Applied Economics Ph.D. Candidate
South America region
Here you can find different types of projects developed across the South America region.
Basin upstream and downstream links in Colombia
Water quality of a given municipality depends on water quality of municipalities located upstream within the same river network. To account for this relationship in my studies, I developed an expected water quality level index that integrates the water quality of the municipalities upstream from a target municipality using GIS techniques.
To develop this index, I first identify the adjacent downstream micro-watersheds belonging to every micro-watershed using the watershed information provided by the WorldWide Organization. Once the downstream connections across all micro-watersheds are known, it is possible to identify which micro-watersheds are upstream of a target micro-watershed. Then, I made a spatial join to know which municipalities belong to each micro-watershed. With all this information what I have at the end is, for each municipality, the whole range of upstream municipalities and their corresponding water quality.
Software: R, ArcGIS, QGis.
Environmental justice and civil conflict in Colombia
As part of my thesis, I studied the impacts of the Colombian peace treaty on drinking water quality during and after the civil conflict. Several areas of the country became accessible to industry and government, thus affecting both pollution and water treatment capacity. Because municipalities are highly different and spatially grouped in terms of drinking water quality, I used a propensity score matching to create the most balanced treatment and control groups.
Software: Stata, R, ArcGIS, QGis.
Environmental justice in Brazil
I had the opportunity to work with indigenous communities from Brazil. The focus of this project was to advocate for indigenous communities' rights with respect to land access and care of natural resources.
