Working Papers on Economics

In this paper we find empirical evidence of bank lending channel for Colombia, using a balanced panel data of about four thousand non-financial firms. We find that increases in the interest rate, proxiing for the monetary policy instrument, lead to a reduction in the proportion of bank loans,…

A minimum performance insurance in the Principal-Agent problem is wealth reducing to the principal. This result points to further inefficiencies in mandatory individual Pension Funds' contracts, particularly the one established in the 1993's 100th Law in Colombia.

This paper advances on the analysis of the structural interdependence among Colombian departments. The results show that Bogotá has a large influence in the other regional economies through its purchasing power. Additionally, it can be observed a center-periphery pattern in the spatial…

The focus of this paper is on the short-term macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy in Colombia in a structural vector autoregression context. Government spending shocks are found to have positive and significant effects on output, private consumption, employment, prices and short-term interest…

The objective of this paper is to analyze how international cycles affect the real GDP cycle and so monetary policy decisions in Colombia. We estimate that cycles in world GDP, export prices and capital inflows are strongly associated with the Colombian business cycle both on impact and even…

The assessment of inflationary pressures in Colombia has faced two important challenges in the present decade. The first one occurred in 2006 and consisted of detecting an overheating economy in the midst of fast growing investment and increasing measured productivity. The second challenge took…

 If theory-consistent models can ever hope to forecast well and to be useful for policy, they have to relate to data which though rich in information is uncertain, unbalanced and sometimes forecasts from external sources about the future path of other variables. One example from many is…

This paper presents an estimation of credit quality transition matrices for commercial banks in Colombia, using a duration hazard function model, and following the methodology proposed by Gómez-González et al (2009). Using a test developed by Weißbach et al (2005), we test for the time-…

Classic financial theory relies on the absolute perfection of capital markets, which results in one of the milestones of theoretical corporate finance: the firm’s value is invariant to the choice of capital structure. As an extension to the aforementioned proposition by Modigliani and Miller (…

This paper provides evidence of long run purchasing power parity by performing a recently developed method to test for unit roots in the presence of structural breaks. Data consist of real exchange rate series for 20 countries including developed and developing economies. Structural breaks are…

This paper studies the determinants of the probability of participating in a process of merging or acquisition for financial institutions in Colombia. We use survival analysis techniques and competing risks models to estimate the probability of participating in such processes as an acquiring or…

This document provides evidence to show that Colombia is a net exporter of 5% of its population with a university or post-graduate degree, while Argentina, Brazil and Chile are net importers of people with a similar level of education.

This paper explores the relationship between central bank independence and inflation in Latin America, using as a case study the experience of Colombia (1923-2008). Since its creation, in 1923, Colombia’s central bank has undergone several reforms that have changed its objectives and degree of…

Operational Risk (OR) results from endogenous and exogenous risk factors, as diverse and complex to assess as human resources and technology, which may not be properly measured using traditional quantitative approaches.  Engineering has faced the same challenges when designing practical…

This paper uses a survey on wage formation that was applied to 1,305 Colombian firms to study wage-setting decisions with respect to newly hired employees. The Colombian case is interesting, since the country´s labour market performance, especially its unemployment rate and level of informality…

This paper analyses a comprehensive dataset on migration using robust econometric methodologies to assess a range of economic and social impacts of migration on individuals and households left behind. Our findings indicate that there is no significant impact on labour force participation in…

An application of Bayesian Model Averaging, BMA, is implemented to construct combined forecasts for the colombian inflation for the short and medium run. A model selection algorithm is applied over a set of linear models with a large dataset of potencial predictors using marginal as well as…

This work analyzes the relationship between real interest rates and commodity prices. According to Frankel’s hypothesis (1986-2006): “low real interest rates lead to high real commodity prices”. However, some empirical evidence suggests that commodity prices can predict monetary policy. In this…

This paper uses a wage setting survey of 1,305 Colombian firms to explore the nature and sources of wage rigidities. This is the first study of a non-European emerging economy that uses evidence from a survey of firms to analyse this topic. The survey was carried out during the first half of…

We use occupations descriptions for Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, to build computer-use related tasks intensities, and link then to series of cross sections of data of each country in order to empirically assess to what extent the observed empirical regularities, and the reallocation of workers…