Research

Research program on poverty measurement, machine learning for poverty targeting and small area estimation, distributional incidence analysis, structural poverty and informality in Bolivia, intergenerational mobility, inequality, social protection, and gender norms in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Working papers, submitted manuscripts, and publications organized by research theme. Papers marked Under review or Submitted are available on SSRN or upon request.

1. Income Measurement and the Invisible Firm

Traditional survey instruments designed for wage workers produce income figures for the self-employed that reverse sign for the majority of informal firms once full costs are accounted for. I develop gold-standard diary validation, ML-based corrections, and structural approaches for contexts where only consumption is observed.

  • Ledgers of the Self-Employed: Accounting for the Invisible Firm Paper EN · Paper ES · Slides EN · Slides ES · GitHub — Working Paper
  • Cash, Profit, and Selection: Decomposing Self-Employment Income Error Paper · Slides · GitHub — Working Paper
  • The Income You Can’t See: Detecting and Correcting Self-Employment Measurement Error with Unsupervised Machine Learning PDF — Submitted, Journal of Development Economics
  • The Noise Floor: Measurement Error Limits on Poverty Mapping and a Machine Learning Solution — Working Paper
  • Recovering Individual Labor Earnings from Household Consumption: A Collective Model Approach with an Application to the Sahel G5 SSRN — Working Paper
  • Identification and Estimation of Income Tails Under Nonclassical Measurement Error: Evidence from Brazil — Working Paper

2. Optimal Poverty Targeting

Proxy means tests and poverty maps break down where poverty populations concentrate — in the distribution tails. I develop augmented ML methods and small area estimation techniques that remain reliable where standard tools fail, validated across 17 LAC countries.

  • Optimal Poverty Prediction Under Measurement Error: Theory and Evidence from Augmented Machine Learning SSRN — Review & Resubmit, Journal of Applied Econometrics
  • Poverty Mapping in the Tails SSRN — Submitted, Journal of Econometrics
  • The Tail Test: A Factorial Simulation on the Sources of DRF Advantage in Small Area Estimation GitHub — Submitted, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A
  • Data Augmentation for Bias Reduction in Imbalanced Regression PDF — Working Paper

3. Distributional Incidence Analysis

When governments reform subsidies, currencies collapse, or climate shocks hit, who gains and who loses? I develop real-time distributional monitoring tools combining microsimulation, ML filters, and minimum cross-entropy reweighting to estimate welfare impacts between survey rounds.

  • Between Surveys: Real-Time Distributional Monitoring for Vulnerable Populations — Working Paper
  • Forecasting the Distributional Impacts of Climate Change and Climate Policy PDF — World Bank Technical Note
  • P2P Dollars as an Early Warning System: Exchange Market Pressure, Panic Premia, and the Currency Stress Cycle in Bolivia PDF Dashboard — Working Paper WP/2026/01
  • Who Bears the Cost of Devaluation? Price Dynamics and Welfare Impacts During Bolivia’s 2024–2025 Currency Crisis DOI SSRN GitHub — Published, Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, No. 44, 2025
  • When the Pump Becomes a Shock: Stress-Adjusted Incidence of Fuel Subsidy Reform in a Fragile Informal Economy — Working Paper
  • Estimands, Specification Sensitivity, and Tail Reliability in Growth Incidence Curve Analysis — Working Paper
  • Measuring Redistribution Effects of Climate Change — Working Paper

4. Structural Poverty, Informality, and Inclusion Policy

Not all poverty is the same. I distinguish workers structurally trapped in loss-making informal firms by accumulated relational capital from the transitory poor, and derive the distinct policy implications for social inclusion, social investment, and social protection.

  • Quantifying Permanent, Structural, and Transitory Income Components with Machine Learning: Re-examining the Inequality Decline in Latin America PDF — Working Paper
  • Structural Poverty in Latin America: Definition, Measurement, and Twenty Years of Change — Working Paper
  • The Three Faces of Inequality: Systematic, Structural, and Residual Inequality in Latin America, 2000–2022 — Submitted, Journal of Development Economics
  • Trapped by Cash: A Theory of Voluntary Informality Among the Economically Non-Viable Paper · Slides · GitHub — Working Paper
  • To Be a Taquero or to Build a Taquería: Occupational Sorting under Risk and Embedded Capital — Submitted, Journal of Development Economics
  • Narcocorridos as Recruitment Technology: Cultural Prestige Production, Adverse Selection, and Criminal Human Capital in Mexico and Brazil SSRN — Working Paper

5. Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality of Opportunity

Falling intergenerational coefficients across LAC mask rising positional rigidity. I develop the Mobility Frontier framework and the schooling lag methodology, and apply both to Mexico, Bolivia, and 18 LAC countries using census and survey data spanning five decades.

  • The Mobility Frontier: Why the Intergenerational Elasticity Is an Insufficient Statistic PDF — Working Paper
  • Ladders and Gates: Where Opportunity Breaks in Mexico PDF — Working Paper
  • Sticky Ends, Mobile Middle: The Shape of Intergenerational Persistence in Mexico — Submitted, Journal of Economic Inequality
  • The Schooling Lag: Rank Persistence and the Measurement of Intergenerational Educational Mobility PDF — Submitted, Review of Income and Wealth
  • Mexico’s Mobility Mirage: Falling Intergenerational Coefficients, Rising Positional Rigidity SSRN — Submitted, Journal of Development Economics
  • The Road of No Returns: 25 Years of Returns to Education in Bolivia (1999–2024) SSRN — Working Paper
  • Between Communities and Within Them: A Five-Census Decomposition of Intergenerational Persistence in Bolivia, 1976–2024 — Working Paper
  • Network Thickness, Inequality of Opportunity, and the Persistence of Advantage — Submitted, Social Choice and Welfare

6. Gender, Adaptive Preferences, and Social Norms

Persistent gender inequality operates through preferences and norms, not just endowments and returns. When preferences are endogenous to the distribution, redistribution alone cannot close gaps. I develop the theory and provide intersectional evidence across LAC.

  • Adaptive Preferences, Endogenous Returns, and the Failure of the Second Welfare Theorem SSRN — Working Paper
  • Mainstreaming the Wrong Channel: Gender Policy, Adaptive Preferences, and the Limits of Redistribution PDF — Working Paper
  • Compounding Penalties: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Structure of Wage Inequality Among Indigenous Women in Latin America — Working Paper
  • Adaptive Preferences, Social Filters, and the Political Economy of Gendered Inequality SSRN — Working Paper
  • Where Does the Money Go? Financial Inclusion, Sectoral Savings, and the Gender Misallocation Trap SSRN — Working Paper
  • Skills or Parks? A Nested Test of Dynamic Complementarity versus Preference Formation in Early Childhood PDF — Working Paper

Bolivia: Applied Research and Live Tools

Bolivia has the highest informality rate in Latin America, a currency under stress, and some of the deepest ethnic and geographic inequality in the hemisphere. I have worked with its household surveys since 1999, its five population censuses since 1976, and its informal economy through 500 firm-level financial diaries. The tools below — a live currency early warning system, a 339-municipality poverty map, and an implicit bias experiment — are applications of the methods developed in the research program above to the country I know best.

Live dashboards and interactive tools

  • Bolivia P2P Dollar — Early Warning System Live Dashboard Dynamic Factor Model + Kalman filter. Updated daily from Binance P2P order book.
  • Bolivia Poverty & Nutrition Map 2024 — 339 Municipalities Interactive Map Census 2024 + DRF + BYM2 + Optimal Transport calibration. Poverty, extreme poverty, stunting, wasting, anemia.
  • Implicit Association Test — Racial Bias in Latin America Take the Test Measures implicit bias against indigenous names and faces. 7-minute online experiment.

Bolivia-focused papers

  • P2P Dollars as an Early Warning System: Exchange Market Pressure, Panic Premia, and the Currency Stress Cycle in Bolivia PDF Dashboard — Working Paper · Theme 3
  • Who Bears the Cost of Devaluation? Price Dynamics and Welfare Impacts During Bolivia’s 2024–2025 Currency Crisis DOI SSRN — Published, Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, 2025 · Theme 3
  • Ledgers of the Self-Employed: Accounting for the Invisible Firm — 500 firms, 25,338 transactions, double-entry financial diary Paper EN · Paper ES · Slides EN · Slides ES · GitHub — Working Paper · Theme 1
  • Trapped by Cash: A Theory of Voluntary Informality Among the Economically Non-Viable — 500 firms, four-type equilibrium partition Paper · Slides — Working Paper · Theme 4
  • Cash, Profit, and Selection: A Machine Learning Framework for Measuring Income in the Informal Sector — AE + GRF + Selection, 66/34 decomposition Paper — Working Paper · Theme 1
  • The Road of No Returns: 25 Years of Returns to Education in Bolivia (1999–2024) SSRN — Working Paper · Theme 5
  • Between Communities and Within Them: A Five-Census Decomposition of Intergenerational Persistence in Bolivia, 1976–2024 — Working Paper · Theme 5
  • La evolución de la pobreza en Bolivia: un enfoque multidimensional (with P. Villarroel). DOI — Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, No. 20, 2013
  • ¿Qué Separa a los Bolivianos? Un Estudio Experimental de los Efectos de las Identidades Sociales en la Confianza y el Afecto DOI Slides — Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, 2024
  • Understanding Changes in Social Cohesion in Bolivia (with M.A. Villegas). PDF Slides — OECD Conference on Social Cohesion and Development, 2010
  • Unravelling Declining Income Inequality in Bolivia: Do Government Transfers Matter? (with A. Eid). ResearchGate — Fundación ARU Working Paper, 2014
  • Trends in Income and Consumption Inequality in Bolivia: A Fairy Tale of Growing Dwarfs and Shrinking Giants (with A. Eid and R. Aguirre). PDF — Fundación ARU Working Paper, 2013
  • Entrepreneurship and Economic Mobility: A Case Study of Bolivia (with P. Villarroel and A. Eid). PDF — IDB Research Network, 2011

Earlier Publications (Selected)

    International Labour Organization

  • Promoviendo el trabajo decente para las trabajadoras del hogar de Perú: COVID-19, cambios en el empleo, condiciones laborales y riesgos de trabajo forzoso de las trabajadoras del hogar remuneradas en Perú. ILO Organización Internacional del Trabajo, 2025.
  • Aprendiendo sobre la transversalización de la perspectiva de género: Avances y matices en los programas de trabajo de la OIT en América Latina y el Caribe, 2010–2021 (with A. Eid Valdiviezo and N. Echenique). ILO Organización Internacional del Trabajo, 2022.
  • Meta-analysis of ILO interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean on child labor, forced labor and human trafficking. ILO Organización Internacional del Trabajo, 2020.
  • Magnitud y Características del Trabajo Infantil en Bolivia: Informe Nacional 2008. PDF Organización Internacional del Trabajo, 2008.

    • Inter-American Development Bank

  • Intended and Unintended Effects of Non-contributory Pensions: The Case of Bolivia’s Renta Dignidad (with G. Mena). IDB DOI IDB Working Paper No. IDB-WP-631, 2015. Also in Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, 2015.
  • Unemployment in Bolivia: Risks and Labor Market Policies (with E. Yáñez and M.A. Villegas). IDB IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-WP-271, 2011.

    • World Bank · IDB · UNDP — Book Chapters

  • Are Teachers Well Paid in Latin America and the Caribbean? In Incentives to Improve Teaching: Lessons from Latin America, E. Vegas (Ed.). World Bank, 2005.
  • Regional Integration and Wage Inequality (with S. Duryea and R. Robertson). In Beyond Borders: 2002 Report on Economic and Social Progress in Latin America. Inter-American Development Bank, 2002.
  • Bolivia: Efectos de la Liberalización sobre el Crecimiento, Empleo, Distribución del Ingreso y Pobreza (with R. Pereira and W. Jiménez). In Liberalización, Desigualdad y Pobreza: América Latina y el Caribe en los 90. UNDP, 2002.

    • Bolivia — Survey Experiments

  • ¿Qué Separa a los Bolivianos? Un Estudio Experimental de los Efectos de las Identidades Sociales en la Confianza y el Afecto. DOI Slides (PPTX) Slides (Keynote) Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, 2024.
  • Understanding Changes in Social Cohesion in Bolivia (with M.A. Villegas). PDF Slides International Conference on Social Cohesion and Development, OECD, 2010.

    • Impact Evaluation of Bolivian Social Programs — Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, 2015.

  • Intended and Unintended Effects of Unconditional Cash Transfers: The Case of Bolivia’s Renta Dignidad (with G. Mena). DOI 77–148.
  • Temporary Employment Programs, Consumption Smoothing and Employability. DOI 7–34.
  • Job Training and Employability: Evidence from Mi Primer Empleo Digno (with P. Villarroel). DOI 35–76.
  • Free of Illiteracy? Evaluating the Bolivian Experience with the National Literacy Program Yo Sí Puedo (with P. Villarroel and C. Valencia). DOI 149–232.
  • Evaluating the Impact of Micro-credit in Bolivia (with P. Villarroel). DOI 233–282.
  • Assessing the Impact of School Subsidies in Bolivia: A Reduced Form Non-Parametric Approach. DOI 283–296.

    • Poverty and Inequality in Bolivia

  • La evolución de la pobreza en Bolivia: un enfoque multidimensional (with P. Villarroel). DOI Revista Latinoamericana de Desarrollo Económico, No. 20, 2013, 7–74.