Jeancarlo Vélez Lebrón

Recent work in economics finds positive long-run effects of colonial investment in export agriculture, while the historical record of Caribbean sugar describes dispossession, coercive labor practices, and a rural population that stayed poor throughout the boom. This project asks whether the two can be reconciled through market structure. Sugar cane is heavy and decays quickly once cut, so mills (centrales) had to process within a local catchment, making each the dominant buyer of labor and raw cane nearby — though the number of accessible mills varied across the island. I digitize Puerto Rico’s full-count censuses (1910–1950) using vision-language models, together with land tax records, the 1935 PRRA agricultural census, and mill-level production records, to examine how foreign colonial investment shaped distributional outcomes in the short and long run.

States and school districts across the US have consolidated schools in response to underused buildings and pressure to reallocate scarce resources. We study over 600 consolidations of public elementary and middle schools in Puerto Rico between 2010 and 2018, asking what determines which schools close and what follows for displaced students and their teachers. Closure decisions appear unrelated to baseline academic performance, with the strongest predictors being low aggregate enrollment and small class sizes. Displaced students leave the public system at higher rates, and, unlike in earlier work, that gap does not close in the years after displacement. Using a matched event study that controls for enrollment histories, we find no persistent effects on math or language test scores. Students displaced from underperforming schools gain, and those gains coincide with access to teachers with higher baseline value added. At receiving schools the two channels offset: displaced peers lower achievement and raise exit, while displaced teachers raise achievement. Together, the results suggest that cost-saving consolidations need not harm achievement when closures happen near adequate alternatives.

We study whether a large-scale management training program for public school principals can improve school management quality and student achievement in Puerto Rico. In a randomized controlled trial covering approximately 845 public schools across the island, we evaluate the effects of an intensive professional development program providing training, workshops, and personalized coaching on key management practices. The staggered design allows us to estimate both short- and medium-run treatment effects, addressing whether management training impacts can be sustained over time.