Research Statement

(5 min read)

Broad Research Interests

My primary research interest focuses on the study of conflict and non-state armed groups in democratic societies. Electoral processes offer an opportunity to establish a connection between voters and politicians. What distinguishes conflict settings from others, however, is that the electoral connection and politicians’ responsiveness to citizens’ demands might be affected by (a) how societies and governments prioritize the fight against non-state armed groups, (b) how non-state armed groups capture and modify state institutions, and (c) how armed actors substitute for the state affecting the relationship between the government and citizens. I address these issues in three streams of work.

During my Ph.D. studies, I worked on the first stream of work on how societies prioritize the fight against non-state armed groups. The fight against violence is complex, and national and local citizens’ demands may privilege certain security policies over others. For instance, national demands may focus on fighting organized crime instead of dealing with local ordinary petty crimes while local residents may prioritize the former. My dissertation contributes to our understanding of this responsiveness dilemma in a specific conflict, the Mexican War on Drugs. The dissertation highlights how electoral incentives affect local politicians’ responsiveness to national and local citizens’ security demands, and how the introduction of reelection modifies the existent accountability structure.

During my postdoctoral fellowship, I polished and refined papers on the study of modes of state capture by private and non-state armed actors. Responsiveness to citizens’ demands might be affected by the presence of non-state armed groups and private interests that take control of local and national institutions and shape them according to their preferences and vested interests. These actors capture the state through intimidation and pressure on politicians and bureaucracies, or through the election of favored candidates who then carry out the policy preferred by the interest group, among other reasons. In the second stream of work, I explore state capture by non-state actors and private interests at the local level in Benin and Colombia.

Lastly, during the first year of my postdoctoral fellowship, I developed a new research agenda on the interrelation between climate security and criminal governance. Theoretically, a factor that may affect the relationship between politicians and citizens in conflict settings is the ability of non-state armed groups to bypass governments and directly address citizens’ public good demands and needs. Climate shocks create opportunities for this, and for non-state armed groups to expand their reach and compete over resources. My third stream of work and future line of research focuses on the study of how non-state armed groups take advantage of climate shocks to develop violent and benevolent actions to win the hearts and minds of citizens, substitute for the state, and deter rival organizations. This agenda interrelates the study of climate policy and resource politics, as well as criminal rule. Below I describe each of these three lines of research more thoroughly.

Dissertation Project on electoral accountability and crime

In my dissertation, I study the interrelation between government responsiveness to citizens’ demands, crime, and governance. The first essay -and job market paper titled “Going local: how reelection breaks the national pressure of local governments to fight organized crime in Mexico”- studies how reelection incentives influence how responsive local politicians are to local as opposed to national demands. For many public goods, local and national preferences are often aligned and so are politicians’ responses – say reducing poverty or fostering economic development. But when it comes to fighting crime the preferences of local citizens may diverge from those of the national government or citizens in other constituencies: local governments need to respond to local demands to solve ordinary crime issues including theft and property damages, for example, while national governments prioritize fighting organized crime. Since national governments need the participation of local governments to fight organized crime, this may crowd out important resources to fight ordinary local crime. This paper studies how reelection incentives shape the choice of local governments to serve local rather than national security policy preferences. To do so, I leverage the staggered implementation of an electoral reform that introduced reelection for local mayors from 2014 to 2022 in Mexico. Results show that local mayors facing reelection favor local rather than national preferences by decreasing the signing of security agreements with upper-level governments focused on the fight against organized crime. As a result of going local ordinary crimes, such as theft and property damages decrease, while organized crime-related homicides increase. This paper shows how reelection, by strengthening the electoral connection between citizens and local politicians, may affect the level of cooperation with upper levels of government on issues that may conflict with the preferences of local voters. This paper recently won funding from the National Endowment from Democracy.

The second essay of my dissertation, “Love your Incumbent but Hate his Party: The Asymmetric Effect of Reelection on Partisan and Personal Incumbency Returns in Mexico”, goes deeper into the understanding of local accountability by opening the black box of incumbency advantage. A large literature has tried to disentangle the partisan and personal electoral incumbency advantage. However, uncovering the partisan and personal incumbency advantage has proved methodologically challenging. Studies have tried to exploit cross-sectional comparisons between term limits and non-term limit races, expiring and non-expiring careers, and changes in redistricting. These studies, however, rely on strong identification assumptions including no confounding difference between these types of races. This paper disentangles the personal and partisan incumbency advantages and addresses various methodological shortcomings of the existing literature. To do so, I use a difference-in-discontinuity of close elections design in Mexico that exploits the staggered implementation of an electoral reform that introduced reelection for mayors from 2014 to 2022. Term limit elections allow us to identify a partisan advantage since the politician cannot run for office again but his party can. Elections with candidates up for reelection identify both the partisan and personal incumbency returns. The difference between these two quantities -or the difference-in-discontinuity estimator- identifies the personal incumbency advantage. The difference-in-difference setup allows us to test for parallel trends before treatment. Furthermore, by focusing on close elections we rule out potential omitted variables coming from differences in parties and electoral races. The main results show an asymmetry: incumbent politicians enjoy an electoral advantage while parties suffer from an incumbency disadvantage. These results suggest the personal advantage to be a driving force of incumbency returns even in party-centered systems like Mexico when reelection is introduced. This implies incumbency became a personal affair when reelection was introduced in a country with a historically strong party-centered system, Mexico.

How non-state actors capture and modify local institutions

In other work, I focus on understanding state capture by non-state actors. In the context of internal conflicts, local institutions (both formal and informal) are shaped by different types of vested interests. In theory, internal conflict should create strong incentives for governments to develop the fiscal capacity necessary to defeat rivals and be accountable to local citizens’ demands. My work “Endogenous taxation in ongoing internal conflict: The case of Colombia was”, published in the American Political Science Review (co-authored with Abbey Steele -University of Amsterdam-, Jacob Shapiro -Princeton University-, and Juan F. Vargas -Universidad El Rosario) argues that one reason that this does not occur is that internal conflict enables groups with de facto power to capture local fiscal and property rights institutions. We test this mechanism in Colombia using data on tax performance and property rights institutions at the municipal level. Findings show that municipalities have tax institutions and land formality rates consistent with the preferences of the parties dominating local violence: those suffering more right-wing violence feature more land formalization and higher property tax revenues; municipalities with left-wing guerrilla violence collect less tax revenue and witness less land formalization. This paper provides systematic evidence that internal armed conflict helps interest groups capture municipal institutions impeding state-building and accountability.

What would happen if these non-state armed actors were granted legitimate territorial claims to regions already under their control? Would this affect their incentive to foster economic development or would they expand their illegal markets to the detriment of the existing population? In the paper “Territorial Control and Economic Growth: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Colombian Insurgency” (co-authored with Juan F. Vargas -Universidad el Rosario- and Michael Weintraub -Universidad de los Andes) we study this question using a quasi-experimental design in the context of the Colombian civil war. Specifically, we study places inside and outside the zona de distension (ZD), a region the size of Switzerland ceded by the Colombian government from 1997 to 2002 to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) -the most durable non-state armed group in the world. Results show that the FARC carried out state-like activities such as raising taxes and securing the ZD, increasing economic activity, and -surprisingly- decreasing their reliance on cocaine production. This paper challenges the notion that territories ruled monopolistically by non-state armed groups suffer universally and encourages further study of the consequences of insurgents’ nation-building incentives and state incorporation of these groups. Given the lack of administrative data on cocaine before 2002, I created a novel tool that predicts production that relies on high-resolution satellite imagery, agriculture images feature extraction tools, and machine learning algorithms. This methodology opens an interesting avenue of research on its own to identify illicit crops in settings where we lack data.

In a third paper forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics and titled “Political Uncertainty and the Forms of State Capture” (co-authored with Leonard Wantchekon -Princeton University- and Nathan Canen -University of Houston) I turn to the study of capture not by non-state armed groups but by special groups, more concretely firms and businessmen.. This paper studies when and why firms prefer more direct forms of state capture (i.e., directly capturing tenured state officials who implement policy, as bureaucrats) to more indirect ones (i.e., using intermediaries, such as elected officials, to influence bureaucrats). First, we propose a principal-agent model under political uncertainty. Firms can induce market distortions by making transfers to incumbents, but such incumbents may be displaced in an election. Direct capture acts as insurance for the firm, guaranteeing that its paid-for distortions are kept in place even when the incumbent loses. We then show that policies thought to decrease state capture, such as improved bureaucrat selection, can have little to no effect once substitution towards indirect control is accounted for. We test the model’s predictions using a novel database on contractual arrangements between politicians, political brokers, and businessmen in Benin. As proposed by the theory, we find that an increase in political uncertainty is associated with an increase in direct forms of capture. We conclude that electoral competition is not a sufficient mechanism to curb firms’ control of government when they can switch forms of state capture. Moreover, this paper shows an electoral competition paradox: while electoral competition is generally thought to be desirable and to strengthen democracy, it can imply a reverse effect by increasing state capture due to increasing returns to government control. This may unravel the welfare benefits of electoral competition to voters, even beyond other known – and potential – drawbacks of electoral competition. Therefore, when firms are connected to politicians, electoral competition is not a panacea. An extension of this paper is forthcoming in State Capture in a Rent-Based Economy: An Institutional Diagnostics of Benin, published by Cambridge University Press.

Future Research on climate security and criminal governance

Following my interest in the study of conflict and governance, I am currently working on a novel research agenda on the intersection between climate security and criminal governance. Criminal groups have increasingly provided humanitarian aid in the wake of natural disasters, to win the hearts and minds of citizens and strengthen their territorial control and substitute for the state. Insufficient state resources to cope with the effects of climate change can thus inadvertently strengthen criminal control and weaken the accountability between governments and citizens.

Some examples help to motivate this line of research. After Hurricane Ingrid hit in 2013, the Gulf Cartel dispensed trucks full of humanitarian aid to civilians across the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. In a video that circulated on social media, the criminal organization offers an altruistic motive, claiming to have helped because they “have a heart.” In September 2021, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación delivered goods to the municipality of Genaro Codina after the San Aparicio dam overflowed due to excessive rain. Countless examples of Mexican cartels providing aid to localities in the aftermath of climate disasters have appeared in the news. Narcodespensas — aid packages delivered by criminal groups — allow such organizations to build goodwill and gain good publicity. In localities with weak state presence, providing aid to those affected by climate shocks allows criminal groups to strengthen local control. Even in settings with a strong state presence, providing aid allows criminal groups to protect their existing illegal businesses and control the local economy.

This line of research -to the best of my knowledge- will be the first to (a) study the relationship between climate change and criminal governance, and (b) study the effect of climate adaptation policies on criminal behavior. While the papers described below study the case of Mexico and organized crime, non-state armed groups across the globe follow a similar pattern, from Al-Shabaab strategically harnessing droughts and floods to bolster their recruitment efforts amongst disaffected in the Sahel region, to how jihadists in Mali and Niger take advantage of changes in land use to establish a balance between herding and farming all in Sub-Saharan Africa. A large literature has indeed studied how extreme weather affects civil conflict but little is known about when citizens turn to illegal armed groups to mitigate weather-related shocks, and how non-state armed groups take advantage of climate change. Since climatic distress will increase in frequency and intensity in the coming decades, particularly in low-income countries, there is a pressing need to identify policies that prevent armed groups from taking advantage of such shocks.

Below, I describe three ongoing research projects. These projects won funding support from the Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Peace and Recovery Program. These projects plus qualitative interviews in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa will form the basis of a book on Climate Security and Criminal rule: how non-state actors take advantage of climate distressed populations.

The first project titled “Criminal rule: Narco-Aid in Climate Distressed Populations in Mexico” (co-authored with Jane Esberg and Ulrich Eberle, Postdoctoral Fellows at Princeton University) studies if non-state groups substitute for the state through humanitarian aid, and other strategies used to expand their territorial control in climate-affected populations. To do so it exploits the exogeneity and fine-grained data of extreme floods in Mexico, and their effect on three sets of outcomes. First, criminal governance is measured through a novel dataset of known narcodespensas incidents — aid packages delivered by criminal groups used for propaganda strategies that allow organized crime to build goodwill –, by applying text analysis to data collected from public websites of official newspapers. The paper also explores if climate shocks are capitalized on by cartels to expand their presence, and we measure this using novel data on criminal groups also reliant on websites of newspapers. Third, we study the effect on welfare including expenditure and consumption levels, health and education, and agricultural productivity, as well as violence using homicides and other criminal activities. This project will allow researchers to expand their understanding of the strategic response of non-state armed actors to climate change, opening a line of research on the strategic response of special interests with similar practices across the globe. It will also allow for new research on how citizens inefficiently cope with bad weather and which policies could be developed to prevent this.

A second project explores if climate adaptation policies can deter criminal activity. The project titled “Can climate adaptation policies reduce criminal governance and violence in climate-affected populations? Assessing index-based weather insurance in Mexico” assesses if the most widely used climate adaptation policy in the world, weather index insurance, reduces criminal governance. Index-based weather insurance has been shown to positively affect ex-ante investment decisions and crop choices, increase crop cultivation, and mitigate the impact of climate shocks among the poor. This project will assess if the index-based weather insurance for a variety of perils in Mexico (e.g., droughts, floods, hail), helped mitigate climate shocks and prevent criminal governance. To study the effect of weather index insurance on criminal governance I will exploit the staggered implementation of weather stations and insurance since 2002 and across the Mexican territory: weather stations slowly expanded in the early 2000s covering different municipalities in different waves, and weather index insurance came after since it relies on weather stations metrics. By comparing not treated (not insured), and not-yet treated municipalities to treated ones (insured) through a staggered difference-in-difference research design this project evaluates the effect of weather index insurance on criminal presence and narco-aid incidents. The paper will be the first to assess the effect of climate security policies on criminal rule.

While index-based weather insurance may provide relief to households, it may potentially backfire in conflict settings. The insurance revenues can also make beneficiaries the target of looting and violence from non-state actors. This feature has raised concerns about its effectiveness as a climate adaptation policy in settings that suffer from internal wars. A third project titled “Can public employment ameliorate climate shocks and reduce criminal governance? The case of a randomized workfare program in Mexico” (co-authored with Jane Esberg and Ulrich Eberle) runs a randomized control trial (RCT) in Mexico that tests a workfare program that can fix the concern raised for weather insurance. The workfare program is guaranteed public employment for three months focused on reconstruction after a climate disaster. Being employed not only helps compensate for the loss of income after a disaster but allows for a direct relation with the state, presumably reducing dependence on non-state actors.

The RCT scheduled for 2023-2024 will be conducted on a two-stage stratified random sample in Mexico. We will divide high crime municipalities into those with a high likelihood of experiencing climate shocks (flooding, hurricanes, or landslides), based on historic records, and those where climate shocks are less likely to occur. Out of these two stratified groups, we will randomly select local governments to receive the workfare program (the first randomization stage). In the second randomization stage, we will select neighborhoods according to key socioeconomic and political characteristics (crime, state presence, state capacity, etc.) to receive treatment. In selected neighborhoods, households that suffered from weather-related shocks will be invited to participate in the workfare program. We will then test the effect of the workfare program on six sets of outcomes: (1) citizens’ dependence on illegal armed groups (or coping strategies that rely on illegal armed groups); (2) illegal armed group presence; (3) narco-aid; (4) welfare: expenditures, consumption levels, inflation, and local prices, health, education, income and reconstruction efforts after weather shocks; (5) State and cartel’s trust and legitimacy; and (6) violence: armed confrontations between cartels and with the state, and civilian casualties. We are currently conducting a pilot study in the Mexican Bajio intended to provide feedback for the pre-analysis plan.

The project will also assess how to answer several secondary questions: Is narco-aid more prevalent in settings with low or high state presence? Is it more prevalent in urban or rural areas? Are cartels better at delivering aid in localities with sporadic climatic events or those with constant ones? What forms of distribution do cartels use to deliver their aid? Do cartels block state aid to affected neighborhoods? Is narco-aid perceived differently by citizens who are expecting state aid? Should our treatment target the most affected households or the most vulnerable ones? Is there a multiplier effect of workfare programs?