Faculty News
March 05, 2025
Maria Micaela Sviatschi, assistant professor of economics and public affairs, wins 2025 Sloan Award
Maria Micaela Sviatschi, assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, has been named a 2025 recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship for early career researchers.
Sloan Research Fellows are selected annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and represent “the most promising early-career scientists working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada,” per the Sloan Fellowship site. Sviatschi is one of four Princeton faculty to receive the award this year.
Sviatschi is a microeconomist working at the intersection of Political Economy and Development. She studies how individuals’ lives and well-being are shaped by the presence of non-state violence—a common threat across many parts of the developing world—and seeks to identify policies to reduce exposure to non-state violence. Her work spans three continents (Latin America, SubSaharan Africa, and South Asia) and combines innovative data with frontier empirical methods. One area of her research explores how children start a criminal career in drug trafficking and gangs, and the consequences of organized crime on economic development and state capacity. Another studies the role of norms and policing in reducing gender-based violence through various randomized control trials. Sviatschi received her bachelor’s degree in economics from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires and her Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in New York.
Taking the Path Less Traveled
“It’s great to see the Sloan Fellowship recognize Mica’s important work. She has done groundbreaking research furthering our understanding of the economics of crime and violence, particularly the causes and consequences of organized crime in low and middle-income countries,” said Thomas Fujiwara, associate professor of economics at Princeton University and one of Sviatschi’s mentors. “These are hugely important issues affecting the lives of millions of people, but they had received relatively little attention from economists. Her rigorous empirical work uses data from multiple sources, spanning administrative data to randomized trials and fieldwork in places that most social scientists would find too dangerous.”
In a
study on exposure to illegal labor markets in childhood, Sviatschi shows that this exposure leads to an increase of children starting down the criminal path. Using the timing of US anti-drug policies, Sviatschi shows that “when the return to illegal activities increases in coca suitable areas in Peru, parents increase the use of child labor for coca farming, putting children on a criminal life path.” By using administrative records, Sviatschi also shows that “affected children are about 30% more likely to be incarcerated for violent and drug-related crimes as adults.”
Another
study evaluates the impact of an innovative police patrol program on sexual harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad, India. Sviatschi and her co-authors implemented a novel, high-frequency observation exercise to measure sexual harassment at 350 hotspots, where enumerators took note of all observed instances of sexual harassment and women’s responses in real time. “We find that although police patrols had no impact on overall street harassment, the visible policing patrols reduced severe forms of harassment (forceful touching, intimidation) by 27 percent and reduced the likelihood of women leaving the hotspot due to sexual harassment.”
The Work Continues
“I am thrilled to hear the news about receiving the Sloan nomination. When the department informed me of my nomination, I felt deeply honored,” said Sviatschi. “I am incredibly grateful for the support from my Princeton colleagues. Being one of the Sloan recipients is not just a significant acknowledgment of my work; it also a recognition to the critical importance of advancing research on reducing the expansion of criminal organizations and developing policies to combat gender-based violence—areas where we still have much to learn.”
Reflecting on Sviatschi’s history of groundbreaking research, Ilyana Kuziemko, the Theodore A. Wells ’29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University and one of Sviatschi’s mentors, shared, “I still remember quite vividly the first time Mica presented her work at Princeton, when she was still a graduate student at Columbia. The whole room was captivated.” She continued, “I’ve long admired Mica for her independence as a researcher. She’s really blazed her own path and I can’t think of another, more senior, researcher that she reminds me of. She’s unique and we are so lucky to have her at Princeton.”
Sviatschi is currently working with collaborators to analyze whether reducing child recruitment can prevent criminal careers and the expansion of organized crime in several countries in Latin America. This project combines large-scale data efforts including digitalizing new data on gang recruitment collected by civilian informants since 2010 up to today, juvenile detentions records, and individual school enrollment. This project will shed light on preventive policies to reduce child recruitment by gangs and whether increasing the cost of recruiting affects gangs’ extortion businesses in the long run.
Now a Sloan fellow, Sviatschi plans to use the funds to enhance her research on organized crime and gender-based violence. There are three specific areas, including collecting data on how criminal organizations recruit children in Latin America and assessing various prevention policies, examining how police officers’ attitudes toward gender-based violence impact their performance in India, along with investigating the root causes of street sexual harassment during commutes by evaluating several interventions in Bangladesh, and understanding how gender violence against girls in schools affect dropout rates in Mozambique. “For all of these projects I have partnered with governments so that my research could inform policy,” said Sviatschi.
To learn more about Sviatschi and her work, visit her
website.