Publications

The informal sector is an extensive phenomenon in developing countries. While some of its implications have drawn considerable attention in the literature, one relatively unexplored aspect has to do with the saving patterns of workers and firms and how these might influence aggregate savings and…

Presentation titled "Timing and Duration of IT Regimes", delivered during the Seminar of the EEP Journal (Essays on Economic Policy), organized by Banco de la República at the Events Center of Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá, Colombia.

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…

Together with a set of not commonly reported ones, the most widely known stylized facts of high frequency Nominal Exchange Rates in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru with respect to the US Dollar are studied and interpreted to the light of recent literature in this paper.

The price of Brent crude oil remained relatively stable between early 2011 and the first half of 2014, averaging USD 110 per barrel (bl).

This  paper  uses  the  Colombian  National  Health  Survey  to  analyze  the relationship between education and risky health behaviors, namely smoking, heavy drinking, being obese, and unsafe sexual behavior, by estimating the education gradient…

This paper analyzes the role of the Great Depression and protectionism in the Colombian industrialization of the early 1930s as well as the role of other determinants in the rapid industrialization that took place during the period 1934-1953. We conclude that the market pushed industrialization…

Many central banks that have opted for monetary autonomy have also been reluctant to relinquish control over the value of their currencies. As a result, they have operated through both interest rate and foreign exchange interventions.  However, in the context of the monetary trilemma, both…

We present a stochastic frontier model with random inefficiency parameters which is able to capture the influence of risk-taking on bank efficiency and that distingues those effects among banks with different characteristics. Cost and profit efficiency are found to be over- and underestimated…

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…

The paper presents a global model for analysis and projections. The model features a handful of elements that make it suitable for analyzing three broad sets of topics; first, systemic risk and its transmission to country risk premiums; second, the transmission from country risk premiums to…

This paper has as main objective to build a composite metric of financial soundness for the private corporate sector in Colombia. Instead of relying on the individual and sometimes restrictive financial ratio analysis approach, the purpose of this document is to provide a single metric aimed at…

This document explores an alternative strategic asset allocation framework for foreign exchange reserves, whose main purpose is to maximize the risk-adjusted returns maintaining the objectives of liquidity and safety of a foreign reserves’ portfolio.   The overall portfolio can be…

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…

This paper analyzes efficiency in an economy with an informal sector that consists of unregulated self-employment, and where there are no costs of being informal, (Albrecht et al. (2009)). First, assuming workers in the formal sector are ex-ante heterogeneous, I show that this type of economy is…

Paper presented at Money and Banking Conference “Lessons and Challenges for Emerging Countries during the Crisis”.

Remarks presented at the Bear Stearns 2006 Colombia Conference.

Using a stylized model in which output is measured with error, we derive the optimal policy response to the demand shock signal and to changes in the measurement error volatility from two different perspectives: the minimization of the expected loss (from which we derive the ‘standard’ policy)…