Working Papers on Economics

Since correlation may be interpreted as a measure of the influence across time-series, it may be conveniently mapped into a distance and into a weighted adjacency matrix. Based on such matrix, network theory has attempted to filter out the noise in correlation matrices by extracting the dominant…

This study provides new evidence on the relationship between abnormal loan growth and banks’ risk taking behavior, using data from a rich panel of Colombian financial institutions. We show that abnormal credit growth during a prolonged period of time leads to an increase in banks’ riskiness,…

The recent financial crisis has renewed the interest of economists, both at the theoretical and empirical level, in developing a better understanding of credit and its mechanisms. A rapidly growing strand of the literature views banks as facing funding restrictions that condition their borrowing…

This document explores the predictive power of the yield curves in Latin America (Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile) taking into account the factors set by the specifications of Nelson & Siegel and Svensson. Several forecasting methodologies are contrasted: an autoregressive model, a vector…

The paper examines the bidders behaviour in the Colombian government bond auctions during 2007 for the period in which there is no uncertainty in the supply. Three main findings are presented. First, in contrast with other treasury auctions (Castellanos [2]), the market clearing price in the…

In this paper we develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium fiscal model for the Colombian economy. The model has three main components: the existence of non-Ricardian households, price and wage rigidities, and a fiscal authority that finances government spending partly with public debt.…

Banco de la República’s FX intervention policy is described, with a focus on its objectives and main features. Then, based on a survey of the effectiveness of sterilized intervention in Colombia, it is argued that this tool is not useful to cope with the challenges posed by medium term external…

This paper investigates whether transforming the Consumer Price Index with a class of power transformations lead to an improvement of inflation forecasting accuracy. We use one of the prototypical models to forecast short run inflation which is known as the univariate time series ARIMA . This…

We use a unique data set at the individual level to estimate an empirical model explaining the probability of young individuals to become criminals as a function of the presence of adult criminals in their neighborhoods, an a complete set of control variables, including census sector fixed…

Network analysis has been applied to identify systemically important financial institutions after the 2008 financial crisis. Such applications have stressed the importance of centrality within the too-connected-to-fail concept.

In the context of financial crises influenced by the development and burst of housing price bubbles, the detection of exuberant behaviors in the financial market and the implementation of early warning diagnosis tests are of vital importance. This paper applies the new method developed by…

We assess the effects of the Colombian Unemployment Subsidy (US) program on future labor participation, unemployment, formality, school attendance and earnings of its beneficiaries, on household earnings and school attendance of the household members, and on weight and height of their children…

This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of fiscal decentralization on Colombia's public basic education. Based on the social and economic data available for 1,003 municipalities and 13,670 public schools, for the last decade, we confirmed that decentralization has had a positive and…

In this paper I explore the potential link between Plan Colombia and violence with a new perspective. I focus the analysis only on the first three running years of the program (2000-2002) in order to avoid the overlapping effect with a security policy started in 2002/2003. This paper exploits…

This paper investigates the impact of sovereign risk on the stochastic rational expectations equilibrium of a pure exchange small open economy. International borrowing and lending arise from the interaction between a risk averse sovereign representative agent in a small open economy trying to…

Informational constraints may turn the Merton Model for corporate credit risk impractical. Applying this framework to the Colombian financial sector is limited to four stock-market-listed firms; more than a hundred banking and non-banking firms are not listed. 

As a result of the most recent global financial crisis literature has embraced size, connectedness and substitutability as key indicators for financial institutions’ systemic importance. Despite the intuitiveness of these concepts, identifying systemic important institutions remain a non-trivial…

In this document we use the Expectations Survey conducted monthly by the Central Bank of Colombia during the period of October 2003 – August 2012. We find that exchange rate revaluations were generally followed by expectations of further revaluation in the short run (1 month), but by…

This paper studies whether the geographical separation of markets constitutes a factor that helps explain the dynamics of agricultural prices. To do this, we employ a highly disaggregated dataset for Colombia that consists of weekly observations on wholesale prices for 18 agricultural products…

We apply a pair-wise approach to test the law of one price for deposit (lending) rates in Colombia. We find that when banks are of different size deposit rates adjust quickly, suggesting a competitive environment. By contrast, lending rates adjust rapidly when banks are of similar size,…