Protected Incorporation: Elite Marriage Networks and Political Hierarchy in Peru
Job Market Paper
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Economic expansion can increase the resources of elite families outside the ruling circle leading to demands for political incorporation. Existing research explains why these families seek political access, but not how established elites manage the risks of granting it. I argue that established elites use protected incorporation: they favor families with growing resources that are already connected to them through marriage, while limiting how far they advance politically. I examine this argument in Peru’s República Aristocrática (1895–1919), when export growth increased sugar- and cotton-producing families’ resources and when control of executive appointments shifted from military rulers toward a durable network of established families. I construct an original panel of 3,198 elite families by digitizing and linking executive appointments, tax registries, association memberships, and nearly 6,500 marriage records that identify prior ties to Lima's established elite. A factorial difference-in-differences design compares sugar- and cotton-producing families with and without such ties before and after 1895. Families with ties became substantially more likely to hold positions in the high national bureaucracy but not the presidency or cabinet; those without ties saw no comparable increase. These results show how elites accommodate economic change without ceding political dominance.
Published Articles
Diverse But United. Elites and Public Goods in Early 20th Century Ecuador | Journal of Historical Political Economy (2026)
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What explains variation in public goods provision across local contexts? While existing research often emphasizes mass-level diversity or inequality between elites and citizens, such inequality also reflects a broader pattern: elites typically exerted disproportionate influence over public investment—especially where democratic institutions were weak. This paper examines how internal elite composition shaped public goods provision in early 20th century Ecuador. It argues that elite heterogeneity—measured as the number of distinct elite families within a locality—is associated with higher levels of provision. Using 1908 historical records, I construct a parish-level index of elite heterogeneity from 2,200 elite surnames and match it to a 1914 inventory of state-owned assets, used as a proxy for local public investment. The results show a robust positive relationship between elite heterogeneity and public goods, even after accounting for geography, population, and elite density. Drawing on descriptive evidence of elite networks and institutions, the paper suggests that heterogeneity generates distinct but overlapping interests that are harder to satisfy privately—encouraging public investment, especially where elites are socially or institutionally connected. The findings highlight the political importance of elite heterogeneity and contribute to broader debates on state capacity, elite behavior, and public goods.
A nowcasting model for Ecuador: Implementing a time-varying mean output growth | (with Manuel González-Astudillo). Economic Modelling. (2019).
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We propose a model to nowcast the annual growth rate of real GDP for Ecuador, whose economy lacks timely macroeconomic information for some key variables and has gone through unstable periods due to its dependence on oil exports. Our specification combines monthly information for 30 macroeconomic and financial variables with quarterly information for real GDP in a mixed-frequency approach. Our setup includes a time-varying coefficient on the mean annual growth rate of output to allow the model to incorporate prolonged periods of low or high growth. The model produces more accurate nowcasts of real output growth in pseudo out-of-sample exercises than a nowcasting model that assumes a constant mean real GDP growth rate. We also conduct sensitivity analyses on our nowcasting model within the time-varying mean setup and find that including financial variables can be detrimental to the performance of the proposed model.
Working Papers
When the State Can't Deliver: Land Reform and Long-Term Poverty in Ecuador | Forthcoming, Roots of Underdevelopment, Vol. 2
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This chapter examines the long-term impact of agrarian reforms implemented in Ecuador during the 1960s and 1970s—programs intended to reduce inequality and promote rural development. Using a novel parish-level dataset and an instrumental variable strategy based on the government’s 1973 priority zone designation, the analysis shows that land redistribution under the Second Reform (1975–1978) led to a sizable and statistically significant increase in poverty by 2010—contrary to the reform’s stated goals. This result is robust to controls for baseline poverty (proxied by access to pipe water in 1962) and geographic characteristics such as land suitability. By contrast, the First Reform (1964–1970) shows no significant association with long-term poverty outcomes, including in historically marginalized Huasipungo areas. Additional analyses indicate that neither reform reduced land inequality or improved public goods provision, suggesting limited structural change in affected regions. These findings align with a scenario in which elite resistance and weak state capacity jointly constrained implementation—allowing formal reforms to advance without substantive transformation on the ground. The results underscore the limits of redistribution in settings where institutional weakness and informal elite power undermine state-led change.
Victory, Institutions, and State Formation in Latin America | R&R Journal of Latin American Studies (with Nicholas Gachet)
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War has long stood at the center of explanations of state formation. Classical bellicist accounts emphasize how conflict pressures rulers to extract resources and centralize authority, while recent work on Latin America shows that victory and defeat reshape domestic coalitions and fiscal capacity. Yet war outcomes alone cannot explain why defeat produced fiscal collapse in some states while others recovered. We argue that inherited colonial institutions condition the fiscal consequences of war by shaping the local administrative capacity available to sustain extraction after conflict. Where colonial rule built locally rooted administrative institutions, fiscal systems could continue operating after defeat weakened the central coalition. Where colonial rule left less local administrative capacity, coalition disruption produced deeper fiscal decline. We combine a country-year panel of fourteen Latin American countries from 1865 to 1913 with subnational measures of colonial institutional exposure aggregated to the national level. After defeat, government revenue fell most sharply in countries with the least inherited local administrative capacity, while countries with greater capacity proved more resilient. Railroad construction did not follow the same institutional pattern, consistent with its reliance on foreign concessionaires, external capital, and elite investment incentives. Case studies of Peru, Paraguay, and Colombia examine how inherited capacity moderated the fiscal consequences of war and provide qualitative evidence on how postwar institutional arrangements carried those consequences forward.
Joining the Revolution: Elite Support for Redistributive Movements | (with Ivan San Miguel)
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Economic elites who are excluded from political power, despite holding substantial economic resources, often mobilize against incumbent regimes. Existing accounts trace such elites to industrialization, which creates entirely new economic classes with grievances against the incumbent. We argue that a shock can produce a similar challenger elite without creating any new class, so long as its gains accrue disproportionately to elites already excluded from political power. This gap between economic power and political access gives outsider elites both the incentive and the resources to challenge the incumbent. We test this argument using the Mexican Revolution. We build a shift-share variable that combines changes in American commodity demand during the Second Industrial Revolution with agricultural endowments across Mexican municipalities, and we identify elite revolutionary participation using more than 5,000 biographical entries from a comprehensive historical dictionary. Trade shock intensity strongly predicts elite revolutionary participation in municipalities where local elites had been excluded from political power before the Revolution, but shows no such association where local elites retained access. Post-revolutionary land reform follows the same pattern in reverse: after accounting for geographic and economic conditions, revolutionary governments redistributed export-suitable land at significantly higher rates in states where local elites retained power before the Revolution, a relationship not present in states where local elites had been excluded.
Working Projects
Educational Expansion and Religious School Infrastructure | (with Nicholas Gachet)
Land Reform and the Rise of Cooperatives | (with Nicholas Gachet and Joaquin Endara)
Commodity Booms and the Politics of Abolition: Evidence from Republican Peru | (with Kimberly Renk and Ivan San Miguel)
Book Chapters
Responsabilidad fiscal en economía dolarizada | (with Felipe Hurtado, José Mieles and Diego Guerra). in Política Monetaria y Fiscal: ¿Ha aprendido América Latina a mitigar los efectos de las crisis? SOPLA. (2015). pp. 151-174.
Los desafíos de la educación preescolar, básica y media en Ecuador | (with Sebastián Oleas and José Mieles). in Los Desafíos de Educación Preescolar, Básica y Media en América Latina. SOPLA. (2014). pp. 177-194.
Book Reviews
Review Essay: The Original Sin of Latin American States: Formation, Building and Capacity | (with Raul Aldaz-Pena). Journal of Historical Political Economy. (2025)
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The capacity of the state in Latin America is limited, preventing the implementation of policies to address problems that have been historically necessary (e.g., under-nutrition, poverty, or security). While existing explanations propose that Latin American states emerged weak as a by-product of independence — its original sin — there is no consensus on why low state capacity has persisted in spite of political and economic shocks in the last two centuries that could have been expected to influence state capacity. A research agenda on the long-term determinants of state capacity should be informed by emerging, historically rooted, scholarship on state formation and state building. We review recent publications on these topics with two objectives. First, we provide an analytical synthesis of recent contributions. Second, this synthesis suggests future research on state capacity in the region. In particular, we emphasize the role of elites, geography, institutional dynamics, mid-range theories and methods sensitive to processes and time. We believe that a consideration of these elements can contribute to the development of theory and the integration of state capacity in Latin America, as well as facilitate a more fluid dialogue with literature focused on other parts of the world.