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.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Is Voting Transformative? Expanding and Meta-Analyzing the Evidence
Journal Article Political Behavior · September 1, 2023 Voting is the foundational act of democracy. While thousands of studies have treated voting as a dependent variable, comparatively little research has studied voting as an independent variable. Here we flip the causal arrow and explore the effect of exogen ... Full text CiteLearners in cities: Agglomeration and the spatial division of cognition
Journal Article Regional Science and Urban Economics · January 1, 2023 This paper uses new psychometric data to reconsider the composition of cities, the role of sorting in urban learning, and the generation of agglomeration economies more generally. The analysis establishes that individuals in large cities tend to have great ... Full text CiteRacial Disparities in COVID-19 Case Positivity and Social Context: The Role of Housing, Neighborhood, and Health Insurance
Journal Article Housing Policy Debate · August 18, 2022 Full text CiteRecent Grants
Property Sales and Residential Displacement of Black and Hispanic Children in the American South: Implications for School Mobility and Educational Inequality
ResearchCo-Principal Investigator · Awarded by Spencer Foundation · 2023 - 2025NextGenPop -- Recruiting the Next Generation of Scholars into Population Research
Inst. Training Prgm or CMECo Investigator · Awarded by University of Wisconsin - Madison · 2021 - 2025Housing market activity, racial-ethnic inequality in housing insecurity and school success
ResearchCo Investigator · Awarded by William T. Grant Foundation · 2023 - 2024View All Grants