Working Papers on Economics

As a result of the most recent global financial crisis literature has embraced size, connectedness and substitutability as key indicators for financial institutions’ systemic importance. Despite the intuitiveness of these concepts, identifying systemic important institutions remain a non-trivial…

Informational constraints may turn the Merton Model for corporate credit risk impractical. Applying this framework to the Colombian financial sector is limited to four stock-market-listed firms; more than a hundred banking and non-banking firms are not listed. 

This paper investigates the impact of sovereign risk on the stochastic rational expectations equilibrium of a pure exchange small open economy. International borrowing and lending arise from the interaction between a risk averse sovereign representative agent in a small open economy trying to…

In this paper I explore the potential link between Plan Colombia and violence with a new perspective. I focus the analysis only on the first three running years of the program (2000-2002) in order to avoid the overlapping effect with a security policy started in 2002/2003. This paper exploits…

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of fiscal decentralization on Colombia's public basic education. Based on the social and economic data available for 1,003 municipalities and 13,670 public schools, for the last decade, we confirmed that decentralization has had a positive and…

We assess the effects of the Colombian Unemployment Subsidy (US) program on future labor participation, unemployment, formality, school attendance and earnings of its beneficiaries, on household earnings and school attendance of the household members, and on weight and height of their children…

In the context of financial crises influenced by the development and burst of housing price bubbles, the detection of exuberant behaviors in the financial market and the implementation of early warning diagnosis tests are of vital importance. This paper applies the new method developed by…

We use a unique data set at the individual level to estimate an empirical model explaining the probability of young individuals to become criminals as a function of the presence of adult criminals in their neighborhoods, an a complete set of control variables, including census sector fixed…

This paper investigates whether transforming the Consumer Price Index with a class of power transformations lead to an improvement of inflation forecasting accuracy. We use one of the prototypical models to forecast short run inflation which is known as the univariate time series ARIMA . This…

Banco de la República’s FX intervention policy is described, with a focus on its objectives and main features. Then, based on a survey of the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in Colombia, it is argued that this tool is not useful to cope with the challenges posed by medium term external…

Abstract: This paper employs network analysis to study world trade from 1995 to 2014. We focus on the main connective features of the world trade network (WTN) and their dynamics. Results suggest that countries’ efforts to attain the benefits of trade have resulted in an…

The paper examines the bidders behaviour in the Colombian government bond auctions during 2007 for the period in which there is no uncertainty in the supply. Three main findings are presented. First, in contrast with other treasury auctions (Castellanos [2]), the market clearing price in the…

This document explores the predictive power of the yield curves in Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile) taking into account the factors set by the specifications of Nelson & Siegel and Svensson. Several forecasting methodologies are contrasted: an autoregressive model, a vector…

The recent financial crisis has renewed the interest of economists, both at the theoretical and empirical level, in developing a better understanding of credit and its mechanisms. A rapidly growing strand of the literature views banks as facing funding restrictions that condition their borrowing…

Since correlation may be interpreted as a measure of the influence across time-series, it may be conveniently mapped into a distance and into a weighted adjacency matrix. Based on such matrix, network theory has attempted to filter out the noise in correlation matrices by extracting the dominant…

The adoption of a managed regime assumes that interventions are relatively successful. However, while some authors consider that foreign exchange interventions are ineffective, arguing that domestic and foreign assets are close substitutes, others advocate their use and maintain that their…

We study the  existence of a monetary policy transmission mechanism through banks in Colombia, using monthly banks’ balance sheet data for the period 1996:4 – 2012:12. We obtain results which are consistent with the basic postulates of the bank lending channel (and the risk-taking channel)…

Based on individual data on the population of those arrested in Medellín, we assess whether the change in punishment at age 18, mandated by law, has a deterrent effect on arrests. No deterrent effect was found on index, violent or property crimes, but a deterrence effect was found on non-index…

This paper addresses the estimation of peer group effects on a fertility decision. The peer group is composed of neighbors with similar socio-demographic characteristics. In order to deal with the endogeneity problem associated to the estimation of neighborhood effects, an instrumental variables…

International reserves are very important for emerging economies, as they allow to buffer possible liquidity vulnerabilities within a countries' balance of payments. Consequently, the issue of how many reserves should each country hold is a relevant issue for economic policy. The literature has…