Electricity Subsidies and Firm Performance in Argentina

I joined this project on Argentina’s electricity subsidies well after it was underway. The team had already built a strong case for how subsidies shaped firm-level electricity consumption, but only for the province of Tucumán. My first job was to catch up: understand the economics of energy subsidies, the identification strategy already in place, and where the analysis could go next.

Drawing on my background in open data ecosystems across Latin America, I saw an opportunity the existing dataset didn’t capture: a nationwide one. I sourced, cleaned, and structured firm-level and regulatory data covering every province in Argentina, building the dataset from scratch and pairing it with the firm-level data the team already had. That let us move the analysis from a single province to the whole country, and opened up new identification strategies: comparing high- versus low-intensity industries, and high- versus low-consumption firms, among others.

As the project moved forward, I coordinated the data management and research pipeline day to day, managing iterative research cycles across multiple econometric specifications, robustness checks, and design adjustments. I contributed directly to the identification work: building the figures for the paper, running additional analyses, and interpreting results together with the professor leading the project.

I also documented the work as we went, fully commented analytical scripts, data visualization outputs, and technical memoranda that laid out our methodological decisions clearly, both for the research team and for broader audiences following the project.