WORKING PAPERS

Growing up inside the invisible frontier: the effect of gang’s territorial control on youth’s human capital accumulation (JMP).

How does the enforcement of gang’s territorial borders affects children’s and youth’s human capital accumulation? I explore this question in Medellín, Colombia. To be able to observe binding gang borders, I focus on a city-wide gang turf that happened during 2009-2012. I map the borders of one of the competing factions and perform a spatial regression discontinuity using geo-located individual level data on educational enrollment. I find that the probability of dropping out of high school is 8 p.p higher for teenage male students living inside the gang border than for students living only 100m outside of it. This discontinuity did not exist before the gang border become binding for non-gang members.

Exposure to homicidal violence during childhood: effects on schooling outcomes.

I examine the effect that exposure to homicidal violence has on youth’s human capital accumulation. I explore this question in Medellín, Colombia, focusing on the time period between 2007 to 2018, period for which I have both geo-located educational enrollment data and geo-locoated homicide data. This micro-level panel data enables me to overcome the identification challenge of estimating the causal effect of homicidal violence on education outcomes. I measure homicide exposure at the school-level and leverage a time and school fixed effects design as well as in depth case knowledge of the production function of violence in Medellín to overcome the identification challenge. I do not find statistically significant results of the effect of exposure to homicidal violence on school dropout for the full sample. However, I do find suggestive evidence of exposure to homicidal violence increasing the probability of dropout for primary students. These results might point to the role that schools have as protective spaces for older children in times of gang turf.

Who expects to join criminal gangs and why? Occupational choice among 10,000 teenage boys in Medellín. With Christopher Blattman and Santiago Tobón.

Currently conducting an original survey with 13 and 14-year-old adolescent males in high-risk gang recruitment neighborhoods. We will use this survey to assess risk factors associated with gang interest and estimate a structural model of career path choice under budget constraints to investigate how different factors influence adolescent’s career choice. Preliminary results find that not only monetary incentives, but also importantly non-monetary rewards (status and enjoyment) as well as non-monetary costs (effort needed to fulfill education requirements) significantly influence adolescent’s potential career choice.

Coverage: Rethinking measurement in organized crime research (World Bank Development Impact Blog by Lelys Dinarte-Diaz), Reshaping Aspirations for Kids in Medellín: Steering Youth Away from Gang Recruitment (Templeton World Charity Foundation).

Management of Police Misconduct Investigations. With Bocar Ba, Jacob Kaplan, Dean Knox, Gregory Lanzalotto, Rei Mariman, and Jonathan Mummolo.

The notion of procedural justice implies that effective oversight of police can foster public trust, which police require to fulfill their mission. But what happens when oversight systems fail? We argue that if deficient oversight erodes public trust, it can produce a feedback effect which further harms oversight, as perceived past illegitimacy may reduce civilians’ willingness to report future police misconduct. To investigate this theory, we leverage rare access to police misconduct investigation files in three of the five largest U.S. police departments. Analyzing over twenty-five thousand allegations, we establish several stylized facts that suggest oversight systems in major agencies are deficient. Investigators impose vague labeling systems that downplay the severity of alleged offenses in public data; terminate investigations if civilians do not follow elaborate and prolonged processes; and virtually never impose serious discipline even when civilian complaints are verified. Using surveys fielded in the same jurisdictions, we then test the impact of informing civilians of features of their city’s oversight systems. We find aggregate statistics conveying the rates of sustained allegations and subsequent discipline depress trust in police, while detailed narratives showing how complaints were investigated produce relatively more positive assessments. Our findings shed light on the often-shrouded inner workings of oversight systems, and illustrate how different variants of transparency can lead to divergent assessments of police legitimacy. Our paper also underscores how institutional design and public perceptions can function in tandem to determine the efficacy of bureaucratic oversight.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Choosing to stay in the gang: the role of endogenously formed expectations.

Large-scale and long-term evaluation of a whole-of-school self-regulation and planning skills intervention. With Gabriele Oettingen, Angela Duckworth, Christoipher Blattaman, and Santiago Tobón.