Overview
Marcos A. Rangel is an applied microeconomist. His research focuses on the patterns of accumulation of human capital with particular attention to the intra-family decision process (parents and children), to the impact of policies to foment education and health, and to racial differentials. His research has contributed to a better understanding of how the negotiations between mother and fathers, and also how families insert themselves into societies, influence the allocation of resources towards investment in human capital of children.
Recent projects branched out in investigating the impact of prenatal care policies and maternal labor regulations over child outcomes, focusing on the innovative use of data to infer causal effects of policies. Current work takes advantage of a satellite pictures of areas in which agricultural activities rely on the use of fires to compute the impact of agricultural development, environmental regulation and business cycles over health outcomes of infants and mothers-to-be.
Rangel is a research affiliate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Population Research Center at NORC/University of Chicago, and the Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI). He is also an associate editor of The Journal of Development Economics.