Exporting abroad is much harder than selling at home, and overcoming hurdles to exporting takes time. Our goal is to identify specific barriers to exporting and to measure their importance. We develop a model of firm-level export dynamics that features costly customer search, network effects in...

Previous studies for developed countries show negative short-run impacts of automation on employment and earnings. In this paper, we instead examine whether automation by a key trading partner can hurt workers in a developing country. We specifically focus in Colombia's labor market, and how the...

Does foreign military assistance strengthen or further weaken fragile states facing internal conflict? Aid may strengthen the state by bolstering its repressive capacity vis-à-vis armed non-state actors, or weaken it if resources are diverted to these very groups. We examine how U.S. military...

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...

"We evaluate multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries -- the conditional cash transfer (CCT) -- with a student level randomization that allows us to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. We test three treatments: a basic CCT...

This paper investigates the link between gender and crime using information from a gender-based lockdown policy in Bogota Colombia during the pandemic. Under the policy, men were allowed out on odd days and women on even days, and we investigate whether overall crime rates differed and whether...

Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

Conditional Cash transfer (CCT) programs have been shown to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes including education, consumption and health visits, amongst others. We estimate the long-run impacts of the urban version of Familias en Accion, the Colombian CCT program on crime, teenage...

We analyze the effect of Colombia's ambitious "Free Housing" program on children's educational outcomes. The program was generous, giving free housing to beneficiaries in desirable areas. We evaluate the program by leveraging housing lotteries and linking applicants to their children. We find...

Medellin's government wanted to raise its efficacy, legitimacy, and control. The city identified 80 neighborhoods with weak state presence and competing armed actors. In half, they increased non-police street presence tenfold for two years, offering social services and dispute resolution. In...