Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico
with Leopoldo Fergusson &
Horacio Larreguy
(Revise & Resubmit to The Economic Journal)
We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent
parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods
provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents
have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for
the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) that affected local state capacity across Mexican municipalities and over time. Our
difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a
national shock that threatened the Mexican government’s hegemony in the early 1960s. The
intensity of this shock, which varied across municipalities, was partly explained by severe
droughts that occurred during the 1950s.
Collateral Damage: Legacy of the Secret War in Laos
with Felipe
Valencia (submitted)
As part of its Cold War counterinsurgency operations in Southeast Asia,
the U.S. government conducted a "Secret War" in Laos from 1964-1973. This war
constituted one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in human history. As
a result, Laos is now severely contaminated with UXO (Unexploded Ordnance)
and remains one of the poorest countries in the world. In this paper we document
the negative long-term impact of conflict on economic development, using highly
disaggregated and newly available data on bombing campaigns, satellite imagery
and development outcomes. We find a negative, significant and economically
meaningful impact of bombings on nighttime lights, expenditures and poverty
rates. Almost 50 years after the conflict officially ended, bombed regions are poorer
today and are growing at slower rates than unbombed areas. A one standard
deviation increase in the total pounds of bombs dropped is associated with a 9.3%
fall in GDP per capita. To deal with the potential endogeneity of bombing, we use
as instruments the distance to the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh Trail as well as US
military airbases outside Laos. Using census data at the village and individual levels,
we show the deleterious impact of UXOs in terms of health, as well as education,
structural transformation and rural-urban migration.
Media, Secret Ballot and the Process of Democratization in the United States
with Leopoldo Fergusson
& BK Song (submitted)
Social Dissent, Coercive Capacity, and Redistribution: Evidence from Authoritarian Mexico
with Horacio Larreguy
& Mariano Sánchez
Talanquer
The extent to which authoritarian regimes use coercive, relative to redistributive, strategies
to manage social dissent exhibit significant variation across the territory they govern. We
argue that the incidence of different authoritarian tactics to deal with dissent depends on
the coercive capacity of the state, which autocrats often inherit from the past. Where
autocrats facing increasing discontent can rely on their capacity to coerce regime dissidents,
they are more likely to eschew redistributive strategies. In contrast, dissent increases the
likelihood of redistribution where autocrats lack readily-available tools for coercion. We
provide empirical support for this argument primarily using a difference-in-differences
identification strategy that exploits three sources of variation. First, we use a land reform
that between 1910 and 1992 redistributed more than 50% of Mexico’s agricultural land. Second,
we exploit a wave of dissent around the 1960s. Finally, we use municipal data on the
availability of loyal semi-formal militias to coerce dissidents. Our results indicate that,
when confronted with dissent, the PRI regime redistributed relatively less land in
municipalities with more rural militia presence. We also show that, in those municipalities,
events expressing social discontent were more successfully deterred. The study sheds light on
how state coercive capacity shapes authoritarian strategies.
Bureaucratic Nepotism
Job Market Paper (draft in progress)
Nepotism is one of the most chronic pathologies within public administrations around the world and one
especially endemic to developing countries. Yet, empirical evidence on the impact of this behavior on the
functioning of the state is scarce.
In this paper, I document how family connections within the public administrations
could distort the process of hiring, promotion, and compensation of civil servants, and how these
strategically respond to the enforcement of anti-nepotism legislation. I also investigate how the
presence of nepotistic career paths ultimately relates to the performance of governmental agencies and
individual bureaucrats. My analysis focuses on the Colombian public administration and
its entire bureaucratic system. I use un-anonymized administrative data on the universe of civil servants
and their family members in the first degree of consanguinity. Based on this, I reconstruct bureaucratic
family networks
and full career paths of public servants. My empirical strategy exploits discontinuities in
anti-nepotistic legislation and the political turnover of top bureaucrats to evaluate the impact of
kinship ties on civil servants' outcomes. As opposed to most of the literature on patronage and political
quid-pro-quo exchange, I emphasize the role of kinship networks within the complete hierarchical structure
of the state, from top managers to low tier bureaucrats, regardless of the political affiliation of
individuals and their inherent jurisdictional power.