Juan Ferro

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) under the guidance of José Guerra and Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri.

My work centers on applied microeconomics, using behavioral insights to understand public policy challenges. In particular, I study the effect of social norms and behavioral considerations on risky behaviors.

My job market paper studies the effectiveness of fines at changing socially unwanted behavior, and wether this effect depends on the relative price of those fines. I answer this questions with data from Cameras that give speedint tickets in Bogotá, Colombia. Using the real speed limit as a source of exogeneous variation and a regression discontinuity design, I find that fines do change behavior but only when the price is not too high.

The second chapter of my dissertation studies the effect of institutional legitimacy on the efficacy of legal sanctions. I measure the effect of police scandals on the deterrent capacity of traffic tickets, using Google Trends data and traffic tickets and accidents in Bogotá. I find that drivers that get their first tickets just after a police scandal are 21% morle liekly to be involved in an accident. The thrid chapter studies the effect of norm legitimacy on the deterrence of legal sanctions. I study this in the context of traffic infractions using the Speed Camera program implmeented in Bogotá on 2020 as a case study. I find that speed limits that are too far from what drivers consider legitimate are less effective at reducing accidents.

I also have a career in fiction writing. My novel Economía Experimental won the 2022 National Prize by the Ministry of Culture. It came about in September 2023 in a beautiful edition by angosta editores