Working Papers on Economics

This paper proposes new monthly estimates for the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) and the output gap for Colombia. These rely on a New Keynesian small open economy model following González et al (2013), augmented by an Okun’s Law equation. The resulting output gap closely…

Macroprudential policy in Colombia is described along with a discussion of the main challenges faced by the authorities in implementing it and a review of episodes in which macroprudential measures were taken. An overview and some estimates of their effectiveness in preventing the buildup of…

This paper explores the behavior of Colombia labour market flows. We focus on job creation and job destruction from the plant´s perspective, and on hiring and separations from the worker´s point of view. We show how these labour flows change across different dimensions such as, firm’s size,…

The international financial crisis of 2007-2009 strongly affected asset prices, risk and growth in the advanced economies, leading to large capital movements between these economies and the emerging countries. The capital movements were reflected in sharp fluctuations in the emerging countries’…

The functioning of large-value payment systems (LVPSs) can be affected when some of its participants voluntarily decide to delay their payments until they can totally fund them with the payments received from other participants. This behaviour, known as the free-rider problem, can cause an under…

Even though international authorities encourage open and wide access to large value payment systems, the optimal level of access, or tiering, is still an open question. In the case of real-time gross settlement systems (RTGS), the level of access, or tiering, may be limited by the tradeoff…

We examine how liquidity is exchanged in different types of Colombian money market networks (i.e. secured, unsecured, and central bank’s repo networks). Our examination first measures and analyzes the centralization of money market networks. Afterwards, based on a simple network optimization…

We implement a modified version of DebtRank, a measure of systemic impact inspired in feedback centrality, to recursively measure the contagion effects caused by the default of a selected financial institution. In our case contagion is a liquidity issue, measured as the decrease in financial…

A core goal of regulators and financial authorities is to understand how market prices convey information on the financial health of its participants. From this viewpoint we build an Early-Warning Indicators System (EWIS) that allows for identifying those financial institutions perceived as…

Abstract: In this paper we try to elucidate the relationship between foreign and domestic banks external indebtedness and the business cycle in Colombia. After a brief review of related literature, we characterize the historical behavior of banking external indebtedness in…

This paper presents a methodology to estimate the intraday liquidity that systemically important entities (SIE) need to fulfill all its obligations in a timely fashion, when a simulated failure-to-pay from its main liquidity supplier by discretionary concepts of payment occurs. Using the Bank of…

Large value payment flows can be disrupted by several types of failures such as operational incidents, problems experienced by the administrator of the payments settlement system, outages in the communications networks and the inability of a participant to submit payments due to insufficient…

An interacting network coupling financial institutions’ multiplex (i.e. multi-layer) and financial market infrastructures’ single-layer networks gives an accurate picture of a financial system’s true connective architecture. We examine and compare the main properties of Colombian multiplex and…

We study the network of Colombian sovereign securities settlements. With data from the settlement market infrastructure we study financial institutions’ transactions from three different trading and registering individual networks that we combine into a multi-layer network.

This paper contributes to the theoretical analysis of the informal sector in the search and matching framework. Building upon the work of Albrecht et al. (2009), where the informal sector consists of unregulated self-employment, I describe the search and matching equilibrium in an economy with…

In the present paper we remark that the absence of an intrinsic or fundamental value represents a problem for the stability of the bitcoin’s price as an asset. In addition, we consider some financial stability concerns that derive from the hypothesis that the bitcoin will survive as an asset…

Evidence suggests that the Colombian interbank funds market is an inhomogeneous and hierarchical network in which a few financial institutions fulfill the role of “super-spreaders” of central bank liquidity among market participants. Results concur with evidence from other interbank markets and…

Despite various payment innovations, today, cash is still heavily used to pay for low-value purchases. This paper develops a simulation model to test whether standard implications of the theory on cash management and payment choices can explain the use of payment instruments by transaction size…

Under the view that the market is a weighted and directed network (Barabási, 2003), this document is a first attempt to model the Colombian money market within a spatial econometrics framework. By estimating two standard spatial econometric models, we study the cost of collateralized borrowing (…

This document presents an enhanced and condensed version of preceding proposals for identifying systemically important financial institutions in Colombia. Three systemic importance metrics are implemented: (i) money market net exposures network hub centrality; (ii) large-value payment system…