Working Papers on Economics

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…

We use data of neighborhoods of Bogotá to assess the causal relation between their adolescent fertility and their homicide rates. We find that neighborhoods with high adolescent fertility rates, and that have low secondary enrollment and high crime rates at the moment the children of their teen…

A Statement of the Colombian Constitutional Court has mandated wage indexation on the basis of past inflation. A simple model with a wage price system, a real block, and an inflation targeting interest rule is calibrated to resemble price setting in the Colombian economy and to analyze the…

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…

  This paper contains a nonlinear, nonstationary autoregressive model whose intercept changes deterministically over time. The intercept is a flexible function of time, and its construction bears some resemblance to neural network models. A modeling technique, modified from one for single…

We use experimental data of a training program in 2005 in Colombia. We find that even up to ten years ahead, the JeA program had a positive and significant effect on the probability to work in the formal sector, and to work for a large firm. Applicants in the treatment group also contributed…

This paper presents a DSGE model with banks that face moral hazard in management. Banks receive demand deposits and fund investment projects. Banks are subject to potential withdrawals by depositors which may force them into early liquidation of their investments. The likelihood of this…

We argue that international lenders take into account that taxes (or subsidies) affect borrowers’ available income for debt repayments. Using an endowment-economy model, we show that by incorporating this fact into the analysis of …financial crises from the pecuniary externality perspective, ex…

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.…

We provide evidence of private returns to education and of externalities which jointly render social returns to education in Colombia. The spillover is generated by the share of college-educated workers within the working-age population. Thus, the higher this share in the cities, the higher the…

This study uses a Dynamic Conditional Correlation multivariate GARCH approach for testing for contagion among Latin American financial markets to shocks originated in the United States and Europe. Using daily data on stock market returns for the period comprised between July 4th, 2001 and…