Peer-reviewed Publications
2022. When Clients Vote for Brokers: How Elections Improve Public Goods Provision in Urban Slums. Forthcoming at World Development.
Does electoral democracy improve public goods provision for the poor? This paper considers whether and how the introduction of elections to choose slum-level representatives affects the provision of basic public goods and services in these communities. To address this question I take advantage of an unexpected interruption in the judicial process that introduced elections in urban slums in Argentina. Drawing on an original household survey, an expert survey, and insights from in-depth interviews, I show that the introduction of elections enhanced public goods and services provision only in slums with high organizational density. In such a context, existing organizational structures and citizens' organizational experience facilitated individuals’ endeavors to demand and monitor the provision of public goods and the emergence of new leaders other than partisan brokers that skewed political competition towards the provision of public goods. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between elections, participation and public goods provision in urban informal settlements and have implications for development practitioners: Under the right conditions, the democratic selection of slum intermediaries vis-à-vis the state can substantially improve the livelihood of these communities.
2021. Economic Elites and the Constitutional Design of Sharing Political Power (with Jan Vogler). Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 33, No. 1, March 2022, pp. 25-52.
What explains the emergence and persistence of institutions aimed at preventing any ruling group from using the state apparatus to advance particularistic interests? To answer this recurring question, a burgeoning literature examines the establishment of power-sharing institutions in societies divided by ethnic or religious cleavages. Going beyond existing scholarly work focused on these specific settings, we argue that political power-sharing institutions can also be the result of common disputes within the economic elite. We propose that these institutions are likely to emerge and persist where competition between elite factions with dissimilar economic interests is balanced. To address possible endogeneity between elite configurations and institutions, we leverage natural resource diversity as an instrument for elite configurations. We show that, where geological resources are more diverse, competition between similarly powerful economic groups is more likely to emerge, leading ultimately to the establishment of power-sharing mechanisms that subsequently allow elite groups to protect their diverging economic interests.
2020. Moving Markets? Government Bond Investors and Microeconomic Policy Changes (with Layna Mosley and Erik Wibbels). Economics & Politics, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 197-249.
Do sovereign bond markets react systematically to microeconomic policy reforms? Some observers suggest that investors are very attentive to supply-side policies such as those related to labor markets, corporate taxation and product standards. They argue that, along with macroeconomic outcomes and broad financial market conditions, such reforms affect sovereign bond premiums, for developed as well as emerging economies. In contrast, we predict few systematic effects of supply-side policy reforms on sovereign bond market outcomes. Our theory draws on a standard three-equation model of the economy, widely accepted among economic and finance professionals. That model makes few clear predictions regarding the anticipated effects of microeconomic policy changes; as a result, we expect that such reforms will not generate systematic market reactions. Our analyses, based on daily data from 37 countries from 2004 to 2012, indeed reveal little evidence of a systematic bond market reaction to the 47 most significant reforms to corporate taxation and labor market regulation. These results call into question the notion that "bond market vigilantes" play a central role in compelling governments to enact specific microeconomic policy changes.
Working Papers
Landowners, Capitalists and Bankers: The Political Economy of Business Influence
- Recipient of the Early Career Award for the Best Paper Delivered by a Graduate Student in the 2018 MPSA Conference
What explains economic elites’ choice of mechanisms to protect their capital? Existing approaches to economic elites’ influence and their role in distributive struggles explicitly or implicitly assume that elites identify with a single economic activity. Some of these theories consider this group’s interests as cohesive, whereas others emphasize factoral, sectoral, industry or firm cleavages. In contrast, I make the point that to explain why members of the economic elite choose different political strategies to advance their policy interests it is necessary to disentangle the diversification structure of their asset portfolio. I argue that investors’ asset portfolio structure accounts for variation in their motivations to influence different types of policy outcomes and, therefore, to invest in different political strategies. I test my argument in Argentina between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries using original individual-level data gathered from previously untapped historical archives. I show that diversified economic elites are more likely to participate directly in politics occupying elected and appointed positions in government, participating in encompassing employer organizations, and to embed themselves into elitist social circles, whereas those who are specialized in a single sector tend to resort to non-encompassing business associations to advance their interests. I explain that the choice of such strategies is a consequence of the effectiveness that each of these has in shaping different policy arenas: whereas diversified investors need to influence macro-level policies to protect their investments in multiple sectors, specialized ones prioritize policies that affect their sector alone. These findings suggest that the asset portfolio diversification of the economic elite has consequences for the balance on representation in democratic institutions with important implications for the design and implementation of policies that shape development and redistribution.
Insuring Against Democracy: The Political Economy of Premodern Elites' Asset Portfolio Diversification
Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions. I argue that the creation of domestic financial markets unevenly transformed the asset portfolios of landed elites exposed to different levels of land inequality, reshaping their political and economic incentives. Using previously untapped archival data that allows me to identify landholdings and participation in joint-stock companies of 55,504 elite members, I exploit the approval of the first corporate law that regulated joint-stock companies in Chile in 1854 to show that, given the emergence of new investment opportunities, landed elites that perceived a higher economic risk under democracy strategically hedged such risk by diversifying their holding portfolio into other economic activities. As a consequence, on the one hand, landed elites that insured their capital through portfolio diversification became more supportive of suffrage expansion. On the other hand, diversification of economic interests also produced incentives for diversified elites to seek positions in government at the national level from which they could steer state intervention towards policies with a multiplier effect across the different sectors of the economy where they had investments. Ultimately, the interest of diversified elites in this type of policies resulted in higher investments in public goods in their districts. This set of findings challenges the idea that land inequality has detrimental consequences for democratization and development, and provides novel evidence supporting the argument that initial high levels of land inequality can lead to prosperity.
Commodity Booms, State Capacity and Enfranchisement (with Pablo Beramendi and Melissa Rogers)
Agricultural commodity booms are revenue windfalls that provide resource-rich nationsthe opportunity to improve their fiscal capacity and their nations’ distributive strategies.Yet only a subset of nations appear able to employ those resources to increase tax revenue,shrink inequalities, and retract sectoral subsidies. We provide a theory to explain nations’current distributive strategies by the sequencing of investment in state capacity and theexpansion of popular suffrage. In early capacity developers, investments in the adminis-trative and fiscal engines of the state reflected elite preferences for public goods to expandeconomic development. When suffrage arrived, state capacity was already committed tothose goals. Late capacity developers built state capacity at a time when the masses alreadyheld sway via the ballot box. Elites were unlikely to cede significant control to developcapacity that would come from their pockets, yet not reflect their priorities. We focus onresource mobilization from commodity booms as indicative of long-run state capacity andgovernment priorities in the current times. Those states that developed state capacity priorto popular suffrage are able to mobilize resources from commodity booms to expand thefiscal state, compensate losers from boom, all the while reducing inequality at the top.States that developed capacity after suffrage change little in the short term, and appearworse off in the long term after the boom.
Selected Work in Progress
Political Elites: Representation in the Legislative and the Executive as Substitutes (with Joan Ricart-Huguet)
Corruption and Partisan Bias in Brazil (with Marco Morucci and Luis Vilaça)
Land Inequality Perceptions and the Demand for Redistribution. Experimental Evidence from Rural Colombia (with Germán Feierherd and Ana Montoya) [data analysis stage]
Corruption and Partisan Bias in Brazil (with Marco Morucci and Luis Vilaça)
Land Inequality Perceptions and the Demand for Redistribution. Experimental Evidence from Rural Colombia (with Germán Feierherd and Ana Montoya) [data analysis stage]