Working Papers on Economics

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…

Determining the exchange rate pass-through on inflation is a necessity for central banks as well as for firms and households. This is an apparently easy and intuitive task, but it faces high complexity and uncertainty. This paper examines the nature of the pass-through and quantifies…

This paper proposes an empirical model to identify and forecast banking fragility episodes using information on the credit funding sources. We predict the probability of occurrence of such episodes 0, 3 and 6 months ahead employing a Bayesian Model Averaging of logistic regressions. The…

The purpose of this paper is to estimate a model for gross capital flows for a sample of developing economies and assess their long-term determinants by using a panel co-integration approach. Results indicate that there is a co-integration relationship between key push and pull factors and gross…

In this paper we expanded the closed economy model by Bernanke and Gertler (1999) in order to account for the macroeconomic effects of an asset price bubble in the context of a small open economy model. During the nineties emerging market economies opened their financial accounts to foreign…

In this paper we analyze the effects of financial constraints on the exchange rate through the portfolio balance channel. Our contribution is twofold: First, we construct a tractable two-period general equilibrium model in which financial constraints inhibit capital flows. Hence, departures from…

The effect of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has been substantial across markets and countries worldwide. We examine how the GFC has changed the way equity markets group together based on the similarity of stock indices’ daily returns. Our examination is based on agglomerative clustering…

In this paper we study exchange rate effects due to shifts in the portfolio composition of the Colombian financial sector during 2003-2014. We first provide a theoretical understanding of the channel's transmission mechanism by modeling how the banking sector optimally allocates its portfolio…

We study the existence and international migration of housing market bubbles, using quarterly information of twenty OECD countries for the period comprised between 1970 and 2015. We find that housing bubbles are present in all the countries included in our sample. Multiple bubbles are found in…

We extend the framework of Diebold and Yilmaz [2009] and Diebold and Yilmaz [2012] and construct volatility spillover indexes using a DCC-GARCH framework to model the multivariate relationships of volatility among assets. We compute spillover indexes directly from the series of asset…

In this paper we explore one of the oldest labour market phenomena documented in the literature: the added worker effect, which refers to the labour supply response of secondary workers to main earners´ job losses. To do so we take advantage of the panel data survey conducted by a Colombian…

In a previous paper (Parra-Polania and Vargas, 2015) we modify the financial constraint of a very standard model to incorporate the fact that international lenders take into account that taxes (or subsidies) affect borrowers’ income available for debt repayments, and find that ex-post…

In this paper we present estimates for the coefficients of a production function, and the corresponding total factor productivity (TFP) for the Colombian manufacturing industry during 2005{2013. We follow several structural microeconometric techniques to estimate the production function…

This paper evaluates the role of rural infrastructure on the performance of some agricultural crops in Colombia. The study utilizes geo-referenced cross sectional data of four crops, coffee, rice, beans and plantains, collected for the majority of municipalities. Using genetic matching models,…

Central banks in emerging countries frequently build-up (diminish) reserves while attempting to depreciate (appreciate) their domestic currencies. Even if these interventions are effective, they often entail various costs. Basu (2012), nonetheless, proposes a model in which the sole announcement…

We analyse three models to determine the conditions under which reserve requirements are used as a part of an optimal monetary policy framework in an inflation targeting regime. In all cases the Central Bank (CB) minimizes an objective function that depends on deviations of inflation from its…