Working Papers on Economics

We study the effect of shocks to the United States government bonds term premium on Latin American government bonds term premia. For doing so, we compute dynamic multipliers. Our main findings indicate that Latin American countries’ term premia respond permanently to changes in United States…

This paper uses the first wave of the Colombian Longitudinal Survey (ELCA) to analyze the relationship between individual health status and labor force participation. The empirical modeling strategy accounts for the presence of potential endogeneity between these two variables.

In this paper we set up a small open economy model with financial frictions, following Curdia and Woodford (2010)’s model. Unlike other results in the literature such as Curdia and Woodford (2010), McCulley and Ramin (2008) and Taylor (2008), we find that optimal monetary policy should not…

Typically, central banks use a variety of individual models (or a combination of models) when forecasting inflation rates. Most of these require excessive amounts of data, time, and computational power; all of which are scarce when monetary authorities meet to decide over policy interventions.…

This paper provides evidence of short-run predictability for the real exchange rate by performing out-of-sample tests of a forecasting equation which is derived from a consumption-based asset pricing model. In this model, the real exchange rate is predictable as a result of the implications of…

A small open macroeconomic model, in which an optimal interest rate rule emerges to drive the inflation behavior, is used to model inflation within an inflation targeting framework. This set up is used to estimate the relationship between commodity prices shocks and the inflation process in a…

We embed a small open economy model for Colombia into the global risk model of Gómez-Pineda, Guillaume, and Tanyeri (2014). The small open economy model is estimated by Bayesian methods and used for analysis and projections. The model enable us to give a consistent treatment of shocks to global…

This paper studies the behavior of the survival function of accruing loans during the slowdown experienced by the Colombian economy between January-2008 and March-2009 as documented by Alfonso et al. (2013). We use a dataset with information of different vintage loans between July-2007 and March…

In this paper we survey prominent theories that have shaped the literature on sterilized foreign exchange interventions. We identify three main strands of literature: 1) that which advocates the use of sterilized interventions; 2) that which deems sterilized interventions futile; and 3) that…

This paper presents the construction of a tailor-made Macro Computable General Equilibrium Model for the Colombian economy that satisfies Banco de la República's macroeconomic programming and forecasting interests. Using information on the national accounts divulged by the National Statistics…

This paper analyses a comprehensive dataset on migration using robust econometric methodologies to assess a range of economic and social impacts of migration on individuals and households left behind. Our findings indicate that there is no significant impact on labour force participation in…

Our research seeks to determine the impact on female labor outcomes of the amendment on the Colombian labor law in which maternity leave was extended from 12 to 14 weeks (through Law 1468 of July 2011). To identify this impact we compare labor market outcomes of two groups of women with…

The sudden collapse of oil prices poses a challenge to inflation targeting central banks in oil exporting economies. This paper illustrates that challenge and conducts a quantitative assessment of the impact of permanent changes in oil prices in a small and open economy, in which oil represents…

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…

Large value payment flows can be disrupted by several types of failures such as operational incidents, problems experienced by the administrator of the payments settlement system, outages in the communications networks and the inability of a participant to submit payments due to insufficient…

We study the relationship between total factor productivity (TFP) and exporting decisions for Colombian manufacturing firms during 2005-2013. We find that productivity increases a firm's probability of being an exporter, and that exporters have higher productivity, with a premium as high as 85…

This paper presents a methodology to estimate the intraday liquidity that systemically important entities (SIE) need to fulfill all its obligations in a timely fashion, when a simulated failure-to-pay from its main liquidity supplier by discretionary concepts of payment occurs. Using the Bank of…

This paper presents a DSGE model with banks that face moral hazard in management. Banks receive demand deposits and fund investment projects. Banks are subject to potential withdrawals by depositors which may force them into early liquidation of their investments. The likelihood of this…

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.…