Camacho González Adriana - Documentos de trabajo

Stress and Birth Outcomes:Evidence from Terrorist Attacks in Colombia
27/11/2007

This paper estimates the impact of random terrorist attacks (landmines) in Colombia on the health of babies born between 1998 and 2003. The results suggest that these types of terrorist activities that occur during a woman’s first trimester of pregnancy have a negative and significant impact on child health outcomes such as birth weight and preterm deliveries, and behaviors such as use of prenatal care. These findings persist when mother fixed effects are included, suggesting that neither observable nor unobservable characteristics of the mothers are driving the results. The paper contributes to the existing literature by identifying yet another important channel through which violence affects economic well being. Given that studies have found a strong link between Low Birth Weight (LBW) and short and long-term socioeconomic outcomes, the negative consequences of violence identified in this paper may have long-term effects on economic activity.

Effects of Subsidized Health Insurance on Newborn Health in Colombia
15/08/2008

Colombia's rapid expansion of health insurance coverage in the 1990s provides an opportunity to evaluate whether health insurance coverage positively affects health care usage and outcomes. We use the discontinuity in eligibility for the Subsidized Regime (SR), the subsidized health insurance for the poor, to see if the Subsidized Regime increased the incidence of doctor assisted births, prenatal care, and hospital deliveries; and if it improved newborn health measured by birth weight, gestation period, Apgar score and incidence of low (lbw) and very low birth weight (vlbw). We find that the Subsidized Regime had positive effects on newborn birth weight, but although positive, not consistently significant effects on other health measures or access to medical personnel and facilities.

Manipulation of Social Program Eligibility: Detection, Explanations and Consequences for Empirical Research

We document manipulation of a targeting system which used a poverty index score to determine eligibility for social welfare programs in Colombia, including health insurance. We show strategic behavior in the timing of the household interviews around local elections, and direct manipulation when some households had their eligibility scores lowered. Initially the number of interviews increased around local elections. After the algorithm was made public to local officials, the score density exhibited a sharp discontinuity exactly at the eligibility threshold. The discontinuity at the threshold is larger where mayoral elections are more competitive; and smaller in municipalities with less competitive elections, more community organizations and higher newspaper circulation.

Misallocation and Productivity in Colombia’s Manufacturing Industries
11/01/2010

Following Hsieh and Klenow (2009), this paper studies productivity dispersions in
Colombian industrial establishments using the Colombian Annual Manufacturing
Survey (AMS) from 1982 to 1998. The United States is used as a benchmark to
estimate the reallocation of capital and labor to equalize marginal products across
plants in Colombia. Gains are found in manufacturing Total Factor Productivity
(TFP) of approximately 3-8 percent and TPF is positively correlated with
exporting status, age, size, and location in the central region of the country. There
is also suggestive evidence that opening the economy in 1991 is associated with
an increase in plant productivity levels for firms that export goods. The 1990
reform that reduced dismissal costs is associated with an increase in productivity,
while the reform that increased labor costs in 1993 is associated with a decrease in
plants’ productivity. Further work is needed to establish a causal relation between
productivity and policy changes.

Effects of Colombia's Social Protection System on Workers' Choice between Formal and Informal Employment

We examine whether the Colombian government, when instituting and expanding social programs in the early nineties, inadvertently created incentives for people to become informal. We use data from repeated cross-sections of the Colombian Household Survey for periods before and after implementation of the reforms. As robustness, we also construct a panel of individuals interviewed for the first and second Census of the Poor. Using the variation in the onset of interviews across municipalities we find robust and consistent estimates of an increase in informal employment between 2 and 4 percentage points. From a policy perspective this implies that the broad expansion of government provided health insurance in Colombia contributed to increasing informal employment.