Working Papers on Economics

Inglés: In spite of the increasing evidence that has revealed that early access to financial services has long-term impacts, children and adolescents continue to face major obstacles to be financially included, particularly in the developing world. This document presents the main results of a…

Inglés: We propose a maximal covering location problem with a budget constraint to determine the optimal location of facilities that provide fast police assistance to homicide hot spots, to mitigate criminal activity in Medellín (Colombia). We use the Google Maps Application Programming…

This work uses readily accessible data about the stocks of unemployed workers, labor force and duration of unemployment to measure the job finding and separation rates for Colombia from 1984 to 2014. It also evaluates the relative contribution of these rates to the fluctuations of unemployment…

When managing international reserves, central banks generally face the problem of determining what their optimum or adequate level is.  A critical review of some methodologies for calculating the optimum amount of reserves is presented in this document.

We study the interdependence between real commodity prices and world real GDP using long-term annual data since 1870, by performing two empirical exercises. First, we compute long-term and medium-term cycles and measure their degree of synchronization for different leads and lags. Second, we…

This paper assesses the efficiency of crop and livestock production in Colombia by using a sample of 1,565 households. The study considers households located in different production systems which differ in geography, climate and soil types. These conditions affect technical efficiency and thus…

Fluctuations in commodity prices are an important driver of business cycles in small emerging market economies (EMEs). We document how these fluctuations correlate strongly with the business cycle in EMEs. We then embed a commodity sector into a multi-country EMEs business cycle model where…

We introduce a dispatch model of Colombia's independent system operator (XM) in order to study the relative merits of self-commitment vs. centralized unit comment.  We capitalize on the transition that took place in 2009 from self-unit commitment to centralize unit commitment and use data…

This paper reports on the recent developments in the construction of an interregional input-output matrix for Colombia (IIOM-COL). As part of an ongoing project that aims to update an interregional CGE (ICGE) model for the country, the CEER model, a fully specified interregional input-output…

This paper provides evidence on the positive role of fiscal decentralization on regional economic growth in Colombia since the promulgation of the Political Constitution of 1991. The empirical strategy involved the choice of a suitable estimator for the panel data approach, the Augmented Mean…

In this paper, we compute standard measures of fluidity for the Colombian urban labor market: worker and job reallocation rates and the excess of worker reallocation over job reallocation. We analyze the period between the second semester of 2008 and the second semester of 2014, finding evidence…

Value at Risk (VaR) is a market risk measure widely used by risk managers and market regulatory authorities. There is a variety of methodologies proposed in the literature for the estimation of VaR. However, few of them get to say something about its distribution or its confidence intervals.…

Inflation expectations in Colombia are characterized. Empirical evidence following conventional tests suggests that they might not be rational, although the period of disinflation included in the sample makes it difficult to ascertain this conclusion. Inflation expectations display close ties…

Levels of interest rates below historical norms may have enhanced financial instability in developed and developing economies during the 2000's. The risk taking channel of monetary policy transmission is a recent theory that explains the interaction between risk perceptions of the financial…

Monetary neutrality in the colombian Monetary neutrality in the Colombian real exchange rate

Why justice is unresponsive to crime: Why justice is un responsive to crime: The case of cocine in Colombia

This piece was part of a research on the colombian inflationary experience published as: The Rise and Perpetuation of a Moderate Inflation, Colombia 1970-1991. It collects together the summaries of the response of Colombian policy-makers to the shocks identified in that paper. Since 1963 the…

A price-setting mechanism based on a markup over variable costs is studied for the quite different inflationary experiences of Argentina and Colombia. The paper pursues a twofold strategy: first, it test the null hypothesis of a constant markup against the alternative of a variable one; second,…

The study evaluates the virtues of asymmetric trimmed means as efficient estimators of inflation for Colombia, an economy with high and variable inflation rates. Results suggest that the proposed indicators are more efficient than alternative indexes and are particularly suited for environments…

The paper provides a model of the banking firm in the macroeconomy intended to explain what determines the interest rate spread. A key factor explaining the spread in our model is the resource cost of capital. A statistical result confirms the prediction of the model, that is, the bank's spread…