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 - Luis Felipe Saenz

Standards of living were roughly constant before 1800, almost everywhere. In the early 19th century, English-speaking countries began a process of sustained economic growth that continues today. We document that this rise in living standardsfirst observed in Great Britain and the United Statesis now a global phenomenon. Across countries, we observe four robust patterns along the development path: (i) a reallocation of labor out of agriculture, (ii) a demographic transition, (iii) rising human capital, and (iv) a U-shaped trajectory of female labor force participation. We develop a Unified Growth Theory in which these changes arise endogenously from household decisions. Parents choose how to allocate their time between working and raising children, and how to divide labor between a traditional land-based technology and a modern, human-capital-intensive one. A gradual rise in traditional productivity relaxes resource constraints, enabling investments in child quality. These investments, in turn, make the modern sector profitable, triggering a self-sustaining transition to growth. Calibrated to historical data, the model reproduces the main features of the global development pathincluding, critically, the U-shaped evolution of female labor force participation.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Juan José Ferro

Governments use fines in order to deter socially unwanted behavior on a wide array of issues. It is commonly assumed that, fixing the probability of sanction, the higher the price, the more deterrent a sanction is. I use data from automated speed cameras in Bogotá, Colombia to measure the deterrent effect of a speeding ticket. By using the real speed limit as a source of exogeneous variation and a regression discontinuity design, I find that speeding tickets have a general deterrent effect on speeding behavior but a null effect on reducing traffic accidents. Using the commercial price of the vehicle as a proxy for wealth and the fact that the monetary sanction is fixed, I find that the deterrent effect is concentrated on the higher quintiles of the distribution. I validate these findings with a judge-IV using the fact that a police agent manually verifies all tickets. Other dimensions of driving behavior show that speeding tickets do change behavior, not only adjust beliefs about enforcement. In short, speeding tickets might be less useful for preventing road fatalities than it is commonly assumed and inefficiently expensive for changing behavior for a considerable number of drivers. They also seem to be of little effectiveness for the current public health challenge of traffic fatalities in low and middle income countries. This evidence points to income based fines as a necessary public policy tool.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Daniel Schwartz

The minimum payment warning, a notice that informs credit cardholders of the downside of making the minimum payment, has been described as a perverse nudge because it negatively affects those who would pay more than the minimum, presumably due to the anchoring bias. This issue is tackled in a massive field experiment by introducing a novel "statement balance warning." The experiment used email payment reminders that randomly added minimum payment or statement balance warnings. Results indicate that the messages shifted actual payment distribution depending on the warning and that payments increased when the statement balance warning was added. The analysis is combined with causal random forests to examine heterogeneous treatment effects, underlying mechanisms, and the optimum policy in different scenarios, and with an online experiment to further examine conditions in which the warnings affect payment behavior. The statement balance warning makes debtors prioritize paying a higher amount, which significantly increases payments by cardholders who are more likely to make deliberate decisions every billing cycle and improves the understanding of the consequences of not paying the statement balance. Furthermore, the optimal policy to decrease interest charges or debt delinquency indicates that cardholders should receive a combination of warning messages depending on their payment history. The results provide evidence that the statement balance warning offers a new element for financial market regulation to improve the decision-making of indebted households.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Luis Fernando Mejía

An analysis of corporate income tax reveals a largely overlooked fact: statutory tax rates are higher in developing economies. In addition, statutory tax rates are procyclical in low-income economies, rising during downturns and potentially amplifying recessions. This paper develops a theoretical framework that reconciles these two phenomena. In our model, firms choose between formal and informal operations based on their productivity and the benefits of formalization, while the government---constrained by limited tax collection efficiency---must set a statutory tax rate to finance a given level of expenditure. We show that low state capacity forces governments to adopt high statutory tax rates, which in turn raise the threshold for formalization and exacerbate informality. Moreover, during economic downturns, the contraction of the tax base compels these governments to raise statutory rates, rendering fiscal policy procyclical. We demonstrate that this procyclicality intensifies as state capacity decreases, creating a compounding challenge where the weakest states face the most destabilizing fiscal adjustments during economic downturns. We also show that even when firms in different countries have the same inherent productive capabilities, stronger state capacity leads to higher observed productivity. This creates an artificial productivity gap between developing and developed countries, driven by institutional constraints rather than actual differences in productive potential. A dynamic extension of our model reveals how political instability and high reform costs can trap countries in a low-capacity equilibrium. Our framework offers implications for policies aimed at modernizing tax administration, broadening the tax base, and implementing countercyclical fiscal measures in developing economies.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Heather Sarsons

What drives opposition to affirmative action policies? We test whether individuals' college admissions outcomes, relative to their expectations, influence their attitudes toward affirmative action policies and inequality more broadly. Using a retrospective survey, we find that disappointed individuals---those who were admitted to fewer schools than anticipated---believe that affirmative action played an outsized role in their admissions outcomes, have the lowest support for affirmative action policies, and are more willing to donate to anti-affirmative action organizations. They also hold more negative views about the academic qualifications of under-represented minorities. A complementary survey experiment provides causal evidence that disappointing news about one's admissions prospects can directly shift beliefs, reduce support for affirmative action, and make people believe that there is less racial inequality than there actually is.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Antoine Zerbini

We analyze the incentives of authoritarian regimes to segment access to censored content through technology. Citizens choose whether to pay to access censored online content at a cost fixed by the regime: the firewall. A low firewall segments access and generates more compliance than full censorship - a high firewall - ever could. Regime opponents self-select into consuming censored content, and comply conditional on positive independent reporting. Regime supporters exclusively consume state propaganda, which secures their compliance. This segment-and-rule strategy can be engineered by making local news outlets uninformative, or by affecting the intrinsic benefit from access.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Nava Ashraf

This paper evaluates a scalable psychosocial intervention designed to improve economic outcomes among individuals exposed to trauma and displacement. Guided Mental Experiencing (GME) is a group-based program that trains participants to construct vivid, emotionally coherent simulations of future scenarios. Motivated by a conceptual framework linking trauma to impairments in episodic future simulation, we test GME in two randomized controlled trials. In Ethiopia, where GME was delivered to newly arrived refugees, it increased employment, hours worked, and well-being. In Colombia, where GME was embedded in business training, it mitigated the negative earnings effects observed under training alone. Effects are largest among individuals with high trauma exposure. These results suggest that trauma can impair forward-looking cognition in ways that depress economic engagement, and that repairing this capacity can improve program effectiveness. Simulation-based interventions may thus complement standard approaches to poverty alleviation, particularly in settings where opportunity alone is insufficient to motivate action.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Carolina Castro

Global efforts to mitigate climate change include Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+). However, evidence on its effectiveness remains mixed, with many studies finding limited impacts on deforestation and overlooking potential effects on other economies. This study evaluates the effectiveness of collective REDD+ agreements signed by Afro-Colombian communities in curbing both deforestation and coca cultivation. Using satellite data and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that REDD+ projects significantly reduced deforestation by an average of 33 m² per pixel and coca cultivation by 0.33 ha / km2, which is approximately 9,695 hectares of avoided deforestation and 7,098 hectares of contained coca crop expansion annually. These significant impacts, which stand in contrast to findings from previous REDD+ evaluations, likely stem from the way these collective agreements strengthen local monitoring systems, enhance social cohesion, and improve economic conditions.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Laura Juárez González

We estimate the labor and health effects of the menopause transition for U.S. women. Using data from the NLSYW and the SWAN and applying an event study methodology which exploits the individual-level variation in the time of menopause, we find that women undergoing this transition have a lower probability of employment of almost 20 percentage points, and a higher probability of working part-time if they remain employed. We do not find significant impacts on their monthly earnings or hourly wage. Regarding health, we find that menopause increases the probability of having osteoporosis and bone fractures but does not have a significant impact on the probability of being diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. We also find that the probability of taking hormones to treat symptoms increases throughout the menopause transition, as expected. However, such increase in hormonal take-up is concentrated among White and highly educated women, which highlights the unequal access to treatment, and probably different menopause experiences, associated with traditional markers of socioeconomic status.

12:30 pm

Universidad de los Andes