This paper examines the potential impact of different US economic sanctions policies on Venezuelan migration flows. I consider three possible departures from the current status quo in which selected oil companies are permitted to conduct transactions with Venezuela’s state-owned oil sector: a...

This paper explores the empirical support behind the idea that there is a trade-off between the size of the migrant population and the rights and entitlements enjoyed by immigrants. We first look at the empirical correlation between measures of migrants’ rights and the size of the stock of...

For how long does cultural heritage persist? Do the culturally inherited values of immigrants dilute as generations pass? We answer these question by studying the relationship between revealed political behavior of immigrant families and the culture of the place where they migrated from, either...

Surprising trends in late-counted votes can spark conflict. When late-counted votes led to a narrow incumbent victory in Bolivia last year, fraud accusations followed—with dramatic political consequences. We study the pro-incumbent shift in vote share as the tally progressed, finding that we...

This paper provides a political economy explanation for Venezuela's suboptimal macroeconomic policy choices during the Nicolás Maduro administration. Venezuela’s political system, embodied in the 1999 Constitution, dramatically increased the stakes of power, raising both the benefits of being...

Argentina’s case is symptomatic of a confidence crisis as explained by multiple equilibria models of balance of payments crises. The IMF’s debt sustainability framework should be made flexible enough to allow for welfare-improving reprofiling solutions in such cases.

We argue that economic collapses can result from the adoption by political actors of strategies that generate severe negative economic externalities for society. We establish the conditions for political conflict to become economically destructive and develop a diagnostics toolkit to identify...

We revisit the results of Equipo Anova (2021), who claim to find evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in 2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and...

Venezuela has suffered three economic catastrophes since independence: one each in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Prominent explanations for this trilogy point to the interaction of class conflict and resource dependence. We turn attention to intra-class conflict, arguing...

This article reviews recent advances in addressing empirical identification issues in cross-country and country-level studies and their implications for the identification of the effectiveness and consequences of economic sanctions. I argue that, given the difficulties in assessing causal...