New published paper: Beliefs, information sharing, and mental health care use among university students
This paper introduces a database of electoral precinct-level election returns for Mexican municipal elections between 1994 and 2019. This database includes: (i) electoral precinct-level votes for each electoral coalition, the coalitions of the incumbent mayor and incumbent state governor, and the four most popular political parties; (ii) electoral precinct-level valid and total votes, the number of registered voters, and turnout; (iii) the partisan composition and municipal-level votes of the incumbent and runner-up electoral coalitions from the previous election; and (iv) the partisan composition of the state-level incumbent governor. This paper outlines the organization of this data, its sources, and key variables, and describes the processes used to standardize the data. This database has the potential to support the cross-sectional and longitudinal study of local Mexican elections over two decades using fine-grained precinct-level electoral returns that enable panel and regression discontinuity analyses.
This paper investigates the role of beliefs and stigma in shaping students’ use of professional mental health services at a large private university in Mexico, where supply-side barriers are minimal and services are readily accessible. In a survey experiment with 680 students, we find that nearly 50% of students in distress do not receive professional mental health support despite a high level of awareness and perceived effectiveness, constituting a substantial treatment gap. We document stigmatized beliefs and misconceptions correlated with the treatment gap. As three-quarters of students incorrectly believe that those in distress perform worse academically and that the majority of students going to therapy are in severe distress, we implement an information intervention to correct these beliefs. We find that it increases students’ sharing of on-campus mental health resources with peers and encourages them to recommend these resources when advising a friend in distress. Interestingly, we find that it lowers respondents’ willingness to pay for private therapy at the end of the intervention. Yet, this effect does not translate into a long-run reduction in self-reported therapy use 6 months after the experiment, with prior therapy users showing increased off-campus take-up.
This paper analyzes wage dynamics in Mexico from a structural perspective, exploring how digital skills, work experience, and geographical location influence workers’ earnings. Using microdata from the National Employment and Occupation Survey (ENOE), an econometric model based on Mincer equations was employed, extended through a Seemingly Unrelated Regressions (SUR) methodology, to identify key factors.