I am an economist working at the intersection of international finance, development finance, political economy, and Latin American development. My work combines applied econometrics, policy analysis, and historical perspective to study how global financial structures shape development outcomes.
Currently based in Amherst, Massachusetts. Available for research, policy, and collaborative projects.
My work sits between academic research and policy-oriented analysis. I study how debt burdens, financial constraints, public policy, and global asymmetries affect development trajectories, especially in Latin America and other developing economies. Earlier in my research, I focused on extractive industries, land conflict, violence, and local development in Colombia.
I am especially interested in sovereign debt, development finance, public investment, international financial architecture, and the political economy of structural transformation. My research combines quantitative methods with institutional and historical analysis, and I care about producing work that is analytically rigorous but also useful for public debate.
I use applied econometrics, spatial analysis, policy research, and data visualization. Across different projects, I have worked with household, municipal, state, and cross-country data, often bringing together administrative records, public datasets, and institutional sources.
My recent work has moved toward development finance and international macro-political economy, while remaining grounded in earlier research on conflict, extractive industries, and inequality.
I study how global financial conditions, external constraints, and public policy shape development opportunities.
I use empirical analysis to study public policy, inequality, development outcomes, and institutional change.
My previous research examined how gold mining expansion affected violence and land conflict in Colombia.
I analyze how energy burden, pollution, and climate exposure interact with inequality across places and communities.
With G. Matamoros. Published in Problemas del Desarrollo. This paper revisits Latin America’s structural development challenges, focusing on inequality, growth, and the region’s long-standing constraints.
This paper estimates the causal effects of gold mining expansion on violence in Colombia, using international gold prices and geochemical anomalies as sources of exogenous variation. It examines how mining interacts with armed groups, ethnic territories, and local institutional contexts.
With Ximena Aristizabal. This paper studies how energy burden, heat exposure, and air pollution overlap across neighborhoods in New York City, showing how environmental and economic risks reinforce urban inequality.
With Louis Hotte. This project studies the effects of unemployment benefits during the pandemic on violent crime in the United States, combining empirical analysis with a Bayesian game model of informal enforcement.
I have worked across academic, policy, and teaching settings, with a strong emphasis on applied research, communication, and data-driven analysis.
Drafting issue briefs and reports on international finance, development finance, debt, and climate-related policy challenges affecting developing economies.
Research on environmental inequality, climate-related challenges, and development issues, using data-driven analysis and policy-oriented research.
Specialized in development economics, conflict, natural resources, and applied microeconomics. Conducted original research using instrumental variables, fixed effects, spatial methods, and policy analysis.
Taught development economics and technical workshops, and supported graduate and undergraduate courses across econometrics, environmental economics, statistics, and microeconomic theory.
My teaching experience spans development economics, statistics, econometrics support, and practical workshops. I care about making complex ideas accessible without losing analytical depth.
In Winter 2024, I taught Introduction to Development Economics at the University of Ottawa. I also designed and taught short workshops in LaTeX and introductory Stata for Economics PhD students, with a strong emphasis on practical academic skills.
As a teaching assistant, I supported courses including the graduate-level courses Economics of Natural Resources and Advanced Microeconomic Theory, as well as Financial Econometrics, Probability and Statistics, and Analysis of Economic and Social Data.
I am interested in research collaborations, policy work, and opportunities related to development, international finance, and political economy.