Working Papers on Economics

The effects of the Pension Fund Managers (PFMs) behavior on the foreign exchange market may be important, given the increasing size of their portfolio and their possible market power. Some authors argue that when big investors like PFMs trade large volumes in the foreign exchange market, they…

The long-run component of the Colombian unemployment rate is estimated for the last twenty years. According to the results, the main determinants of the permanent component of the unemployment rate are the real hourly wage, the non-wage labor costs and the rate of capital accumulation. Given the…

According to traditional literature, liquidity risk in individual banks can turn into a system-wide financial crisis when either interbank credit exposures or bank runs are present. This paper shows that this phenomenon can also arise when individual liquidity risk trans- forms into system-wide…

This paper studies foreign and domestic firms in Colombia and, in particular, whether these firms behave differently.   The study uses a dataset containing the 2003 balance sheets and income statements for some 7,001 firms.  The dataset was obtained from the Superintendencia de…

This paper investigates the possible responses of an inflation-targeting monetary policy in the face of asset price deviations from fundamental values.

The study presented here looks at the Colombian corporate sector broken down by city.  In particular, it studies the eight main cities of the country.  It is an initial study, maybe the first of its kind, and it aims to act as a foundation for future research in the area.  A…

A pseudo-panel was built to estimate the determinants of the labor participation decision of married women between 1984 and 2000. Past participation decisions, education level, labor income taxes, children between 1 and 2 years of age, and the presence of other people unemployed at home are the…

This paper evaluates the effects of capital account controls adopted in the past years by the FLAR’s member countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Perú and Venezuela) on the efficiency of the banking sector, the economic growth and the volatility of output, consumption, and…

The paper develops a New Keynesian Small Open Economy Model characterized by external habit formation and Calvo price setting with dynamic inflation updating. The model is used to analyze the effect of nominal ex-change rate targeting on optimal policy and impulse responses. It is found that…

This paper contributes an estimation framework to measure both technological and linkage externalities from foreign direct investment (FDI). Empirical research dealt mainly with intra-industry spillovers from FDI with restrictive treatment of inter-industry effects until recently. However, as…

In this paper we model the effect of migrant remittances on job creation and human capital formation, given migration prospects. Model calibration of deep parameters was performed with data from the AMCO survey on migration and remittances. The simulations based on the model show that…

The Colombian economy experienced several shocks in the past ten years. The permanent fall of inflation, the adoption of inflation targeting (IT) and a financial crisis altered the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. Low inflation and IT reduced inflation persistence and contributed to…

This paper attempts to explain the decrease and reversal of the education gap between males and females. Given a continuum of agents, the education decisions are modelled as an assignment game with endogenous types. In the first stage agents choose their education level and in the second they…

In this paper, we modelled the Colombian long run per capita economic growth (1925-2005) using a Markov switching regime model with both fixed (FTP) and time-varying transition probabilities (TVTP) to explain regime changes in the economic growth. We found evidence of non-linearity in the per…

Domiciliary public utility services in Colombia have a cross subsidy system which charges subsidized rates to the households who live in houses located in strata associated to low wealth levels, and taxed rates to the better off. We assesses the hypothesis that the flow of subsidies that…