Publications

The history of economic recessions has shown that every deep downturn has been accompanied by disruptions in the …financial sector. Paradoxically, up until the …financial world crisis of 2007-2009, little attention was given to macroeconomic and …financial interdependence. And, in spite of a…

Using data from Medellín, second largest city in Colombia, we asses in this paper how a set of neighborhood characteristics determines wages and labor supply for workers in the city. We use GIS data to construct measures of the quality of environments where workers live. This paper focuses in…

We study endogenous growth within a model with occupational choice in which innovators produce ideas, within an asymmetric information framework. Each innovator has private knowledge of their production costs. Developers offer innovators non-linear contract schemes that affect both the number of…

Using Add Health, a very comprehensive longitudinal data set of teenagers and young adults in the United States, we estimate a structural dynamic model of the determinants of obesity. In addition to including many of the well-recognized endogenous factors mentioned in the literature as obesity…

In this paper, I estimate the demand for housing in Bogotá, modeling electricity consumption explicitly to take into account the crossed subsidies included in Colombian utility rates. I use household level data on housing prices, observable dwelling attributes, and demographic variables to…

This paper analyses the effects of sterilised, intraday foreign exchange market operations (non-discretionary and discretionary) on foreign exchange returns and volatility in four inflation targeting economies in Latin America. The distribution of exchange rates during intervention and non-…

Participation notes for the seminar entitled “From the Breakdown of the Bretton Woods System to a New Era of Macro Prudential Oversight”. Cuzco, Peru. 

Mandatory pension fund (MPF) affiliates in Colombia do not have a great deal of information to gauge the financial performance of pension fund managers (PFM). At present, each PFM publishes a monthly report on average profitability for the preceding 36 months (tri-annual yield). However, this…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and monitor the transition process mortgage funding system in Colombia. In particular, it presents an overview of the market, from the point of view of loan securitizations and mortgage-backed bonds offers, regulated by Decree 179 of 2001 and Securities…

This paper uses discrete-choice models to quantify the role of consumer socioeconomic characteristics, payment instrument attributes, and transaction features on the probability of using cash, debit card, or credit card at the point-of-sale. We use the Bank of Canada 2009 Method of Payment…

Exploiting spatial and temporal variations in the number of seizures from criminal organizations, I estimate regional fixed effects models of the increase in the number of properties confiscated on the main crime rates. From 2002 security strategies changed, and as a result,…

In this paper we develop a banking model to study the traditional credit and the microcredit markets. We suppose a monopolistic traditional bank that specializes in screening potential debtors based on their risk profile and a microcredit bank that focus on monitoring the riskier profile…

This paper is an attempt at constructing a simple and eff

The financial crisis of the late 2000's underscored the importance of identifying systemically significant institutions and developing mechanisms for the latter to internalize the externalities they create on the economy should they fail. Using monthly data for the period comprised between…

SEACEN – CEMLA Conference “The Implementation of Monetary Policy: Lessons from the Crisis and Challenges for Coming Years”. 

IMF Statistics Department Seminar. Washington, United States