Jeancarlo Vélez Lebrón

The economic literature on colonial institutions relies primarily on aggregate outcomes measured far from the historical period of interest. Yet the historical record of plantation capitalism consistently emphasizes exploitation and displacement, while recent economic studies tend to find positive aggregate effects. This paper leverages Puerto Rico’s full-count censuses (1910–1950) and a novel firm-level panel to study distributional and short-run effects during the period when the sugar industry was actively operating. The coexistence of U.S.-owned and locally owned mills under the same colonial policy environment makes it possible to ask whether the origin of capital—not just colonial policy—shaped outcomes for surrounding communities.

This paper integrates schools into a Quantitative Spatial Model to provide a tractable framework for evaluating the welfare consequences of school closures. We show that the model admits a sufficient statistics representation in which two measures—School Market Access and Residential Market Access—summarize the spatial equilibrium effects of changes in school accessibility on housing prices, wages, and population. The framework can be taken to data using reduced-form regressions, and we illustrate this using Puerto Rico’s large-scale school consolidation program, in which 44% of public schools were closed between 2007 and 2019.

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.