PhD Candidate, Department of Economics

Contact Information

Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

eduardocampillo2023@u.northwestern.edu
Cellphone: 312-871-1778

Education

Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2023 (expected)
M.A., Economics, Northwestern University, 2018
B.A., Economics, NYU Abu Dhabi, 2017

Primary Fields of Specialization

Development Economics, Political Economy

Curriculum Vitae

Download Vita (PDF)

Job Market Paper

“Caste, bureaucracy, and the limits to political affirmative action in India” [PDF (Google Drive)] [PDF (Locally hosted)]

The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been found to be effective. I explore two reasons for this: 1) these policies target large, heterogeneous groups and ignore rigid boundaries within them, and 2) minority politicians might not have direct control over resource allocation. I focus on the context of India, where certain seats for state legislators are reserved for the historically discriminated lower castes (Dalits). Dalits belong to many heterogenous castes and state legislators must influence local bureaucrats in order to affect the distribution of public goods. To overcome a lack of individual caste data, I exploit the link between names and caste membership and create a new dataset including the caste of workers involved in a public workfare program (NREGA). With this dataset and based on the fact that constituencies are reserved for low-caste legislators through a population cutoff rule, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of having a low-caste state representative on the timing of payments to Dalit laborers within NREGA. I find that low-caste workers represented by a low-caste state legislator experience a 12\% higher probability of receiving their payments late. The effect is constant across all individual castes and is concentrated in areas where politicians have lower bargaining power over the local bureaucrats. Hence, my findings point to the importance of considering vertical power structures when designing policies aimed at empowering under-represented minorities around the world.

Other research papers

“Citizenship Policy and the Spread of Communicable Diseases: Evidence from the Dominican Republic,” joint with Fabiola Alba Vivar and José Flor Toro [PDF]

We study a controversial 2013 policy in the Dominican Republic that targeted as much as 10\% of the country’s population based on their Haitian ancestry and limited their safe access to public health services. Beyond the direct negative effects such policies may have on the targeted group, we argue that they have important indirect effects through the contagion of communicable diseases. We exploit the timing and differential exposure to these policies across the country, as well as highly disaggregated epidemiological data to provide evidence of these indirect effects. Our estimates evidence a notable increase in the number of Dengue cases, a highly contagious disease. We find no increase in the incidence of non-communicable diseases. We argue that these results are due to a restriction in access to health services for the targeted population. These findings show how restricting access to public services for specific groups can have a deleterious effect on the non-targeted population.

Other ongoing work

“The Effect of Increasing Statistical Capacity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Uganda” [slides]

Despite the frequent claim that governments have considerable information on the state of their country, recent work points to the contrary. A natural channel through which governments learn is by gathering statistics on their population. Using the random sampling of villages into the survey coupled with a partial and random replacement of the sample, I shed light on the relationship between increasing the country’s information about the surveyed areas and the allocation of public services in these localities. I find that previously surveyed communities are more likely to receive public goods and services when compared to those areas that have only recently been added to the sample. The effect is concentrated among relatively more affordable improvements, including better quality of drinking water and higher ratings of road maintenance work. Larger investments, such as road infrastructure, which can be assessed without the use of survey data, remain unchanged. These results point to the importance of statistical capacity-building and increasing policy makers’ access to data on the communities they oversee.

“How the Political Power of Teacher Unions Affects Education,” joint with Kensuke Maeba [slides]

This project studies the clientelism between corporatist teacher unions and their members, and this relationship’s impact on education outcomes. Focusing on the biggest teacher union in Mexico around the 2006 presidential election, we compare schools in municipalities before and after the election, and use cross-sectional variation in the degree of the union’s support for the winning party. Our difference-in-differences estimates show an increase in the number of public school teachers both incorporated into and promoted within a pay-for-performance program, a known patronage tool that the union uses to reward teachers. We also show evidence of lower test scores on national standardized exams in more affected municipalities after the election. These results present evidence of the deleterious consequences of large, politically-motivated unions in the Mexican context.

References

Prof. Christopher Udry (Committee Chair)
Prof. Lori Beaman
Prof. Seema Jayachandran
Prof. Nancy Qian

Teaching

ECON 327: Economic Development in Africa (Prof. Christopher Udry), Winter 2022 & Winter 2021
ECON 326: Economics of Developing Countries (Prof. Seema Jayachandran), Fall 2021 & Fall 2020
ECON 307: Economics of Medical Care (Prof. Frank Limbrock), Spring 2021
ECON 310-1: Intermediate Microeconomics I (Prof. James Hornsten), Spring 2019
ECON 201: Introduction to Macroeconomics (Prof. Mark Witte), Winter 2019
ECON 281: Introduction to Applied Econometrics (Prof. Daley Kutzman), Fall 208