Research

In this observational study, we provide estimates of the impact on the maternal mortality ratio of swings in US aid for family planning and reproductive health driven by changes in the implementation of the Mexico City Policy—first introduced as the US Policy on Population Assistance under the Reagan administration in 1984 and often referred to as the Global Gag Rule (GGR). The policy prohibits US foreign assistance for family planning to overseas non-governmental organisations that provide, make referrals to or promote abortion-related services or information, even when financed through non-US funds. Since first implemented by President Reagan in 1984, the GGR has been enacted under every Republican president and revoked under every Democrat. The policy was tightened under President Trump in his first presidency in 2017 and expanded to apply to all US global health assistance. Using data for the period 1985–2023, covering 150 countries worldwide and using a quasi-experimental study design, we estimate that a switch from a Democratic to a Republican administration, for a country with above median reliance on US family planning aid, is associated with an additional 44.7 maternal deaths per 100 000 live births—an increase of 10.5%. This erodes roughly one-fifth of the average worldwide decline in maternal mortality achieved since 1985. Additionally, our findings offer suggestive evidence of potential mechanisms including a reduction in contraceptive use, an increase in unmet need for contraception and a decrease in the proportion of births attended by skilled health workers.

• The Guardian
• BMJ Group

We build a model of equity crowdfunding that incorporates the two major funding models: all-or-nothing (AoN) and keep-it-all (KIA). Both informed and uninformed investors arrive sequentially and rationally choose whether and how much to invest. The KIA solution turns out to be a reduced version of AoN without signalling. We test predictions using data from a leading European equity crowdfunding platform and find support. Results are consistent with rational information aggregation. However, negative information cascades may still appear. The AoN crowdfunding mechanism might therefore fail to finance a non-negligible percentage of positive NPV projects.

This study estimates the relative importance of alternative supply and demand mechanisms in explaining the rise of female labor-force participation (FLFP) over the last 55 years in Mexico. The growth of FLFP in Mexico between 1960 and 2015 followed an S-shaped pattern, with a considerable acceleration during the 1990s. Using descriptive decomposition methods and a shift-share design, the study shows that, put together, supply and demand factors can account for most of the rise of FLFP over the entire period, led by increases in women's education, declining fertility, and shifts in the occupational structure of the workforce. However, there is unexplained variation in the 1990s, when FLFP spiked.

Latin American countries have some of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. However, earnings inequality have significantly changed over time, increasing during the 1980s and 1990s, declining sharply in the 2000s, and stagnating or even increasing in some countries since 2015. Macroeconomic instability in the region in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the introduction of structural reforms like trade, capital, and financial liberalization, affected the patterns of relative demand and relative earnings across skill-demographic groups in the 1990s, increasing inequality. Significant gains in educational attainment, the demographic transition, and rising female labor force participation changed the skill-demographic composition of labor supply, pushing the education and experience premiums downward, but this was not enough to counteract demand-side trends. At the turn of the 21st century, improved external conditions, driven by China's massive increase in demand for commodities, boosted economies across Latin America, which began to grow rapidly. Growth was accompanied by a positive shift in the relative demand for less-educated workers, stronger labor institutions, rising minimum wages, and declining labor informality, a confluence of factors that reduced earnings inequality. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, particularly after the end of the commodities price boom in 2014, economic growth decelerated, and the pace of inequality decline stagnated. There is extensive literature documenting and trying to explain the causes of recent earnings inequality dynamics in Latin America. This literature is examined in terms of themes, methodological approaches, and key findings. The focus is on earnings inequality and how developments in labor markets have shaped it.

After a decade of increasing wage inequality, this paper documents a sharp compression in the distribution of wages in Argentina and Chile during the 2000s. In Brazil, wage inequality has steadily declined since the early 1990s. Counterfactual exercises show that the evolutions of the schooling and experience premiums are key determinants of the decline in inequality. The 2000s witnessed a rapid decline in the schooling and experience premiums, at the same time as the working population was aging and becoming more educated. To understand these changes, the paper develops a model of imperfect substitution across experience and education groups and estimates the relevant elasticities of substitution. Changes in labor supply contributed significantly to the decline of the experience and education premiums, but are not enough to account fully for the observed changes. The demand for experience shifted in favor of younger workers, while the relative demand for college graduates declined during the 2000s.

Crowdfunding has recently become available for entrepreneurs. Most academic studies analyse data from rewards-based (pre-selling) campaigns. In contrast, in this paper we analyse 636 campaigns, encompassing 17,188 investors and 64,831 investments between 2012 and 2015, from one of the leading European equity crowdfunding platforms. We provide descriptive statistics and carry out cross-campaign regression analysis. The descriptive statistics address its size, growth and geographic distributions in the UK. The regressions analyse which factors are associated with the probability of a successful campaign. We find some similarities and some interesting dissimilarities when comparing the descriptive statistics and regression results to research on rewards-based crowding. The data show that equity crowdfunding will likely pose great challenges to VC and business angel financiers in the near future. We discuss some research challenges and opportunities with these kind of data.

We study the use of labour markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on households in rural areas. Because the incidence of violent shocks is not exogenous, the analysis uses instrumental variables. As a response to violent shocks men decrease the time they devote to off-farm agricultural activities and increase off-farm non-agricultural activities, while women decrease their leisure time and increase the time they devote to household chores and childcare. Labour markets appear unable to fully absorb the additional labour supply. Policies in conflict-affected countries should aim to prevent labour markets from collapsing.

Recent studies have analyzed the way in which the absence of well-defined property rights can generate the conditions for violent outbreaks to emerge. However, there are few studies that analyze the way in which violence, in the long run, can affect the structure of property rights in the regions that are affected. In this paper I investigate the effect of violence in the rates of informality in the possession of land in Colombia in the long run. By studying one of the periods of most intense violence in Colombia in the 20th century I find evidence that the municipalities affected during this period have informality rates in the possession of land which are higher in close to 2.9 percentage points (0.15 standard deviations).

We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to investigate the joint evolution of gender gaps in labor force participation and wages. We do this overall and by task-based occupation and skill, which allows us to study distributional effects. We structurally estimate the model using data from Mexico over a period during which women's participation increased by fifty percent. We provide new evidence that male and female labor are closer substitutes in high-paying analytical task-intensive occupations than in lower-paying manual and routine task-intensive occupations. We find that demand trends favored women, especially college-educated women. Consistent with these results, we see a widening of the gender wage gap at the lower end of the distribution, alongside a narrowing at the top. We derive own and cross-occupation wage elasticities of labor supply varying with skill, gender and time, and our counterfactual estimates demonstrate that ignoring the countervailing effects of equilibrium wage adjustments on labor supplies, as is commonly done in the literature, can be misleading. We find that increased appliance availability was the key driver of increases in the participation of unskilled women, and fertility decline a key driver for skilled women. The growth of appliances acted to widen the gender wage gap and the decline of fertility to narrow it. We also trace equilibrium impacts of growth in college attainment, which was more rapid among women, and of emigration, which was dominated by unskilled men.

Illegal economies are commonly viewed as barriers to development and sources of violence. This study challenges that view by showing that illegal markets can generate broader economic and social benefits without necessarily increasing violence. We examine the economic and socio-environmental impacts of the 2010s coca cultivation surge in Colombia—the producer of two-thirds of the global coca and cocaine supply—using a difference-in-differences strategy that leverages a policy announcement that created incentives to expand coca cultivation in some municipalities, combined with nighttime lights as a proxy for economic activity. We find that the coca boom increased annual municipal GDP by 2.8% to 10.5%, with an estimated GDP multiplier of 1.45. Despite a 250% rise in coca cultivation, we find no evidence of increased violence. Suggestive evidence indicates improvements in youth educational outcomes. However, the income shock did not lead to higher tax revenues or improvements in public goods provision. Moreover, the economic expansion raised deforestation rates by 77.5%, underscoring the long-term environmental costs of the coca boom.

• El Tiempo
• El Espectador
• El Pais
• A Fondo (Podcast)

Developing countries often face a cycle where weak tax compliance limits public goods, cutting incentives to pay taxes. We test whether improved local infrastructure can disrupt this cycle, using a randomized street paving experiment in Acayucan, Mexico. Of 56 eligible street projects, 28 were randomly selected. A model highlights two mechanisms: belief updating about government efficiency and reciprocity from direct benefits. Three implications follow: (1) belief updating occurs through exposure to paving anywhere in the network; (2) compliance rises with broader exposure; (3) reciprocity boosts compliance among directly treated owners. Survey data supports belief updating: among initially dissatisfied residents, a one-SD increase in exposure to assigned paving lowered dissatisfaction by 7.9 pp, while exposure to actual paving lowered it by 8.8 pp, with no effect among the satisfied. Property tax records show exposure to assigned paving raised compliance by 1.5 pp, and to actual paving by 2.6 pp (3% above baseline). Reciprocity mattered too: owners whose street was assigned paving (or actually paved) increased compliance by 3.2 pp (4.8 pp, or 5.5% above baseline). Belief updating yields four times as much revenue as reciprocity.

We investigate supply-side barriers to medical care in Colombia, where citizens have a constitutional right to health, but insurance companies impose restrictions. We use administrative data on judicial claims for health as a proxy for unmet demand. We validate this using the health services utilization register, showing that judicial claims map into large, pervasive decreases in medical consultations, procedures, hospitalizations and emergency care. This manifests in population health outcomes. We identify increases in mortality pervasive across cause, age, sex, and income, with particularly pronounced effects for certain cancers.

Countries at similar income levels exhibit markedly different rates and anatomies of labor informality. We organize these patterns around three interacting forces: a legal wedge (minimum wages and non-wage labor costs, alongside enforcement), the sectoral productivity and composition, and the private value of formality (coverage, portability, and contract enforceability). A parsimonious model yields sharp "thin-margin'' predictions: effects concentrate where earnings cluster near the minimum legal standards. Evidence from a cross-country, country–sector panel supports the framework—legal and enforcement effects are largest where thin-margin exposure is high; higher private value lowers informality and dampens wedge effects; and composition, especially within services, conditions aggregates. The results reconcile disparate findings and imply targeted policy: align enforcement with thin-margin exposure, raise the private value of formality via low-friction administration and portability, and pursue sectoral paths that expand formal-leaning activities.

We study the effect of the upsurge of natural-resource income from the commodity-price boom of the 2000s on the functional distribution of income. To do so, we build a general-equilibrium model of Dutch disease that characterizes how natural-resource windfalls affect equilibrium factor shares. The theory suggests that the response of factor shares to exogenous changes in commodity prices depends on the relative intensity of factors in the tradable and natural-resource sectors. We construct estimates of income shares accruing to raw labor, human capital, physical capital, and natural resources, and quantify the effect of the resource boom on factor shares. For identification, we use a two-way fixed-effects strategy and a differential-exposure design to instrument commodity prices. We find that a natural-resource boom negatively impacts the total labor, human-capital, and physical-capital shares, while the raw-labor share remains unchanged. Our estimates suggest that the natural-resource boom explains nearly 25.7 percent of the global decline of the total labor share during the 2000s. We also find a redistribution effect within labor income that indicates that the fall of the labor share was unevenly distributed against human capital.