Historical Narratives in the United States (with Elsa Voytas)
We examine how Americans think about the history of race in 14,033 surveys that elicit views and narratives about the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and slavery’s legacy. Ideology is their strongest predictor, with conservatives detaching the past from the present and liberals portraying inequities as the past’s continuation. Two experiments show that (1) raising the salience of this history widens ideological gaps in institutional satisfaction, and (2) those exposed to narratives that portray past injustices as ongoing report significantly lower satisfaction than those exposed to narratives portraying them as settled, regardless of ideology and without changing historical beliefs. (Access paper here)
Gauging Sentiment towards Democracy without Referencing Political Systems in a Novel Experimental Task (with Josie I Chen and Louis Putterman)
Whether people favor democratic political institutions is difficult to judge when speaking freely carries political risks. We introduce an incentivized experimental task as a way to reveal implicit sentiment towards democracy without referencing politically-sensitive terms. We include it in a survey of émigrés from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan living in North America, and in smaller representative surveys of residents of the U.S. and of China. In the surveys in which participants can be asked explicitly about their preference for democracy among other survey questions after completing the task, we find the task-based measure and the survey-based response to be robustly correlated. Differences of both incentivized and survey-based measures among participants from Hong Kong and Taiwan versus those in the U.S. and in the China representative surveys align with expectations based on differences in political histories. Differences in responses between China émigrés who report a political rights motivation for living in North America and those who do not do so also align with intuition. These findings suggest that our task provides a tool worthy of further testing both in settings where conventional survey questions cannot be asked, and as a complement to such questions when both approaches are feasible. (Access paper here| Online Appendix) [A previous version of this paper circulated under the name "Gauging Preference for Democracy in Abscence of Free Speech]
Supplementary Files: Instructions and Questionnaires
Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia's Leper Colony, American Economic Review, 2023, 113 (5): 1294-1333.
This paper explores the intergenerational legacy of social exclusion on pro-sociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia’s leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic and extend such altruism to outsiders who have undergone similar circumstances. These individuals also display mistrust toward those who have, historically, been exclusionary—in this case, doctors. The content of historical narratives shared by ancestors who were excluded, which emphasize the endured mistreatment and doctors’ historical misinformation, is one mechanism that partially explains the intergenerational patterns. (Access paper here)
Media: Psychology Today | Nada es Gratis (In Spanish) | Winner of the Nada es Gratis Job Market Paper Prize | El Espectador (In Spanish)
Legacies of Liberation: Political Dynamics in Civil War Refugee Camps, Journal of Economic Growth, 2026, 31 (2): 179-203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-025-09259-1
This paper documents the evolution of political outcomes in Civil War refugee camps, where roughly 600,000 enslaved African Americans achieved freedom. Refugee camps became sites of African American empowerment after the war, but these accomplishments were followed by a backlash that overturned the progressive outlook by the early 1900s. Despite the backlash, African Americans enjoyed persistently higher rates of literacy in counties home to refugee camps, fostering a sustained, selected outmigration of whites and enabling improved interracial relations. Today, progressive politics enjoy an advantage at these sites of former emancipation, and whites are key contributors to this progressive outlook. Overall, while progressive achievements may provoke backlash, they can also set in motion the very conditions that eventually erode resistance and foster renewed political progress. (Access Paper Here)
Moving Up the Ranks: Conscription and Intergenerational Mobility, Journal of Development Economics, 2026, 182: 103764. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103764 (with Juan Pedro Ronconi)
This paper examines whether military service can promote intergenerational mobility in developing countries. We use survey data from 3,037 men exposed to conscription to compare respondents’ socioeconomic and educational outcomes with those of their parents. Exploiting the random assignment of conscription by lottery, we show that serving increases upward mobility for individuals from low-SES backgrounds, with no effects for those from more privileged ones. The positive effects of military service on mobility disappear under non-democratic regimes or wartime, underscoring the importance of stable institutional contexts for the military to enhance mobility. (Access Paper Here)
Nation-Building Through Military Service, Journal of the European Economic Association, 2026, 24 (5): 1723-1758. https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvaf064 (with Juan Pedro Ronconi)
This paper studies conscription’s role in durably shaping attitudes and beliefs consistent with nation-building. We pair original survey data covering 29 cohorts of conscripts in Argentina with random variation in service emerging from a lottery. We find that serving in the military leads to a stronger national identity and social integration several decades after serving but does not affect civic behaviors such as voting or paying taxes. Value inculcation during service helps explain the baseline patterns, while exposure to and interaction with diverse peers reinforce but do not drive the results. (Access Paper Here | Pre-analysis Plan | Pre-analysis Plan Second Round )
Media: VoxDev | Faculti | Foco Económico (In Spanish)
Historical Conflict and Gender Disparities (Access latest draft here)
Interpersonal Diversity and Carbon Emissions (Access latest draft here)