Working Papers on Economics

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…

The economic research of 30 central banks in OECD and Latin America countries from 2000 to 2007 is evaluated in this study. An international comparison based on four indexes that measure central bank research output, demand, productivity and relevance is included. From this view, the European…

The price setting behavior of Colombian retailers of goods and services was studied based on a unique dataset containing 12,052,970 individual price reports covering all items in the Colombian CPI from March 1999 to May 2008. The main results are summarized as follows: 1. Colombian consumer…

The unfolding of the 2007 world financial and economic crisis has highlighted the vulnerability of real economic activity to strong fluctuations in asset prices. Which is the optimal monetary policy in an economy like the Colombian that is exposed to swings in asset prices? What is the…

The Colombian economy and financial system have coped reasonably well with the effects of the global financial crisis. Hence, "unconventional" policy measures have not been at the center of the policy decisions and discussions. Nominal short term interest rates have remained the main monetary…

This paper studies the determinants of individual bank failures and M&A processes in Colombia during the financial crisis of the late 1990s. Using bank-specific data we estimate competing risk hazards models and find that while profitability and capitalization are the most important…

This article analyzes identification problems that may arise while linearizing and solving DSGE models. A criterion is proposed to determine whether or not a set of parameters is partially identifiable, in the sense of Canova and Sala (2009), based on the computation of a basis for the null…

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, it provides an empirical characterization of fiscal policy in Colombia over the last decades, by assessing the three most relevant macroeconomic factors: the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle; whether it has been coherent with the long…

This paper analyzes the link between young people's sense (locus) of control over their lives and their investments in education. We find that young people with a more internal locus of control have a higher probability of finishing secondary school and, conditional on completion, meeting the…

This paper identifies the main bank specific determinants of time to failure during the financial crisis in Colombia using duration analysis. Using partial likelihood estimation, it shows that the process of failure of financial institutions during that period was not a merely random process;…

During the transition from a moderately high level of inflation to an internationally accepted level, the target, the inflation rate, the nominal interest rate and the nominal equilibrium interest rate may be difference stationary. Policy rules estimation, however, is usually performed under…

Banks and other credit institutions are key players in the transmission of monetary policy, especially in emerging market economies, where the responses of deposit and loan interest rates to shifts in policy rates are among the most important channels. This pass-through depends on the conditions…

This paper presents a multimarket spatial competition oligopoly model for the Colombian deposit market, in line with the New Empirical Industrial Organization (NEIO) approach. In this framework, banks use price and non-price strategies to compete in the market, which allows us to analyze the…

We assess whether international remittances affect Colombian household’s expenditure composition and demand of education. We exploit the migratory wave that took place on late 90s due to one of the deepest crises in Colombian history, along with institutional barriers to migration, to identify…

We identify interbank (i.e. non-collateralized) loans from the Colombian large-value payment system by implementing Furfine’s method. After identifying interbank loans from transactional data we obtain the interbank rates and claims without relying on financial institutions’ reported data.…