Working Papers on Economics

At the end of the last decade, the real activity in Colombia underwent the sharpest recession of the last fifty years. We postulate a non-triangular structural VAR model (Amisano and Giannini, 1997) to describe the dynamics of output, prices, unemployment and wages during the last two decades.…

This paper tests for purchasing power parity (PPP) between Colombia and its main trading partners using the Johansen framework of multivariate cointegration. The tests shows that PPP does not hold in the strong sense, but a clear purchasing power relationship is, nevertheless, show to exist. The…

This study develops three exchange rate models as well as a simple statistical model defined as a random walk with a variable drift. The exchange rate models all use the purchasing power parity hypothesis to account for the long-term relationships between prices and the exchange rate, together…

This study uses two different econometric frameworks to study exchange rate pass-through to import, producer and consumer prices in Colombia. Both frameworks are based on vector autoregressive (VAR) models, the first using an unrestricted VAR model, and the second using the Johansen framework of…

This paper approaches active management of baskets of currencies from the perspective of Complexity theory, where the market is analysed as a Complex Adaptive system. A basket of currencies is constructed using objective probabilities (propensities) and an artificial intelligence optimization…

Political economists have traditionally been indifferent to the communicative construction of money and central banking in the public sphere. It does not matter to them whether monetary affairs are rendered as a rational game over the preservation of the value of the currency or, for example, as…

The World Bank has proposed an alternative hedging instrument to be offered by the FRECH, instead of the collar-swap currently available. The suggested derivative corresponds to a European Cap option for the real interest rate, which could give greater flexibility to the hedging mechanism,…

Sudden stops seem to create the perfect environment for disinflation, especially when central banks defend the exchange rate by increasing interest rates. We propose a variation of the output gap model that incorporates the sudden stop shock. The use of the model in policy analysis shows that…

In this paper the evolution in the average height of Colombians from 1910 to 1984 is analyzed. The anthropometric evidence reveals a sustained increase in the standard of biological welfare during this period.  A database with more than 8.000.000 observations from the national citizenship…

In this paper we discuss cost and profit efficiency for a sample of financial institutions on the Colombian financial market in the period 1989-2003, using stochastic frontier efficiency analysis. During the period, the cost efficient frontier deteriorates, but profit efficient frontier is…

This study uses a panel-data framework to identify the determinants of the spread over US Treasuries of emerging market sovereign issues as well as of the creditworthiness of the issuers, where the latter is represented by the Institutional Investor’s creditworthiness index. We use a sample of…

The study presented here is a follow-up study to Rowland and Torres (2004), who used a panel data framework together with data from 16 emerging market issuers to identify the determinants of the spread and the creditworthiness. Since many new issuers of emerging market sovereign debt have…

Some univariate time series properties of output Some univariate time series properties of output

Estimating credibility in Colombia's exchange rate target zone Estimating credibility in Colombia´s exchange rate target zone

Some evidence of smooth transition Some evidence of smooth transitíons nonlinearity in Colombian inflation

Evidence of the causal long-term relationship between budget deficit, money growth and inflation in Colombia is analyzed in this paper, considering the standard (M1), the narrowest (M0-Base) and the broadest (M3) definitions of money supply. Using a vector error correction (VEC) model with…

This paper offers some preliminary steps in the marriage of some of the theoretical foundations of the new economic geography with spatial computable general equilibrium models.  Modeling the spatial economy of Colombia using the traditional assumptions of CGE models makes little sense when…

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…

First developed by Markowitz (1952), the mean-variance framework is the most widespread theoretical approximation to the portfolio problem. Nevertheless, successful application in the investment community has been limited. Assumptions such as normality of returns and a static correlation matrix…

A threefold analysis of commodity prices is carried out to observe their long-run behaviour, their short-run properties and the main determinants. According to the evidence, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis does not seem to be a property of most prices. The cycles of commodity prices are…