Job Market Paper

  • Ritter, S. (2026). “The Urban Costs of Rural Conflict: Evidence from Southern Chile”.

    Abstract This paper studies whether predominantly rural conflict affects nearby urban markets even when conflict events occur outside the city. I examine the Mapuche conflict in southern Chile, an Indigenous self-determination conflict centered on land restitution, territorial control, and historically recognized claims. Combining geocoded conflict events with administrative and satellite outcomes for fixed urban markets and urban census blocks, I distinguish aggregate formal-activity responses from within-market spatial incidence. Urban markets with greater nearby rural conflict exposure experience lower municipal formal activity, measured by tax-reported sales: in the preferred specification, sales are about 4 percent lower, even after accounting for conflict events inside the urban area. Other margins adjust more slowly or less consistently. Enterprise counts show at most a short-run decline, while urban nighttime lights and fiscal appraisal respond mainly in lagged specifications rather than in the baseline contemporaneous estimates. Within urban markets, more exposed blocks do not show broad contemporaneous declines in lights or assessed values, but the commercial-use share of the cadastral stock falls modestly. Mechanism patterns are consistent with spatial amplification near historical claim and restitution geography, but they do not identify a clean mediation channel. The results indicate that rural territorial conflict can weaken formal activity in nearby urban markets, with slower and more uneven adjustment in asset and built-form measures.

Published Papers

  • Ritter, S. (2025). The economic effect of splitting a region in a centralized country: A case from Chile.
    Global Challenges & Regional Science (2), 100011. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gcrs.2025.100011

    Abstract The economic impact of territorial reforms has been discussed in the literature but mostly looking at amalgamations rather than de-amalgamations. Little is known about the impact of territorial splits and even less in the context of a centralized and emerging country. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the 2007 territorial reform in Chile, where two new regions were created at opposite ends of the country. By using a synthetic control approach, a difference-in-differences and event studies, the causal effect of such reform over GDP and private sales on the affected regions is estimated, including the effect of the new administrative status for the cities of Valdivia, La Unión, Arica and Putre. After accounting for all potential external shocks, no significant impact of the division on the affected regions was found. However, at the municipal level, while regional capital status had no significant effect, transitioning from a regular municipality to a provincial capital had a notable positive impact in a small, low-urbanization city such as La Unión. We believe these results are very important as they illustrate that policies aimed at splitting regions or relocating the capital status to promote growth should consider the context and the scope of competences of the subnational governments as well as the socioeconomic characteristics of the places.

Working Papers

  • Ritter, S. & Royuela, V. (2026). “The Geography of the Green Transition: Performance, Vulnerabilities and Opportunities”.
    AQR Working Papers 202601 (revised Feb 2026). IDEAS/RePEc · PDF

    Abstract _As the EU races to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target, regional disparities in transition progress threaten to leave some territories behind. We introduce the Regional Green Transition Performance Index (RGTP), a novel composite measure capturing progress across seven pillars (environmental; energy; circular economy and waste; sustainable development; just transition; innovation and policy; and transport and mobility) for 232 European NUTS2 regions over 14 years. Drawing on 31 indicators, we map spatial patterns and dynamic processes. Furthermore, we argue that the green transition acts as a structural force whose potential effects on regional development can be expressed along two axes: vulnerability and opportunity. We propose an alternative measure of Regional Green Transition Opportunity index (RGTO) which we combine with the existent Regional Green Transition Vulnerability index (RGTV) of RodríguezPose & Bartalucci (2024) to construct a simple 2×2 typology of regions. We translate this evidence into a policy playbook: pair risk-mitigation with opportunity-creation and embed diffusion mechanisms so gains propagate beyond individual regions. The paper contributes an open dataset, a transparent methodology to separate performance, opportunities, and vulnerabilities which responds to the EU’s performance-based policy agenda by offering a region-level monitoring tool that complements cohesion instruments (ERDF/CF/JTF/ESF+) and flags where to reduce vulnerabilities while mobilizing opportunities in the green transition._

Work in Progress

  • “Will the Green Transition Deepen Regional Divides? Evidence from Mobility Intentions across European regions.” Joint with Vicente Royuela & Yann Marx. (Under review.)
  • “Do language policies affect internal migration in a multilingual country?” Joint with Antonio di Paolo, Raul Ramos & Vicente Royuela.