research

2026

1. Sugar Rush: The Effect of Foreign Direct Investment in Colonial Puerto Rico (1898-1952)

   Jeancarlo Vélez Lebrón

   2026

   Job Market Paper. Work in Progress

   Abs

   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.

2. Improving and Sustaining Management Practices in Public Schools: Evidence from Puerto Rico

   Gustavo Bobonis, Marco González-Navarro, Daniela Scur, and 1 more author

   2026

   Work in Progress

   Abs J-PAL Blog FOS Website

   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.

2025

1. Spatial Consequences of School Closures

   Jeancarlo Vélez Lebrón and Reza Moradi

   2025

   Work in Progress

   Abs Slides

   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.

1. China's Evolving Role in Asian Trade: A Network Approach

   Jeancarlo Vélez Lebrón

   Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto Río Piedras, 2020

   MA Thesis

   Abs PDF

   This paper uses network analysis to examine China's evolving role in world trade in 1995, 2005, and 2014. I construct directed trade networks from a World Input-Output Matrix covering 43 countries and 56 industries, filtering for commercially significant linkages. Using centrality measures—including degree, betweenness, hub, and authority indices—I trace how China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan's positions shifted over two decades. China exhibits large increases across all centrality measures, while other East Asian economies remain stable. Combined with growing network density and diameter, these results suggest China's export-led rise expanded the trade network rather than displacing established regional economies.