Seminarios CEDE

Con el propósito de fortalecer el pensamiento crítico y difundir avances investigativos, esta propuesta abre un espacio de discusión académica organizados por el Centro de Estudios sobre Desarrollo Económico (CEDE) de la Universidad de los Andes. Abiertos a investigadores/as, estudiantes y público general, estos encuentros promueven el intercambio de ideas en torno a temas clave como el desarrollo económico, la microeconomía, la macroeconomía y la historia económica.

En cada sesión se presentan investigaciones recientes, se discuten avances académicos y se generan debates sobre los desafíos económicos más relevantes para Colombia y el mundo.

Octubre
29 - Daniel Mejía, Universidad de los Andes

Noviembre
5 - Ricardo Fonseca
19 - Nolan Pope
26 - Sebastián Montaño, Universidad de los Andes

Ver los seminarios CEDE de más de 2 años

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Daniel Mejía

Daniel Mejía. This paper estimates the causal effect of pretrial detention on subsequent criminal behavior using linked police and judicial administrative records from Bogotá, Colombia, for the period 2008–2018. To address selection into pretrial detention, we exploit the quasi-random assignment of cases to judges who differ in their propensity to detain individuals pretrial. Pretrial detention reduces the probability of rearrest by 9 percentage points and the probability of new charges by 5.4 percentage points, corresponding to reductions of approximately 32 percent and 35 percent relative to the respective baseline means. The estimated reductions in recidivism are concentrated among property crime defendants and repeat offenders. The estimated effects are also larger among defendants with longer detention spells, suggesting that pretrial detention may increase the salience of punishment or disrupt criminal routines and networks. These findings contrast with much of the existing U.S. evidence, which typically finds no net effect on crime.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Diana Ricciulli-Marín

Diana Ricciulli-Marín. This paper studies the real economic consequences of offshore tax evasion by wealthy individuals. Exploiting an increase in the probability of detecting offshore wealth triggered by the 2016 Panama Papers leak, I find that Colombian firms owned by individuals using offshore vehicles increase retained earnings following the leak and use this additional liquidity to expand capital, leading to higher sales and net income two years later. These effects are larger among owner-managed firms, where shocks to owners are more likely to influence firm decisions. Higher net income also generates fiscal spillovers through increased corporate income tax revenues. These responses are economically meaningful: the additional net income represents between 0.12% and 0.3% of total value added in affected sectors. Overall, my findings show that offshore tax enforcement can stimulate domestic capital accumulation and firm growth, generating benefits beyond improved wealth tax compliance.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Diálogos Interdisciplinarios - Mauricio Santos Vega

Mauricio Santos Vega. El dengue es una de las enfermedades más sensibles al clima y representa una carga creciente para los sistemas de salud en América Latina. Sin embargo, determinar el impacto del clima es complejo: las series epidemiológicas son ruidosas, no estacionarias y siguen su propia dinámica, ya que la inmunidad de la población puede amplificar o amortiguar cada brote. En esta charla, a través de cuatro ejemplos de nuestro trabajo de investigación, mostraré cómo el clima influye en enfermedades sensibles al clima como el dengue. En el primer ejemplo, presento métodos para detectar señales climáticas en series temporales de casos y de variables climáticas (temperatura, precipitación y ENSO), y muestro cómo El Niño actúa como un evento recurrente cuyos efectos varían en el tiempo y en el espacio. En el segundo, a partir de modelos espaciotemporales con rezagos distribuidos, se cuantifica el impacto de la temperatura máxima y de las sequías sobre el riesgo de dengue en más de mil municipios colombianos y se encuentran efectos heterogéneos según la elevación y el grado de urbanización. En el tercero, mostraré cómo estas relaciones permiten generar pronósticos estacionales que anticipan brotes con meses de antelación. En el cuarto, presento un estudio de atribución que estima qué proporción de la expansión del dengue hacia zonas de mayor altitud puede atribuirse al cambio climático de origen humano. Concluiré discutiendo las implicaciones para los sistemas de alerta temprana, la asignación de recursos y quién asume los costos de un riesgo climático en aumento.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Todd Schoellman

Todd Schoellman. 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.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

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.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

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.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

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.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Heather Royer

Heather Royer. Are men and women rewarded differently for research productivity? Academic economists provide a particularly useful setting in which to examine this question because publications in a small number of highly prestigious peer-reviewed (“top-five”) journals are especially valuable. Using a novel panel dataset of academic economists employed in top-75 public U.S. university economics departments, we estimate the earnings return to a top-five publication separately for men and women. We find a striking gender difference: men’s earnings rise by 8.0 percent following a top-five publication, compared with just 1.7 percent for women.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Mateo Uribe-Castro

Mateo Uribe-Castro. Illegal economies often persist because because legal markets are costly to access. In Colombia, coca buyers purchase output at the farm gate, shifting transportation costs from farmers to traffickers, while legal crops require costly commercialization. We explore how a large program of national road construction changed this relative profitability, helping farmers to substitute away from illegal crops. Exploiting the staggered rollout of Colombia's third- and fourth-generation road concessions, we estimate event-study models comparing municipalities before and after receiving a new road. Road construction reduces coca cultivation and expands legal cash crops. We develop a structural model of farmers' land allocation between licit and illicit crops that rationalizes these findings and use it to quantify the counterfactual level of coca cultivation absent road construction.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101