from evidence of the MPRD of the general population (which finds that poorer individuals have a higher MPRD). We exploit a payment made by the Government of Canada to the universe of 73 and 74-year-olds, where the decision rule determining payment was the exact date of birth. Using RDD techniques and data from the universe of Canadian credit bureau files, we find that
MPRD for older adults varies across wealth and credit status.