Working papers are available on SSRN; final versions are available upon request.
Research
Selected research
Standard election forensics cannot separate genuine polarization from manipulation. This paper uses the polling stations a losing candidate formally challenged as a treatment group, comparing their forensic properties to the unchallenged remainder of the same election — turning the fraud allegations themselves into the counterfactual.
Trade liberalization significantly increases innovation outcomes in developing countries, with effects persisting for up to 30 years.
Analyzes geographic concentration, methodological trends, and citation patterns in Nobel Prize awards.
Import liberalization has larger poverty-reducing effects than export expansion through lower consumer prices.
Opportunity costs reduce state-based conflict while rapacity increases non-state conflict. Boom-period growth reduced insurgencies by 2.65pp but intensified territorial competition by 0.49pp.
First author with S. Feng, J.J. Heckman, and Z. Yang. Structural modeling with sophisticated error structures separates preferences from deliberation quality; cognitive ability affects decision precision more than underlying risk preferences.
154 views, 31 downloads. Develops a game-theoretic model of when politicians lie under electoral pressure.
Reconstructs the universe of cartelized road tenders from an antitrust resolution, validates collusion-detection screens against the adjudicated label, and measures the procurement-side price of corruption and its incidence.
A framework for how economists adopt new methods, where the cost of learning a technique, the returns to specialization, and the sorting of researchers into method-based communities shape which methods become mainstream. Under review at the Journal of Economic Methodology.
A district-level electoral panel for Peru tests whether voters punish an attributable electoral-subversion offensive and an authorless material shock. Both yield no differential punishment, and two-round coordination helps explain why subversion can go locally unpunished.
A pre-post distributional (bunching) estimator on three Peruvian minimum-wage increases (S/750 to S/1,025, 2016–2022). Bunching ratios of 0.70–0.83, placebo ratios seven times smaller, and a 15–21 pp rise in self-employment in the affected range.
Develops a novel task-based framework showing why aggregate automation hides opposite skill-premium effects of robots and AI.
42 views, 16 downloads. Examines conditions under which tariff threats effectively coerce policy changes in target countries.
Across 85 quarters (2004–2025) and seven identification strategies, only Cholesky recursive identification survives in an administered-rate economy; the peak GDP response to a 100 bp hike is −0.195 pp. An LLM-classified central-bank tone instrument passes relevance but fails exogeneity.
Standard election forensics cannot separate genuine polarization from manipulation. This paper uses the polling stations a losing candidate formally challenged as a treatment group, comparing their forensic properties to the unchallenged remainder of the same election — turning the fraud allegations themselves into the counterfactual.
Between 2016 and 2023 Peru cycled through seven presidents, a self-coup, and deadly protests, yet its sovereign spread fell to historic lows. The decoupling is traced to the credibility of the Central Reserve Bank under Governor Velarde, and rationalized with a delegation-and-learning model.
Develops a macroeconomic framework for asymmetric automation across tasks, robots, and AI, and traces the aggregate implications for labor markets and growth.
Using birth-cohort variation in democratic exposure across first-transition countries, the paper finds no formative effect on regime support, and shows that the apparent formative effect on emancipative values is observationally equivalent to a secular cohort trend.
Robots reinstate displaced workers through new tasks, while AI mostly displaces without creating offsetting task demand — generating sharper inequality.
Trade liberalization significantly increases innovation outcomes in developing countries, with effects persisting for up to 30 years.
Analyzes geographic concentration, methodological trends, and citation patterns in Nobel Prize awards.
Studies how exposure to terrorism during Peru’s internal war (1980-2000) affected long-term regional economic development.
Import liberalization has larger poverty-reducing effects than export expansion through lower consumer prices.
Opportunity costs reduce state-based conflict while rapacity increases non-state conflict. Boom-period growth reduced insurgencies by 2.65pp but intensified territorial competition by 0.49pp.
First author with S. Feng, J.J. Heckman, and Z. Yang. Structural modeling with sophisticated error structures separates preferences from deliberation quality; cognitive ability affects decision precision more than underlying risk preferences.
Published in AI and Ethics - examines the relationship between technological progress and genuine civilizational advancement.
154 views, 31 downloads. Develops a game-theoretic model of when politicians lie under electoral pressure.
Addresses strategic deception, political economy, misinformation, and political manipulation through a mathematical framework.
304 views, 46 downloads. Examines how financial liberalization affects political and social stability.
A first-event local projection on the Bjørnskov–Rode panel of 180 countries (1960–2022) shows the impact-year TFP contraction is 4.2 percent for coups that displace a democracy and negligible otherwise. An option-value framework and a two-block structural estimation organize the asymmetry.
Examines how minimum wage policy affects ethnic income gaps in Peru.
347 views, 45 downloads. Analyzes returns to cooperation across Latin American firms.
Estimates the effects of mining activity on violence against women in Peru, examining both direct and indirect channels through labor markets and social norms.
Published in Mineral Economics - examines effects of mining presence on inequality, labor income, and poverty in Peru.
Elaborates a new measure of monetary policy shock and examines heterogeneous effects across industries using firm profitability and Local Projections methodology.
811 views, 153 downloads. High-impact paper on minimum wage effects on domestic violence in Peru.
344 views, 73 downloads. Panel VAR examining causal effects of FDI on aggregate productivity.
Uses panel VAR methods to examine how exchange rate undervaluation affects economic growth.
Examines Peru’s ethnic income gaps during sustained economic growth period.
Examines how macroeconomic fundamentals shape the real exchange rate across Latin American economies.
Estimates how the El Niño phenomenon affects the welfare of communities that depend on the dry forests of Peru’s northern coast.
Combines behavioural and fundamental approaches to study real exchange rate dynamics in Latin American countries.
Estima los efectos de la violencia física contra la mujer sobre la salud familiar en el Perú durante el periodo 2012–2016.
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