Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (56)
Working Paper
pdf
Violent conflicts affect the lives and livelihoods of almost one quarter of the world’s population. But the effects of violent conflict are not uniform. This study assesses the differential effects of violent conflict on young people’s education, job prospects, and forms of civic engagement and...
Working Paper
pdf
We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an in-person survey to nearly 3,000 urban youths...
Working Paper
pdf
– The role of oil theft and narcocracy and the electoral consequences of organized crime
When does organized crime resort to assassinating politicians? In narcocracies, criminal groups co-opt political elites through bribery in exchange for protection to traffic illegal drugs. When criminal groups compete, they may also resort to political violence to influence which candidate wins...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper analyses the land tenure reform that took place in Mexico in 1992 and its PROCEDE programme (Ejido Rights Certification Programme). It considers the counter-agrarian reform’s objectives, the context in which it was proposed, and the different actors involved. It delves into the main...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Mexican municipalities
Does clientelism perpetuate the weak state capacity that characterizes many young democracies? Prior work explains that clientelist parties skew public spending to private goods and under-supply public goods. Building on these insights, this article argues that clientelism creates a bureaucratic...
Working Paper
pdf
Voter coercion is a recurrent threat to pro-poor redistribution in young democracies. In this study we focus on Mexico’s paradigmatic Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. We investigate whether local mayors exploited POP to coerce voters, and if so, what effect these actions had on the...
Working Paper
pdf
There are sound theoretical reasons to expect clientelism to suppress economic growth: politicians who garner support by offering employment to voters and grassroots party members can do so more effectively when the voters’ participation constraint is met with low wages. Hence, clientelism can...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Latin American countries
We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Mexican informal and formal workers
In this paper we analyse informal work in Mexico, which accounts for the majority of employment in the country and has grown over time. We document that the informal sector is composed of two distinct parts: salaried informal employment and self-employment. Relative to self-employment and formal...
Working Paper
pdf
– Supply vs demand factors
We estimate the relative importance of alternative labour supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labour force participation over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of female labour force participation in Mexico between 1960 and 2015 followed an S-shape, with a...
Working Paper
pdf
– Uncovering the nature of informal employment in urban Mexico
Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers’ preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. A discrete choice...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from changes in the occupational structure of employment in the USA and Mexico
The decline of employment in middle-wage, routine task intensive jobs has been well documented for the USA. Increased offshoring towards lower-income countries such as Mexico has been proposed as a potential driver of this decline. Our analysis provides a unique and new approach to address the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from the Panic of 1907
Using height as a proxy for physical productivity of labour, this paper estimates the selection of Mexican migration to the United States at the beginning of the flow (1906–08), and it exploits a natural experiment of history to evaluate the impact of random shocks on short-run shifts in selection...
– On the rise again
Since 1989, inequality in Mexico has risen, declined, and risen again. The evolution of labour income inequality is at the core of this pattern. To reverse the current trend of rising inequality, access to secondary and tertiary education should continue to expand, minimum wages should be increased...
Working Paper
pdf
– Labour markets and fiscal redistribution 1989–2014
Income inequality in Mexico increased between 1989 and 1994; between 1994 and 2006, inequality declined; and, between 2006 and 2014, inequality was again on the rise. We apply decomposition techniques to analyse the proximate determinants of labour income inequality and fiscal incidence analysis to...
Working Paper
pdf
– The case of Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera programme
This study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP’s administrative records and elections data, we exploit the targeting criteria...
Displaying 16 of 56 results