Working Papers on Economics

A threefold analysis of commodity prices is carried out to observe their long-run behaviour, their short-run properties and the main determinants. According to the evidence, the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis does not seem to be a property of most prices. The cycles of commodity prices are…

First developed by Markowitz (1952), the mean-variance framework is the most widespread theoretical approximation to the portfolio problem. Nevertheless, successful application in the investment community has been limited. Assumptions such as normality of returns and a static correlation matrix…

This paper advances on the analysis of the structural interdependence among Colombian departments. The results show that Bogotá has a large influence in the other regional economies through its purchasing power. Additionally, it can be observed a center-periphery pattern in the spatial…

This paper offers some preliminary steps in the marriage of some of the theoretical foundations of the new economic geography with spatial computable general equilibrium models.  Modeling the spatial economy of Colombia using the traditional assumptions of CGE models makes little sense when…

An empirical model of the pass-through of international to domestic food inflation is proposed. The inflation rates and exchange rates of China and India are found to be significant in explaining imported food inflation in Colombia, 10,000 miles away. Notwithstanding the recent increase in…

We present an investment process that: (i) decomposes securities into risk factors; (ii) allows for the construction of portfolios of assets that would selectively expose the manager to desired risk factors; (iii) perform a risk allocation between these portfolios, allowing for tracking error…

The focus of this study is to build, from the ‘bottom-up’, a market with artificially intelligent adaptive agents based on the institutional arrangement of the Colombian Foreign Exchange Market (1994-1999) in order to determine simple agents’ design, rules and interactions that are sufficient to…

We use hedonic price models to estimate the value households are willing to pay to avoid violent crime in the city of Bogotá. We find that households living in the highest socioeconomic level (stratum 6) pay up to 7.2% of their house values in order to prevent average homicide rates from…

This paper analyzes the evolution and impact of capital flows in Colombia over the past five years. An examination of the nature and composition of the capital flows indicates that to large extent they have originated in foreign direct investment, especially in the oil and mining sectors. The…

The objective of this paper is to analyze how international cycles affect the real GDP cycle and so monetary policy decisions in Colombia. We estimate that cycles in world GDP, export prices and capital inflows are strongly associated with the Colombian business cycle both on impact and even…

This paper analyzes the link between young people's sense (locus) of control over their lives and their investments in education. We find that young people with a more internal locus of control have a higher probability of finishing secondary school and, conditional on completion, meeting the…

The purpose of this study is twofold: First, it provides an empirical characterization of fiscal policy in Colombia over the last decades, by assessing the three most relevant macroeconomic factors: the behavior of fiscal policy over the business cycle; whether it has been coherent with the long…

We use data of neighborhoods of Bogotá to assess the causal relation between their adolescent fertility and their homicide rates. We find that neighborhoods with high adolescent fertility rates, and that have low secondary enrollment and high crime rates at the moment the children of their teen…

This article analyzes identification problems that may arise while linearizing and solving DSGE models. A criterion is proposed to determine whether or not a set of parameters is partially identifiable, in the sense of Canova and Sala (2009), based on the computation of a basis for the null…

This paper studies the determinants of individual bank failures and M&A processes in Colombia during the financial crisis of the late 1990s. Using bank-specific data we estimate competing risk hazards models and find that while profitability and capitalization are the most important…

The Colombian economy and financial system have coped reasonably well with the effects of the global financial crisis. Hence, "unconventional" policy measures have not been at the center of the policy decisions and discussions. Nominal short term interest rates have remained the main monetary…

The unfolding of the 2007 world financial and economic crisis has highlighted the vulnerability of real economic activity to strong fluctuations in asset prices. Which is the optimal monetary policy in an economy like the Colombian that is exposed to swings in asset prices? What is the…

The price setting behavior of Colombian retailers of goods and services was studied based on a unique dataset containing 12,052,970 individual price reports covering all items in the Colombian CPI from March 1999 to May 2008. The main results are summarized as follows: 1. Colombian consumer…

The economic research of 30 central banks in OECD and Latin America countries from 2000 to 2007 is evaluated in this study. An international comparison based on four indexes that measure central bank research output, demand, productivity and relevance is included. From this view, the European…

Operational Risk (OR) results from endogenous and exogenous risk factors, as diverse and complex to assess as human resources and technology, which may not be properly measured using traditional quantitative approaches.  Engineering has faced the same challenges when designing practical…