Essays on development economics

Abstract

This thesis is a collection of three chapters in empirical development economics. The first chapter investigates the impact of the dramatic growth of the fresh-cut flower industry in Colombia on different forms of violence. My empirical strategy exploits variation in the geo-climatic suitability for flowers to understand how export shocks affect violence at the municipality level. I show that flower shocks lead to a differential reduction in unorganized violent crime (homicide rates) in the suitable municipalities, but not to any changes in participation in guerrilla warfare. In contrast, increases in the coffee price are associated with a decrease in civil conflict (as in Dube and Vargas, 2013) but, as I find in this paper, an increase in homicide. I propose a household model where households both participate in and indirectly consume criminal activities (organized and unorganized) and women have different preferences than men, which can explain these asymmetric results. The second chapter studies the relationship between the arrival of employment opportunities in the fresh-cut flower industry and investments in human capital in Colombia. I study how schooling completion and grade enrollment respond to local employment shocks. I show that blooming periods for the flower industry are associated with a differential increase in the probability that a student will graduate from secondary schooling. I do not find evidence of an asymmetrical impact by gender. My results remain robust to different forms of shock aggregation, and accounting for differential trends by municipality characteristics. The third and final chapter uses the fresh-cut flower industry to understand the impact that the access to the export jobs had on the lives of Colombian women. My goal is to understand how flower shocks affect the timing of fertility and marriage decisions for women exposed to them during their adolescence. I find that girls exposed to the flower shocks are more likely to have initiated sexual activity, to be pregnant and married at younger ages. The results remain robust to different forms of shock aggregation, differential trends by municipality characteristics, accounting for migration, and geographically restricting the sample to the departments that concentrate flower production.