Explore My Research
My research focuses on migration, entrepreneurship, and political economy, with an emphasis on how institutions, policy environments, and economic incentives shape individual behavior and long-run development outcomes. Click a topic below to filter.
Migration Forthcoming
Syrian refugees and the resilience of European economic freedom: Evidence from Austria, Germany, and Sweden
We find no robust evidence that the Syrian refugee surge lowered overall economic freedom in Austria, Germany, or Sweden, though Germany and Sweden show suggestive declines in legal system and property rights.
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The Syrian civil war sent more than a million refugees to Europe, concentrated in a few countries: by 2022 Germany hosted 612,000 Syrians, Sweden 232,000, and Austria 77,000, reaching 2.2% of Sweden’s population. That makes it a strong test of the “new economic case for immigration restrictions,” the claim that migrants from countries with poor institutions erode the institutions where they settle. We build synthetic controls for each country’s Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) score from European countries that received few Syrian refugees, then stack the three to estimate an average effect.
Overall economic freedom fell by more than its synthetic counterpart in every post-treatment year, but the gaps are small, about 0.11 points on average, and not significant in 7 of 9 years (joint p = 0.106). The Legal System and Property Rights area is different: its stacked gap widens steadily, driven by Germany and Sweden, which we read as suggestive rather than conclusive.
Migration Entrepreneurship
Working Paper
Displaced Cuban Elites: Business Formation and Local Economic Outcomes
Where Cuba’s exiled business elite settled after 1959, new business formation pulled ahead from the late 1960s and unemployment rose less by 1980.
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Cuba’s first post-revolution exiles were disproportionately business owners, managers, and professionals, and many reached Florida with skills but little capital. We identify them by name, linking two 1958 Cuban elite registers to Florida telephone directories and corporate filings, and follow the census tracts and zip codes where at least five elite households settled through 1980.
Synthetic control estimates for 30 Florida zip codes, each matched to a weighted combination of 196 donor zip codes, show incorporations in elite-settlement zip codes pulling away from their synthetic controls in the late 1960s, with an average post-1965 effect of 2.20 times each zip code’s own pre-1965 level. The effect grows with the number of elite households, reaching 3.96 times in the seven zip codes that became the core of Miami’s Cuban enclave.
Labor-market outcomes come second. Matching estimators show that by 1980 treated tracts had a lower change in unemployment than comparable controls, by about 1.9 to 2.3 percentage points, with no consistent effect on employment or family income.
Political Economy Under Review
Leader’s Ideology and Economic Freedom
Do right-wing leaders expand economic freedom and left-wing leaders restrict it? Causal estimates show the effects are small and mostly absent.
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A long-standing proposition holds that right-wing governments promote free markets while left-wing governments constrain them. This paper provides the first causal estimates of the effect of government leaders’ ideology on economic freedom, using a doubly-robust stacked difference-in-differences design that accounts for staggered treatment timing and identifies clean ideological transitions following a stable pre-treatment period.
The analysis uses two samples: a global panel of 153 countries measured with the Economic Freedom of the World index, and 21 OECD countries reaching back to 1870 measured with the Historical Index of Economic Liberty.
Globally, transitions to either a left- or a right-wing government have no significant effect on economic freedom, and among OECD countries transitions to the right have no effect either. The two most robust findings are a small negative effect after transitions to the left among OECD countries, driven by a larger size of government, and a small positive effect after transitions to the right among non-OECD countries.
Entrepreneurship R&R
Do corruption reforms spur entrepreneurship?
Sustained anti-corruption reforms briefly raise formal firm registration, but have no lasting effect on entrepreneurship.
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I identify sustained five-year improvements in the ICRG corruption index, following Bologna Pavlik et al. (2023), and estimate their effect with two designs: the Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021) difference-in-differences estimator and an entropy-balanced stacked difference-in-differences. Entrepreneurship is measured two ways: new formal firms per 1,000 working-age people from the World Bank (24 treated countries) and early-stage entrepreneurial activity from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (20 treated countries).
Formal registrations rise right after reform, consistent with corruption acting as “sand in the wheels,” but the effect loses significance within three years, while early-stage activity in the GEM data does not change. Reform appears to change the form of entrepreneurship, as informal firms formalize, rather than its level. The results hold under a stricter treatment threshold, a ten-year horizon, reverse treatment, and a sample extended past COVID-19.
Migration Published
Emigration and origin country economic institutions
Moderate emigration improves origin-country economic institutions through an inverted-U relationship, driven by medium- and high-skill emigrant stocks.
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Drawing on public choice theory and Hirschman’s exit-voice framework, this paper identifies four channels through which emigration affects origin-country institutions: the absence channel, the prospect channel, the diaspora channel, and the return channel. These predict an inverted-U: moderate emigration improves institutions, but extreme levels deplete human capital and civic participation.
We test this using panel data on emigration from 132 countries to 20 OECD destinations (1980-2010) and the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index. Specifications include two-way fixed effects, quadratic terms, and skill-specific disaggregation.
The results confirm the inverted-U hypothesis. Emigrant stocks are positively and significantly associated with improvements in economic freedom, peaking at about 20% of the population abroad (a 0.90-point improvement on the 10-point EFW scale). Only above 47% does the effect turn negative, and only Guyana exceeds that threshold.
Medium- and high-skill emigrant stocks drive the result. High-skill emigration never turns negative within the observed range, suggesting persistent institutional spillovers. The policy implication: allowing greater emigration from low-freedom countries could promote development through institutional improvement, a channel that adds to the already large estimated gains from freer migration.
Entrepreneurship Published
Property rights and entrepreneurship
Property rights and total entrepreneurship follow a U-shaped relationship: necessity entrepreneurship falls first, then opportunity entrepreneurship rises.
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The literature assumes a linear relationship between property rights and entrepreneurship. This paper challenges that assumption, proposing and testing a U-shaped (nonlinear) relationship. At low levels, necessity-driven entrepreneurship dominates. As institutions improve, formal jobs absorb this activity. Beyond a threshold, opportunity-driven entrepreneurship accelerates and total activity rises again.
The empirical analysis uses panel data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor across 90 countries (2004-2018, 822 observations), paired with the Fraser Institute’s Legal System and Property Rights sub-index. The baseline is a random-effects panel regression of TEA on property rights and its square, controlling for GDP per capita, GDP growth, unemployment, and population growth.
The results confirm the U-shape. The linear term is negative and significant (−5.590, p<0.01), the quadratic term positive and significant (+0.418, p<0.05), with a Wald test confirming the squared term matters (p = 0.011). The minimum occurs at a score of approximately 6.69, comparable to Chile. A purely linear specification yields an insignificant coefficient, demonstrating it misses the true relationship entirely.
Separate regressions reveal the mechanism: each additional point in property rights increases opportunity entrepreneurship by 0.0432 pp (p<0.01) while decreasing necessity entrepreneurship by 0.0142 pp (p<0.01). The gain in opportunity ventures is more than three times the decline in necessity ventures. Results are robust to using the World Bank’s Rule of Law index instead.
The policy implication: policymakers should not be discouraged if modest institutional improvements do not immediately produce a surge in business creation. The initial decline reflects a healthy transition away from survivalist informality. The payoff comes with sustained reform past the trough.
Fiscal & Monetary Policy R&R
Debt Constraints in Emerging Economies: Evidence from Guatemala
Guatemala’s 1991 rule against central bank financing ended debt monetization, but the fall in debt-to-GDP came from inflation, not fiscal discipline.
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After a 1980s crisis in which inflation peaked near 60% and the fixed exchange rate collapsed, Guatemala limited central bank lending to the government, first through a 1991 Monetary Board resolution and then a 1993 constitutional amendment. Using the synthetic control method with 1991 as the treatment year, I find that Guatemala’s debt-to-GDP ratio falls below its synthetic counterfactual, with a gap averaging nearly 12 percentage points over 1991–2000. The gap is significant in only one year (2000), and a synthetic difference-in-differences estimate of −10.6 points is not significant.
The mechanism explains why. Central bank financing ended, but the government kept borrowing through other channels and total nominal debt kept rising. The ratio fell because inflation pushed nominal GDP up far faster than the debt stock, while growing remittances supported a slow, managed depreciation. The rule bound on its target without producing a more conservative fiscal path.
