Jenny Guardado
Biographic Data
| ID | 1101680 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jenny Guardado |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jenny |
| FAMILY NAME | Guardado |
| SIGNATURE | GUARDADO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1366-1206 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 140 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Venal Origins of Development in Spanish America
Venal Origins is a comparative and historical study of the roots of spatial inequalities in Spanish America. The book focuses on the Spanish colonial administration and the 18th-century practice of office-selling-where colonial positions were exchanged for money-to analyze its lasting impact on local governance, regional disparities, and economic development. Drawing on three centuries of rich archival and administrative data, it demonstrates how…
The seasonality of conflict
This paper uses one of the largest changes to labor demand in developing countries—harvest—to examine how the returns to fighting vs. working impact the intensity of conflict. Exploiting the exogenous allocation and timing of harvest across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, we find that the onset of harvest reduces the number of insurgent attacks by between 6 and 21%. This is not due to changes in local temperature or rainfall, to name a few possi…
Deliberation and Ethical Voting Behavior: Evidence from a Campaign Experiment in Benin
The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters' political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign-that is, one-way communication of t…
Shock Persistence and the Study of Armed Conflict: Empirical Biases and Some Remedies
Poor employment prospects for potential insurgents are often thought to increase the intensity of armed conflict. A large empirical literature tries to identify the strength of this “opportunity cost” channel, in part by regressing conflict on commodity price shocks that affect the demand for workers. In this research note we develop a theoretical framework to interpret these empirical results. We argue that because commodity price shocks are usu…
Do gifts buy votes? Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America
Hierarchical Oversight and the Value of Public Office: Evidence from Colonial Peru
The article examines how different appointment mechanisms, namely, office selling, impacted the performance of government officials in colonial Peru. Results show that entry by sales into the audiencia—a high-level institution with provincial oversight duties—worsened local governance in at least two ways: first, it led to a surge in the value of provincial positions, which capture the (illicit) returns from office. Second, it increased the likel…
The long-run influence of institutions governing trade: Evidence from smuggling ports in colonial Mexico
The Promise and Peril of Peacekeeping Economies
Contemporary United Nations (UN) peacekeeping deployments commonly pursue both security and economic objectives, but the existing scholarly literature contains hardly any systematic assessments of peacekeeping missions' economic effects. We address this issue in two ways. First, we use cross-country data to show that UN peacekeeping missions are large-scale economic interventions. They stimulate demand in depressed economic environments; we find …
Land tenure, price shocks, and insurgency: Evidence from Peru and Colombia
Do electoral handouts affect voting behavior
Office-Selling, Corruption, and Long-Term Development in Peru
The paper uses a unique hand-collected dataset of the prices at which the Spanish Crown sold colonial provincial governorships in seventeenth and eighteenth century Peru to examine the impact of colonial officials on long-run development. Combining provincial characteristics with exogenous variation in appointment criteria due to the timing of European wars, I first show that provinces with greater extraction potential tended to fetch higher pric…
Peacekeeping, Compliance with International Norms, and Transactional Sex in Monrovia, Liberia
United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses…
Peacekeeping, Compliance with International Norms, and Transactional Sex in Monrovia, Liberia
United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses…
Do electoral handouts affect voting behavior
Office-Selling, Corruption, and Long-Term Development in Peru
The paper uses a unique hand-collected dataset of the prices at which the Spanish Crown sold colonial provincial governorships in seventeenth and eighteenth century Peru to examine the impact of colonial officials on long-run development. Combining provincial characteristics with exogenous variation in appointment criteria due to the timing of European wars, I first show that provinces with greater extraction potential tended to fetch higher pric…
The Promise and Peril of Peacekeeping Economies
Contemporary United Nations (UN) peacekeeping deployments commonly pursue both security and economic objectives, but the existing scholarly literature contains hardly any systematic assessments of peacekeeping missions' economic effects. We address this issue in two ways. First, we use cross-country data to show that UN peacekeeping missions are large-scale economic interventions. They stimulate demand in depressed economic environments; we find …
Land tenure, price shocks, and insurgency: Evidence from Peru and Colombia
Do gifts buy votes? Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America
The seasonality of conflict
This paper uses one of the largest changes to labor demand in developing countries—harvest—to examine how the returns to fighting vs. working impact the intensity of conflict. Exploiting the exogenous allocation and timing of harvest across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, we find that the onset of harvest reduces the number of insurgent attacks by between 6 and 21%. This is not due to changes in local temperature or rainfall, to name a few possi…
The long-run influence of institutions governing trade: Evidence from smuggling ports in colonial Mexico
Deliberation and Ethical Voting Behavior: Evidence from a Campaign Experiment in Benin
The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters' political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign-that is, one-way communication of t…
Shock Persistence and the Study of Armed Conflict: Empirical Biases and Some Remedies
Poor employment prospects for potential insurgents are often thought to increase the intensity of armed conflict. A large empirical literature tries to identify the strength of this “opportunity cost” channel, in part by regressing conflict on commodity price shocks that affect the demand for workers. In this research note we develop a theoretical framework to interpret these empirical results. We argue that because commodity price shocks are usu…
Hierarchical Oversight and the Value of Public Office: Evidence from Colonial Peru
The article examines how different appointment mechanisms, namely, office selling, impacted the performance of government officials in colonial Peru. Results show that entry by sales into the audiencia—a high-level institution with provincial oversight duties—worsened local governance in at least two ways: first, it led to a surge in the value of provincial positions, which capture the (illicit) returns from office. Second, it increased the likel…
Peacekeeping, Compliance with International Norms, and Transactional Sex in Monrovia, Liberia
United Nations policy forbids its peacekeepers and other personnel from engaging in transactional sex (the exchange of money, favors, or gifts for sex), but we find the behavior to be very common in our survey of Liberian women. Using satellite imagery and GPS locators, we randomly selected 1,381 households and randomly sampled 475 women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Using an iPod in private to preserve the anonymity of their responses…
Land tenure, price shocks, and insurgency: Evidence from Peru and Colombia
Do electoral handouts affect voting behavior
Office-Selling, Corruption, and Long-Term Development in Peru
The paper uses a unique hand-collected dataset of the prices at which the Spanish Crown sold colonial provincial governorships in seventeenth and eighteenth century Peru to examine the impact of colonial officials on long-run development. Combining provincial characteristics with exogenous variation in appointment criteria due to the timing of European wars, I first show that provinces with greater extraction potential tended to fetch higher pric…
The Promise and Peril of Peacekeeping Economies
Contemporary United Nations (UN) peacekeeping deployments commonly pursue both security and economic objectives, but the existing scholarly literature contains hardly any systematic assessments of peacekeeping missions' economic effects. We address this issue in two ways. First, we use cross-country data to show that UN peacekeeping missions are large-scale economic interventions. They stimulate demand in depressed economic environments; we find …
The long-run influence of institutions governing trade: Evidence from smuggling ports in colonial Mexico
Do gifts buy votes? Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America
Hierarchical Oversight and the Value of Public Office: Evidence from Colonial Peru
The article examines how different appointment mechanisms, namely, office selling, impacted the performance of government officials in colonial Peru. Results show that entry by sales into the audiencia—a high-level institution with provincial oversight duties—worsened local governance in at least two ways: first, it led to a surge in the value of provincial positions, which capture the (illicit) returns from office. Second, it increased the likel…
Shock Persistence and the Study of Armed Conflict: Empirical Biases and Some Remedies
Poor employment prospects for potential insurgents are often thought to increase the intensity of armed conflict. A large empirical literature tries to identify the strength of this “opportunity cost” channel, in part by regressing conflict on commodity price shocks that affect the demand for workers. In this research note we develop a theoretical framework to interpret these empirical results. We argue that because commodity price shocks are usu…
The seasonality of conflict
This paper uses one of the largest changes to labor demand in developing countries—harvest—to examine how the returns to fighting vs. working impact the intensity of conflict. Exploiting the exogenous allocation and timing of harvest across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, we find that the onset of harvest reduces the number of insurgent attacks by between 6 and 21%. This is not due to changes in local temperature or rainfall, to name a few possi…
Deliberation and Ethical Voting Behavior: Evidence from a Campaign Experiment in Benin
The article provides experimental evidence of the effect of candidate-citizen town-hall meetings on voters' political behavior. The intervention took place prior to the March 2011 elections in Benin and involved 150 randomly selected villages. In the treatment group, candidates held town-hall meetings where voters deliberated over their electoral platforms. The control group was exposed to the standard campaign-that is, one-way communication of t…
The Venal Origins of Development in Spanish America
Venal Origins is a comparative and historical study of the roots of spatial inequalities in Spanish America. The book focuses on the Spanish colonial administration and the 18th-century practice of office-selling-where colonial positions were exchanged for money-to analyze its lasting impact on local governance, regional disparities, and economic development. Drawing on three centuries of rich archival and administrative data, it demonstrates how…
Political science (11 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Development economics (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Colonialism (4 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (4 works) · Public Administration (4 works) · Public Administration (4 works)