Eventos pasados

Seminario CEDE - Alvaro Sandroni

We ask whether the decisions of a rational and impartial judge can be distinguished from a coin toss. The question is inspired by the logic of the selection effect: Cases that have a clear outcome tend to be settled out of court. But that means that the cases that tend to go to court are often decided by small shocks on perceptions, the equivalent of a coin toss. That conclusion changes when judges are biased in their prior beliefs. In that event, outcomes will be determined exclusively by the judge’s prior beliefs. Either way the outcome of the case tends to be decided as if it is unaffected by the merits of the arguments presented in court. However, taken to its logical conclusion, the selection effect leads to something we refer to as the paradox of open methods: if rational judges decide to evaluate the merits of the cases that go to court, they will come to regret this as wasteful effort and strictly prefer to ignore the merits of the case. But if judges ignore the merits of the case, and this becomes generally known and taken into account by the litigants, judges will come to regret doing so and end up strictly preferring to attend to the merits of cases. This paradoxical seesaw can only be resolved in a full game-theoretical model of strategic interaction between the judge and the litigants. We refer to this game as the Judging Game. The strength of the selection effect and the fraction of judges who evaluate the merits of cases can thus be determined by the equilibrium of the Judging Game. Paper  

Feria de publicaciones Facultad de Economía

Seminario CEDE - Christian Manuel Posso

We study gender inequality within the physicians’ labor market. We document significant gender gaps in earnings, starting in the early years of their careers. We provide evidence of firm-level drivers of this labor market inequality. We show that firm-specific wage premiums explain about 70 percent of the gender gap in the specific case of physicians. In addition, we show that the relative wage-setting effects - which measure the proportion of the difference that is associated with the presence of low supply elasticities - dominate, while the sorting effect plays only a tiny, negative role. Finally, we explore how the random assignment of recently graduated physicians to their first job— through a nationwide public service program in Colombia — with pre-set hospital wage policies and random allocation of hospitals, allow us to study the importance of hiring practices in the first and subsequent years of female physicians’ careers. Using administrative data from the program, we find that the random assignment to the first job increases the probability of a woman being hired and her earnings up to 5 years after the program. The evidence suggests that the random assignment to the first job fostered impartiality in hiring and access to graduate degrees.

Seminario PePe (Políticas Públicas) - Myriam Vargas

El año 2022 fue declarado como el Año Internacional de la Pesca y la Acuicultura Artesanal con el ánimo de resaltar el rol de estas actividades económicas en los medios de vida de numerosos hogares alrededor del mundo. En este contexto, se manifiestó la necesidad de comprender el funcionamiento de la actividad pesquera de pequeña escala a la par de insertar este conocimiento en la adopción de políticas. Parte de la comprensión de esta actividad económica incluye entender que los hogares pescadores actúan en los mercados de bienes y en el mercado laboral simultáneamente como productores y consumidores. Con el objetivo de establecer una base teórica sólida para el análisis y desarrollo de políticas que promuevan la extracción sostenible de pescado y el mejoramiento de los medios de vida de los hogares rurales costeros, se propone un modelo de producción de hogares pescadores (MPHP) que considera la actividad pesquera para venta y autoconsumo, el ocio y las transferencias monetarias. El modelo es aplicado al contexto de una comunidad marino- costera del Caribe colombiano, evaluando para la misma algunas actividades propuestas en el Plan de Acción Mundial del Año Internacional de la Pesca y la Acuicultura Artesanales. Los resultados muestran que: i) las transferencias monetarias no tienen relación directa con las decisiones de producción, pero sí sobre las decisiones de consumo; ii) se presenta cierto grado de tensión entre el impulso a la producción pesquera y el impulso al consumo de los hogares; iii) ante mejores condiciones de pesca, los hogares optan por permanecer en la pesca, reducir el tiempo destinado a otras actividades económicas y optar por más tiempo de ocio; iv) el escenario de política relacionado con la diversificación del ingreso, muestra el desempeño más favorable para la seguridad alimentaria de los hogares pescadores; y v) se confirma la presencia del efecto beneficio al no ser posible determinar el grado de sensibilidad de algunas demandas y ofertas del MPHP de forma teórica.

Semana de las oportunidades académicas

Seminario CEDE - Facundo Sepúlveda

We study the life cycle pattern of job displacement, including wage losses and displacement risk, in an Overlapping Generations economy with a frictionless labor market. In our model, finitely lived worker-firm pairs accumulate both firm specific and general human capital. Competition for zero tenure workers and the non contractible nature of specific capital implies that wages are higher than productivity for newly tenured workers, and lower for those with longer tenure. In the life cycle, the expected value of the firm is then hump shaped, so displacement risk is naturally u-shaped, as in the data. Our model provides novel insights regarding the empirical relationships between tenure, age, and both displacement risk and post displacement wage loss. While most of the literature uses a framework based on search frictions to study job displacement, our results suggest that the non contractible nature of specific human capital can, by itself, explain most of the empirical regularities under study.

Lupa a las pensiones ¿Cómo asegurar una vejez digna para todos, hoy y en el futuro?

Seminario CEDE - Miguel Acosta-Henao

Using confidential credit registry data, merged with firm tax records in Chile, we evaluate the macroeconomic consequences of relationship lending. We find that longer relationships between banks and firms give access to more credit at better terms, and that more productive and larger firms have stronger relationships with banks. We find no systematic evidence of evergreening. We build a dynamic model of firms behavior where firms choose to borrow within relationships or in arms-length transactions jointly with their investment and borrowing decisions. Calibrating the model to the Chilean data, we find that borrowing in relationships is characterized by lower collateral requirements and looser working capital constraints, but greater contract enforceability. Counterfactual experiments indicate that the effects of relationship lending are large. Eliminating relationship lending implies a loss of more than 40 percent in steady state output and capital, of which the most significant loss comes from the reduction in the banks’ ability to enforce the debt contract and repossess a greater fraction of firms´ assets in case of default.

Seminario PePe (Políticas Públicas) - Cristina Fernández