About

Marco Gonzalez-Navarro is the George Pardee Jr. Family Chair of International Sustainable Development and an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. His research focuses on issues in Development Economics, Urban Economics, and Political Economy. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, along with a Master's degree in Economic Theory from ITAM and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from ITAM. He currently serves as co-editor at the Journal of Development Economics, associate editor at Regional Science and Urban Economics, and is a member of the editorial board at the Journal of Urban Economics. Additionally, he is affiliated with J-PAL, CEGA, and BREAD.

Research topics

• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Economics
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Local Public Goods and Property Tax Compliance: Experimental Evidence from Street Pavement

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Combating Corruption Reduce Clientelism?

  The Economic Journal · 2025-09-05

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Does combating corruption reduce clientelism? To investigate this question, we focus on a policy that has been widely used across the world: anti-corruption audits. We examine the impact of Brazil’s prominent audit programme on clientelism using a novel survey of rural citizens. Randomised audits reduce politicians’ provision of campaign handouts, decrease citizens’ demands for private goods, and reduce requests fulfilled by politicians. We investigate mechanisms by which audits may reduce clientelism, and find that audits significantly reduce citizens’ willingness to supply clientelistic votes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Irrigation infrastructure and satellite-measured land cultivation impacts: Evidence from the Senegal river valley

  Journal of Development Economics · 2025-09-04 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Expanding irrigation in sub-Saharan Africa is widely viewed as a promising strategy for closing yield gaps and enhancing resilience to climate change. Drawing on more than 3,000 satellite images over a 30-year period, we examine the impact of irrigation infrastructure development in the Senegal River Valley. We find that cultivation rates increase substantially following irrigation project completion. Cultivation rates are remarkably stable at around 25 percentage points above pre-irrigation levels for the first 20 years, and trend even higher from years 20 to 25. Moreover, we show that crops cultivated on irrigated land are significantly less sensitive to both positive and negative temperature shocks, underscoring the role of irrigation in climate adaptation. Despite these aggregate gains, we document considerable heterogeneity in project outcomes, with intermittent land use remaining widespread. To shed light on these patterns, we complement the satellite analysis with farmer survey data, which point to persistent water access constraints as a key barrier to continuous cultivation—constraints that cannot be resolved solely through individual farmer action. • We use over 3000 satellite images to study irrigation infrastructure development. • Cultivation rates increase persistently following irrigation project completion. • Intermittent land use is widespread among irrigation projects. • Farmer survey data point to water access constraints as a barrier to cultivation.

  PublisherDOI

• In-situ Upgrading or Population Relocation? Direct Impacts and Spatial Spillovers of Slum Renewal Policies

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-12-01

  reportOpen access

  Slums are widely viewed as disadvantaged areas characterized by substandard housing and negative neighborhood spillovers that constrain local economic development.Governments typically respond with one of two place-based interventions: (a) in-situ upgrading that improves infrastructure and housing conditions within existing settlements, or (b) relocation of slum households to formal housing elsewhere in the city, freeing valuable urban land for alternative uses.We compare the direct effects and local spatial spillovers of these two approaches in Chile.We construct a 20-year national panel of slum polygons that integrates satellite imagery, census microdata, construction permits, administrative records, crime reports, and property-tax data.Using this dataset, we estimate how each policy affects the physical characteristics of slums and adjacent areas, and whether either intervention shifts the socioeconomic composition of residents.Our empirical strategy relies on Synthetic Difference-in-Differences for causal identification.We find that both policies reduce the share of land devoted to housing within the original slum perimeterin-situ upgrading by reallocating land toward neighborhood infrastructure, and population relocation by reducing the number of slum households and housing structures.However, only insitu upgrading generates durable improvements in housing quality and the socioeconomic status of residents.In addition, upgrading produces substantial positive spillovers in nearby neighborhoods, increasing formal housing investment and reducing crime.Moreover, administrative cost data show that in-situ upgrading is roughly one-third less expensive per household than population relocation, underscoring its greater cost-effectiveness.

  PublisherDOI

• Road maintenance and local economic development: Evidence from Indonesia’s highways

  Journal of Urban Economics · 2024-07-31 · 33 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  This paper estimates the local welfare impacts of highway maintenance investments. We instrument road quality exploiting Indonesia’s two-step budgeting process for allocating funding to local road authorities. Using comprehensive data on road quality from 1990–2007, we find evidence that better roads help manufacturers create new jobs, enabling worker transitions out of informal employment, and increasing labor income. Road quality also changes the cost of living, reducing perishable food prices but also raising housing prices. We estimate the elasticity of household welfare with respect to road quality to be 0.1 and the benefit/cost ratio for road maintenance investments to be 2.3.

  PublisherDOI

• Road Maintenance and Local Economic Development

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Measuring Welfare and Inequality with Incomplete Price Information

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2023 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Econometrics
  • Mathematics

  Abstract We propose and implement a new approach that allows us to estimate income-specific changes in household welfare in contexts where well-measured prices are not available for important subsets of consumption. Using rich but widely available expenditure survey microdata, we show that we can recover income-specific equivalent and compensating variations from horizontal shifts in what we call “relative Engel curves”—as long as preferences fall within the broad quasi-separable class (Gorman 1970, 1976). Our approach is flexible enough to allow for nonparametric estimation at each point of the income distribution. We apply the methodology to estimate inflation and welfare changes in rural India between 1987 and 2000. Our estimates reveal that lower rates of inflation for the rich erased the real income convergence found in the existing literature that uses the subset of consumption with well-measured prices to calculate inflation.

  PublisherDOI

• Rural Roads and Agricultural Value Chains

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-01-11

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Rural Roads and Agricultural Value Chains

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-01-11

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Does Combating Corruption Reduce Clientelism?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Paul Gertler

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  18 shared

• Alberto Chong

  University of the Pacific

  14 shared

• Climent Quintana‐Domeque

  13 shared

• Benjamin Faber

  University of California, Berkeley

  12 shared

• Thibault Fally

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  11 shared

• Dean Karlan

  10 shared

• Gustavo J. Bobonis

  10 shared

• David Atkin

  University of Connecticut

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Princeton University

  2009

Awards & honors

• J-PAL affiliate
• CEGA affiliate
• BREAD affiliate