Franco Calle

About Me

Ph.D. and MBA in Economics from Chicago Booth

I apply econometrics, economic theory, and AI to solve real-world business problems.

Research Focus

  • Spatial capital allocation models
  • Water utility demand estimation
  • LLMs for expense classification
  • Causal inference on education and political behavior
  • ML-based income prediction with big data

Industry Experience

  • Financial product profitability analysis
  • Buy-now-pay-later programs
  • Agentic AI systems
  • Cloud infrastructure (AWS)
  • Microservices and containerization

Conference Presentations

  • Congreso Anual 2024 de la Asociacion Peruana de Economia at Universidad de Lima
  • 2024 Development and Political Economics Conference at Stanford University
  • Rising Scholars Conference at Chicago Booth School of Business
  • Chicago Booth Student Research in Economics Seminar

Research Grants & Fellowships

  • Grant from Becker Friedman Institute
  • Grant from the Weiss Fund
  • Research grant from the Booth School of Business
  • Schmidt Futures Fellow - NYU for computational economics
  • Several smaller grants for work in economics

Featured Research

Term Limits and the Spatial Allocation of Capital by the Public Sector

A study on how term limits affect local mayors' investment decisions and their impact on local markets and consumer welfare in Peru.

Key Findings:

  • Mayors preferred more proximate capital investments after term limit changes
  • 20 pp reduction in households receiving untreated water
  • 10 pp increase in families connected to water network
  • 15% increase in water expenditure
  • 6 pp annualized increase in internal rate of return on investments
Term Limits and the Spatial Allocation of Capital by the Public Sector Figure

Partisan Colleges and Political Donations

A study on how educational institutions shape political ideologies and activism in Chile.

Co-author: Estefano Rubio

Key Findings:

  • Left-leaning universities significantly impact political donation behaviors
  • 0.69 pp increase in likelihood of donating to any political party
  • 0.48 pp surge in donations favoring left-wing campaigns
  • 80% of leftist donations from left-leaning college alumni due to causal effect
  • No significant effects for graduates of right-oriented colleges
Partisan Colleges and Political Donations Figure

Screening and Recruiting Talent At Teacher Colleges Using Pre-College Test Scores

An evaluation of policies using pre-college academic achievement to restrict or incentivize entry to teacher-colleges in Chile.

Co-author: Sebastian Gallegos, Christopher Neilson

Key Findings:

  • Positive relationship between pre-college achievement and teacher productivity
  • Targeted scholarships effective at shifting career choices of high-achieving students
  • Screening policies can identify a significant portion of ex-post low performing teachers
  • Screening low-performing students more effective than targeting only high-achieving students
  • Better data and prediction methods can improve teacher recruitment and investment targeting
Screening and Recruiting Talent At Teacher Colleges Using Pre-College Test Scores Figure

Household Income Prediction in Real Time: An analysis with Peruvian Data

An innovative approach to predicting household income one year in advance using a combination of traditional survey data and big data sources.

Co-author: Hernan Winkler

Key Findings:

  • Integration of traditional survey data with big data from various sources
  • Use of state-of-the-art machine learning methods for income prediction
  • Incorporation of weather patterns and nightlight data as economic indicators
  • Enhanced precision in income predictions
  • Valuable insights for policy-making and economic planning
Household Income Prediction in Real Time: An analysis with Peruvian Data Figure

Software & Other Projects

In addition to my main research projects, I've worked on various other initiatives and developed software tools to support economic analysis and modeling.

Discrete Choice Models - Matlab and Julia

A package for computing different versions of static discrete choice models that maximize the likelihood, or the joint likelihood, of a decision problem.

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Municipal Investment Optimization Web App

A web application that uses my research results to identify locations that would benefit from higher investment based on model estimation.

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Economics PhD Repository

A comprehensive collection of code for demand and supply estimation, dynamic discrete choice estimation, Kalman Filtering, Bayesian updating, and more.

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