López-Calva, Luis-Felipe

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López-Calva, Luis-Felipe

Poverty Global Practice, The World Bank

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López-Calva, Luis-Felipe, López-Calva, Luis F., Lopez-Calva, Luis Felipe, Lopez-Calva, Luis F.

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Poverty Global Practice, The World Bank

Last updated:October 6, 2025

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Territorial Inequalities: A Note on State Discontinuity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-06) Ceriani, Lidia; Lopez-Calva, Luis F.; Restrepo-Oyola, Samuel David
When the state does not reach with the same effectiveness everybody and everywhere, it creates pockets of exclusions and hampers the opportunities of individuals belonging to the excluded groups to participate fully economically, socially, and politically. This paper develops an index to measure state discontinuity, defined as the uneven presence and responsiveness of the state across the territory. Different layers of capacity, service provision, and responsiveness determine the density of state presence. By examining the discontinuity of the state in 32 developing countries using extensive data sets from the International Integrated Public Use Microdata Series International and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, the paper explores the underlying drivers of this discontinuity and identifies potential policy intervention points.
Growing Vulnerability: What Happened to Europe’s Middle Class in the Course of a Decade ?
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-28) Bussolo, Maurizio; Karver, Jonathan; Lokshin, Michael M.; López-Calva, Luis-Felipe; Torre, Iván
This paper uses a vulnerability-based approach to analyze the evolution of the middle class in Europe between 2005–08 and 2015–18. The analysis reveals that, on average, the income level needed to ensure a low probability of falling into poverty—also understood as the vulnerability threshold—increased between those periods in real terms. This increase correlates with decreases in the size of the middle class in many European countries. In parallel, the composition of the middle class changed, with an increased share of tertiary-educated household heads and a larger share of household heads with managerial and professional occupations. Lastly, the households that were not poor, but not yet middle class, were further from becoming middle class in the second period than in the first period.
Development Acupuncture: The Network Structure of Multidimensional Poverty and Its Implications
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-27) Stojkoski, Viktor; Lopez-Calva, Luis F.; Bolch, Kimberly; Fernandez, Almudena
While development literature has come a long way in conceptualizing and measuring poverty multidimensionally, policy interventions to address it remain trapped in fragmented, sector-specific approaches. One of the main challenges in implementing integrated policy responses to multidimensional poverty reduction is understanding how the different dimensions are interlinked and how they jointly evolve over time. For example, this could require disentangling how a person’s health, education, and standards of living all interact in a dynamic sense. Motivated by economic complexity methods and applications, this paper uses network science to propose two new measures to understand the interconnected structure of multidimensional poverty: the Poverty Space (a network that visualizes the interactions among different indicators of poverty) and Poverty Centrality (a measure of the relative importance of each indicator within this network). Applying these measures to 67 developing countries using data from the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative–United Nations Development Programme Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, the paper finds that the structure of multidimensional poverty networks is similar across countries and stable over time. The findings also show that indicators that are more central in the Poverty Space witness a more significant reduction in the censored headcount ratio over time, compared to peripheral indicators. These results are used to demonstrate how the Poverty Space can be applied in policy: using the forward-looking Policy Priority Inference framework to help guide policy choices. Overall, the paper points to the relevance of using network science methods to help to identify key “nodes” in the structure of multidimensional poverty where applied pressure (targeted interventions) could lead to a greater effect on the system as a whole.
Persistent Misallocation and the Returns to Education in Mexico
(Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the World Bank, 2020-06) Levy, Santiago; López-Calva, Luis F.
Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers’ earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the returns to education. This paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena, because these firms are less intensive in well-educated workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that while the relative supply of workers with more years of schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward less-productive firms has persisted. These two trends have generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker earnings into observable and unobservable firm and individual worker characteristics, and computes a counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen, raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico from taking full advantage of its investments in the education of its workforce.
The Effects of Local Market Concentration and International Competition on Firm Productivity: Evidence from Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-04) Barriga Cabanillas, Oscar; Rodriguez-Castelan, Carlos; Lopez-Calva, Luis Felipe
Although market concentration is one of the main impediments to productivity growth globally, data constraints have limited its analysis to developed countries or cross-country studies based on definitions of market concentration across nations and industries. This paper takes advantage of a database that is unusual by developing-country standards by means of leveraging the richness of five rounds of the Mexican Manufacturing Census between 1994 and 2014. The data allow estimation of the effects of local industry concentration on productivity. The main results show that a decline by 10 points in the Herfindahl-Hirschman index (on a 0-100 scale), a measure of market concentration, explains an increase by 1 percent in the total factor productivity of revenue. Local industry concentration also has heterogeneous effects on productivity across industries, while its impact on productivity varies by level of exposure to international markets. The results here show that the effect of greater exposure to trade offsets and, in most cases, reverses the negative effects of local concentration on productivity. These results are robust to specifications based on the estimation of firm productivity using the panels of establishment data from the 2009 and 2014 rounds of the economic census, to controlling for a proxy of markups, and to the use of alternate indicators of local industry concentration.
Income Inequality and Violent Crime : Evidence from Mexico's Drug War
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06) Enamorado, Ted; López-Calva, Luis-Felipe; Rodriguez Castelan, Carlos; Winkler, Hernán
The relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior), which, combined with rising inequality, increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.
Poverty Convergence in a Time of Stagnation: A Municipal-Level Perspective from Mexico (1992-2014)
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) Ortiz-Juarez, Eduardo; Lopez-Calva, Luis F.; Rodriguez-Castelan, Carlos
This paper exploits a novel municipal-level data set to explore patterns of convergence in income and poverty in Mexico during 1992-2014. The paper finds that, despite a context of overall stagnant economic growth and poverty reduction, there is evidence of income and poverty convergence at the municipal level. The findings suggest that these convergence processes stem from a combination of considerable positive performance among the poorest municipalities and stagnant and deteriorating performance among richer municipalities. Re distributive programs, such as federal transfers to poor municipalities and cash transfers to poor households, seem to have played an important role in driving these results by bolstering income growth among the poorest municipalities, while also inducing progressive changes in the distribution of income.
Persistent Misallocation and the Returns to Education in Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-01) Levy, Santiago; Lopez-Calva, Luis Felipe
Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced macroeconomic stability, an open trade regime, and substantial progress in education. Yet average workers' earnings have stagnated, and earnings of those with higher schooling have fallen, compressing the earnings distribution and lowering the returns to education. This paper argues that distortions that misallocate resources toward less-productive firms explain these phenomena, because these firms are less intensive in well-educated workers compared with more-productive ones. It shows that while the relative supply of workers with more years of schooling has increased, misallocation of resources toward less productive firms has persisted. These two trends have generated a widening mismatch between the supply of, and the demand for, educated workers. The paper breaks down worker earnings into observable and unobservable firm and individual worker characteristics, and computes a counterfactual earnings distribution in the absence of misallocation. The main finding is that in the absence of misallocation average earnings would be higher, and that earnings differentials across schooling levels would widen, raising the returns to education. A no-misallocation path is constructed for the wage premium. Depending on parameter values, this path is found to be rising or constant, in contrast to the observed downward path. The paper concludes arguing that the persistence of misallocation impedes Mexico from taking full advantage of its investments in the education of its workforce.
Pro-Growth Equity: A Policy Framework for the Twin Goals
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-11) Lopez-Calva, Luis F.; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos
Growth is an important channel for poverty reduction. Policies to make growth more "inclusive" have permeated the development debate and "pro-poor growth" has been the subject of a wide range of papers in the literature, including issues related to measurement, modeling, and policy. However, the analytical and particularly empirical literature to support the idea that equity-enhancing policies have a positive effect on growth is more scarce and limited, especially on the potential policy links. This paper proposes a simple conceptual framework to identify the main elements that contribute to the income generation of households, building on the notion that growth can be seen partly as the aggregate outcome of the income generation capacity of households. The framework relies on an asset-based approach, and offers insights on how a more equitable distribution of assets and opportunities for their productive use can feed back into higher growth in the long term. Using this framework, the paper links the World Bank's twin goals to specific policy channels that have direct impacts on the income generation capacity of households, with a particular focus on households at the bottom of the income distribution. The four key policy channels include (i) implementing equitable, efficient and sustainable fiscal policy and macroeconomic management, (ii) strengthening fair and transparent institutions capable of delivering quality basic services, (iii) enabling well-functioning markets, and (iv) establishing adequate risk management instruments at the macro and household levels.
Income Inequality and Violent Crime: Evidence from Mexico’s Drug War
(Elsevier, 2016-05) Enamorado, Ted; López-Calva, Luis F.; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos; Winkler, Hernán
The goal of this paper is to examine the effect of inequality on crime rates in a unique context, Mexico's drug war. The analysis exploits an original dataset containing inequality and crime statistics on more than 2000 Mexican municipalities over a 20-year period. To uncover the causal effect of inequality on crime, we use an instrumental variable for the Gini coefficient that combines the initial income distribution at the municipality level with national trends. Our estimates indicate that a one-point increment in the Gini coefficient between 2007 and 2010 translates into an increase of more that 36% in the number of drug-related homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. The fact that the effect found during the drug war is substantially greater is likely caused by the rise in rents to be extracted through crime and an expansion in the employment opportunities in the illegal sector through the proliferation of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), accompanied by a decline in legal job opportunities and a reduction in the probability of being caught given the resource constraints faced by the law enforcement system. Combined, the latter factors made the expected benefits of criminal activity shift in a socially undesirable direction after 2007.