Seminario CEDE - Todd Schoellman | Universidad de los Andes

Chandler (1977) shows that large firms require hierarchies of white-collar workers to coordinate complex production. We document that this insight continues to hold globally today, and we show that low education levels in developing countries limit the supply of white-collar workers and constrain firm size. We extend the occupational choice model of Lucas (1978) to allow entrepreneurs to reorganize their firms by allocating administrative tasks to hired professionals, which brings the firm closer to constant returns to scale. We calibrate the model to be consistent with cross-sectional microdata and validate it using quasi-experimental and experimental evidence on the effects of educational expansions and management training interventions. Skills explain two-thirds of the reorganization of production into large firms with economic development, while structural transformation and reductions in barriers are needed to explain the remaining shift.

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Seminario CEDE- John Gomez-Mahecha

John Gómez-Mahecha. Standard estimates of the economic costs of air pollution assume (directly or indirectly) that causal effects and instrument strength are homogeneous across regions. We relax this assumption and show that it matters. Using a panel of European NUTS3 regions from 2000 to 2022, we estimate the effect of PM2.5 on regional GDP per capita through a strategy that jointly accounts for heterogeneity in both the instruments' first stage and the causal response. For the average effect, we implement the Flexible IV (FIV) estimator from the Double-Debiased Machine Learning literature, allowing instrument strength to vary across biogeographical regions. Our preferred estimate is a 0.3 percent decline in GDP per capita per ug/m3 increase in annual PM2.5 - approximately one-third of the reported by conventional two-stage least squares specifications in previous work. Coupling the FIV with an IV Causal Forest yields conditional causal responses that span -1.22 to 0.1 percent, with a long left tail. Statistically significant heterogeneity is driven by regional dependence on agriculture and manufacturing, and by historical exposure to pollution, reflecting the interplay between vulnerability and adaptive capacity. We then allocate the localized damage estimates across income quintiles using microdata from the EU Labor Force Survey and the Survey on Income and Living Conditions. The resulting distributional pattern is non-monotonic: middle-income quintiles bear the largest proportional losses while the top quintile is the least affected.

schedule 12:30 pm

location_on Salón W-101

Activo

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Seminario CEDE - Sarah Janzen

Sarah Janzen. Climate change threatens to increase the likelihood of extreme weather events, with impacts projected to disproportionately affect vulnerable low-income populations. This paper examines how local deviations in temperature and precipitation affect early-childhood growth outcomes in the first 1,000 days of development — from conception to 24 months old — when children are most developmentally vulnerable. We exploit Demographic and Health Surveys data linked to high-resolution ERA5 weather data to reconstruct the full daily weather exposure history of over 1.2 million children from 57 low- and middle-income countries. Identification compares children surveyed in the same province-climate zone and month, while accounting for time-varying country-level factors, who experienced different weather realizations in the first 1,000 days. We further exploit differences in the timing of shocks within those 1,000 days to estimate persistent effects of shocks experienced at different points across a child's early-life exposure history. We observe limited evidence of persistent effects of early life extreme heat exposure. Drought exposure and extreme cold exposure in utero both persistently lower the average height-for-age z-scores (i.e. increase stunting) of children ages 3-5 years.

schedule 12:30 pm

location_on Salón W-101

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Seminario CEDE - Jorge Montero

Jorge Montero. This paper examines how upstream deforestation shapes economic development and climate vulnerability in tropical watersheds. Using a novel grid and municipality-level panel data set for Colombia during 2012–2020, I combine high-resolution hydrological and forest data with municipal socioeconomic, agricultural, disaster, infrastructure, and institutional information. Upstream forest loss is spatially linked to downstream municipalities through hydrological flow networks, allowing me to trace the transmission of environmental shocks across watersheds. The empirical analysis combines two-way fixed-effects models, staggered Difference-in-Differences and event-study designs, and causal forests to identify both average and spatially heterogeneous effects of watershed governance. The results show that upstream deforestation amplifies downstream hydrological risks, significantly increasing exposure to both floods and droughts. This provides evidence that forest loss generates spatially distributed externalities that extend beyond the areas where deforestation occurs. Watershed governance through POMCAs can mitigate these effects by reducing deforestation and attenuating downstream hydrological risks, although its effectiveness varies across watersheds.

schedule 12:30 pm

location_on Salón W-101

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Universidad de los Andes | Vigilada Mineducación. Reconocimiento como Universidad: Decreto 1297 del 30 de mayo de 1964. Reconocimiento personería jurídica: Resolución 28 del 23 de febrero de 1949 MinJusticia.