Sanctions and Venezuelan Migration
This paper examines the potential impact of different US economic sanctions policies on Venezuelan migration flows. I consider three possible departures from the current status quo in which selected oil companies are permitted to conduct transactions with Venezuela’s state-owned oil sector: a return to maximum pressure, characterized by intensive use of secondary sanctions, a more…
Scorched Earth Politics and Venezuela’s Collapse
Between 2012 and 2020, Venezuela’s per capita income declined by 71%, the largest peacetime economic contraction documented in the Common Era. I estimate that the severing of the country’s links to global trade and financial markets explains 56% of this contraction. I propose an explanation of Venezuela’s economic collapse as a consequence of the incentives…
Sanctions and Human Development
How much have sanctions, and other politically induced restrictions on economic activity, affected the Venezuelan economy? How much of the country’s decline can be attributed to these causes, as opposed to the more standard causes of poor policies and external shocks? In this paper I offer a quantification of the effect of alternative causes. The…
The Global Seigniorage Duopoly
How much have sanctions, and other politically induced restrictions on economic activity, affected the Venezuelan economy? How much of the country’s decline can be attributed to these causes, as opposed to the more standard causes of poor policies and external shocks? In this paper I offer a quantification of the effect of alternative causes. The…
How Clientelism Works: Evidence from the Barinas Special Election
Published in the World Development Journal Do politicians target the benefits of social programs to party loyalists or to swing voters? Traditional tests of this question are clouded by an identification problem caused by the simultaneity of politician and voter choices to participate in the exchange of assistance for votes. I use the holding of…
Quantifying Venezuela’s Destructive Conflict
How much have sanctions, and other politically induced restrictions on economic activity, affected the Venezuelan economy? How much of the country’s decline can be attributed to these causes, as opposed to the more standard causes of poor policies and external shocks? In this paper I offer a quantification of the effect of alternative causes. The…
Estimating Causal Effects of Sanctions Impacts: What Role for Country-Level Studies?
How much have sanctions, and other politically induced restrictions on economic activity, affected the Venezuelan economy? How much of the country’s decline can be attributed to these causes, as opposed to the more standard causes of poor policies and external shocks? In this paper I offer a quantification of the effect of alternative causes. The…
Sanctions and Imports of Essential Goods: A Closer Look at the Equipo Anova (2021) Results
We revisit the results of Equipo Anova (2021), who claim to find evidence of an improvement in Venezuelan imports of food and medicines associated with the adoption of U.S. financial sanctions towards Venezuela in 2017. We show that their results are consequence of data coding errors and questionable methodological choices, including the use an unreasonable…
Political Growth Collapses
We argue that economic collapses can result from the adoption by political actors of strategies that generate severe negative economic externalities for society. We establish the conditions for political conflict to become economically destructive and develop a diagnostics toolkit to identifywhen income declines are consequence of the breakdown of conflict-management arrangements.When political conflict drives a…
The economic determinants of Venezuela’s hunger crisis
This paper argues that Venezuela’s hunger crisis was caused by the collapse of the country’s import capacity. I show evidence supporting the hypothesis that the key driver of the decrease in caloric intake was the decline of more than nine-tenths in oil revenues, which sparked an economic contraction and forced the economy to undertake massive…
Francisco R. Rodríguez 