Documento de trabajo

 The understanding of foreign investment flows is important for emerging market policy makers, since such flows make up a considerable part of the balance of payments, and since such flows tend to be very volatile. Sudden stops or reversals of investment flows have, indeed, played an…

This paper proposes a framework for a regional economic policy in Colombia. The regional characteristics and disparities of the country are studied, and regional disparities are shown to be both significant and persistent over time. This calls for a policy initiative to promote the development…

The surge in Colombian sovereign international bond issues during the 1990s has created an increasing need for the Colombian Government and the Banco de la República to understand the dynamics and the determinants of the sovereign spread. This is the first comprehensive study of the Colombian…

Although Colombia was not directly involved, the economic consequences of World War II had a clear influence on the macroeconomic policies applied in the country during the international conflict, and in the first few years that followed. This essay attempts to explore the role of internal…

 In this essay, the Colombian experience with internal and external debt since the end of the war up to 1970, is discussed. Following a common thread of previous essays, that experience is commented in the international context. The document highlights important similarities and contrasts…

We develop a small open economy model with sectorial balance sheets that are exchange rate exposed and with sectorial stock and flow consistency. The model is perturbed by a shock to investor sentiment and a sudden stop to capital inflow. It is used to evaluate the claims that usually back the…

Since 1991, inflation in Colombia was reduced from 25% on average to about 6% more recently. Although this performance is in line with a long run inflation target of 3%, some analysts ask whether the Central Bank should continue disinflating. In this paper we present a dynamic stochastic general…

Colombian monthly data covering the period from 1995:01 to 2002:11 and ECM, fixed and time-varying parameters and Kalman filter techniques are used in this paper to quantify the exchange rate pass-through effects on import prices within a sample of manufactured imports. Also, whether the foreign…

 At a request from the Ministry of Finance, Banco de la República last year carried out an investigation into the feasibility to use parts of the foreign reserves to buy back some of Colombia’s outstanding sovereign U.S.-dollar debt.  This project resulted in two thorough technical…

Derivatives are contingent claims that complete financial markets. Their use allow agents and firms to ameliorate the impact over con-sumption, production and investment given a change in relative prices induced by an active monetary policy. In this sense, derivatives generate in some cases a…

In this paper, we modeled the Colombian long run economic growth (1925-2003) using a two- regime first order Markov switching model. We found evidence of non-linearity in the annual rate of economic growth. The results show that changes between regimes are sudden and sporadic. The Colombian…

The Colombian economy and financial system have coped reasonably well with the effects of the global financial crisis. Hence, "unconventional" policy measures have not been at the center of the policy decisions and discussions. Nominal short term interest rates have remained the main monetary…

This paper studies the determinants of individual bank failures and M&A processes in Colombia during the financial crisis of the late 1990s. Using bank-specific data we estimate competing risk hazards models and find that while profitability and capitalization are the most important…

This article analyzes identification problems that may arise while linearizing and solving DSGE models. A criterion is proposed to determine whether or not a set of parameters is partially identifiable, in the sense of Canova and Sala (2009), based on the computation of a basis for the null…

We use data of neighborhoods of Bogotá to assess the causal relation between their adolescent fertility and their homicide rates. We find that neighborhoods with high adolescent fertility rates, and that have low secondary enrollment and high crime rates at the moment the children of their teen…

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, it provides an empirical characterization of fiscal policy in Colombia over the last decades, by assessing the three most relevant macroeconomic factors: the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle; whether it has been coherent with the long…

This paper analyzes the link between young people's sense (locus) of control over their lives and their investments in education. We find that young people with a more internal locus of control have a higher probability of finishing secondary school and, conditional on completion, meeting the…

This paper identifies the main bank specific determinants of time to failure during the financial crisis in Colombia using duration analysis. Using partial likelihood estimation, it shows that the process of failure of financial institutions during that period was not a merely random process;…

During the transition from a moderately high level of inflation to an internationally accepted level, the target, the inflation rate, the nominal interest rate and the nominal equilibrium interest rate may be difference stationary. Policy rules estimation, however, is usually performed under…