Working Papers

Kinship systems have played a central role in defining individuals' positions within indigenous societies. This paper studies the evolution of the kinship system of Chile's Mapuche people since their forced settlement. The results reveal that patrilineal inheritance, a key component of Mapuche's kinship system, has been significantly eroded. Nevertheless, the status of lineages has persisted across generations: members of lineages whose heads held prominent positions a century ago have a higher relative status today. These results illustrate that status can persist even when key components of the social structure that gave rise to it do not.

This paper focuses on how policy supporting the expansion of forest plantation has transformed the homeland of the largest indigenous group in Chile, the Mapuche. It presents the first decadal estimates of land cover since 1973 in a region that contains most Mapuche reservations to study how plantation forests have transformed Mapuche's landscape in the past four decades. The proposed CNN-RNN deep learning architecture successfully combines low resolution satellite imagery from the 1970s with modern contemporary satellite imagery to deliver state-of-the-art decadal land-cover maps. The results reveal that plantations sharply increased in the proximity of reservations since 1973. A large share has replaced native vegetation from which Mapuche benefited.

This paper provides experimental evidence that audit threats from Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) deter non-essential and potentially wasteful year-end spending by government agencies. One hundred randomly selected public agencies in Chile received a letter from the head of Chile's SAI two weeks before the end of thefiscal year, with instructions on year-end spending accounting and an audit threat. The intervention had a signicant impact: treated agencies reduced year-end aggregate procurement spending by 33% relative to controls. Purchases of office supplies, safety equipment, personal care products, and paper products largely explain this reduction, a result consistent with wasteful year-end spending. We also find that the decrease in year-end spending was smaller for agencies with at least one top manager appointed by Chile's Civil Service. We rationalize both findings with a simple model where the manager of an agency has an `empire building' motive.

In this paper, we develop and test a conceptual framework to link diversity in small-scale communities and local resource management, intended as the ability of a community to protect common resources. Diversity could reduce this ability by its adverse impact on the potential for collective action and the extent of individual attachment to the community. Using geocoded data on 1,600 Grade-3 gas leaks in 2016 across Boston and Cambridge, we show that block groups displaying higher degrees of ethno-racial and linguistic fractionalization in the most recent Census and American Community Survey enjoy a lower share of reparations of the local pool of leaks. In particular, the more robust and conservative estimates imply that moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile of the linguistic fractionalization distribution is associated with a decrease in the reparation share by 6.3 percentage points, compared to the baseline average of 3.7%. We address a number of empirical challenges inherent to the spatial nature of our data by estimating models at the leak level and accounting for spatial autocorrelation. Although we are able to confirm, through quantitative and qualitative evidence, that more fractionalized communities appear to be less endowed with social capital and individual attachment, measures of these concepts do not explain away the baseline results. We conclude by discussing possible reasons for this puzzle in the form of alternative mechanisms and other challenges to our approach.