Seminarios CEDE

Con el propósito de fortalecer el pensamiento crítico y difundir avances investigativos, esta propuesta abre un espacio de discusión académica organizados por el Centro de Estudios sobre Desarrollo Económico (CEDE) de la Universidad de los Andes. Abiertos a investigadores/as, estudiantes y público general, estos encuentros promueven el intercambio de ideas en torno a temas clave como el desarrollo económico, la microeconomía, la macroeconomía y la historia económica.

En cada sesión se presentan investigaciones recientes, se discuten avances académicos y se generan debates sobre los desafíos económicos más relevantes para Colombia y el mundo.

Agosto
4 - Camila Galindo, Universidad de los Andes
13 - Fabio Sánchez, Universidad de los Andes
20 - Oskar Nupia, Universidad de los Andes
27 - Mateo Uribe, Universidad de los Andes

Septiembre
3 - Heather Royer
10 - Thiemo Fetzer
17 - Sarah Janzen

Octubre
8 - Todd Schoellman
15 - Manuel Fernández, Universidad de los Andes
22 - Laurent Bouton

Noviembre
19 - Nolan Pope

Ver los seminarios CEDE de más de 2 años

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Juan Escobar

This paper explores how to allocate an indivisible good to agents who are privately informed about their valuations and wealth. Wealth is distributed in the population of agents and restricts the purchasing ability. The optimal mechanism sells the good at a price below the marginal cost of production with strictly positive probability. Some rich agents are rationed. We discuss how inequality shapes the optimal mechanism.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Jonathan Weigel

Progressive taxation is a defining feature of high-income countries' tax systems, but developing countries typically rely on less progressive instruments. We study the introduction of progressive property taxation in a large Congolese city through a citywide field experiment conducted in partnership with the provincial government. Neighborhoods were randomly assigned to either a progressive or a proportional schedule with equal revenue potential. The progressive system increased total revenue by 55\% relative to the proportional one. Revenue gains occurred across the property value distribution: at the top, higher statutory rates mechanically outweighed modest compliance losses, while at the bottom, lower rates induced large compliance gains that more than offset the mechanical revenue loss. Cross-randomized information treatments show that taxpayers' responses were driven by their own rates rather than by others' rates or by the perceived fairness of the overall system. Finally, we examine how statutory progressivity maps into \textit{effective} tax rates (ETRs). Across all systems, ETRs decline with property value --- implying that the rich pay less as a share of wealth --- and this gradient is steepest under the progressive schedule. However, enforcement interventions focused on higher-value properties reverse this relationship, suggesting that investments in targeted enforcement can help align effective with statutory progressivity.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Nicolás González

This paper examines the impact of productivity signals in academia on posgraduate education and labor market trajectories. I exploit discontinuities in the assignment of Latin honors—magna cum laude, summa cum laude, and cum laude—to compare graduates who receive honors with similarly high-achieving graduates who narrowly miss the distinction. Using a regression discontinuity design, I identify the causal effect of academic signaling on postgraduate investments and subsequent labor market outcomes. Evidence shows that while Latin Honors do not significantly increase the likelihood or intensity of postgraduate education, they lead to substantial improvements in the quality of institutions attended. In the labor market, the effects are concentrated on leadership outcomes and, to a lesser extent, international exposure, with little impact on job stability, firm characteristics, or mobility. These findings highlight that academic distinctions primarily operate by shifting individuals toward higher-quality educational and professional opportunities, supporting a signaling interpretation of academic achievement.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - José Guerra

What drives prosocial behavior and how it can be shaped through education interventions? This paper examines whether reading literary fiction can causally influence prosociality. In a pre-registered field experiment, university students were randomly assigned to one of two four-week extracurricular courses: a fiction-reading curriculum or a placebo course focused on behavioral science, with equivalent intensity and reading content. After the intervention, participants took part in experimental sessions featuring incentivized economic games and psychological scales. We find evidence that the fiction course increases prosocial behavior, primarily through higher altruism and greater trustworthiness. The effects appear to reflect shifts in individual preferences rather than updates in social norms. While empathy does not change, we find suggestive evidence that fiction increases transportation and attention to what makes others unique—consistent with a social cognition mechanism centered on valuing individuation rather than self–other overlap or empathy. These findings contribute to the growing literature on how narrative experiences shape social behavior and offer paths for future interventions to increase prosociality without social norms change.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Oscar Becerra

In this paper, we analyze the effect of natural disasters on municipal fiscal outcomes. Unlike national governments, municipalities operate under distinct fiscal frameworks with limited local revenues and dependency on earmarked transfers. By analyzing the universe of Colombian municipalities, we identify a systemic pattern in which institutional rigidities inhibit fiscal adjustments. Using an event-study approach with data from 2000 to 2023, we find no statistically significant effect of disasters on fiscal outcomes, even in municipalities with high levels of preventive investment. These results, robust to alternative severity measures, suggest that rigid institutional setups prevent municipalities from adjusting their finances in response to disasters.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Sebastián Montaño

This paper studies how delays in diploma receipt affect the school-to-work transition and long-term labor market outcomes. In Colombia, graduating seniors can wait up to six months to receive their college diplomas after completing all degree requirements. Waiting times are largely determined by administrative procedures and vary considerably across and within programs. Exploiting within-program variation, we show that students experiencing longer delays are less likely to be employed one year after graduation and have significantly lower earnings ten years later. Our findings suggest that delays in diploma receipt disrupt initial firm–worker matching, helping explain the persistence of these effects.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Rachid Laajaj

This work emphasizes the central role of skill and altruism in development, understood as an increase in social welfare. In the basic model, skill expands the set of feasible payoffs, while altruism governs the private–social tradeoff in the decision maker’s choice. Higher altruism consistently increases social welfare. By contrast, higher skill needs not: capability expansions combine a positive frontier effect with an ambiguous reallocation effect, potentially toward actions that are privately attractive but socially harmful. When altruism is absent or low, whether more skill contributes to development is therefore subject to a “lottery of technology.” Hence altruism acts as a guardrail, limiting misuse of technology, thus when altruism is sufficiently high, skill improvement unambiguously raises social welfare. The rest of the paper discusses possible counterarguments to the central role of altruism in development. Endogenous technological change makes altruism more influential in the long-run. The effect of institutions is subject to a “lottery of alignment of interests” (between policymakers’ objectives and social welfare), unless the altruism of policymakers is high enough to ensure the good use of institutional power. Allowing altruism to be group-specific highlights that only universal, indiscriminate altruism guarantees development and the effective use of skill improvement. This basic setting appears to speak to many contemporaneous and historical events, and the role of altruism leads to the conclusion that ensuring long-term development requires a selection of altruistic leaders and a shift in the distribution of altruism.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Alexia Delfino

Organizations often require employees to collaborate with others who may see the world differently, yet we know little about how misalignment in personal values affects performance within firms. Using survey and administrative data from a world-leading bank, we show that employees whose values diverge from their managers perform worse. This effect is not explained by demographic diversity, managerial biases or misalignment with organizational values. The productivity loss of moving from the least to the most misaligned worker is nearly four times larger than that of having a manager of a different gender. Value differences with teammates do not generate similar effects. We provide empirical evidence and a theoretical framework to show that value misalignment with managers can affect performance by discouraging employee-led communication.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Jorge Cuartas

La violencia contra la primera infancia constituye una de las mayores amenazas para la acumulación de capital humano y para las trayectorias educativas, sociales y económicas a lo largo del ciclo de vida. Sin embargo, algunas de sus formas, como el castigo físico, siguen siendo socialmente normativas y altamente prevalentes. En esta charla presentaré evidencia empírica sobre los efectos del castigo físico en el desarrollo humano, con énfasis en los principales desafíos asociados a la identificación causal, así como a la validez externa de los estudios existentes. A continuación, reflexionaré sobre una alianza de investigaciónpráctica con el Gobierno de Colombia orientada al diseño, evaluación y escalamiento de Apapacho, un programa de prevención de la violencia en la primera infancia. Mostraré cómo integramos (1) teoría económica, psicología y ciencias de la implementación con (2) evidencia empírica proveniente de una evaluación experimental con más de 2.500 madres, padres y otros cuidadores de niños y niñas en primera infancia, así como pilotos y estudios de métodos mixtos, para maximizar la efectividad, aceptabilidad, relevancia, factibilidad y sostenibilidad del programa. Concluiré discutiendo cómo el trabajo interdisciplinario, aplicado y colaborativo con responsables de política puede aumentar de manera sustantiva la efectividad y escalabilidad de intervenciones orientadas a promover el desarrollo infantil temprano.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes