Paula A. López Villalba

We study how parents adjust their labor supply following family separation and how child support shapes these adjustments in a context of high labor informality. We build a new dataset from child support and family court records in Ecuador, then link it to administrative labor-market and census data. Using a matched difference-in-differences design comparing separating parents with similar parents in stable unions, we find that formal employment among fathers, who are the child support payers, declines by 5% one year after separation and child support entry, while mothers' formal employment increases by 6%. Fathers' formal employment also declines relative to individuals who separate without entering child support, and when child support begins without household dissolution. At longer horizons, fathers shift toward informal employment, while mothers increase their overall labor-market attachment. These findings, together with evidence that formal employment is associated with higher child support obligations and payments, suggest that child support incentives may contribute to fathers' shift toward informal employment. We estimate a model of household employment and separation that incorporates how formality matters for both the amount of child support set and its enforcement. The model shows that the enforcement mechanism matters more for fathers' sector choices than how obligation amounts are set.

This paper studies the effects of coca cultivation on local development in Peru between 2004 and 2017. To address endogeneity, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in coca exposure generated by the interaction of local agro-climatic suitability with lagged coca production in Colombia and Bolivia. We combine annual geo-referenced coca maps with satellite-based night-time lights, household surveys, agricultural and prison census records, and administrative and electoral data. We find that coca exposure increases local economic activity, household income, consumption, and wages. Complementary evidence from prison census records shows that coca-growing districts have higher incarceration-linked crime, with the most consistent associations concentrated in drug-related offenses rather than violent or property crime. We also find that coca-growing areas are substantially more likely to be subdivided into new districts, alongside more suggestive evidence of changes in local electoral competition and political succession. Our findings show that coca generates meaningful local economic gains in areas with limited outside opportunities, while also shaping patterns of criminal activity and the organization of local government.

Corruption constitutes a major impediment to economic development. We contend that who sits at the controls matters for corruption, and explore the effects of electing a government of a certain ideology. We argue that electing such a government may change the policies pursued, as well as the people who implement them and the institutions that constrain them, and that the interaction of these changes helps explain the effect on corruption. Employing a regression-discontinuity design on a dataset of worldwide national general elections in the post-WWII period, we find a causal effect of electing a government with a left-wing ideology on overall corruption. On average, countries under left-wing governments experience more systemic corruption in the four years after the election—a 13.2% increase in the index compared to the mean of non-left governments. The effect materializes gradually over time and can be seen both in the bureaucracy (petty corruption) and in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the state (grand corruption). Our evidence suggests that the effect operates through both policies, and people and institutions: left-wing governments intervene more extensively in the economy, while also being associated with lower-quality bureaucracies and weaker constraints on government. These changes are concentrated in countries with weaker checks and balances and, given the complementarity between these dimensions, can amplify corruption.

We estimate the causal impact of military conscription on long-term beliefs and personality traits. To address potential endogeneity concerns, we exploit the conscription lottery in Argentina. We combine administrative data from the conscription lottery with data from a survey we designed on beliefs and personality traits. We find that men who were conscripted are more likely to adopt a military mind-set and that the effect is long lasting. Given the many people who go through military conscription, our results are useful for understanding how personality traits and beliefs are formed for a very salient part of the world's population.

While the accumulation of factors of production, both physical and human capital, has helped Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to narrow the income gap with developed economies, aggregate productivity is still relatively low. Although there are numerous determinants of aggregate productivity, it is largely based on the underlying productivity of all firms in the economy. Using firm-level data from several waves of the World Bank Enterprise Survey and Chile's National Manufacturing Survey, we explore the ‘what’ question on productivity dispersion in LAC. We document three stylized facts: (i) there are significant differences in firm productivity within industries– the firm at the 90th percentile of the productivity distribution produces almost seven times as much output (using the same measured inputs) as the 10th percentile firm; (ii) productivity differences persist over time – regressing a firm's current productivity on its one-year lagged productivity yields an autoregressive coefficient of around 0.9; and (iii) most of the growth in aggregate productivity comes from improvements in the productivity of existing firms.

This project studies how households adjust to formal job loss in Ecuador by combining longitudinal employment surveys with administrative employer-employee records. The survey data allow me to follow workers and their household members across formal employment, informal employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation, while the administrative records provide detailed information on formal workers and their employers. To address the endogeneity of job separations, I exploit idiosyncratic firm-level employment contractions as an instrument for formal job loss. I examine how the loss of a formal job affects the labor supply of other household members and whether informal employment provides a margin through which households insure against the resulting income shock.