Working Papers on Economics

This paper studies foreign and domestic firms in Colombia and, in particular, whether these firms behave differently.   The study uses a dataset containing the 2003 balance sheets and income statements for some 7,001 firms.  The dataset was obtained from the Superintendencia de…

According to traditional literature, liquidity risk in individual banks can turn into a system-wide financial crisis when either interbank credit exposures or bank runs are present. This paper shows that this phenomenon can also arise when individual liquidity risk trans- forms into system-wide…

The long-run component of the Colombian unemployment rate is estimated for the last twenty years. According to the results, the main determinants of the permanent component of the unemployment rate are the real hourly wage, the non-wage labor costs and the rate of capital accumulation. Given the…

The effects of the Pension Fund Managers (PFMs) behavior on the foreign exchange market may be important, given the increasing size of their portfolio and their possible market power. Some authors argue that when big investors like PFMs trade large volumes in the foreign exchange market, they…

Capital inflows and outflows often remind policymakers of the monetary policy “trilemma” and the several associated dilemmas. To tackle these dilemmas, an equilibrium model of capital flows is proposed. The model captures bouts of capital inflows and outflows with shocks to the emerging-market…

 In this paper we find empirical evidence of bank lending channel for Colombia and Argentina. As for Argentina, we do not find evidence that changes in the interbank interest rate affect the growth rate of total loans directly. However, it does indirectly through interactions: the interbank…

Structural VAR and Structural VEC models were estimated for Chile and Colombia, aiming at identifying fiscal policy shocks in both countries between 1990 and 2005. The impulse responses obtained allow the calculation of a peso-for-peso ($/$) effect on output of a shock to public spending and to…

The paper develops a New Keynesian Small Open Economy Model characterized by external habit formation and Calvo price setting with dynamic inflation updating. The model is used to analyze the effect of nominal ex-change rate targeting on optimal policy and impulse responses. It is found that…

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of decentralisation in Colombia, using a multiregional CGE model. We investigate to what extent will the Colombian population be better off when goods such as health and education, are delivered locally as against centrally. A provision scheme based on…

The empirical literature about economic growth has usually ignored spatial interdependence among countries. This paper uses spatial econometrics to estimate a growth model that includes cross-country interdependence, in which a country’s economic growth depends on the growth rate of its…

This paper estimates an asymmetric error correction model to analyse the dynamic behaviour of the Colombian unemployment rate. We find evidence that wages above their long-run equilibrium level do increase unemployment, but wages below this level do not reduce it.

In this paper we check the relationship between the yields of the Colombian bonds traded in the (secondary) internal market and the yields of the sovereign global securities for the sample period 1999-2001. The hypothesis we maintain is that, under the assumption of capital mobility, it should…

This paper studies the performance, in terms of volatility and welfare, of different monetary policy rules in an economy with two market frictions. We consider a financial friction that highlights the credit channel as the monetary transmission mechanism and a labor friction, that considerably…

This paper studies the dynamic response of a few key macroeconomic variables to each one of three exogenous shocks: monetary, government spending and technological shocks. By using a cash in advance model with two market frictions, one in the intermediation of loanable funds, and one in the…

This paper investigates the effect of sovereign risk on the stochastic rational expectations equilibrium of a real business cycle small open economy. The market is imperfect because the sovereign cannot commit to repay its outstanding debt and chooses to default when it is optimal to do so. The…

In this paper I consider the following problem: there is a collection of exogenously given socially feasible sets, and for each one of them, each one of a group of individuals chooses from an individually feasible set. The fact that the product of the individually feasible sets is larger than…

General equilibrium theory was criticized for its apparent irrefutability, as seemingly implied by the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem.  This view was challenged by Brown and Matzkin (1996), who showed the existence of testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold. Brown and Matzkin,…

Derivatives are contingent claims that complete financial markets. Their use allow agents and firms to ameliorate the impact over con-sumption, production and investment given a change in relative prices induced by an active monetary policy. In this sense, derivatives generate in some cases a…