Research

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.

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.

Abstract: The demographic consequences of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) remain among the most contested in Latin American history, with estimates of population loss ranging from under 20 percent to nearly 70 percent. This article revisits the debate by introducing newly digitized wartime 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. Linking these records to prewar census benchmarks through a transparent projection methodology, I find that across the 42 districts with a usable projected denominator, only 10,628 draft-eligible males aged twelve and older were observed against a projected male population of 100,692—roughly one in nine. The result is robust to alternative growth assumptions. Although male absence may reflect death, service, imprisonment, desertion, or displacement, the severity of late-war male scarcity is difficult to reconcile with low-loss interpretations and aligns closely with high-loss scenarios.

Keywords: Paraguayan War; historical demography; armed conflict; population loss; archival records

Resumen: Las consecuencias demográficas de la Guerra del Paraguay (1864–1870) se encuentran entre las más debatidas de la historia latinoamericana, con estimaciones de pérdida poblacional que van desde menos del 20 por ciento hasta cerca del 70 por ciento. Este artículo retoma ese debate a partir de registros administrativos de guerra recientemente digitalizados, provenientes de la Sección Nueva Encuadernación del Archivo Nacional de Asunción, que documentan a los varones aptos para el reclutamiento en 45 distritos a fines de 1867 y comienzos de 1868. Al vincular estos registros con los censos previos a la guerra mediante una metodología de proyección transparente, encuentro que en los 42 distritos con un denominador proyectado utilizable solo se observaron 10.628 varones de doce años o más frente a una población masculina proyectada de 100.692, es decir, aproximadamente uno de cada nueve. El resultado es robusto a supuestos alternativos de crecimiento. Aunque la ausencia masculina puede reflejar muerte, servicio activo, prisión, deserción o desplazamiento, y no solo mortalidad, la magnitud de la escasez de varones hacia el final de la guerra es difícil de conciliar con las interpretaciones de bajas pérdidas y se alinea estrechamente con los escenarios de pérdidas altas.

Palabras clave: Guerra del Paraguay; demografía histórica; conflicto armado; pérdida de población; registros de archivo

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.

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.

Objectives. Determine whether the local supply of journalism leaves a measurable imprint on the dark figure of crime, and whether that imprint differs across crime types. 

Methods. We develop a rational-choice model of intimidation and reporting that delivers both a testable cross-crime ranking and a reduced-form specification. We take our model to a novel dataset combining administrative crime records and a unique outlet-level mapping of local journalism in Argentina. Measuring media intensity by the number of local outlets, we estimate this model-implied reduced form by Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML), with a set of placebo and robustness tests. To further assess whether this relationship can be interpreted causally, we complement our empirical analysis with a matching design. 

Results. A denser supply of local outlets is associated with more reported property crime (about +1.5% per outlet for theft and +3% for robbery, the latter near +30% across the bottom-to-topquartile contrast), no detectable change for assault, and a negative point estimate on reported sex offenses. The cross-crime ranking that the theoretical model predicts (robbery above theft, both positive; assault near zero; sex offenses directionally negative) is stable across matching estimators, an alternative journalist-based measure, and a month-by-month placebo, and is sharpest where outlets produce genuinely local content. 

Conclusions. Local information environments shape what enters the official record of crime. Comparisons of recorded crime across regions that ignore media supply can misrepresent true victimization, and information-based interventions are better judged by their effect on offending, detection, and reporting than on aggregate counts. Because the design is cross-sectional and covers a single country and year, identification rests on selection on observables, and replication is warranted.

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.