Eventos pasados

Seminario CEDE - Miguel Morales-Mosquera

Research on the effects of police presence tends to focus on the impact such policies have on crime rates. Less is known about how much individuals value place-based policing strategies. This paper fills this gap by estimating the willingness-to-pay (WTP) to avoid crime using housing market data in the three largest cities of Colombia. Specifically, I study the effects of 100 newly constructed police stations on crime and property values using an instrumented difference-in-differences design. I find that police deter violent crime by 12 percent and property crime by 22 percent in the immediate vicinity of the newly constructed police stations, with no crime displacement nearby. Using a hedonic pricing model, I find that the opening of new police stations leads to a 5 percent increase in property values —a gain of $3.5 million for households directly affected. While hedonic regressions identify the effect of crime on housing values for the marginal buyer, I estimate a correlated random coefficients model and show that the welfare effects of crime are homogeneously distributed in the population. I conclude that the average marginal WTP to avoid crime due to the local effects of the intervention is $4,500 per household. These results suggest that cities under-provide policing and target high crime neighborhoods while the benefits are widespread.

Seminario CEDE - Marta Reynol

Abstract In this paper, we document the long-run impact of the geographical heterogeneity in skills among the first settlers to Latin America. To this end, we compile administrative data on the early settlers in the Americas between 1492 and 1540 including, among others, name, city of origin, destination, and occupation. From a methodological perspective, a focus on the initial period of colonization in Latin America offers several advantages. First, differences in the geographical distribution of occupations among the first settlers are likely to be accidental. Second, a set-up that analyzes an area with a single colonizer (Spain) allows to hold constant formal institutions and legal origin. Our results show a relevant effect of the skills of first colonizers on long-run levels of development of the areas located around the original settlements. We find evidence of persistence in the form of market orientation and entrepreneurial spirit.  https://www.barcelonagse.eu/research/working-papers/colonization-early-settlers-and-development-case-latin-america

Lanzamiento del libro en español - Violencia y paz en la guerra contra las drogas

Seminario CEDE - Nicolás de Roux

We study the effect of civil conflict on investment using detailed microdata from Colombia’s largest agricultural bank. We use a difference-in-difference design that compares municipalities with varying levels of historical activity by insurgent group FARC before and after the 2016 demobilization agreement between this group and the Colombian government. We show that the monthly number of loans to small farmers in municipalities with historical FARC presence increases disproportionately after the agreement, without changes in average size or interest rate. This increase is driven by a larger number of applications and is concentrated in municipalities with better access to markets. There is no change in default rates and reports from randomized audits reveal no difference in misuse of funds. Effects are much weaker during the negotiation phase that preceded the agreement, despite a reduction in violence, suggesting that armed group presence and the threat of continued conflict disincentivize the pursuit of profitable investments. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3725231

Seminario CEDE - Sandra Sequeira

We examine the impact of conflict-driven displacement on investments in human capital and occupational choice, looking at the Mozambican civil war (1977-1992), one of the largest and most diverse forced displacement episodes in recent times. Mozambique's uniquely rich 1997 census allows us to trace the movement of more than 4 million individuals who were either internally displaced into cities and rural areas or externally displaced into refugee camps in neighboring countries. To overcome selection in displacement trajectories, we compare the displacement experience of siblings separated during the war, in areas equidistant (in terms of transport costs) to cities and to refugee camps. Children displaced into urban areas were more likely to invest in education and later experience a shift towards occupations outside of agriculture, even when they returned to the countryside once the war was over. Displacement to refugee camps in neighbouring countries yields no discernible differences in education and occupational specialization compared to rural non-movers. These patterns hold even when restricting our sample to twins and to siblings of the same gender and age group. Increased investments in schooling do not appear to be driven by increased access to school but instead, by a reduction in violence and by a move to areas with a higher stock of human capital, particularly cities. We then conduct a survey in one of Mozambique's largest cities to uncover the long-run impact of forced displacement. We show that displaced individuals have significantly higher education than their siblings, and that they seem to have integrated socially into urban areas, having comparable views and attitudes to non-mover city-dwellers. Yet, internally displaced individuals have lower mental health levels, lower levels of intra-community trust, and are less optimistic about economic mobility relative to city dwellers not displaced during the war. These findings underscore how forced displacement can act as a mobility shock that breaks links with subsistence agriculture, increases investments in education, and consequently increases human capital accumulation. However, it may come at the cost of decreased mental health.

Charla virtual - La pandemia del Covid

La Escuela de Posgrados de la Facultad de Economía de la Universidad de los Andes los invita a la charla La pandemia del Covid: una oportunidad para contribuir desde la academia. Panelistas: Marcela Eslava, decana de la Facultad de Economía – Uniandes. Rachid Laajaj, profesor de la Facultad de Economía – Uniandes. Andrés Zambrano, profesor de la Facultad de Economía – Uniandes. Jimena Hurtado, profesora de la Facultad de Economía – Uniandes (Moderadora)

Seminario CEDE - Cesi Cruz

We study the relationship between social structure and political incentives for public goods provision. We argue that when politicians–rather than communities–are responsible for the provision of public goods, social fractionalization may decrease the risk of elite capture and lead to increased public goods provision and electoral competition. We test this using large-scale data on family networks from over 20 million individuals in 15,000 villages of the Philippines. We take advantage of naming conventions to assess intermarriage links between families and use community detection algorithms to identify the relevant clans in those villages. We show that there is more public goods provision and political competition in villages with more fragmented social networks, a result that is robust to controlling for a large number of village characteristics and to alternative estimation techniques. 

Seminario de políticas públicas - Luis Omar Herrera

Using administrative data, I track the path of 5.4 million secondary school graduates to higher education and the formal labor market in Colombia. I compare graduates from the same secondary school cohort to estimate the premium of higher education and workers that earned a bachelors against their college classmates that finished 90% or more of the college course-work but did not graduate to estimate the sheepskin effect. Using a modified Mincer equation, I find that the Colombian labor market values a college graduate at the time of graduation the same as a secondary school graduate with five years of formal labor market experience. I also find high positive correlations between the quality of higher education institutions and students’ skills and earnings, and between on-time graduation and earnings. High-quality tertiary institutions boost the entry-level salary for its graduates, but this boost fades over time as others gain experience and graduates’ skills as workers are revealed. I found evidence of how higher education is slowly reducing the gender gap and improving income distribution. Finally, the sheepskin effect is about 12.6% on average and the returns for bachelors, diplomas, and masters are 15.1%, 33.6%, and 53.2%, respectively.

Seminario CEDE - Mara Squicciarini

We construct a novel dataset to examine the process of technology adoption during a period of rapid technological change: The diffusion of mechanized cotton spinning during the Industrial Revolution in France. We document several stylized facts that can explain the well-documented puzzle that major technological breakthroughs tend to be adopted slowly and – even after being adopted – take time to be reflected in higher aggregate productivity. Before mechanization, cotton spinning was performed in households, while production in plants only emerged with the new technology around 1800. This allows us to isolate the plant productivity distribution of new technology adopters in mechanized cotton spinning and to show that this distribution was initially highly dispersed. Over the subsequent decades, cotton spinning experienced dramatic productivity growth that was almost entirely driven by a disappearance of plants in the lower tail. In contrast, innovations in other sectors (with gradual technological progress) shifted the whole productivity distribution. We document rich historical and empirical evidence suggesting that the pattern in cotton spinning was driven by the need to re-organize production under the new technology. This process of ‘trial and error’ led to widely dispersed initial productivity draws, low initial average productivity, and – in the subsequent decades – to high productivity growth as new entrants adopted improved methods of production and organization. Ver documento