Working Papers on Economics

Monetary neutrality in the colombian Monetary neutrality in the Colombian real exchange rate

Why justice is unresponsive to crime: Why justice is un responsive to crime: The case of cocine in Colombia

This piece was part of a research on the colombian inflationary experience published as: The Rise and Perpetuation of a Moderate Inflation, Colombia 1970-1991. It collects together the summaries of the response of Colombian policy-makers to the shocks identified in that paper. Since 1963 the…

A price-setting mechanism based on a markup over variable costs is studied for the quite different inflationary experiences of Argentina and Colombia. The paper pursues a twofold strategy: first, it test the null hypothesis of a constant markup against the alternative of a variable one; second,…

The study evaluates the virtues of asymmetric trimmed means as efficient estimators of inflation for Colombia, an economy with high and variable inflation rates. Results suggest that the proposed indicators are more efficient than alternative indexes and are particularly suited for environments…

The paper provides a model of the banking firm in the macroeconomy intended to explain what determines the interest rate spread. A key factor explaining the spread in our model is the resource cost of capital. A statistical result confirms the prediction of the model, that is, the bank's spread…

Structural time series models, frequency domain analysis, the HP-filter, and the Blanchard-Quah decomposition, are used to observe, some peculiarities of the business cycle. Such properties are those related to the volatility of the temporary component and the duration of the business cycle…

Exploiting spatial and temporal variations in the number of seizures from criminal organizations, I estimate regional fixed effects models of the increase in the number of properties confiscated on the main crime rates. From 2002 security strategies changed, and as a result,…

In this paper we study the effect of monetary policy shocks on commodity prices. While most of the literature has found that expansionary shocks have a positive effect on aggregate price indices, we study the effect on individual prices of a sample of four commodities. This set of commodity…

In this paper, we study the empirical relationship between credit funding sources and the financial vulnerability of the Colombian banking system. We propose a statistical model to measure and predict banking-fragility episodes associated with credit funding sources classified into retail…

In this paper we investigate the impact of rapid credit growth on ex ante credit risk. We present micro-econometric evidence of the positive relationship between rapid credit growth and deterioration in lending portfolios: Loans granted during boom periods have higher probability of default than…

Based on the counting of Help-wanted advertisements in print newspapers, we present national vacancy indexes and vacancy rates for Colombia. These series will allow tackling a myriad of questions related to the functioning of the labor markets in emerging economies, where such datasets were not…

In this paper we study the structural determinants of differentials in unemployment rates and labour markets’ performance for colombian cities.

This document analyzes the macroeconomic effects of a boom in a small-open economy’s natural-resource sector. We study the effects of this shock on the most important macroeconomic variables, the resource reallocation across sectors and on welfare under alternative fiscal rules. We employ a DSGE…

Using a three-equation New Keynesian model we find that incorporating an escape clause (EC) into Forward Guidance (FG) is welfare improving as it allows the monetary authority to avoid cases in which the cost of reduced flexibility is too high. The EC provides the central bank with another…

A maximum likelihood method for estimating the power-law exponent verifies that the positive and negative tails of the Colombian stock market index (IGBC) and the Colombian peso exchange rate (TRM) approximate a scale-free distribution, whereas none of the heavy tails of a local sovereign…

Using a stylized model in which output is measured with error, we derive the optimal policy response to the demand shock signal and to changes in the measurement error volatility from two different perspectives: the minimization of the expected loss (from which we derive the ‘standard’ policy)…

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the…

When managing international reserves, central banks generally face the problem of determining what their optimum or adequate level is.  A critical review of some methodologies for calculating the optimum amount of reserves is presented in this document.

We study the relationship between US and Colombian sovereign debt interest rates. We also evaluate the response of the Colombian long-term bond yield and other asset prices to shocks to the US long-term Treasury rate. Two empirical exercises are performed. First, we use a moving window linear…