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Stage | Document | Abstract | Resources | Press |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Accents as Capital, with Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Michael Weintraub, CEDE Working Paper No. 2026-01. | Do accents—the way that language is pronounced—shape social and economic interactions? We answer this question using an experiment embedded in an online survey of 6,000 Colombian adults. Respondents evaluated paired profiles in which audio introductions were randomly assigned to feature either a high- or low-class accent, while income, education, and other attributes were independently randomized. We find a sizable accent premium: speakers with high-class accents are 5–16 percentage points more likely to be chosen as friends, business partners, colleagues, or bosses. This premium is significantly larger among respondents with high socioeconomic status, consistent with an in-group favoritism capable of reproducing inequality. By varying the information we present to respondents, our experiment allows us to conclude that the premium cannot be attributed solely to inferences about income or education. We further show that the premium vanishes for high-class foreign accents, suggesting that class cues are culturally specific and difficult for outsiders to detect. Finally, we document that respondents systematically associate high-class accents with multiple proxies of social status and that they elicit more deferential treatment. Overall, our findings reveal that accents function as a form of capital: culturally specific linguistic signals that reproduce social hierarchies, with implications for labor markets and efforts to promote mobility and integration. | No additional resources | ||
Colombia’s Missing Fiscal Pact: The Political and Cultural Foundations of Weak Taxation, Economía LACEA Journal 25, no. 1 (2026): 156–183. CEDE Working Paper https://ideas.repec.org/p/col/000089/021810.htmlNo. 2025-39 | This document explores the failure of Colombia’s tax system, arguing that its instability and inefficiency are symptoms of a deep-seated political and cultural equilibrium. Historical legacies of extractive institutions and extreme inequality have fostered a society that prioritizes individualistic private solutions over collective public investment. This environment reinforces low tax morale and clientelism, allowing the state to remain weak while elites and citizens alike bypass formal rules. Although political openness since the 1990s has increased the demand for public goods, the fiscal pact remains broken, creating a dangerous mismatch between rising social expectations and limited revenue. Colombia must establish a more consensual and inclusive fiscal foundation to avoid recurring crises and long-term developmental stagnation. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire, with Giorgio Chiovelli, Luis R. Martínez, Juan David Torres, and Felipe Valencia-Caicedo, CEDE Working Paper No. 2024-11. | We study the fiscal and political consequences of state modernization in the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America. We focus on the introduction of a new corps of provincial governors called intendants in the late 18th century. Leveraging the staggered adoption of the reform and administrative fiscal microdata, we show that the intendancy system sizably increased Crown revenue by strengthening state presence in the periphery and disrupting local elite capture. Politically, the reform reduced rebellions by previously exploited indigenous peoples. However, naming patterns reveal that the intendants heightened anti-Spanish sentiment among Creole elites, plausibly contributing to the nascent independence movement. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Birds of a Feather Collude Together: Subnational Alignment and Corruption (Updated! Previously circulated as Political incentives and corruption evidence from ghost students), with Arturo Haker, Carlos Molina and Juan Camilo Yamín, Cede-TREES Working Paper 2023-10. | We study the effect of links between politicians on corruption under prevailing clientelism. Connections between politicians increase fabricated "ghost" students to obtain more national transfers, without raising the quality or quantity of education. Bureaucratic turnover, temporary and discretionary hiring, electoral fraud, and complaints against functionaries also increase. Effects on ghosts are larger in municipalities with more clientelism, discretion over resource spending, and weaker oversight. The findings favor a venal view of corruption, where politicians divert resources for personal gain rather than to favor their constituencies. Nonetheless, they have better future career prospects, reflecting a failure of electoral control. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Anti-social Norms, with José-Alberto Guerra and James A. Robinson, CEDE Working Paper No. 2024-25. | Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm —the “don’t be a toad” norm, as it is referred to in Colombia— that tells people to mind their own business and not snitch on others. In a set of fairness games where a third party can punish unfair behavior, but players can invoke the “don’t be a toad” norm, we find that the mere possibility of invoking this norm completely reverses the benefits of third-party sanctioning to achieve fair social outcomes. We establish this is an anti-social norm in a well-defined sense: most players consider it inappropriate, yet they expect the majority will invoke it. To understand this phenomenon we develop an evolutionary model of endogenous social norm transmission and demonstrate that a payoff advantage from adherence to the norm in social dilemmas, combined with sufficient heterogeneity in the disutility of those who view the norm as inappropriate, can generate the apparent paradox of an anti-social norm in the steady-state equilibrium. We provide further evidence that historical exposure to political violence, which increased the ostracization of snitches, raised sensitivity to this norm. | No additional resources | ||
Constitutions and Order: A theory and comparative evidence from Colombia and the United States? with Javier Mejía, James A. Robinson, Santiago Torres | We propose a framework to explain why some societies may end up with different constitutional solutions to the problem of maintaining order in the face of self-interested behavior. Though the salient intellectual tradition since Hobbes has focused on how institutional design is used to eradicate violence, our framework illustrates that equilibrium constitutions may in fact have to deliberately allow for violence. This arises because some societies are unable to use institutions to influence income distribution. In this case, a constitutional tolerance of violence emerges as a credible way for an incumbent to meet the participation constraint of a challenger. We illustrate the results with the comparative constitutional history of the US and Colombia. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Interaction of Economic and Political Inequality in Latin America, with James A. Robinson and Santiago Torres, CEDE WorkingPaper No. 2024-05 | We investigate how economic inequality can persist in Latin America in the context of radical falls in political inequality in the last decades. Using data from Colombia, we focus on a critical facet of democratization - the entry of new politicians. We show that initial levels of inequality play a significant role in determining the impact of political entry on local institutions, policy, and development outcomes, which can impact future inequality. A vicious circle emerges whereby policies that reduce inequality are less likely to be adopted and implemented in places with relatively high inequality. We present evidence that this is caused both by the capture of new politicians and barriers to institution and state capacity building, and also by the fact that politicians committed to redistribution are less likely to win in relatively unequal places. Our results, therefore, help to reconcile the persistence of economic inequality with the new political context. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Do Third-Party Guarantors Reassure Foot Soldiers? with Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Michael Weintraub, Juana García, Laia Balcells | Since the end of the Cold War, international third parties such as the United Nations (UN) have become frequent guarantors of peace agreements. Existing studies document that third parties provide assurances that help maintain peace, yet these studies nearly exclusively marshal evidence at the macro-level and focus on elites rather than foot soldiers. Also, their focus is often on the immediate aftermath of war, rather than how third parties affect agreement implementation. Using a novel phone survey of 4,435 ex-combatants from the FARC-EP, Colombia's largest rebel group, and an embedded survey experiment, we examine the role of third parties in providing guarantees to foot soldiers during the implementation of the Colombian peace agreement, five years after its signing. We find no evidence that the UN Verification Mission in Colombia increased: confidence among ex-combatants that the government would fulfill its commitment to implement the peace agreement, confidence that the FARC would do the same, perceptions of physical safety, positive perceptions of ex-combatants' future economic prospects, nor trust in institutions more generally. We discuss possible explanations for these null findings and the study's relevance to debates about conflict termination, peace agreement implementation, and international intervention. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Social media and mobilisation, with Carlos Molina. In Campante, F., Durante, R. andTesei, A. (eds), The Political Economy of Social Media, Paris and London: CEPR Press | On 25 January 2011, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to demand change. A few weeks later, Wael Ghonim, an internet activist who helped coordinate the protests and was incarcerated during the events, summarised the emotions: “if you want to liberate society, all you need is the internet”. Many shared the enthusiasm during the Arab Spring, especially with regards to one of the internet’s most disruptive innovations: online social media. One Egyptian went as far as naming his daughter Facebook, honouring the platform’s role in freeing the country from autocracy. Social media continues to feature in the news as a major contributing factor to recent waves of citizen mobilisation. Still, there is now greater recognition that some protests may be ineffective. Egypt and almost every country involved in the Arab Spring failed to deliver the democratic promises. Moreover, social media may be used to attack democracy, not just to demand or protect it. The Capitol Riots against the 2021 US democratic presidential transition provide just one example.
On the whole, how important has social media been for citizen mobilisation? What mechanisms explain its influence? Moreover, what have been the broader political implications? The answers to these questions now seem more complex than one might have imagined in 2011. When invited five years later to talk again at TED, Ghonim himself stated: “Remember I said in 2011 that if you want to liberate society, all you need is the internet? Well, I was wrong”. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Media, Secret Ballot and Democratization in the US, with Juan Felipe Riaño and B.K. Song, Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2023, 3(3): 391-425 | Can the media determine the success or failure of institutional reforms? We study the adoption of secret voting in the US and the role of media in this arguably crucial step to improve democracy. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy and a rich dataset on local newspapers, we find that in areas with high levels of media penetration democratization outcomes improved following the adoption of the secret ballot. Specifically, the press contributed to the decrease in partisan attachment and support for dominant parties. The press also undermined the manipulation of electoral boundaries and the unintentional decline in turnout incentivized with the introduction of the secret ballot. We consider multiple concerns about our identification strategy and address the potential endogeneity of newspapers using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the introduction of wood-pulp paper technology in 1880 combined with counties’ woodland coverage during the same period. Exploring the heterogeneous effects of our results, we argue that the media mattered through the distribution of information to voters and the increase of public awareness about political misconduct. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico with Horacio Larreguy and Juan F. Riaño, The Economic Journal, 2022, Volume 132, Issue 648, Pages 2815–2834. Cede Working Paper, 2020-16 | We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party that affected local state capacity across Mexican municipalities and over time. Our difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a national shock that threatened the Mexican government’s hegemony in the early 1960s. | No press content | ||
with Carlos Molina and James Robinson, Economica, 2022, 89(354): 293--331. NBER Working Paper No. 26848 and CEDE Working Paper 2020-25. | Development outcomes come in ‘clusters’ that seem difficult to exit. Using original data from Colombia, we present evidence of the interconnection between two critical political components: state weakness and clientelism. State weakness creates the right environment for clientelism to flourish. Clientelism sets in place a structure of incentives for politicians and citizens that is detrimental to building state capacity. We show that vote buying, as a measure of clientelism, and tax evasion, as a measure of state weakness, are highly correlated at the micro level. We also report evidence that both practices are widely accepted in society, a result consistent with a deeply entrenched relationship of mutually reinforcing influences. Finally, we propose a set of mechanisms that underlie the hypothesis that a weak state and widespread clientelism are part of a political equilibrium with multiple feedback loops. Our results suggest that state weakness is a trap that is likely hard to exit. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Real Winner's Curse with Pablo Querubín, Juan F. Vargas and Nelson Ruiz. American Journal of Political Science, 2021, 65(1): 52-68. Cede Working Paper, 2017-05 | Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict and lead to lower violence.However, this argument ignores the response of established elites when: i) their interests are threatened by the policy stance of new political actors, and ii) elites have a comparative ad-vantage in the exercise of violence. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the narrow election of previously excluded left-wing parties to local executive office in Colombia results in a one-standard-deviation increase in violent events by right-wing paramilitaries.We interpret this surge in violence as a reaction of traditional elites to offset the increase in outsiders’ access to formal political power. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that violence by left-wing guerrillas and other actors is unaffected, and that violence is not influenced by the victory of right-wing or other new parties in close elections | |||
with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Review of Economic Studies, 2020,87(4): 1565-1604 . (Earlier version as "Population and Civil War" NBER Working Paper No. 23322) | Medical innovations during the 1940s quickly resulted in significant health improvements around the world. Countries with initially higher mortality from infectious diseases experienced larger increases in life expectancy, population and subsequent social conflict. This cross-country result is robust across alternative measures of conflict, and is not driven by differential trends between countries with varying baseline characteristics. Asimilar effect is also present within Mexico. Initial suitability conditions for malaria varied across municipalities, and anti-malaria campaigns had differential effects on population growth and social conflict. Both across countries and within Mexico, increased conflict over scarce resources predominates and this effect is more pronounced during times of economic hardship (specifically, in countries with a poor growth record and in drought-stricken areas in Mexico). At least during this time period, a larger increase in population made social conflict more likely | No press content | ||
The Perils of High-Powered incentives: Evidence from Colombia's False Positives with Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Darío Romero, and Juan F. Vargas. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2020, 12(3): 1-43. NBER Working Paper 22617. | We investigate the use of high-powered incentives for the Colombian military and show that it produced perverse side effects. Innocent civilians were killed and misrepresented as guerillas (a phenomenon known in Colombia as ‘false positives’). There were significantly more false positives during the period of high- powered incentives in municipalities with weaker judicial institutions and where a higher share of brigades were commanded by colonels, who have stronger career concerns than generals. In municipalities with higher share of colonels, the high-powered incentives period also coincided with a worsening of local judicial institutions and no discernible improvement in overall security. | |||
Conflict, Educational Attainment and Structural Transformation: La Violencia in Colombia with Ana María Ibáñez and Juan F. Riaño. Economic Development and Cultural Change. 2020, 69(1):335-371. Documento CEDE 2015-35 | We examine the long-term impact of violence on educational attainment, with evidence fromColombia’sLa Violencia, a period of intense political violence in the mid-XXth Century.We find that individuals exposed to violence during, and especially before, their schooling years experience a significant and economically meaningful decrease in years of schooling.Exploring consequences beyond human capital accumulation, we show that exposed cohorts also engage in economic sectors that typically employ less qualified labor and are less likely to transition to jobs in manufacturing and services (relative to agriculture). Violence thus appears to place obstacles on the process of transition to more modern sectors, potentially affecting the structural transformation that may occur as income increases | No press content | ||
CSI in the tropics. Experimental evidence of improved public service delivery through coordination with Daniela Collazos, Miguel La Rota, Daniel Mejía, and Daniel Ortega. In Carlos Solar, Carlos A. Pérez Ricart (eds), Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America, New York: Routledge, 2022. | This paper evaluates the impacts of increased coordination, accountability, and leadership among teams of responsible public officials, with evidence from homicide investigations in Colombia. We randomly assigned the investigations of 66% of the 1,683 homicides occurring in Bogotá, Colombia, during 2016 to a new investigation procedure emphasizing these features. We find a statistically significant 30% increase in the conviction rate in the treatment group relative to the control group. Indicators of the quality of the investigative process also improve, as well as the rate at which a formal accusation is presented before a court. Complementary findings suggest that the treatment produces well-coordinated teams that can communicate more fluently. Also, a survey of investigative team members reveal that work motivation, the extent to which they receive feedback on their performance, the pertinence and effectiveness of their roles, and the perceived quality and coordination of the team all improve under the new scheme. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with Carlos Molina. Cede WP No. 2019-41 and Lacea Working Paper 2020-0041 | Using Facebook's release in a given language as an exogenous source of variation in access to social media where the language is spoken, we show that Facebook has had a significant and sizable positive impact on citizen protests. By exploiting variation in a large sample of countries during close to 15 years and combining both aggregate and individual-level data, we confirm the external validity of previous research documenting this effect for specific contexts along a number of dimensions: geographically, by regime type, temporally, and by the socioeconomic characteristics of both countries and social media users. We find that coordination" effects that rest on the social" nature of social media play an important role beyond one-way information transmission, including a liberation effect" produced by having a direct outlet to voice opinions and share them with others. Finally, we explore the broader political consequences of increased Facebook access, helping assess the welfare consequences of the increase in protests. On the negative side, we find no effects on regime change, democratization or governance. To explain this result, we show there are no effects on other political engagements, especially during critical periods, and that social media access also helps mobilize citizens against opposition groups, especially in less democratic areas. On the positive side, we find that Facebook access decreases internal conflict, with evidence that this reflects increased visibility deterring violence and that social media and the resulting protests help voice discontents that might otherwise turn more violent. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Perils of Misusing Remote Sensing Data. The Case of Forest Cover with Santiago Saavedra and Juan F. Vargas, Cede WP No. 2020-15 and Lacea Working Paper 2020-0043 | Research on deforestation has grown exponentially due to the availability of satellite-based measures of forest cover. One of the most popular is Global Forest Change (GFC). Using GFC, we estimate that the Colombian civil conflict increases ‘forest cover’. Using an alternative source that validates the same remote sensing images in the ground, we find the opposite effect. This occurs because, in spite of its name, GFC measures tree cover, including vegetation other than native forest. Most users of GFC seem unaware of this. In our case, most of the conflicting results are explained by GFC’s misclassification of oil palm crops as ‘forest’. Our findings call for caution when using automated classification of imagery for specific research questions. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with James Robinson, Ragnar Torvik, and Juan F. Vargas, The Economic Journal, 2016, 126 (593): 1018-1054. | We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting against insurgents in a civil war and derive two main empirical implications which we test using Colombian data during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. First, as long as rents from power are sufficiently important, large defeats for the insurgents should reduce the probability that politicians with comparative advantage, President Uribe, will fight the insurgents. Second, this effect should be larger in electorally salient municipalities. We find that after the three largest victories against the FARC rebel group, the government reduced its efforts to eliminate the group and did so differentially in politically salient municipalities. Our results therefore support the notion that such politicians need enemies to maintain their political advantage and act so as to keep the enemy alive. | No additional resources |
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