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Welcome to my website!

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at American University, writing my dissertation on economic development in Latin America, and an economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. My research explores various topics related to development challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean. More specifically, I focus on issues related to trade, inequality, energy, and productive development.

I have professional experience in economic research and analysis in international organizations (The World Bank, IDB, OECD), central banking (Banco de España), and higher education institutions (AU, EHESS, UAM).

I am a person with a wide range of interests and a multidisciplinary educational background in economics, development studies, and psychology. I hold a MA in Economics from Université Paris VII Diderot, a MA in Development Studies from the University of the Basque Country, a BA in Economics from Autonomous University of Madrid, and a BA in Psychology from the National University of Distance Education.

You can find my CV here.

Publications

• The consumption side of trade shocks: Inequality dynamics and luxury imports (with Vinicius Curti Cícero). Journal of Development Economics 179 (2026).

We study how a large, exogenous trade shock — triggered by China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 — reshaped income, inequality, and import behavior across Brazilian regions. Using a shift-share instrument based on pre-shock export structures, we show that regions more exposed to China’s demand boom experienced faster growth in per capita income and larger increases in within-region inequality relative to less exposed areas. These changes, in turn, led to rising import values and shifts in composition, especially toward consumption and medium- to high-tech manufactured goods. To analyze these shifts, we classify goods by necessity and luxury status using Brazilian household data and introduce a complementary classification based on the spending patterns of high-income households in the United States. Luxury imports rose most in regions that were initially more unequal or experienced sharper post-shock inequality growth, consistent with non-homothetic preferences and broader theories of stratified consumption. Our findings highlight inequality as a key channel through which trade shocks shape regional import demand in developing economies.

• The rise of the middle class and the pattern of consumption imports in Latin America. Structural Change and Economic Dynamics 75 (2025), 464-485.

This paper examines the relationship between the middle class and the pattern of consumption imports in fifteen Latin American economies over the period 1996–2019, which includes the latest commodity boom. The consumption patterns of the middle class, which are likely to be different from those of lower classes, could be reflected in the imports in the case of countries with little diversified productive structures, such as those of Latin America. In the context of highly unequal countries, the middle class may not only consume according to its own preferences, but may also be driven by emulation and status motives. My results show that the middle class has become the main income group driving both aggregate consumption imports and imports disaggregated by product type, including luxury imports. The estimated coefficients are particularly large for the lower-middle class and during the period of the commodity boom, when this income group expanded most rapidly. This finding points to a significant role of the middle class as a determinant of consumption imports and their composition, with implications for the region’s fragile balance of payments dynamics.

Works in progress

• Economic liberalization, industrial policy and manufacturing performance in Mexico.

Mexico is often presented as a successful case of trade liberalization, as the country managed to sustain a significant manufacturing base after liberalization in the mid-1980s. This paper introduces a new dimension to the analysis of manufacturing performance in the country by assessing the role of industrial policy implemented during the pre-liberalization period, known as the import substitution industrialization (ISI) era, in shaping post-liberalization outcomes. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it constructs industry-level measures of industrial policy, including tax subsidies and public credit support, based on primary sources, mainly historical government documents, and develops a harmonized industry classification using data from the Censos Económicos spanning 1970 to 2019. Second, leveraging the vertical and temporal nature of ISI-era industrial policies, it examines their long-term effects in a quasi-experimental setting. In particular, it investigates whether industries that were more exposed to industrial policy during the ISI period experienced superior productivity outcomes in the liberalization and post-liberalization periods compared to less-exposed industries. The findings point to a positive impact of ISI policies on labor productivity across industries in the post-protectionist era. Overall, this paper provides new evidence on the long-term effects of industrial policy and contributes to the scarce empirical literature on ISI in Latin America.

• Import substitution industrialization in Mexico: An industry-level database of industrial policy measures.

• Energy transformation and local economic development: Evidence from renewable energy investments (with Lenin H. Balza and José Belmar).

Pre-doctoral publications

• Heras Recuero, L. and R. Pascual González (2019). Economic growth, institutional quality, and financial development in middle-income countries. Working Papers No. 1937, Banco de España.

• Sastre, T. and L. Heras Recuero (2019). Domestic and foreign investment in advanced economies. The role of industry integration. Working Papers No. 1933, Banco de España.

• Heras Recuero, L. and E. Olaberría (2018). Public spending in education and student performance in Colombia. OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 1460. OECD Publishing, Paris.

• Heras-Recuero, L., L’Hotellerie-Fallois, P. and S. Párraga Rodríguez (2019). La economía de EEUU, diez años después de la crisis. Boletín Económico del ICE, No. 3110. Secretaría de Estado de Comercio, Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo, Madrid.

Other publications

• Osca, A. and L. Heras-Recuero (2024). Actor-partner effects of coping strategies on emotional exhaustion in dual-earner couples. Family Relations, 73(2). 1219-1234.

• Heras Recuero, L. and A. Osca Segovia (2021). Work-family conflict, coping strategies, and burnout: A gender and couple analysis. Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 37(1). 21-28.