Research

Here you will find my current and past research projects.

Publications

Do Fiscal Transfers Affect Local Democracy? Lessons from Chilean Municipalities (with Carla Alberti and Diego Díaz) Latin American Politics and Society, Volume 65 , Issue 4 , November 2023.

• Abstract
  Extant literature concurs that fiscal transfers affect local democracy when they grant subnational governments nontax revenue. Yet there is nonetheless a mismatch between this concept and existing measures, which consider the whole transfers local governments receive, including both tax and nontax revenue. This article studies the Fondo Común Municipal (FCM), the most important intergovernmental grant in Chile, and provides a novel measure of nontax revenue. It uses this measure alongside the whole FCM transfer to test the rentier hypothesis. On the one hand, it shows that both measures increase the incumbent party vote share, although the effect of our measure is smaller. On the other hand, it finds that the FCM transfer has an impact on the probability of reelection and the competitiveness of elections, but this effect disappears when using our measure. Overall, the findings suggest that rents from transfers do not lead to strong electoral dominance in unitary states.

Medium-run Local Economic Effects of a Major Earthquake (with Paula Aguirre, Kenzo Asahí, Diego Díaz and Rodrigo Valdés) Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 23, Issue 2, March 2023.

• Abstract
  Existing research is inconclusive regarding the longer-term economic effects of earthquakes. We examine the medium-run impacts of the 2010 earthquake in Chile, the sixth largest ever recorded, using value-added tax collection as a proxy for economic activity at the municipal level and a measure of local ground-shaking intensity. We find that the affected municipalities suffered a relevant and persistent drop in their economic activity of about ten percent, eight to nine years after the event. We discuss the plausibility of the assumption of conditional parallel trends and show that the overall results are robust to using alternative estimation methods.
• Replication Files

Working Papers

Heterogeneous effects of Lengthening the School Day on Students’ Academic Achievement: a Longitudinal Study of Full Day School Reform in Chile (with Dante Contreras and Ignacio Lepe) submitted.

• Abstract
  This paper studies the effects of a large and gradual increase in the Chilean school day over students' academic achievement. We exploit a gradual and exogenous variation produced by the reform with an innovative measure of exposure to longer school day treatment. Using longitudinal data at an individual level and a fixed-effects strategy, we find that in the long run, this reform had no relevant effect on students’ standardized test scores nor higher education enrollment. However, this paper found heterogeneous response to additional instructional time by gender, type of school, and socioeconomic status. These results are robust to the inclusion of several covariates and insensible to the cohort selection.

Research in Progress

The Effect of Short-Term Rentals on Property Crime (with Davide Proserpio).

• Abstract
  This study investigates the impact of short-term rentals (STRs) on property-related crimes. We use a dataset of approximately half a million properties listed on Airbnb between 2008 and 2019 in 12 selected cities and incident-level crime data to answer the research question. Using STRs regulations across different cities as a source of exogenous variation for the supply of Airbnb, we present several findings. First, the direct association between Airbnb supply and crime incidence suggests a negative correlation between property crime and Airbnb supply, indicating that reducing the number of Airbnb listings in a neighborhood may coincide with increasing property crime. Second, after the implementation of STR regulations, the supply of Airbnb decreased considerably, and the number of property crimes increased in the medium run (6 to 12 months).

The Effects of Brand Involvement in Sociopolitical Events on Consumer Store Visits (with Tal Shoshani and Lan Luo).

• Abstract
  This research aims to empirically investigate whether and how brands' sociopolitical stands shape customer store visits in the US. We explore answers to the following questions: (1) How has the political polarization in stores' clientele composition evolved over the last few years (2019-2022) in the US? (2) Whether brands' sociopolitical stands play a role in this evolution? (3) If so, are store visits of certain brands sensitive to particular types of sociopolitical events? We use foot traffic data to identify brands' physical stores and track visits to their stores, detailed by which census block groups consumers come from. Second, we utilize voting data at the precinct level of the 2020 presidential election to capture political preference heterogeneity. We then merge these two data sets to create a novel and granular measure of the political customer profile for each store and week between 2019 and 2022. Third, we gauge the stands of a large number of brands on all significant sociopolitical events during this period based on conversations on social media. We further examine the extent to which customer store visits vary based on the sociopolitical stands of these brands. This study expands upon previous research by offering insights into whether and how US consumers from a large and diverse set of popular brands alter their store visit behavior in response to these brands' stands on various sociopolitical events.