IRVIN ROJAS 
Professor and researcher
​cide - santa fe

New paper!

​SHORT BIO
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Can Hope Elevate Microfinance? Evidence from Oaxaca, Mexico, in Oxford Economic Papers
In collaboration with a microfinance lender in Mexico, we produced a documentary featuring successful borrowers within the organization and designed and implemented a hope curriculum rooted in positive psychology (Snyder, 1994), which conceptualizes hope as aspirations, agency, and pathways. We find that the intervention modestly increased indices measuring both aspirational hope and microenterprise performance over this time period. The intervention significantly increased employment and plans to hire new employees. Increases in microenterprise sales and profits were positive but statistically insignificant.
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I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the  Center for Research and Teaching in Economics  (CIDE in Spanish) at Mexico City. I received my Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Davis.  I am also a Faculty Associate at Cornell University's DEEP-GREEN-RADAR and TREESPEAR research groups, where I previously held a Visiting Fellow appointment.

My research expertise is at the intersection of development economics and econometric methods. I use econometrics to analyze phenomena in the context of economies with market failures, weak institutions, and government interventions. In my research, I combine traditional evaluation methods with other less-standard tools and approaches (such as local economy impact models, dynamic models of strategic interactions, spatial econometrics, among others).

At CIDE I teach the undergraduate course on Microeconometrics, a graduate course on Econometrics, and the graduate course on Impact Evaluation. I also co-lead the Thesis Seminar for master's students.
 
​I have worked as consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. I hold a bachelor's degree in Agricultural Economics from Universidad Autónoma Chapingo and a master's degree in Economics from El Colegio de México.