Research

Using the quasi-random allocation of Indonesia's Transmigration Program and variation in productivity among transmigrant villages, I show that cities proximate to more productive villages experience higher population and employment growth, concentrated in service industries. The higher growth occurs alongside greater in-migration to cities (from both rural and urban districts) and is not driven by transmigrants abandoning their destination villages. Because migrants tend to stay in more productive villages, the results provide suggestive evidence of positive indirect spillovers of rural productivity onto regional urban markets.

In many neighborhoods of Latin American cities such as Rio de Janeiro, crime rates are very high, producing educational disruption and acute stress. We find that neighborhood shootings near a school shortly before an exam have a robust negative effect on students' performance on the language and math university-entrance tests. The effects are robust to school and year fixed effects: exposed students perform significantly worse (by 0.1 to 0.3 standard deviations) than non-exposed students.

A field experiment studying whether cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) can improve sleep among low-income adults, and measuring the downstream effects on economic and wellbeing outcomes. (Full abstract to come.)

We examine the links between urban and rural economic performance in India using geo-spatial socio-economic data on 1,000 cities and 500,000 villages. Rural development falls almost universally with distance from towns; gradients are shallow and urban-rural gaps remain large even at short distances. A Bartik estimation of urban demand shocks reveals clear urban-to-rural spillovers that are larger and wider for manufacturing than for services, and extend further along major highways. Surprisingly, urban demand raises population in proximate rural areas but not in the urban areas themselves, suggesting constraints on densification.

We investigate the role of beliefs and stigma in shaping students' use of professional mental health services at a large private university in Mexico, where supply-side barriers are minimal. In a survey experiment with 680 students, nearly 50% of students in distress do not receive professional support despite high awareness and perceived effectiveness, a substantial treatment gap. We document stigmatized beliefs and misconceptions correlated with this gap: three-quarters of students incorrectly believe that those in distress perform worse academically and that most students in therapy are in severe distress. An information intervention correcting these beliefs increases students' sharing of on-campus resources and their willingness to recommend them to peers, though it lowers willingness to pay for private therapy and does not change self-reported therapy use six months later.

We design and test a novel tutor-training intervention on a tutoring platform, with a focus on peer-group discussions. Roughly 2,000 university-student volunteer tutors lead math sessions for around 8,000 schoolchildren. By comparing Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) training with and without peer-group discussions, we isolate the role of peer connections in improving teaching, self-confidence, and communication. Pilot results indicate that students assigned to tutors who participated in peer-group discussions show larger gains in endline math scores than those whose tutors trained individually or without SEL training; tutors trained in peer groups also feel more connected and supported.

The Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP, "Remain in Mexico") required non-Mexican asylum seekers arriving at the U.S.–Mexico border to wait in Mexico during their immigration court proceedings. Using administrative case-level microdata from the Executive Office for Immigration Review covering over one million cases from 2012 to 2020, we estimate the causal effect of MPP on procedural-fairness outcomes with an event-study difference-in-differences design, comparing non-Mexican (treated) and Mexican (control) respondents in courts operating MPP dockets. MPP led to a sharp decline in legal representation, a large increase in in-absentia removal orders, higher removal rates, shorter case durations, and a temporary surge in case terminations, concentrated among nationals of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. The findings indicate that MPP systematically undermined procedural fairness, creating a two-tiered system in which structural barriers, not individual choices, drove adverse case outcomes.

The most urbanized continent, Latin America lags on the economic development expected of its high urbanization rates. Across the region, I find that while industrialization and resource rents explain some variation, they are insufficient to account for exceptionally high urbanization. I present suggestive evidence that the colonial past created an urban system later conducive to "urbanization without growth."