I examine whether female leadership reduces violence. In Colombia, female mayors reduce guerrilla attacks by up to 60% after close elections. New data on commander gender reveal complementarities between female leaders: the effect more than doubles where the local guerrilla leader is also female. The decline reflects de-escalatory behavior on both sides, with female mayors organizing more peace-oriented initiatives and female commanders retaliating less after crackdowns. Campaign manifestos and observed behavior reveal underlying gender gaps in preferences for de-escalation as the main mechanism. Finally, I develop a bargaining model with gender-specific commitment credibility that rationalizes these findings.

Digitizes maps of Catholic missions, presidios, and settler routes in California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico to examine the economic and cultural legacy of Spanish colonialism. Documents initial evangelization success that later dissipated, agricultural practices transitioning to manufacturing and urbanization, and persistent effects on schooling as well as on liberal perspectives among educated populations.

Multilateral governance is currently under severe pressure, which some see as reason for alarm and others as ground for rejoicing. To investigate conflicting claims on the causal impact of the multilateral architecture on peace, we have assembled a novel global dataset of international treaties covering the years 1820–2014. We draw on exogenous variation from the heterogeneous impact of global shifts in the frequency of international treaties and in regional networks. We find that exogenous surges in multilateralism foster peace in asymmetric dyads, protecting small countries from wars with greater powers. Using large language models we are able to investigate the mechanisms at work and key peace-promoting ingredients of international treaties.

Interstate war is making a comeback, yet we still know little about how exogenous changes in appropriable rents drive the onset of conflict between states. We assemble a novel panel of country-level mineral production since the beginning of the 20th century and exploit commodity price shocks to estimate how different types of commodities affect a country's likelihood of attacking and of being attacked. We find that countries experiencing a resource windfall are more likely to be attacked when those resources are appropriable. Building on a simple structural model, we then quantify the share of war spoils appropriated by the winner and how it varies with political bias and regime type. Our estimates suggest that the winning side appropriates one-third of all resources after a war.

This paper examines how foreign economic and military interests shaped patterns of violence and repression during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996). While existing research has largely focused on the consequences of conflict, less is known about the external drivers and institutional dynamics that influence its onset and escalation. We focus on two key channels of foreign involvement: the presence of multinational firms with extensive landholdings and infrastructure, and the rotation of Guatemalan army officers who received standardized military training abroad. To study these links, we compile and digitize historical corporate maps, military assignment records, and archival documents on human rights violations. Using municipalities as the unit of analysis, we apply spatial regression discontinuity designs, leverage officer rotation patterns across units, and instrument for foreign firm presence using agro-ecological suitability. Our findings shed light on how international actors, through their interactions with local institutions, may have shaped the intensity and distribution of violence. Beyond contributing to the historical record of the Guatemalan conflict, the study broadens the scope of the economics of conflict by integrating corporate strategy and military structure into the analysis of mass violence. The resulting dataset will be made publicly available to support further research.

Studies the economic consequences of adopting indigenous governance ("Usos y Costumbres") in Mexican municipalities after 1995. Larger institutional deviations correlate with greater poverty reduction but higher inequality, with no detectable effect on public services. The "Sistema de Cargos" (communal service system) and the removal of voting transparency emerge as the key drivers, suggesting that enhanced community accountability benefits ethnically diverse municipalities most.

Surveys the historical and contemporary literature on regional economic disparities in Latin America. Documents national and sub-national patterns of income inequality, and examines the role of colonial institutions, slavery, land reform, education, and elites. Includes replication exercises extending seminal papers in the literature to incorporate inequality measures.

Develops a model of political competition that studies the welfare effects of campaign-finance policy when contributions fund voter mobilization rather than advertising. Social costs are measured through reductions in the quality of public works. Public subsidies combined with contribution bans are welfare-improving only under low mobilization productivity, whereas contribution taxes that fund public projects prove welfare-improving under all technological conditions considered.