Working Papers on Economics

THE COLOMBIAN BANKING CRISIS: THE COLOMBIAN BANKING CRISIS: Macroeconomic Consequences and What to Expect Andres F. Arias  */

Returns and interest rate: A nonlinear relationship in the Bogotá stock market   Returns and interest rate: A nonlinear relationship in the Bogotá stock market   Luis Eduardo Arango, Andrés González, and Carlos Esteban Posada *  Banco de la República  Summary  …

In this paper, we propose a methodology for calculating a leading index of the economic activity based on a modification of Stock and Watson’s (1989, 1991, 1992) approach. We use Kalman filter techniques for estimating the state space representation of the leading index model. The methodology is…

In a small macroeconomic model of the Colombian economy I investigate the problem of selecting a policy rule that is consistent with inflation targeting. I spell out the characteristics of the optimal feedback and output parameters in the rule, as well as for the optimal forecasting horizon for…

This paper provides an empirical analysis of Colombian integration with East Asia using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, in which we assess the effects of several trade liberalization scenarios on trade flows and welfare.The results show that there is an important potential for the…

General equilibrium theory was criticized for its apparent irrefutability, as seemingly implied by the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem.  This view was challenged by Brown and Matzkin (1996), who showed the existence of testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold. Brown and Matzkin…

In this paper I consider the following problem: there is a collection of exogenously given socially feasible sets, and for each one of them, each one of a group of individuals chooses from an individually feasible set. The fact that the product of the individually feasible sets is larger than…

This paper investigates the effect of sovereign risk on the stochastic rational expectations equilibrium of a real business cycle small open economy. The market is imperfect because the sovereign cannot commit to repay its outstanding debt and chooses to default when it is optimal to do so. The…

This paper studies the dynamic response of a few key macroeconomic variables to each one of three exogenous shocks: monetary, government spending and technological shocks. By using a cash in advance model with two market frictions, one in the intermediation of loanable funds, and one in the…

This paper studies the performance, in terms of volatility and welfare, of different monetary policy rules in an economy with two market frictions. We consider a financial friction that highlights the credit channel as the monetary transmission mechanism and a labor friction, that considerably…

In this paper we check the relationship between the yields of the Colombian bonds traded in the (secondary) internal market and the yields of the sovereign global securities for the sample period 1999-2001. The hypothesis we maintain is that, under the assumption of capital mobility, it should…

This paper estimates an asymmetric error correction model to analyse the dynamic behaviour of the Colombian unemployment rate. We find evidence that wages above their long-run equilibrium level do increase unemployment, but wages below this level do not reduce it.

The empirical literature about economic growth has usually ignored spatial interdependence among countries. This paper uses spatial econometrics to estimate a growth model that includes cross-country interdependence, in which a country’s economic growth depends on the growth rate of its…

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of decentralisation in Colombia, using a multiregional CGE model. We investigate to what extent will the Colombian population be better off when goods such as health and education, are delivered locally as against centrally. A provision scheme based on…

In this theoretical report, the identifiability property of a coincident index model is studied.  As a result, characterization of the identifiability conditions solves a model specification problem, which was detected in the design of an earlier index for the Colombian economy.   Key…

Sudden stops seem to create the perfect environment for disinflation, especially when central banks defend the exchange rate by increasing interest rates. We propose a variation of the output gap model that incorporates the sudden stop shock. The use of the model in policy analysis shows that…

At the end of the last decade, the real activity in Colombia underwent the sharpest recession of the last fifty years. We postulate a non-triangular structural VAR model (Amisano and Giannini, 1997) to describe the dynamics of output, prices, unemployment and wages during the last two decades.…

The study presented here is a follow-up study to Rowland and Torres (2004), who used a panel data framework together with data from 16 emerging market issuers to identify the determinants of the spread and the creditworthiness. Since many new issuers of emerging market sovereign debt have…