Downloads (or reuses a cached copy of) a Latinobarometro survey wave from latinobarometro.org, sanitizes variable and value-label names, optionally renames variables to cross-year-consistent names via the official time-series crosswalk, and optionally merges World Bank population weights.

PhD Thesis

Both migration and remittances in the countries of North Central America (NCA) have been affected by the health and economic shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. […] It was widely predicted at the beginning of the pandemic that the related restrictions and widespread economic contraction would lead to a sharp decline in remittances if they resulted in earnings reductions for migrants. At…

The sheer magnitude of remittance flows to the three countries in Northern Central America (NCA) would suggest that they must play a significant role in reducing poverty. However, the links between migration, remittances, and poverty and inequality are complex, making it difficult to determine the effects a priori. […] In this chapter, we explore the evolution of the relationships between…

About 85 million persons with disabilities live in Latin America and the Caribbean today. They comprise a highly heterogeneous population, but share a common history of invisibility and exclusion. In the last decades, persons with disabilities have improved their situation in terms of statistical visibility, poverty reduction, access to schools, and increased recognition and participation in…

This note describes how poverty measures reported by the World Bank can be replicated using the Stata command povcalnet. Users can estimate poverty at any poverty line for the world, regions or sets of countries, by directly querying the World Bank’s database of household surveys. The command also retrieves inequality statistics provided by the database.

About one in four Latin Americans self-identify as Afro-descendants today. They comprise a highly heterogeneous population and are unevenly distributed across the region, but share a common history of displacement and exclusion. Despite significant gains over the past decade, Afro-descendants still are overrepresented among the poor and are underrepresented in decision-making positions, both…

The povcalnet commands allows Stata users to compute poverty and inequality indicators for more than 160 countries and regions in the World Bank’s database of household surveys. It has the same functionality as the PovcalNet website. PovcalNet is a computational tool that allows users to estimate poverty rates for regions, sets of countries or individual countries, over time and at any poverty…

Does bringing a marginalized group into the state raise its members’ trust in democratic institutions? Uruguay’s 2013 Ley 19.122, reserving eight percent of public-sector hires for Afro-descendant citizens, offers a rare test on the dimension representation theory names. Using the Uruguayan household survey and eight waves of the Latinobarómetro, we document a genuine but small first stage,…

When political leaders single out an immigrant group, does the group seek membership in the polity or withdraw from it? We show the answer depends on what membership costs. Threat raises the protective value of citizenship but lowers the value of committing to a hostile polity, so the response turns on the price of naturalizing and the strength of outside options. Using administrative data and…

Does a more generous migrant regularization regime lead to better welfare outcomes? I study this question by comparing Venezuelan migrants in Colombia and Peru using the 2024 LAPOP migrant surveys combined with nationally representative AmericasBarometer surveys of host populations. Contrary to the conventional expectation, the migrant-native gap in food insecurity is substantially larger in…

Poverty and hunger are well-established drivers of emigration, but the literature largely treats food insecurity as a standing condition rather than something that moves. This paper asks whether a sudden, economy-wide deterioration in food security shifts migration intentions, and whether it does so differently from chronic deprivation. Using the second wave of the World Bank’s Phase 2 High…

Remittances are one of the largest and most stable financial inflows to developing countries, often surpassing foreign aid and foreign direct investment. While research in the area suggest remittances reduce poverty and Food Insecurity, much of it is country specific, or uses older data. This paper examines how remittances affect household food insecurity across six middle-income countries —…

Europe’s job retention schemes were the largest labour market intervention in the continent’s post-war history. We ask whether they insulated older workers’ household finances from the health shock of COVID-19, and find that they did not. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we study 6,709 adults aged 50 and over across 26 countries who were employed before the…

When a public figure announces a transgender or non-binary identity, every institution that curates knowledge about them must decide whether and how to update the record. We study this process at the moment it is sharpest: on English Wikipedia biographies in the week of a public coming-out or pronoun announcement. Combining hand-verified announcement dates for public figures with complete…

How do visitor flows at open-air archaeological sites respond to extreme weather, and to heat in particular? Open-air sites such as Castelseprio and the Valcamonica rock-art parks are physically exposed in a way that indoor museums are not, so as summers warm they face a demand risk that indoor institutions do not share. Using a daily attendance panel for Castelseprio (December 2023-June 2026,…