Publications OLD

This study analyzes the expected effects of climate change on Colombia’s current account. To this end, we present a literature review that outlines how climate-related risks could impact the balance of payments, complemented with an analysis that illustrates how the 2014-2015 oil shock…

We provide evidence of the negative effect of the minimum wage on labor market flows, such as job creation, job destruction, hiring, and separations in Colombia. Depicting firms' minimum wage (MW) compliance cost, we find evidence of an adverse effect of increases on MW compliance cost…

In this paper, we examine the financial and real effects of macroprudential policies with a new identifying strategy that exploits borrower-specific provisioning levels for each bank. Locally, we compare similar firms just below and above regulatory…

We investigate the effects of a change in the regulation of the spot market for electricity in Colombia that took place in 2009. Specifically, the regulation switched from an auction mechanism with simple bids to one with complex bids to allow generators to separately bid on variable…

Banks in emerging market economies rely on cross-border interbank lending to financing firms in the real sector. By matching cross-border bank-to-bank loan level data with domestic bank-to-firm loan level data, and firm-level data, this paper shows that sudden yield reversal observed…

This paper assesses whether the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated automation in developing countries. We studied the case of Colombia, a country with low R&D and productivity and with high labor informality and unemployment. We estimated event-study models to assess the differential…

We study the impact of natural resource royalties on educational outcomes in Colombia. We analyze a reform enacted in 2012 that made the distribution of these royalties more equitable. Before the reform, most royalties were assigned to the regions where the natural resources…

Numerous studies exist about exports at the firm level in Colombia, but only a few exist about the market for imports and the importing firms. This study seeks to fill that gap by looking at the dynamics of imports, the market for imports and the role of importing firms in Colombia…

One of the lessons we learned from the 2008 financial crisis was the importance of monitoring the systemic risk in the stability of financial systems. In this regard, lines of research have been developed with the aim to provide reliable and timely metrics on this risk, taking as much…

The concept of centrality has been widely used to monitor systems with a network structure because it allows identifying their most influential participants.This monitoring task can be difficult if the number of system participants is considerably large or if the wide variety of…

This paper studies the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on corporate credit in Colombia. We first exploit the geographic and temporal variation in the disease spread to estimate the effect of local exposure to the virus on credit. Our estimates indicate that neither local exposure to…

We investigate whether central banks are able to attract or redirect capital flows, by bringing together the entire empirical literature into the first quantitative meta-analysis on the subject. We dissect policy effects by the type of flow and by the origin of the monetary shock.…

Q: The peso has weakened the most among more than 150 currencies since the election last month. How worried are you by this? Under what circumstances would intervention be appropriate?

According to the World Migration Report 2020, the number of international migrants increased from 84 million in 1970 to 272 million in 2019, accounting for 3.5% of the world’s population. This paper investigates the aggregated effect of emigration on the tax revenue of sending…

We study the labor market effects of the Venezuelan migration shock on female labor market outcomes in Colombia using a Bartik-instrument approach.For our identification strategy we leverage regional variation from pull factors and time variation from push factors. Our findings show…

This study characterizes the microstructure of the spot and forward peso-dollar exchange markets in Colombia, with the objective of studying the main dynamics and interactions of all the sectors which are participating in these markets. Additionally, it seeks to identify the economic…

In this paper we evaluate the contribution of business expectations from surveys of Banco de la República and Fedesarrollo, to the forecasts of the main macroeconomic variables: inflation, unemployment, employment and economic growth. We make this assessment by comparing one to four…

This paper proposes comprehensive measures of the Latin American business cycle that help to infer the expected deepness of recessions, and strength of expansions, as they unfold in real time. These measures are based on the largest country economies in the region by accounting for…

This paper estimates the marginal treatment effect of informality on wages for Brazil at the individual level using regional data on labor inspectors for identification. The results show that there is significant essential heterogeneity among otherwise identical workers that lead them…

The extraction of non-renewable natural resources has the potential to generate revenue to finance government activities. One of the most used tax tools is the collection of royalties from mining projects because they are usually unrelated to their profitability. Royalties often have…