Working Papers
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How do elites respond to reform programs that threat their power? Elites, observing a state with weak capacity, could choose to undermine its implementation to preserve control over the existing structure with negative repercussions for economic development. Using the Ecuadorian land reforms from the 1960s and 1970s, and employing a unique dataset of land redistributions in Ecuador at the parish level digitized from historical archives, I study the impact of land reforms on current development outcomes. The main findings show that larger land redistributions during the 1964 and 1973 reforms are associated with higher levels of poverty in 2010, measured by the Unsatisfied Basic Needs Index (UBN). To recover the causal effect of reforms on development, I employ an IV strategy which exploits the assignment to the priority intervention zone defined by the government in 1973 for the second reform as an instrument. The potential mechanism is most likely associated with the fact that the agrarian structure was not affected significantly by the reform and the program did not have an impact of the provision of public goods either, suggesting that the state remained weak in those places. I also show that there is currently a higher share of individuals in the agricultural sector in places where land reform was conducted. Landed elites then appeared to have been successful at undermining the reform implementation process.
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What drives variation in public goods provision? Scholars have focused on heterogeneity among the mass public or inequality between elites and the mass public as potential drivers. However, the initial stages of state building, elites exercised near-total control over government outputs. This paper examines the impact of the composition of these elites on the provision of public goods. I argue that when economic elites are interconnected, a higher level of diversity within this group can be associated with increased public goods provision. To test this hypothesis, I digitized data from the early 20th century in Ecuador, constructing an elite heterogeneity index at the local level using last names from 2,200 economic elites across the country. This index is then combined with a unique inventory of state assets from 1914. The main results show that locations characterized by a greater heterogeneity of economic elites received a greater amount of public goods. The results are robust across various specifications and are not driven by population size, the number of elites, nor geographic characteristics. The evidence on the mechanism aligns with the connectedness across economic sectors between elites, which may have fostered a shared identity at the local level. This work contributes to the literature on public goods provision by highlighting the importance of internal elite diversity and differentiating between heterogeneity and fractionalization.
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Published Articles
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We propose a model to nowcast the annual growth rate of real GDP for Ecuador, whose economy lacks timely macroeconomic information for some key variables and has gone through unstable periods due to its dependence on oil exports. Our specification combines monthly information for 30 macroeconomic and financial variables with quarterly information for real GDP in a mixed-frequency approach. Our setup includes a time-varying coefficient on the mean annual growth rate of output to allow the model to incorporate prolonged periods of low or high growth. The model produces more accurate nowcasts of real output growth in pseudo out-of-sample exercises than a nowcasting model that assumes a constant mean real GDP growth rate. We also conduct sensitivity analyses on our nowcasting model within the time-varying mean setup and find that including financial variables can be detrimental to the performance of the proposed model.