Working Papers on Economics

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…

This paper tests the importance of the financial structure of banks in the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in Colombia, using an unbalanced panel of 51 banks for the period of 1996:4-2014:8. We find that an increase in the interbank rate (proxy of the intervention rate) has…

This paper builds a general equilibrium model that incorporates banks, financial frictions, default and a capital requirements. Ex-ante heterogeneous households decide how much to save or borrow for the sake of consumption (consumer credit) or the provision of housing services(mortgages). These…

This paper presents a novel monthly dataset of job vacancies in Bogota between 1960 and 2010. The dataset was constructed by counting the number of help-wanted announcements published in the most important newspaper with national circulation—namely, El Tiempo. We describe the methodology used to…

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…

In the past decade the Colombian Economic Authorities undertook a series of measures that reduced the structural fiscal deficit, decreased the Government currency mismatch and deepened the local fixed-rate public bond market. This paper presents some evidence suggesting that these improvements…

In this paper we show the importance of subject of degree in explaining the gender wage gap in Colombia. In order to minimize the influence of gender differences in experience, promotions, and job changes on the wage gap, we focus on college graduates who have a formal job and who have been in…

This paper propose indicator variables for the implementation of monetary policy in an inflation targeting regime. Using constant interest rate projections, the notion of a target-compatible interest rate is presented. This variable allows to extract some characteristics that the expected future…

We estimate a non-parametrical Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and find strong evidence rejecting the classical linear CAPM. Furthermore, we find inconsistent linear betas for a series of stocks in the Colombian stock exchange (BVC), supporting the hypothesis of a better and consistent…

Typically, when forecasting inflation rates, there are a variety of individual models and a combination of several of these models. We implement a Bayesian shrinkage combination methodology to include information that is not captured by the individual models using expert forecasts as prior…

This document presents a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with rule of thumb (Non-Ricardian) agents and both nominal price and wage rigidities. The model follows closely that of Galí et al. (2004) and expands it to include a second way form of heterogeneity (besides the Non-Ricardian…

We study the determinants of sovereign default risk in Colombia by focusing on different time spans of risk which are indicated by yield spreads of government bonds with different maturities. Cointegration regressions are performed to analyze whether the drivers of short-run default risk are…

To evaluate whether transparency is beneficial, it is usual to assume that the central bank may choose one of two options, opacity versus truthful communication. However, the monetary policymaker may have incentives to misrepresent private information so as to reduce economic volatility by…

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…

This paper measures the impact of strengthening the security policy on the rural labour market in Colombia by exploiting the structural change in the number of rural seizures. The new policy produced dissimilar effects across gender, age-groups, and types of occupation. For adults, especially…

This document presents how to estimate and implement a structural VAR-X model under long run and impact identification restrictions. Estimation by bayesian and maximum likelihood methods is presented. Applications of the structural VAR-X for impulse response functions to structural shocks,…

In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology to determine the existence of credit booms, which is a complex and crucial issue for policymakers. In particular, we exploit the Mendoza and Terrones (2008)’s idea that macroeconomic aggregates other than the credit growth rate contain…

In this paper two new measures of the Colombian output gap and the real neutral interest rate are proposed. Instead of relying only on statistical filters, the proposed measures use semi-structural New-Keynesian models, adapted for a small open economy. The output gap measures presented are in…

This study implements a regular vine copula methodology to evaluate the level of contagion among the exchange rates of six Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru) from June 2005 to April 2012. We measure contagion in terms of tail dependence coefficients,…