How does return migration from the US to Mexico affect local workers? Return migrants increase the local labor supply, potentially hurting local workers. However, having been exposed to a more advanced U.S. economy, they may also carry human capital that benefits non-migrants. Using an instrument based on involuntary return migration, we find that, whereas workers who share returnees’ occupations experience a fall in wages, workers in other occupations see their wages rise. These effects are, however, transitory and restricted to the city-industry receiving the returnees. In contrast, returnees permanently alter a city’s long-run industrial composition, by raising employment levels in the local industries that hire them.

The literature on wage gaps between Chiapas and the rest of Mexico revolves around individual factors, such as education and ethnicity. Yet, twenty years after the Zapatista rebellion, the schooling gap has shrunk while the wage gap has widened, and we find no evidence indicating that Chiapas indigenes are worse-off than their likes elsewhere in Mexico. We explore a different hypothesis and argue that place-specific characteristics condition the choices and behaviors of individuals living in Chiapas and explain persisting income gaps. Most importantly, they limit the necessary investments at the firm level in dynamic capabilities. Based on census data, we calculate the economic complexity index, a measure of the knowledge agglomeration embedded in the economic activities at the municipal level. Economic complexity explains a larger fraction of the wage gap than any individual factor. Our results suggest that the problem is Chiapas, and not Chiapanecos.

We study the effects of local tariff drops for Mexican exports to the US on the local electoral performance of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election. In an effort to appeal to his rural base, AMLO proposed to unilaterally retain tariff exemptions on imported corn and beans, which were scheduled to drop under NAFTA by the end of 2008. This elevated protectionism in the public agenda during the campaign. We find that local economic gains due to export tariff drops under NAFTA between 1994 and 2001 led to a drop in AMLO’s local vote share gains in 2006. These effects are contingent to the 2006 election, as similar effects on local vote for the left are not found in previous or later elections. Results are robust to controls for local grain growing and Chinese competition. We predict that AMLO would have been elected in 2006 had protectionism not been a salient electoral issue. Our findings suggest export access gains due to globalization undermine local political preferences over national protectionist platforms.

This paper studies the unintended economic consequences of increases in violence following the Mexican Drug War. We study the effects on exports in municipalities with different levels of exposure to violence after the policy. A focus on exports allows us to control for demand shocks by comparing exports of the same product to the same country of destination. Building on the close elections identification strategy proposed by Dell (2015), we show that municipalities that are exogenously exposed to the Drug War experience a 40% decrease in export growth on the in- tensive margin. Large exporters suffer larger effects, along with exports of more complex, capital intensive, and skill intensive products. Finally, using firm level data, we provide evidence consistent with violence increasing marginal exporting costs.

Since 2003, the GDP per capita of Tabasco has consistently figured among the 4 largest in the country. However, this level of economic activity has not translated into an equally favorable performance in other social welfare metrics. According to CONEVAL, the Tabasco poverty rate in 2016 was 50.9%, seven percentage points higher than the national rate (43.6%). On the other hand, the average monthly income of the workers of the state is in the 40th percentile of all the states.

This discrepancy can be explained because the mining activity, despite accumulating only 3% of jobs, represents more than 50% of the state's GDP. If we only consider non-oil GDP, we have that the GDP per capita of the state has tended to be located around the country's median, and for 2016 it was in the 30th percentile nationwide.

Este estudio busca identificar las capacidades productivas de Tabasco a partir de un análisis de la composición de sus exportaciones y su empleo basándose en la perspectiva de la complejidad económica. Asimismo, busca identificar productos potenciales que requieran una base de conocimientos productivos similar a la que ya tiene Tabasco y que le permita mejorar su complejidad económica actual y prospectiva.

Para tales efectos, primero se explora la evolución en el tiempo del valor de las exportaciones de Tabasco y la composición de las mismas, así como de los principales productos de exportación. En sentido, se tiene que las exportaciones de Tabasco están determinadas por el sector petrolero. Los envíos de petróleo representan alrededor del 97% de las exportaciones estatales y explican más del 90% del aumento de las exportaciones de la última década.