MACRO Seminar: Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Vancouver School of Economics

Speaker

Professor Felipe Valencia Caicedo, Vancouver School of Economics 

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia, in Canada. My primary research interests are in Economic History, Development Economics and Political Economy. My current research on historical conflict is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

I am also a Research Affiliate of CEPR (EH, POE and Preventing Conflict) , the Kiel Institute and IZA, a member of the Editorial Board of the Economic History of Developing Regions journal,  the Scientific Committee of RIDGE and co-head of the LACEA-EHN.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from UPF in 2015 through the EDP (visiting the LSE). My dissertation, supervised by Hans-Joachim Voth was awarded the Enrique Fuentes Quintana prize for best thesis in the Social Sciences in Spain.  Before joining the VSE I worked at the Department of Economics and the Macrohistory Lab at Bonn University. I have visited Brown and Harvard's Economics Departments.

Here are my pages at the VSE, IDEAS, SSRN and Google Scholar.

Title

“Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire”

Abstract

We study the fiscal and political consequences of state modernization in the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America. We focus on the introduction of a new corps of provincial governors called intendants in the late 18th century. Leveraging the staggered adoption of the reform and administrative fiscal microdata, we show that the intendancy system sizably increased Crown revenue by strengthening state presence in the periphery and disrupting local elite capture. Politically, the reform reduced rebellions by previously exploited indigenous peoples. However, naming patterns reveal that the intendants heightened anti-Spanish sentiment among Creole elites, plausibly contributing to the nascent independence movement.

Keywords: State Capacity, Taxation, Bureaucracy, Conflict, Elites, Colonialism, Independence, Latin America

JEL Classification: D73, D74, H71, N46, P48