Research
My research studies two sets of decisions that shape economic mobility in Latin America: how smallholder farmers engage with agricultural markets, and how workers build pathways into formal-sector employment. This work comes from 20 years of experience working with Latin Americans: in the US, on the US/Mexico border, in southern Mexico, and in northern Peru. It seeks to influence not only the academy but also policy to improve the lives of people across the region.
Agricultural value chains
One strand of my work examines the market-access, contracting, and information frictions that determine which smallholders thrive. Southern Mexico offers a setting in which these frictions can be observed and measured: indigenous coffee producers, organized into agricultural cooperatives of varying strength, sell into global value chains that repeatedly break and reform around them. Through fieldwork in Chiapas, I study who joins cooperatives, how membership shapes household welfare, and what happens when those relationships break down. The work below uses a household survey and lab-in-the-field experiment that our team collected and administrative data from the coffee cooperative spanning over 20 years of producer records and geolocated coffee parcels. The work is supported by the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota and the Ralph K Morris Foundation.
Published
Unpacking Side-Selling: Experimental Evidence from Rural Mexico (with Chris M. Boyd and Grant X. Storer). Agricultural Economics, 2025. Journal version · Open-access PDF · Replication
Working papers
Information Decay and Cooperative Entry Under Risk (with Grant X. Storer and Jesse Anttila-Hughes). PDF | Slides
Sweet and Timely Income: The Effect of Honey Production in Reducing Food Insecurity of Coffee Producers (with Chris M. Boyd, Grant X. Storer, and Jesse Anttila-Hughes). PDF
Book chapters
The Role of the Farmer and Their Cooperative in Supply Chain Governance: A Latin American Small Producer Perspective. 2023. Handbook of Research on Cooperatives and Mutuals | Ungated version
Value Chain Integration as an Alternative to Fair Trade for Chiapas Coffee Farmers. 2019. Entrepreneurship and Development in the 21st Century. A revised version of my master’s thesis, available open access from the USF thesis repository.
Pathways into formal-sector employment
A second strand examines the pathways workers take into formal-sector employment. Three mechanisms matter: government subsidies that shape internal migration out of agriculture, worker referrals that mediate entry into formal jobs, and vocational training that builds the socio-emotional skills that formal employers value. I work with harmonized Mexican census data from IPUMS and confidential employer-employee data from the EconLab at the Bank of Mexico, and I am launching a new project in Peru on vocational training schools.
Working papers
The Role of Social Networks in Post-Displacement Outcomes (with Juan Pablo Arrendondo Ambriz and Lorenzo Aldeco Leo). Draft available upon request. | Slides
Where You Go Depends on Who You Know: Social Networks as Determinants of Mexican Internal Migration. Second year paper. PDF
The Causal Impacts of Geographic Targeting on Local Poverty Reduction: Evidence from Mexico (with Alejandro Estefan). Draft soon.