Industrial policies are increasingly used to attract investment and create employment. Yet, these policies have often failed to deliver employment growth: beneficiary firms expand, but these gains do not necessarily translate into aggregate employment gains. In this paper, I provide novel evidence on this divergence using Colombia’s Free Economic Zones (FEZs), a place-based industrial policy that provides tax incentives to firms operating in designated areas. Combining the universe of zones with firm-, worker-, and municipality-level data, I use a difference-in-differences design that exploits the staggered opening of new zones. The absence of aggregate employment gains masks a reallocation of workers across firms and toward informality, which increases by roughly five percentage points. The policy increased production and profits among beneficiary firms while raising their demand for high-skilled workers. To meet this growing demand, large firms and FEZ beneficiaries offered higher wages to attract skilled workers already employed by other formal firms, consistent with a limited local supply of skilled labor. This upward wage pressure spread across local labor markets: smaller and less productive formal firms faced rising labor costs and became more likely to exit. I provide suggestive evidence that low-skilled workers displaced by these firm exits moved into informal employment. These results highlight skill scarcity as a mechanism behind jobless industrialization: labor can be abundant in aggregate but scarce at the margin demanded by industrial policy.

SPANDE 2026*, European Development Economics Group (EDEG) Conference 2026, EAYE 2026, CSAE Oxford 2026, LACEA 2025, UNU-WIDER Seminar, JDD Job Market 2025, Helsinki Economics Group Development Seminar, LSE Workshop of Early Career Women in Economic Geography and Spatial Economics, IFS-UCL-LSE/STICERD Development Seminar, HEC PhD Seminar 2025, Junior Workshop ENS de Lyon 2024, LAGV 2024, Konstanz Brown Bag Seminar, Urban Economic Association Summer School 2024, QMUL Workshop 2024, AMSE PhD Seminar.

Domestic violence against women and children is persistent worldwide. This paper examines Bogotá’s Care Blocks, a place-based care infrastructure policy that provides free integrated services to women who perform unpaid domestic and care work, as well as the dependents in their care, mainly children. Using the staggered rollout of Care Blocks across neighborhoods, along with variation in households’ proximity to the centers, we estimate the causal effect of access to care infrastructure on domestic violence incidents using a difference-in-differences framework and administrative records. We find that exposure to Care Blocks reduces domestic violence by 22%, driven by declines in intimate partner violence (IPV) and violence against children (VAC). To shed light on the potential mechanisms, we exploit survey data to show that exposure to Care Blocks services likely reduces time spent with potential perpetrators at home by shifting daily routines. We find that women are more likely to enroll in educational and training programs, while children spend more time in leisure activities such as sports and recreation. Our findings suggest that public investments in care infrastructure generate substantial welfare and social returns, and that place-based care policies can offer an effective, scalable approach to preventing domestic violence in developing countries.

LISER Gender and Economics Workshop*, AMSE DEVPOL Informal Seminar.

Developing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies requires access to data, yet little is known about the economic forces that shape firms’ access to commercially valuable data. This paper studies whether access to foreign markets contributes to AI innovation by expanding firms’ access to data generated through interactions with foreign customers. We combine firm-level financial information from CMIE Prowess, patent records from the Indian Patent Office, and newly developed crosswalks linking firms’ products and services to detailed trade classifications. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in foreign demand through a shift-share design, we find that stronger export opportunities increase both the probability and intensity of AI patenting and are accompanied by higher expenditure on data-related activities. To examine whether commercially generated data constitute the underlying mechanism, we exploit the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which increased the costs of collecting and processing customer data while leaving firms’ access to foreign markets largely unchanged. Firms with greater pre-existing exposure to the European Union experienced a decline in AI patenting intensity following the GDPR, despite showing little evidence of changes in exports or broader firm performance. Our findings indicate that commercially generated data are an important mechanism through which access to foreign markets fosters AI innovation.

Presentations (* by co-author): ETSG Athens (2024), U Bologna (2025), AMSE (*2026).