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.

Agosto
4 - Camila Galindo, Universidad de los Andes
13 - Fabio Sánchez, Universidad de los Andes
20 - Oskar Nupia, Universidad de los Andes
27 - Mateo Uribe, Universidad de los Andes

Septiembre
3 - Heather Royer
10 - Thiemo Fetzer
17 - Sarah Janzen

Octubre
8 - Todd Schoellman
15 - Manuel Fernández, Universidad de los Andes
22 - Laurent Bouton

Noviembre
19 - Nolan Pope

Ver los seminarios CEDE de más de 2 años

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Rakesh Vohra

We consider a collection of firms linked through equity-holdings whose managers choose risky investment decisions in response to an exogenous shock. Agency conflicts arising from a gap between the firm's value and a manager's present rewards (from shares, penalties, bonuses, etc.) or future career concerns will distort the manager's choices. The nature of the conflict determines whether they are overly conservative or overly risky, as well as the strategic complementarity or substitution of the managers choices, independent of the underlying equity network. However, the network will determine the magnitude of these distortions and whether they are amplified, and we characterize when this is so. Furthermore, even when the holding network is fully diversified, within-firm agency conflicts can prevent the aggregate effect of idiosyncratic shocks from diminishing as received wisdom would suggest. This implies that corporate governance plays an important role in macro fluctuations.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Fernando Fernandez

Millions of people depend on artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) for their livelihoods, yet transitions toward cleaner and more formal mining business models remain rare despite decades of policy interventions. We study the sources of this persistence in the Peruvian Amazon using novel survey data collected from concession owners and workers in Madre de Dios. We document substantial heterogeneity in miners economic conditions, exposure to risk and insecurity, access to finance and markets, trust in public institutions, and beliefs about mining and development, and examine how these characteristics relate to stated intentions to adopt clean technologies, pursue formalization, and invest in alternative business models. We then use two complementary survey experiments to discipline interpretation. A randomized conjoint experiment elicits preferences over multidimensional policy bundles, while a vignette experiment isolates the relative importance of liquidity constraints versus downside risk in adoption decisions. Together, the analysis highlights how interacting financial, institutional, and belief-based constraints shape both initial take-up and subsequent follow-through, helping explain why single-instrument policies often fail and informing the design of bundled approaches to support durable mining transitions in environmentally fragile contexts.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Andrés Ham

We examine the effects of drug-related violence on household choices in a transit country in the global cocaine trade. Using a shift-share instrumental variables strategy that interacts temporal variation in Colombian coca production with cross-sectional municipal connectivity in Honduras, we find heterogeneous impacts on men, women, and children. Rising homicide rates reduce male labor force participation, especially among self-employed and informal workers. For women, violence increases household work and lowers self-employment wages, reflecting a shift to low-productivity activities. For children, violence raises school attendance and reduces work, consistent with schooling as a protective response. These findings demonstrate that drug-related violence disrupts labor markets and reshapes time allocation within households, underscoring the broader consequences of drug-related violence in transit countries.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Emanuele Brancati

We measure firms wage-setting power in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Exploiting variation in firms exposure to trade and exchange rates, we generate shocks to labor demand to trace out firm-level labor supply curves and quantify labor market power. We estimate an inverse labor supply elasticity of 0.82, implying that workers receive 55 cents per additional dollar produced. Wage-setting power is significantly higher among firms in countries with lower union density, limited collective bargaining, and no unemployment protection. This underscores the role of labor market institutions in shaping firms wage-setting power and the distribution of the gains from trade.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Michele Di Maio

This paper provides the first global analysis of the impact of conflict exposure on firm performance, combining geolocalized longitudinal firm-level data with information on political violence events across 89 countries between 2006 and 2019. Our results show that higher conflict exposure leads to declines in both sales and total costs, resulting in no significant effect on profits for surviving firms. The reduction in sales is driven by lower output, which reflects conflict-induced shortages of raw materials and production inputs, as well as increased informal competition. Firms respond to declining sales by adjusting labor costs, substituting skilled workers with unskilled ones. The negative effects of conflict on firms are more pronounced in countries that are more involved in international trade, have weaker institutions, infrastructure, and financial development, were initially at peace, or are characterized by more spatially diffuse conflict. In these settings, greater conflict exposure leads to reductions in both sales and profits.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Giselle Labrador-Badia

This paper quantifies how segmentation and bank market power in deposit markets shape the transmis sion of monetary policy. Using rate data differentiated by deposit account size, I document that uninsured rates are higher than insured rates, significant heterogeneity in banks’ uninsured deposit exposure, and in complete pass-through from policy rates to deposit rates. I develop and estimate a structural model of bank competition with segmented deposit markets by insurance status and spatial competition to understand these patterns and quantify their implications for monetary transmission. I find that uninsured deposits are slightly more elastic than insured deposits, while insured deposits have higher servicing costs. In counterfactual simulations of federal funds rate increases, I find that insured deposit outflows are three times larger than unin sured outflows and pass-through is higher for uninsured rates. Banks substitute toward wholesale funding, contracting lending as monetary policy tightens. Small banks experience larger balance sheet contractions following rate increases, while competitive markets exhibit stronger deposit pass-through. These findings demonstrate that accounting for deposit segmentation is essential for understanding monetary transmission: segmentation amplifies policy effects in competitive markets but dampens transmission in concentrated mar kets.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Katarina Kuske

Joint physical custody (co-parenting) is an increasingly popular post-divorce parenting arrangement, and while it benefits children, its economic implications for parents are theoretically ambiguous. I investigate empirically how co-parenting affects parents labour market outcomes after divorce, exploiting a custody reform in the Netherlands that encouraged co-parenting and increased its uptake by 7.6 percentage points among parents with young children. I find that mothers who divorce after the reform experience a 0.8% wage decline in an intention-to-treat framework relative to those divorcing before the reform, which implies an average wage loss of about 10% for compliers. This is driven by slower wage growth for mothers in the treatment group, who are less likely to move further away to access better-paid employment. The findings suggest that co-parenting ties both parents to a fixed location, reducing geographical mobility. Treated mothers also reduce their hours temporarily largely due to rising overtime in the control group while fathers wages and hours remain unaffected. The wage penalty is concentrated among mothers who were secondary earners during marriage and younger at the time of divorce. These patterns are consistent with couples placing greater weight on the primary earners career when making location decisions, which makes the post-divorce location constraint under co-parenting bind more tightly for mothers than fathers, thereby widening the gender wage gap. My results indicate an efficiency cost of location constraints under coparenting.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Isabel Di Tella

How do labor market institutions shape the propagation of inflation shocks? We address this question by studying Brazils annually indexed minimum wage in a highinflation context. Conventional wisdom suggests that inflation can grease labor market adjustments, but institutional wage-setting may alter this mechanism. Using administrative data, we show that indexation creates upward nominal wage rigidity: workers exposed to the policy experience fewer month-to-month wage increases before indexation events, and firms anticipate the policy by rigidifying wages of workers who will be newly bound. We evaluate the macroeconomic implications by introducing a cost-push shock to a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous labor and an indexed minimum wage. While staggered indexation amplifies the inflation as grease mechanism by introducing nominal rigidities, anticipation dampens it via intertemporal substitution. Overall, amplification matters more since cost-push shocks have a weaker effect compared to a setting where the minimum wage indexes every period. Our findings demonstrate that even in high-inflation environments, the institutional structure of wage-setting fundamentally shapes how shocks propagate through the economy.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Alfredo Mendoza-Fernández

We study how central banks respond to U.S. monetary shocks. Using a newly constructed dataset covering over 9,500 monetary policy meetings across 59 economies (the MPM-dataset), we show that emerging market economy (EME) central banks systematically move in unison with the Fed, whereas advanced economy central banks do not. We present evidence that this heterogeneity arises because, in EMEs, U.S. monetary shocks are perceived as cost-push shocks, transmitted through exchange rate fluctuations that affect firms costs, owing to the greater prevalence of dollar debt and dollar-invoiced imports. A three-bloc open-economy New Keynesian model with dominant currency pricing and partial debt dollarization reproduces these empirical patterns, highlighting that EME responses stem from the immediate impact of Fed shocks on exchange rates and, in turn, on firms marginal costs.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes