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Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Columbia University

Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics under the supervision of Prof. Réka Juhász and Prof. Michael Best.

MA

Universidad de los Andes

Economics

• Advanced Econometrics
• Advanced Microeconomics General Equilibrium
• Forecasting in Economics

BsC

Universidad de los Andes

Economics

The Who, What, When, and How of Industrial Policy: A Text-based Approach.

Working Paper

Since the 18th century, policymakers have debated the merits of industrial policy (IP). Yet, economists lack basic facts about its use. This study sheds light on industrial policy by measuring and studying global policy practice for the first time. We first create an automated classification algorithm for categorizing industrial policy practice from text. We then apply it to a global database of commercial policy descriptions and quantify policy use at the country, industry, and year levels (2009-2020). These data allow us to study fundamental policy patterns across the world. We highlight four findings. First, IP is common (25% of policies in our database) and has expanded since 2010. Second, instead of blunt tariffs, IP is granular and technocratic. Countries tend to use subsidies and export promotion measures, often targeted at individual firms. Third, the countries engaged most in IP tend to be wealthier (top income quintile) liberal democracies. In our data, IP is rarer among the poorest nations (bottom quintile). Fourth, IP is targeted toward a subset of industries and is highly correlated with an industry’s revealed comparative advantage. We show that industrial policy is a prominent feature of the global economy and a far cry from industrial policies of the past.

The effect of industrialization on political dynasties: Evidence from Colombian local governments.

Working Paper

In this paper I find that industrialization reduces the concentration of political power, measured by the share of elected officials that were part of political dynasties, in the context of 19 Colombian departments. I use newly digitized data from departmental production by industrial sector since 1969 and the international price of manufactures as an exogenous source of variation in the industrialization levels. Using an instrumental variable approach, I find that an increase in one paid manufacturing employee reduces the share of elected individuals from dynasties by 1.15 p.p. Dividing the results by type of office indicates that the impact is more prominent in the election of dynastic individuals in the legislative brand compared to those elected in the executive one. One additional paid employee decreases the average share of dynastic mayors by 0.75 p.p., a 7.8% decrease in the average. On the other hand, an increase in a paid employee decreases the percentage of representatives from dynastic families by 3.24 p.p., which represents a diminution of 13.4%. I propose multiple mechanisms that could be driving these results including the relevance of industrialization to the creation of labor unions, and in the redistribution of resources such as education and income.