Mateo Uribe-Castro

We study firm responses to a major expansion of the U.S. Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. In 1954, federal law mandated that states extend UI coverage to all firms with four or more employees, a policy change that was binding for some states but not others. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find a sharp and persistent decrease in the number of employers with 4–7 employees in newly-covered states immediately following the law’s implementation. Simultaneously, the number of employers with 0–3 employees increases. This response suggests that firms actively reduced employment to avoid coverage. Our findings imply that, under partial coverage, firms cannot fully shift the costs associated with coverage to workers. Size-based mandates can therefore create substantial and long-lasting distortions in the size distribution of firms.

This study examines the relationship between land inequality and tax collection. Contrary to traditional models that emphasize the redistributive role of taxation, we focus on its role in providing public goods that increase productivity--i.e. enforcement of property rights, coordination, roads, electricity, etc. To explore this relationship, we build a simple model of public good provision where landowners decide whether or not to comply with property taxes taking into account: 1) the role government expenditure has on their property values, and 2) their expectation of the punishment when evading taxes. We validate the model empirically, using data from Colombian municipalities between 1923 and 1960, in two ways. First, we show evidence in favor of the main model predictions: land concentration is positively correlated with tax revenues per capita, and negatively correlated with the average fiscal cost of collecting one peso. These correlations are robust to controlling for measures of potential sources of omitted variable bias. Second, we use detailed land values’ data from cadastres available for a subsample of municipalities and the model’s structure to calibrate the implied expected penalty rate for different levels of land concentration. We find that the penalty rate for evading taxes should be higher in places with lower land concentration to enforce the property tax rate.

This paper examines the evolution of cultural differences in pre-industrial times. We use a novel dataset of approximately 30,000 ceramic objects from pre-colonial Peru, documented through both images and texts. We find significant cross-sectional and inter-temporal differences among human groups spanning two millennia of pre-Inca history, as revealed by the distinctiveness of ceramic style. Nonetheless, we find substantial heterogeneity in the explanatory power of group identity across periods and regions. We provide descriptive evidence that group identity is a stronger predictor of cultural differences during more conflictive periods and in regions with a longer history of political centralization. Examining the symbolic content of ceramics, religious themes emerge as key drivers of stylistic distinctiveness, especially during more conflictive periods. Using an IV approach, we also show that political centralization systematically reduces stylistic and thematic dispersion among objects from the same group, consistent with the idea that political centralization contributed to stronger cultural identities. We show consistent evidence for dispersion in present-day attitudes.

This paper examines the influence of transportation infrastructure on migration decisions in the context of the Great Migration in the United States. Focusing on the opening of the Panama Canal in 1920, we isolate the effect of improved economic opportunities from reduced migration costs. Using full-count Census data, we find that Southern African American migrants preferred areas with enhanced market access, leading to higher inflows after 1920. The study highlights the interplay between migrant networks and labor markets in shaping migration patterns. Our findings underscore the significance of local market conditions induced by improvements in local market access in influencing migration decisions during the Great Migration.

This paper studies the effect of the first wave of globalization on developing countries’ structural transformation, using data from Colombia’s expansion of coffee cultivation. Counties engaged in coffee cultivation in the 1920s developed a smaller manufacturing sector by 1973 than comparable counties, despite starting at a similar level in 1912. My empirical strategy exploits variation in potential coffee yields, and changes in the probability to grow coffee at different altitudes. This paper argues that coffee cultivation increased the opportunity cost of education, which reduced the supply of skilled workers, and slowed down structural transformation. Using exogenous exposure to coffee price shocks as an instrument, I show that reductions in cohorts’ educational attainment led to lower manufacturing activity in the long-run. The effect is driven by both a decrease in demand for education, and reductions in public goods. Finally, coffee cultivation during the early 20th Century had negative long-run effects on both individual incomes and poverty rates.

We study the impact of the Panama Canal on the development of Canada’s manufacturing sector in the years from 1900 to 1939. Using newly digitized county-level data from the Census of Manufactures and a market-access approach, we exploit the plausibly exogenous nature of this historical episode to study how changes in transportation costs influence the location of economic activity and productivity dynamics. Our reduced-form estimates show that lowered shipping costs led to greater market integration of marginally productive Canadian counties with key markets both inside and outside of Canada. This development permitted the reallocation of production activity to places whose production levels had been inefficiently low before the Canal opened. A shift from the 25th to the 75th percentile in terms of gains in market access brought about by the opening of the Canal led to a 9% increase in manufacturing revenues and input expenditures. Productivity rose by 13%. These effects persist when general equilibrium effects are considered: the closure of the Canal in 1939 would have resulted in economic losses equivalent to 1.86% of GDP, chiefly as a result of the restriction of the country’s access to international markets. Altogether, these results suggest that the Canal substantially altered the economic geography of the Western Hemisphere in the first half of the twentieth century.

The redefinition of Catholic Church property rights was common in Europe and the Americas during late eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. In Latin America, the expropriation of the Church’s assets was part of the violent process of institutional change after independence. This paper focuses on Colombia after 1850. It measures the impact of the expropriation of Church wealth on political violence. The paper contests the traditional idea of the expropriation of the real estate of the Church as a source of political violence by highlighting the change in political competition when the alliance between Conservative factions and the Church was weakened. With yearly data on the number of battles per municipality, archival information on the reform, and difference-in-differences, the paper documents a reduction of political violence in places where the Church’s assets were expropriated. Furthermore, it shows the reduction was concentrated in municipalities with high political competition and where the Conservative Party was relatively weak. These results support a political explanation of why the reform reduced political violence.

During the first half of the 20th century, Puerto Rico saw rapid progress in expanding primary education. However, as elsewhere in Latin America, there were pronounced regional differences in the rates of increased schooling. Due to its varied crop suitability and detailed records from the US colonial government, Puerto Rico is an ideal setting to explore the role of agriculture in explaining regional variation in the growth of education. This chapter presents a newly constructed panel dataset of enrollment and attendance rates by counties between 1907 and 1943. It finds that differing agricultural production technologies, alongside policy decisions and rates of urbanization, help explain why the growth rate of education varied across regions.