Suchergebnisse

The first chapter of my dissertation studies the 2011 student movement in Chile, the largest protest mobilization in the country's history, in which hundreds of thousands of students skipped school to protest with the goal of reforming the educational system. Using administrative data on millions of students' daily school attendance decisions on protest and non-protest days, a large network composed by the lifetime history of classmates, and differential network exposure to the first national protest, I employ an instrumental variables approach to test how networks affect protest behavior. The main finding is that individual participation follows a threshold model of collective behavior: students were influenced by their networks to skip school on protest days only when more than 40 percent of the members of their networks also skipped school. Additional findings show that protest participation imposed significant educational costs on students and helped to shift votes towards non-traditional opposition parties. Taken together, results indicate that networks amplify the effect of protests in non-linear ways with potentially significant consequences for institutional change.The second chapter, co-authored with Jose Ignacio Cuesta and Cristi'an Larroulet, investigates the workings of educational institutions in Chile. In education, data on school quality is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of behavioral responses that could distort performance measures. We study the Chilean educational market and document that low-performing students are underrepresented in test days, generating distortions in school quality information. These distorted quality signals affect parents' school choice and induce misallocation of public programs. These results indicate that undesirable responses to test-based accountability systems may impose significant costs on educational markets.The third chapter, co-authored with Mounu Prem, studies firms during Chile's transition to democracy. Political transitions are associated with significant economic changes, but little is known about how firms fare across regimes. We study Chile's democratization and show that firms in the dictator's network make critical investments in physical capital during the political transition. These investments are made possible by government banks during the dictatorship and allow firms to improve their market position in the new regime. Our results show how market distortions can be transferred across political regimes.

Little is known about the relationship between illegal firms and local economic activity. In this paper I study changes in satellite night lights across Mexican municipalities after the arrival of large drug trafficking organizations in the period 2000–2010. After accounting for state trends and differences in political regimes, results indicate no significant change in night lights after the arrival of these illegal firms. Estimated coefficients are precise, robust, and similar across different drug trafficking organizations.

Because they have failed to address the fundamental economic imbalances within Europe obscured by the single currency, each effort by European leaders so far to resolve the euro crisis has only deepened it. Without a decisive move toward fiscal and political union, accompanied by policies that push productivity and competitiveness toward convergence while closing the democratic deficit, the Eurozone will disintegrate. To discuss the way forward, the Nicolas Berggruen Institute's Council on the Future of Europe met in Rome on May 28 with Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. In this section we publish the contributions from that meeting by the former European leaders, scholars and Nobel laureates who are members of the Council. Adapted from the source document.

DAICH, Deborah, VARELA, Cecilia (Coordinadoras) (2020) Los feminismos en la encrucijada del punitivismo. Buenos Aires, Biblos, 238 pp.

The sovereign debt problem in Europe, ignited by Greece, has morphed into an economic crisis challenging the solvency of major banks and countries as well as a generalized crisis of governance. Lacking the legitimacy of public support, the leaders of the European Union's fledgling institutions have been indecisive and unable to contain the looming danger of financial contagion. Along with the economic slowdown in the United States, instability and volatility in Europe threaten to derail the fragile global recovery.In this section, several former European leaders as well as political figures from the emerging economies offer their ideas on how to fix Europe and stem the global threat.