I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. I specialize in comparative public policy and Latin American political economy, with a focus on inequality, poverty, and the redistributive and predistributive policies (labor-market regulation, taxation, and social transfers) used to address them.
My doctoral dissertation, Predistribution, Income Inequality and the Politics of Minimum Wage and the Left in Latin America, combines cross-national econometric analysis of minimum wages and inequality in Latin America with an intensive qualitative study of the recent trajectory of minimum-wage policy in Mexico. Methodologically, I combine econometric analysis, household survey microdata, Bayesian process tracing, semi-structured elite interviews, documentary analysis, and archival research.
My work has been published in The Economic and Labour Relations Review and Policy Studies Journal. My research has been supported by the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS), the American Political Science Association (APSA), and Georgetown University. I am also a Graduate Center Dissertation Fellow (2026), a Latino Data Scholar at CLACLS (2025), a CONAHCYT Scholar (2024–2027), a Junior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality (2024), and a Fulbright-García Robles Scholar (2021–2024).
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar (2026). Minimum wages, household inequality, and predistributive patterns in Latin America. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 1–24.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar (2025). Advocacy coalitions or pragmatic coupling of streams? Explaining policy change in Mexico: The tax reforms of Vicente Fox and Enrique Peña (2001 and 2013). Policy Studies Journal.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar (2025). Latino Economic Inequality in New York City: Income and SNAP Recipiency, 2013–2023. Latino Data Project, Report 117. Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, CUNY.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar. Equality as Compass: Revisiting Norberto Bobbio’s Polar Star from Latin America. Revise and resubmit.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar. Beyond the Pink Tide: Left Governments, Inequality, and the Dual Channel of Predistribution and Redistribution. Under review.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar. Left Behind? Explaining Limited Social Transfer Redistribution Under Mexico’s First Leftist Government. Under review.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar. Expertise as State Power: Technocratic Capacity and Minimum-Wage Reform in Mexico. Dissertation chapter / article in development.
Oswaldo Mena Aguilar. The Politics of Predistribution in Latin America: Minimum-Wage Trajectories in Mexico, Uruguay, and Chile. Book project.
My first line of research studies minimum wages as a tool of predistribution. The doctoral dissertation develops the Mexican case in depth, while the book project extends the argument comparatively to Uruguay and Chile as contrasting wage-policy trajectories under center-left governments.
A second line of research examines the distributive and revenue potential of tax reform in Mexico, including inheritance taxation, progressivity at the top of the income tax schedule, revenue-gap closure, and subnational taxation such as the property tax.
A third line of research studies how administrative architecture, beneficiary registries, eligibility rules, bureaucratic capacity, and intergovernmental coordination mediate the redistributive effects of social transfers and anti-poverty policy.
Instructor of record · Baruch College and Hunter College, CUNY
Course themes include state formation, commodity dependency and development, political regimes, democracy and democratization, social policy, inequality, and contemporary Latin American political economy.
Instructor of record · Baruch College, CUNY
Courses focused on social policy, welfare institutions, inequality, public assistance, and the political and administrative conditions that shape policy design and implementation.
Teaching assistant · Columbia University
Led student sections focused on research design and quantitative methods, and taught an introduction to R.
Teaching assistant · Barnard College, Columbia University
Led student sections focused on democratic emergence, consolidation, and backsliding in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Comparative politics; Latin American politics; public policy; political economy; inequality; redistribution and predistribution; labor politics; social policy; taxation; state capacity; qualitative methods; quantitative methods; research design.