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Postdoctoral Research Fellow @SoDa Labs, Monash University

Building H, Level 4
900 Dandenong Rd
Caulfield East
VIC 3145 Australia

Bio

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University, Australia. I started my role at SoDa Labs, an inter-disciplinary Impact Lab attached to the Monash Business School, in September 2022 and have since moved to the Department of Economics in July 2024 to support the Department's research using unique Australian microdata from the Australian Bureau of Statistics made available through DataLab.

I am on the 2024/25 academic job market.

I am an applied economist with broad research interests in political economy, environment and resource economics, corporate social responsibility, and corporate governance. My research also explores topics in digital economics, and long-run/comparative development.

My Job Market Paper is part of my research agenda on the political economy of natural resource extraction and provides new insights into the causes of violent state suppression of protests against the expropriation and pollution of communal lands. Another paper in this area of research examines how human rights organizations in cooperation with the media can hold powerful multinationals accountable for severe human rights violations related to their operations in the absence of a central authority.

For my work, I often undertake extensive data collection efforts, for which I make use of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML) and geocomputation. I also use financial econometrics and data to answer questions of coporate social responsibility and corporate governance from a political economy perspective.

Research

Job Market Paper


The Political Economy of Socioenvironmental Conflict: Evidence from Peru
Job Market Paper, 2024 (New Version!).
Over the past two decades, violence against land and environmental activists has been on the rise, besetting even stable democracies. Using a unique, fine-grained data set on social conflict events in Peru and exogenous variation in world mineral prices, I document a strong link between local mineral rents and violent state repression of socioenvironmental protests in a democratic institutional setting. I show that the increase in the use of excessive force cannot be explained by changes in protester behavior. Empirical findings highlight the role of local authorities: the election of a pro-mining mayor is associated with a higher prevalence of state repression and corruption in the constituency. The legal and democratic accountability of local authorities is, however, found to be limited. The reported increase in corruption does not translate into more investigations against pro-mining mayors for corruption offenses nor are reelection results of incumbents found to be negatively affected by state violence against protesters. Finally, I show that violent state repression is successful in forestalling conflict resolution agreements that acknowledge protesters’ demands.
SocArXiv

Publications

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Disease and Development - The Predicted Mortality Instrument Revisited
Journal of Applied Econometrics, 2024.
This paper revisits the predicted mortality instrument introduced in the seminal study of Acemoglu and Johnson (2007). Drawing on a unique historical data set of disease-specific mortality rates, we reconstruct several versions of the instrument that differ in terms of data usage and instrument relevance. Our findings confirm its predictive power on life expectancy. The replication analysis reveals a significant positive second-stage effect of life expectancy on population and total birth rates, and a negative effect on GDP per capita for a subset of the revised instruments. Overall, data coverage and empirical tests suggest the superiority of our country-level instrument.
Working PaperReplication Data

Working Papers

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The Value of Names - Civil Society, Information, and Governing Multinationals
R&R @ Journal of the European Economic Association (JEEA), 2023 (New Version Coming Soon!).
Civil society plays a critical role in governance where laws and authority are weak. We study how a key strategy of international civil society—disseminating information about human rights abuse— impacts multinationals. We consider trends at the center of international campaigns: the assassination of activists, and collect 20 years of data related to murders tied to the global mining sector. Using event study methodology, we estimate the impact of the human rights spotlight on the stock price of firms connected to events. We find that the effect of the human rights spotlight is substantial. Firms named in assassination coverage have large, negative abnormal returns following assassinations. Our estimates imply a median loss in market capitalization of 100 million USD. Meanwhile, these events do not impact the social responsibility (ESG) scores of firms. We show that the media plays a crucial role in these effects: the negative impact of assassinations is strongest when they coincide with calm news cycles versus peak news cycles, when news may be crowded out by large, international stories. In addition, we argue our results are driven by events where companies are explicitly named in the reporting. Last, we show that assassinations are positively related to the royalties paid by mining projects to domestic governments.
SSRNSocArXivsynthReturn R package
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The Heterogeneous Productivity Effects of Generative AI
Working Paper, 2024 [Under Review].
We analyse the individual productivity effects of Italy’s ban on ChatGPT, a generative pretrained transformer chatbot. We compile data on the daily coding output quantity and quality of over 36,000 GitHub users in Italy and other European countries and combine these data with the sudden announcement of the ban in a difference-in-differences framework. Among the affected users in Italy, we find a short-term increase in output quantity and quality for less experienced users and a decrease in productivity on more routine tasks for experienced users.
arXiv

Work in Progress

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Population and Conflict Revisited
This study both theoretically and empirically reinvestigates whether population growth causes conflict. Combining disease-specific historic mortality rates of Kreitmeir and Überfuhr (2023) with novel data on age-group–specific mortality rates and the timing of the demographic transition, we provide new evidence for the systematic heterogeneity in the effect of population on conflict. While Malthusian population dynamics can cause conflict, we find that this effect is restricted to countries that have not yet completed the demographic transition. On the other hand, health-induced population changes are shown to have a peace dividend in post-transitional countries. Separating the population size and youth bulge effect in an 2SLS estimation framework, moreover, confirms the non-monotonic population effect but reveals a global positive effect of youth bulges on conflict.
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The Political Economy of Chinese Resource Extraction: A new Dataset
This project introduces a novel geocoded dataset on Chinese overseas mining and exploration projects. We construct a firm-commodity-mine level dataset by 1) identifying the set of overseas mining projects from official records from the Chinese Ministry of Commerce website, 2) coding their geolocation, project owners, and commodities, and 3) linking the project owners to administrative firm-level datasets from China, including firm-commodity-year level customs records. The result is the most comprehensive and granular dataset on Chinese overseas mining projects to date, allowing us to provide new empirical insights into the process behind China’s mining investments and their economic and social impact in the host countries.