Hello, and welcome to my website!

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and am on the 2026–2027 academic job market. My research is in comparative politics and political economy. I study the political effects of economic pressure, with a focus on sanctions, migration, and authoritarian politics in Latin America. Other projects examine policing, public contracts, and elections in Colombia and Bolivia.

My job market paper, “Sanctions and Selective Opposition Exit: Evidence from Venezuela”, asks how economic sanctions can change the opposition an autocrat faces at home by encouraging opponents to emigrate. I develop a formal model and test its implications with administrative and electoral data from Venezuela. After the 2017 financial sanctions, opposition-aligned citizens were more likely to leave formal employment, and opposition-leaning precincts saw larger turnout declines. These patterns are consistent with selective opposition exit.

I also work on applied political methodology, especially regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs. My work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, World Development, and the Cambridge Elements series. A coauthored paper on courts and policing is at the revise-and-resubmit stage at the American Journal of Political Science.

In Fall 2026, I am the instructor of record for Introduction to Quantitative Social Science at Princeton, an undergraduate course with more than 170 students. I was also an instructor of record for Causal Inference for the Social Sciences II at ICPSR in 2025 and 2026, teaching the course with Sebastian Calonico. My CV lists my additional teaching experience at Penn, Michigan, and Universidad de los Andes.

Working papers

[new version] How Police and Crime Respond to Courts: Evidence from Colombia, with Dorothy Kronick and Tara Slough. August 2026.
Revise and resubmit at the American Journal of Political Science.
Latest draft
[Job market paper, new version] Sanctions and Selective Opposition Exit: Evidence from Venezuela. May 2026.
Latest draft | SSRN

Publications

Idrobo, Nicolás, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez. 2026. “On Unfounded Claims of Electoral Fraud.”
World Development 198: 107155.
Final draft | Replication | Publication
Cattaneo, Matias D., Nicolás Idrobo, and Rocío Titiunik. 2024. A Practical Introduction to Regression Discontinuity Designs: Extensions.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Final draft | Replication | Publication
Idrobo, Nicolás, Dorothy Kronick, and Francisco Rodríguez. 2022. “Do Shifts in Late-Counted Votes Signal Fraud? Evidence from Bolivia.”
The Journal of Politics 84(4): 2202–2215.
Final draft | Replication | Publication | Media coverage: NYT (English, Spanish), Crisis Group
OAS Response | Nooruddin’s Response | Our Response to Nooruddin
Cattaneo, Matias D., Nicolás Idrobo, and Rocío Titiunik. 2020. A Practical Introduction to Regression Discontinuity Designs: Foundations.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Final draft | Replication | Publication | Erratum
Idrobo, Nicolás, Daniel Mejía, and Ana María Tribín. 2014. “Illegal Gold Mining and Violence in Colombia.”
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 20(1): 83–111.
Publication

Work in progress

Political Alignment and State Protection in Venezuela: Evidence from Public Employment and Pensions.
The People Who Stayed: Internal Migration during Venezuela’s Collapse.
Economic Sanctions, Emigration, and Political Opposition under Authoritarian Rule.
Waves Apart: The Limits of Pre-Trends Tests in Sparse Panels, with Carolina Torreblanca.
The Advent of the Inference Era: Science Production in Economics and Political Science since 1970, with Arthur Lupia, Hwayong Shin, and Rocío Titiunik.
The Hidden Power of Money: How Campaign Contributions to Legislators Buy Legislative Influence, with Pablo Querubín, Miguel Rueda, and Nelson Ruiz.
Covariate Distributions and Feasible Questions in Comparative Politics and Political Economy, with Rocío Titiunik.