Submitted Work. 

A Land of Unequal Chances: Social Mobility Across Mexican Regions. (with Miles Corak) (Working Paper version available here )

Using a new data set, I estimate the patterns of social mobility in Mexico and its regions, contributing to the growing literature on regional social mobility patterns. I identify that although Mexico is a country with high levels of intergenerational rank persistence, thus low levels of social mobility, there is substantial variability across its regions. While 35 out of 100 individuals born in the bottom quintile of the household asset distribution and in the South of the country experience upward mobility, twice as large a proportion of those born in the bottom quintile but in Mexico City experience the same type of mobility. Controlling for multiple characteristics at the household and neighborhood levels, I find a penalization of 12 percentiles in terms of upward mobility against individuals born in the South, with respect the rest of the country, and a boost of 10 percentiles for those with origin in Mexico City.

Unequal gradients: Gender, skin tone, and intergenerational economic mobility. (with Roberto Vélez-Grajales and Gastón Yalonetzky) (Working paper version available here) (R&R at Journal of Population Economics)

We study how the intersection between skin tone and gender shapes intergenerational mobility of economic resources in Mexico. Using two recent social mobility surveys, we estimate the rank persistence and transition matrices by gender combined with skin tone groups. First, we find no differences in intergenerational mobility patterns between light-skin men and women. Second, the colorist mobility pattern observed in previous literature affects men and women differently. Namely, while women of intermediate and dark-skin tonalities have a lower expected rank than their light-skin peers, only men of the darkest tonalities suffer from the same penalization. Thirdly, women of intermediate and darker skin tones have lower persistence rates at the top of the distribution of economic resources than men of the same skin tonality. 

Modeling the Learning Impacts of Educational Disruptions in the Short and Long-run. (available here) 

This paper proposes a framework for analyzing the short and long-run effects of temporary educational disruptions on children’s learning progression. The framework explicitly models continuous parental investments, filling a gap in the literature related to explicit models of learning progression and acquisition. The model also considers economic resources as part of the resources employed by parents to mitigate the effects of a temporary shock in instruction, expanding previous work by Neidhöffer, Lustig, and Tommasi (2021). With this model, I estimate the potential effects of the instructional disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. The estimates suggest that the potential persistent loss in learning with respect to the counterfactual represents 47% of the learning acquired during a  usual school year.

Work in progress.

Stairway to Elite?: Economic and Educational Intergenerational Mobility in Mexico. 

In this paper, I study the relationship between intergenerational educational and economic mobility in the Mexican case. Human capital theory suggests that attaining upward (downward) educational mobility translates into upward (downward) economic mobility, but this relationship has not been sufficiently studied for developing economies. I overcome this data limitation using the MMSI 2016 – EMOVI 2017 composite dataset and focusing on the individuals who experience relative educational and economic mobility. I find that most educationally mobile individuals also experience more economic mobility and that the direction of the mobility is as predicted by theory. Notably, the magnitude of economic mobility is smaller than the magnitude of the intergenerational change in educational attainment. However, the relationship breaks down for individuals born at the top of the distribution. For these individuals, downward relative mobility in educational terms does not translate into a higher probability of experiencing downward economic mobility.

Apples to Oranges: Imputing Household Income Using Survey Data (with Pedro Torres & Roberto Vélez-Grajales)

The Great Capital and Labor Divide. Compositional Inequality in Latin America (with Marco Ranaldi)

The Persistent Instability: A Neo-Structuralist View of Argentina’s Economy in the XXIst Century