Research

Transit Migration through Mexico: Evidence from The Beast (Job Market Paper) Draft

This paper estimates the effect of transit migration on local crime victimization in Mexico. While existing research focuses on migration's consequences in destination countries, transit countries (those through which migrants pass en route to their final destination) bear social costs that remain poorly understood. Mexico is an especially important case given its role as the primary corridor for Central American migrants heading to the United States. 

I exploit spatial variation in Mexico's freight rail network, known as The Beast, to proxy for predicted migrant flows across 2,462 municipalities from 2011 to 2019. Using a two-way fixed effects design, I combine this measure with individual-level data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (ENVIPE), where victimization is measured as an indicator for whether at least one household member was victimized. I find that an increase of 10,000 predicted transit migrants raises overall crime victimization by 0.24 percentage points, a 3 percent increase relative to the mean. Effects are concentrated in property crime, particularly vehicle parts theft, with additional increases in violent crime, specifically kidnapping and rape.  

These results show that transit countries bear measurable social costs from international migration flows, a dimension that has received insufficient attention in both policy debates and academic research.

Characterizing Time Poverty in Peru: Are Women the Poorest? (with Arlette Beltran and Pablo Lavado) Unpublished Version

Monetary poverty calculations that use the basic consumption basket assume that individuals have enough time to carry out tasks complementary to labor market work, such as preparing food or resting. Time poverty identifies as poor those individuals who cannot devote a minimum number of hours to activities related to leisure or personal care. Using Peru's National Time Use Survey (2010), this study characterized time poverty and the time deficit. One of the most important characteristics of the time-poor is that they are predominantly women, since gender roles tend to discriminate against them: they are the ones who bear the primary burden of unpaid household tasks. This situation is even more pronounced in urban areas and for the wealthiest two-thirds. The decomposition of time poverty and the time deficit into observable and unobservable factors, carried out using the Oaxaca-Blinder method, showed that it is not differences in characteristics between men and women that explain why women are more time-poor. On the contrary, it is unobservable factors that explain these differences: differing preferences or constraints, cultural aspects, or discrimination.