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
8 - Todd Schoellman, Principal Research Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
22 - Diana Ricciulli
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 - 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

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Oskar Nupia

Oskar Nupia. The literature has highlighted that the socioeconomic characteristics of rulers shape their preferences for redistributive policies and that gaps between citizens and politicians can affect how well public policies address citizens' needs. Yet in many countries, including Colombia, basic information on legislators' economic position remains unavailable. Using a unique dataset built from mandatory disclosure filings, we document the income, wealth, and conflicts of interest (CI) of Colombian legislators during the 2018-2022 and 2022-2026 Congresses. Legislators belong to the top 3% of the income and wealth distribution, earning roughly seven times the median tax filer and holding five times their wealth. On average, 70% of legislators report CI, which span all economic sectors. The largest concentrations of these conflicts are found in Agriculture, Livestock, Real Estate, Commerce, Public Administration, and Personal Services. While reported private economic activities have declined between Congresses, conflicts involving relatives increased by a similar magnitude. Left-wing legislators report lower income and wealth but are not less likely to have CI. Right-wing legislators tend to concentrate their conflicts in Agriculture and Livestock, whereas left-wing legislators focus on Information and Administrative Services. Wealthier legislators report more CI across more sectors, and each additional term in Congress is associated with approximately 15% more wealth. These patterns document a substantial representational distance between legislators and citizens that extends beyond income levels to the nature of economic ties that may shape legislative behavior.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Fabio Sánchez

Fabio Sánchez. La investigación revela que las desigualdades regionales actuales en Colombia —en ingreso, pobreza, desigualdad y capital humano— se explican en gran medida por la intensidad de las jerarquías coloniales de castas establecidas entre los siglos XVI y XVIII. Estas jerarquías surgieron de la interacción entre las condiciones iniciales, las dotaciones de factores precoloniales y la elección de instituciones de coerción laboral por parte de los colonizadores, como la encomienda, la mita, el concertaje y la esclavitud, respaldadas por instituciones políticas coloniales como los Cabildos y las Audiencias. Las instituciones de jerarquía basadas en castas instauradas durante el período colonial generaron desigualdades persistentes en el acceso a la tierra, al capital humano, al poder político y a la capacidad estatal, que las reformas posteriores a la Independencia, que no lograron revertirlas. Utilizando un Índice de Jerarquía Colonial elaborado a partir del censo de 1780–1790, el artículo muestra que una mayor jerarquía colonial se correlaciona -en las primeras décadas del siglo XXI- con un menor PIB per cápita municipal, peores resultados educativos, mayor pobreza, menor acceso a la propiedad y mayor desigualdad de la tierra.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101

Activo

Seminario CEDE - Camila Galindo

Camila Galindo. Transport connectivity can expand opportunities for young people. We study a large-scale expansion of domestic air links in Colombia, where small-capacity aircraft connected poorly accessible municipalities to new destinations. We leverage the staggered opening of air links and rich administrative records on the universe of 2000-2019 high-school graduates. In a matched difference-in-differences, new air links increase higher education enrollment and graduation, reduce early fertility, and increase formal employment and earnings. We benchmark air links against the staggered opening of local campuses: preliminary results show that new campuses affect education but not fertility or employment. Air links might yield broader benefits by improving student-program matches and the quality of local services.

12:30 pm

Salón W-101