Eventos

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

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Rakesh Vohra

We consider a collection of firms linked through equity-holdings whose managers choose risky investment decisions in response to an exogenous shock. Agency conflicts arising from a gap between the firm's value and a manager's present rewards (from shares, penalties, bonuses, etc.) or future career concerns will distort the manager's choices. The nature of the conflict determines whether they are overly conservative or overly risky, as well as the strategic complementarity or substitution of the managers choices, independent of the underlying equity network. However, the network will determine the magnitude of these distortions and whether they are amplified, and we characterize when this is so. Furthermore, even when the holding network is fully diversified, within-firm agency conflicts can prevent the aggregate effect of idiosyncratic shocks from diminishing as received wisdom would suggest. This implies that corporate governance plays an important role in macro fluctuations.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Fernando Fernandez

Millions of people depend on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) for their livelihoods, yet transitions toward cleaner and more formal mining business models remain rare despite decades of policy interventions. We study the sources of this persistence in the Peruvian Amazon using novel survey data collected from concession owners and workers in Madre de Dios. We document substantial heterogeneity in miners economic conditions, exposure to risk and insecurity, access to finance and markets, trust in public institutions, and beliefs about mining and development, and examine how these characteristics relate to stated intentions to adopt clean technologies, pursue formalization, and invest in alternative business models. We then use two complementary survey experiments to discipline interpretation. A randomized conjoint experiment elicits preferences over multidimensional policy bundles, while a vignette experiment isolates the relative importance of liquidity constraints versus downside risk in adoption decisions. Together, the analysis highlights how interacting financial, institutional, and belief-based constraints shape both initial take-up and subsequent follow-through, helping explain why single-instrument policies often fail and informing the design of bundled approaches to support durable mining transitions in environmentally fragile contexts.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Andrés Ham

We examine the effects of drug-related violence on household choices in a transit country in the global cocaine trade. Using a shift-share instrumental variables strategy that interacts temporal variation in Colombian coca production with cross-sectional municipal connectivity in Honduras, we find heterogeneous impacts on men, women, and children. Rising homicide rates reduce male labor force participation, especially among self-employed and informal workers. For women, violence increases household work and lowers self-employment wages, reflecting a shift to low-productivity activities. For children, violence raises school attendance and reduces work, consistent with schooling as a protective response. These findings demonstrate that drug-related violence disrupts labor markets and reshapes time allocation within households, underscoring the broader consequences of drug-related violence in transit countries.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Michele Di Maio

This paper provides the first global analysis of the impact of conflict exposure on firm performance, combining geolocalized longitudinal firm-level data with information on political violence events across 89 countries between 2006 and 2019. Our results show that higher conflict exposure leads to declines in both sales and total costs, resulting in no significant effect on profits for surviving firms. The reduction in sales is driven by lower output, which reflects conflict-induced shortages of raw materials and production inputs, as well as increased informal competition. Firms respond to declining sales by adjusting labor costs, substituting skilled workers with unskilled ones. The negative effects of conflict on firms are more pronounced in countries that are more involved in international trade, have weaker institutions, infrastructure, and financial development, were initially at peace, or are characterized by more spatially diffuse conflict. In these settings, greater conflict exposure leads to reductions in both sales and profits.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Emanuele Brancati

We measure firms wage-setting power in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Exploiting variation in firms exposure to trade and exchange rates, we generate shocks to labor demand to trace out firm-level labor supply curves and quantify labor market power. We estimate an inverse labor supply elasticity of 0.82, implying that workers receive 55 cents per additional dollar produced. Wage-setting power is significantly higher among firms in countries with lower union density, limited collective bargaining, and no unemployment protection. This underscores the role of labor market institutions in shaping firms wage-setting power and the distribution of the gains from trade.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Giselle Labrador-Badia

This paper quantifies how segmentation and bank market power in deposit markets shape the transmis sion of monetary policy. Using rate data differentiated by deposit account size, I document that uninsured rates are higher than insured rates, significant heterogeneity in banks’ uninsured deposit exposure, and in complete pass-through from policy rates to deposit rates. I develop and estimate a structural model of bank competition with segmented deposit markets by insurance status and spatial competition to understand these patterns and quantify their implications for monetary transmission. I find that uninsured deposits are slightly more elastic than insured deposits, while insured deposits have higher servicing costs. In counterfactual simulations of federal funds rate increases, I find that insured deposit outflows are three times larger than unin sured outflows and pass-through is higher for uninsured rates. Banks substitute toward wholesale funding, contracting lending as monetary policy tightens. Small banks experience larger balance sheet contractions following rate increases, while competitive markets exhibit stronger deposit pass-through. These findings demonstrate that accounting for deposit segmentation is essential for understanding monetary transmission: segmentation amplifies policy effects in competitive markets but dampens transmission in concentrated mar kets.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes