Documentos CEDE

Gaps between the socioeconomic characteristics of politicians and those of their constituents have been shown to affect public policy, yet little is known about Colombian legislators. Using mandatory disclosure filings, we document their income, wealth, and conflicts of interest (CI) in the 2018–2022 and 2022–2026 Congresses. The median legislator earns seven to eight times the income of the median tax filer and holds five to six times the wealth. Because their income is mostly salary, they pay effective tax rates two to three times those of filers with the same gross income. Information on legislators from before and after they take office suggests that entering Congress shifts them from the 88th to the 97th percentile in income among tax filers. About 70% of legislators report CI, in all economic sectors. Left-wing legislators report lower gross income and wealth but, conditional on wealth, are not less likely to report CI. By sector, CI are more likely in Agriculture and Livestock for right-wing legislators and in Information and Communication and Administrative Services for left-wing legislators. Wealthier legislators report more CI in more sectors, and each additional term in Congress is associated with about 15% more wealth. These patterns suggest a representational distance that extends, beyond income, to the nature of legislators’ economic ties.

Economic development and environmental degradation have moved in tandem. Declining emissions intensity has not prevented aggregate emissions from rising. Pollution can keep accumulating after emissions fall because stocks adjust more slowly than flows. We develop a demand-driven framework in which income distribution, market scale, and cumulative learning-by-doing shape environmental outcomes. Because marginal emissions are high at intermediate incomes, middle-class demand drives output and learning while raising emissions, an equity-pollution dilemma. A development path can be feasible in the long run yet overshoot, even when emissions fall from the outset. Overshoot is endogenous to the path, not a scenario input. Distribution, demand, and learning set the level and decline rate of emissions, and hence the timing and magnitude of peak pollution. The composition of demand raises that peak, whereas market scale raises it below a threshold and lowers it beyond, so demand-driven development is both the poison and the remedy of its own transition. Trade globalizes the demand multiplier. Along the catch-up paths considered, poverty exit adds an extensive margin to the e!ective demand base, while the leader’s accumulated pollution narrows the latecomer’s ecological headroom. Green growth is a property of development paths, not endpoints.

People often represent others through coarse social categories rather than as distinct individuals. We study how the granularity of these representations affects prosocial behavior. A social representation partitions a set of rich, person-specific “inferred stories,” and stories pooled in the same category receive a common other-regarding social weight. When the representation becomes finer, distinctions that were previously compressed become behaviorally available. We show that the resulting social weights form a mean-preserving spread of those generated by the coarser representation. If prosocial action responds convexly to social weights—as in a threshold choice problem—finer representations can increase expected prosocial action even though average social valuation is unchanged. The framework links individuation in social cognition to models of categorical and coarse reasoning in economics. Literary fiction provides a motivating application because it repeatedly exposes readers to the motives, histories, ambiguities, and contradictions that make individuals difficult to reduce to generic types.

Esta investigación evalúa el efecto causal del fuero de estabilidad laboral reforzada (ELR) para prepensionados en Colombia sobre las decisiones de desvinculación laboral. Utilizando datos administrativos de cotizantes formales de la Planilla Integrada de Liquidación de Aportes (PILA, 2011–2019) y una estrategia de diferencias en diferencias con múltiples períodos y efectos dinámicos, se estima el efecto de adquirir la condición de prepensión sobre la tasa de separación laboral. Los resultados muestran que el fuero redujo la tasa de separación en 0,16 puntos porcentuales, equivalente a una caída cercana al 2,0% respecto a una tasa promedio de 8,3 %, con efectos concentrados en los primeros dos años de amparo. No se encuentra evidencia de despidos anticipatorios antes del umbral de protección, ni de que la Sentencia SU-003/2018 haya modificado sistemáticamente las decisiones de desvinculación de los empleadores. Los ejercicios de heterogeneidad muestran efectos similares por sexo y diferencias según la naturaleza jurídica del empleador, el régimen pensional y el rango salarial, consistentes con variaciones en el cumplimiento de la norma, el acceso a información sobre la protección y la vulnerabilidad laboral. En conjunto, la evidencia sugiere que la ELR opera como una protección efectiva pero acotada sobre el margen de separación laboral.

En este estudio examinamos dos sectores de empleos de élite en Colombia: las firmas de derecho y las empresas de desarrollo de software más reconocidas del país. Combinamos datos descriptivos de la composición de los empleados con 42 entrevistas semiestructuradas a directivos, integrantes de recursos humanos e informantes calificados. Los resultados revelan un contraste marcado entre los dos sectores. En las firmas de derecho predominan egresados de universidades privadas de élite y criterios de selección que favorecen a profesionales de origen privilegiado. En tecnología, las habilidades técnicas y la escasez de talento amplían las oportunidades de movilidad social. Sin embargo, las empresas tecnológicas presentan barreras importantes para las mujeres, especialmente en su integración y ascenso. Encontramos también que las credenciales académicas y el inglés adquieren mayor importancia para ascender en estas firmas. Estos hallazgos muestran que los sesgos de clase y de género no operan de la misma manera ni con la misma intensidad en todos los mercados de élite.

This paper examines the effect of hospital crowding on healthcare dynamics and patient health outcomes. Crowding is expected to lower the quality of care by worsening patient-level outcomes, such as 7-day readmissions and in-hospital mortality, and by altering treatment decisions. By exploiting fluctuations in hospital occupancy using hospital records from the Colombian health system (2017–2019), I find that, for emergency departments, crowding increases the probability of 7- day readmissions by 2.1 percentage points. For hospitalizations, the probability of returning within 7 days rises by 2.7 percentage points under high occupancy. No significant effects are found for in-hospital mortality. Crowding reduces referrals and hospitalizations from EDs and increases the length of stay in hospitalization facilities by nearly 2.5 days. To explore the mechanisms that drive these results, I decompose the effect into type of illness, examine the role of lagged crowding and the impact of market concentration and competition among hospitals. Overall, these results suggest that capacity constraints reduce efficiency and continuity of care in health services. My findings highlight how welfare is affected by hospital crowding and open a discussion on how policymakers can reduce these damages.