Documentos CEDE

Colombia has become the main destination for Venezuelan immigrants, triggering a significant labor supply shock. The country’s labor market has faced mounting pressures since then, raising concerns about labor discrimination. Using a Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR), combined with an incentivized betting mechanism, we explore: (1) whether participants are more or less likely to recommend Venezuelan candidates for a job vacancy than their equally qualified Colombian counterparts, and (2) whether they anticipate bias from their peers even in the absence of own discrimination. We find evidence of positive discrimination in favor of Venezuelan candidates both when participants make individual recommendations and when they predict their peers’ preferences. However, conditional on selection, we find wage discrimination against Venezuelan workers, particularly in high-skill occupations, where assigned wages are approximately 8–14% lower. Finally, there is no evidence of taste-based discrimination: participants tend to identify the better-performing candidate correctly, and neither risk preferences nor discriminatory attitudes predict their choices. These results reveal a segmented labor market treatment of Venezuelan migrants, favored at the hiring stage but penalized at the wage-setting stage, with important implications for immigration and labor policy in Colombia and other migrant-receiving economies in Latin America.

Ceasefires are often designed to reduce violence while facilitating peace negotiations or humanitarian access. But poorly designed truces can backfire. This paper examines the 2023 ceasefires decreed by Colombia’s government with several organized criminal groups simultaneously under the Paz Total (Total Peace) policy. Using difference-in-differences on a municipality-month panel, we find that while more visible and salient forms of violence such as homicides, terrorist attacks and massacres were unaffected, less visible forms of violence against civilians, such as extortion, forced recruitment of minors, and threats, increased substantially in municipalities with ceasefire group presence. These patterns are consistent with strategic substitution: armed groups shifted from more visible to less visible forms of violence when political constraints changed. We formalize this mechanism in a structural model of strategic violence allocation, calibrate its parameters to the reduced-form estimates, and simulate policy counterfactuals. The calibration implies that roughly a 50% increase in the detectability of less visible forms of violence, through independent verification missions or community reporting systems, would be needed to fully offset the ceasefire’s perverse effects, restoring total violence to approximately its pre-ceasefire level. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of inadequately designed ceasefire agreements and underscore the need for credible monitoring and enforcement mechanisms.

We study whether two large-scale educational investments act as complements in the formation of human capital. We combine the staggered expansion of public preschools in Colombia with the subsequent decentralized roll-out of the national school feeding program. Using nearly two decades of administrative records on educational trajectories, we find that these investments are complementary for academic progression: students exposed to preschool are more likely to complete grades 9 and 11, less likely to drop out, and more likely to enroll in higher education when also exposed to school feeding. These complementarities are larger when school feeding is introduced shortly after preschool and fade when introduced in secondary school. Complementarities in academic performance on the high school exit exam are absent on average but also emerge if school feeding is introduced by the end of primary school. While preschool alone has limited effects, school feeding alone yields sizable medium- and long-term gains, suggesting that later investments can partially remediate the absence of early ones.

We examine the relationship between inequality and state capacity, measured with tax collection. Contrary to traditional models that emphasize the redistributive role of taxation, we focus on its role in providing public goods that help develop markets, increasing productivity (e.g. enforcement of property rights, coordination, roads, electricity). We build a simple model of public good provision where landowners decide whether or not to comply with property taxes taking into account: 1) that government expenditure increases property values, and 2) their expectation of the punishment when evading taxes. We validate the model empirically, using data from Colombian municipalities between 1923 and 1960, in two ways. First, we use detailed land values’ data from cadastres available for a subsample of municipalities and the model’s structure to predict tax revenues and compare them with actual revenues. Second, we provide empirical evidence supporting the model’s main prediction: land concentration is positively correlated with tax revenues per capita, a relationship that is robust to controlling for potential sources of omitted variable bias. Two additional empirical findings further support the mechanisms underlying the model: the positive relationship is stronger in places with greater potential gains from market development, and land concentration reduces the average fiscal cost of collecting one peso of revenue.

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.

Este artículo presenta un proceso de investigación orientado a la co-construcción de una estrategia pedagógica para el fortalecimiento cultural con jóvenes indígenas del pueblo Inga en la Institución Etnoeducativa Bilingüe Rural Atún Ñambí de Villagarzón, Putumayo. El estudio se desarrolló mediante un enfoque de Investigación Acción Participativa (IAP) articulado con métodos basados en las artes. Durante este proceso, se diseñó de manera colaborativa una estrategia pedagógica materializada en el juego de mesa “Samai, el juego del espíritu Inga”, inspirado en la simbología Inga como un dispositivo para promover el reconocimiento de la identidad cultural de los y las jóvenes. Se evidenció que los procesos de identificación cultural están estrechamente vinculados con las condiciones materiales y sociales que configuran la vida en los territorios marcadas por profundas desigualdades estructurales, así como por dinámicas educativas para la transmisión de saberes. En consecuencia, para hablar del fortalecimiento de la cultura indígena en contextos educativos es indispensable cuestionar las desigualdades estructurales que enfrentan los pueblos. Se concluye que el fortalecimiento cultural requiere de transformaciones en las prácticas educativas y en los métodos pedagógicos para este fortalecimiento. También abordar ampliamente las condiciones estructurales que inciden en las trayectorias de vida de las juventudes indígenas.