Leonel A. Regalado Cardoso
Ph.D. Candidate, Agricultural & Applied Economics
Texas Tech University | Free Market Institute
Migration Entrepreneurship Political Economy
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University and a Research Assistant at the Free Market Institute. I also serve as a Graduate Instructor in the Area of Energy Commerce & Business Economics at the Rawls College of Business.
My research focuses on migration, entrepreneurship, and political economy, with an emphasis on how institutions, policy environments, and economic incentives influence individual behavior and long-run development outcomes.
Education
Texas Tech University Ph.D. in Agricultural & Applied Economics Expected Spring 2027
Texas Tech University M.S. in Agricultural & Applied Economics 2025
Universidad Francisco Marroquin B.A. in Economics, minor in Finance 2023
University of Buckingham PGCert in Money, Banking & Central Banking 2022
Job Market Paper
Migration Entrepreneurship
Displaced Cuban Elites: Business Formation and Local Economic Outcomes
Cuba’s pre-revolutionary business and professional elite lost their assets to expropriation and reached Florida after 1959 with their skills but little of their wealth — a rare case of a skilled population arriving without its capital. We identify the exiles by name, linking two 1958 Cuban elite registers to Florida telephone directories and corporate filings, and follow the places where they settled through 1980. Where the elite settled, new incorporations pulled away from their synthetic controls from the late 1960s — averaging 2.20 times each zip code’s own pre-1965 level, and 3.96 times in the seven zip codes that became the core of Miami’s Cuban enclave. Labor-market effects are smaller: unemployment rose about 1.9 to 2.3 percentage points less by 1980, with no consistent effect on employment or family income.
Other Research
Syrian refugees and the resilience of European economic freedom: Evidence from Austria, Germany, and Sweden
Using synthetic controls, we find no robust evidence that the Syrian refugee surge lowered overall economic freedom in Germany, Austria, or Sweden, but suggestive declines in legal system and property rights in Germany and Sweden.
Do corruption reforms spur entrepreneurship?
Using Callaway–Sant’Anna and entropy-balanced stacked difference-in-differences, this paper finds that anti-corruption reforms briefly raise formal firm registration but have no lasting effect on entrepreneurship: they change its form, not its level.