Gustavo Tovar Albuquerque
Research Area
Education
Universidade Federal Fluminense (BA) 2009-2013
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (Masters) 2014-2016
University of British Columbia (PhD) 2017-2023 (expected)
About
I am an Applied Microeconomist with interests at the intersection of crime, political economy, and history. My research employs historic and administrative data to understand determinants and consequences of crime and political repression. In particular, my job market paper studies the long term impact of large scale temporary violence in long term homicide rates.
I am on the 2022-2023 Job Market for Economics.
Research
Job Market Paper
This paper studies the long term impact of large scale temporary violence in long term homicide rates. I analyze the case of Guatemala’s civil war massacres and assemble data on their locations and homicides between 2016-2019, to test whether there is association between the two. I find that highly victimized municipalities have fewer homicides today. Exploring precipitation variation as an instrument for massacres, I provide evidence that such relation is causal. Generalized trust is also higher in municipalities with more massacres, suggesting a mechanism connecting past violence and present peace through increased local cohesion.
[go to paper]
Work In Progress
Following a policy of increased repression to drug trade, Mexico experienced a large increase in violence (drug war) since 2007. However, not the whole country was equally affected and a large gap opened between majority indigenous and non-majority indigenous municipalities' homicide rates since then. In this paper, I show that the presence of a indigenous majority prevented a increase in homicide rates. Municipalities with that characteristic were less likely to have the presence of a major Drug Trade Organization and their inhabitants were less likely to be imprisoned by drug-trade related crimes. Finally, I show that within indigenous majority municipalities, the ones with autonomous institutions are the ones with less homicides, less DTO presence and less imprisonment for drug-trade related offenses.
This project explore police archives produced at a time when Guatemala had an authoritarian government fighting a leftist insurrection. I am leveraging recent machine learning developments (eg. OCR, Topic Modelling) to transcribe the whole police archive, organize it and quantify its contents in an automated and easily replicable way. In the next months, I will investigate how much police effort was directed to different goals, like combating robbery or repressing political dissent. Additionally, I will research how this effort varied with time and space, and whether this variation was correlated with the political changes Guatemala went through the studied period (1980-1990).
Awards
2022 Centre for Innovative Data in Economics Research (CIDER) Small Grants in Innovative Data
2017-2021 Graduate Support Initiative (GSI) Fellowship
2017-2018 Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC/CIDE) Fellowship
2018 Best PhD Student in 1st Year: Macroeconomics
2014-2016 National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) Fellowship
2013 Best Student (Láurea Acadêmica) at UFF’s Economics Major
2005 Brazilian Public Schools’ Math Olympiad (OBMEP) Honorable Mention (13th place)
Teaching
Corpus Christi College
- Instructor – Principles of Microeconomics (2022)
University of British Columbia
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis (2022)
- Instructor – Economics Refresher Course for International Relations Majors (2022)
- Teaching Assistant – Principles of Microeconomics (2022)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomics II (2021)
- Teaching Assistant – Advanced Empirical Methods for International Economics (2021)
- Teaching Assistant – Principles of Microeconomics (2021)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis (2020)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomics I (2020)
- Teaching Assistant – Economics Analysis of Law (2020)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis I (2019)
- Teaching Assistant – Introduction to Econometrics I (2019)
- Teaching Assistant – Principles of Microeconomics (2019)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis I (2018)
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis (2018)
- Teaching Assistant – Economics of The Environment (2018)
Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro
- Teaching Assistant – Microeconomics I (MA) (2015)
Universidade Federal Fluminense
- Teaching Assistant – Intermediate Microeconomics I (2012)
- Teaching Assistant – Differential Calculus I (2011)
- Teaching Assistant – Differential Calculus II (2011)