Documentos CEDE

Colombia faces a substantial housing deficit and unequal access to basic public services, both in quantity and quality. In 2021, 31% of households were experiencing housing deficits, a condition that disproportionately affects vulnerable households and women. Mi Casa Ya (MCY) is Colombia’s flagship demand-side housing subsidy program, designed to reduce housing deficits by facilitating access to urban social housing for low-income households. This study presents a causal evaluation of the impact of MCY on household welfare, including housing conditions, access to public services, residential safety, labor market outcomes, income, poverty, and vulnerability. Using administrative records and household survey data for applicants, beneficiaries, and non-beneficiaries, the results show that MCY reduces barriers to homeownership and contributes to significant reductions in both quantitative and qualitative housing deficits. Beneficiaries also gain access to more formal housing conditions, improved public services, and safer residential environments. The program improves labor market outcomes, including employment, earnings, and formality, with particularly strong benefits for women. In addition, MCY reduces dependence on other government assistance programs, increases household expenditure, improves access to durable goods and financial products, and lowers the likelihood of poverty and vulnerability. A cost-benefit analysis confirms that the program generates substantial positive private and social returns.

I decompose the canonical Difference-in-differences (DiD) estimator in presence of spillovers into a weighted average of 2×2 estimators that compare treated and untreated units across different levels of exposure to treatment. Identifying the ATT requires strong homogeneity conditions: that spillover magnitudes and exposure probabilities are both identical across treatment status, conditions unlikely to hold in observational studies. While a common response is to control for researcher-proposed interference structures, such estimators induce a selection bias if misspecified, a serious concern given the complex and unknown nature of interference. I propose instead spill-imputation, which identifies individual treatment and spillover effects under a unit-level parallel trends assumption —weaker than correct specification of the interference structure— and recovers spillover heterogeneity ex-post, in a data-driven way. Monte Carlo simulations show deviations of up to 31.2% for the parametric DiD against at most 0.25% for spill-imputation, with standard errors 42% smaller, reflecting greater estimation efficiency. An application to road paving in Mexico finds positive spillover effects of 19.5% on nearby unpaved plots’ property values, and no heterogeneous effects along the distance to the paved street.

Before 1983, Colombia maintained a system of multiple minimum wages that varied by municipality. In 1984, this system was replaced by a single nationwide minimum wage of US$3.68 per day. This paper exploits the unexpected 5.71 percentage point increase in the real minimum wage for low-wage municipalities and the differential exposure of blue-collar versus white-collar workers to understand the effect of the unification on formal employment. Using repeated annual cross-sectional data from 1974 to 1991 in the manufacturing sector and a difference-in-differences approach, I find that the minimum wage unification led to a 10% decrease in the blue-collar/whitecollar employment ratio in the second year, rising to 13.8% five years after the reform. I also find that plants in low-wage municipalities, where the real wage increase was larger, suffered an 11.3% decrease in total employment. Together, these results suggest that the increase in the minimum wage caused by the unification negatively affected the level of formal employment in the manufacturing sector in Colombia, especially in municipalities where the adjustment was higher. Finally, I present an oligopolistic partial equilibrium model that supports these findings, highlighting that employment effects in the formal sector may be larger than in the overall economy due to the absorbing role of the informal sector.

Las rentas derivadas de la extracción de recursos naturales han desempeñado un papel determinante en la configuración de las instituciones políticas, así como en fenómenos de corrupción y clientelismo. Aunque existe una amplia literatura sobre estos temas, aún es limitada la evidencia acerca de la relación entre las rentas extractivas y la participación política. Este artículo busca contribuir a este debate analizando si un aumento de los ingresos locales, producto de las transferencias asociadas a la explotación de recursos naturales, tiene efectos sobre la participación política y la competencia electoral. Para ello, la estrategia de identificación aprovecha la discontinuidad generada por la reforma al sistema de regalías en Colombia en 2012, la cual modificó la metodología de asignación de recursos entre municipios. Los resultados evidencian que un incremento en las transferencias de regalías produce un aumento en el número de partidos y candidatos, así como reduce la participación electoral en las elecciones de autoridades locales. Estos hallazgos tienen importantes implicaciones de política pública, pues sugieren que, aunque una mayor disponibilidad de recursos fiscales puede fortalecer la competencia electoral, también genera incentivos para la captura del poder político, deteriorando la confianza ciudadana y disminuyendo la participación en las urnas.

The energy transition entails a gradual phase-out of carbon-intensive industries alongside the expansion of renewable energy production and consumption. Developing economies are central to this process: while they hold substantial renewable energy potential, they remain particularly vulnerable as they must simultaneously secure economic growth and employment while reducing reliance on fossil production. This paper adapts the International Labour Organization’s Green Jobs Assessment Model (GJAM) to assess the impacts of energy transition scenarios in Colombia, a middle-income country with strong dependence on fossils exports. Through an input–output analysis the study evaluates scenarios of substituting fossil fuels exports, shifting domestic consumption patterns towards electricity, and the expansion of sustainable energy alternatives. The results suggest that transition policies towards domestic adjustments in energy production and consumption could compensate the negative income and employment effects of a drop in fossils global demand, when done at the same time. Compared to a baseline scenario, the energy transition may have positive long-term effects on the economy on 2035, creating up to 1,218,206 jobs (4%) and increasing in 0.2% the economic growth.

This paper studies how ambiguity—uncertainty about the true distribution of risks—affects equilibrium outcomes along the insurance chain. I extend a Stackelberg game to analyze the interactions between a reinsurer leader, who is neutral to both risk and ambiguity, and two ambiguity-averse insurers who compete in a linear city model to offer coverage to risk- and ambiguity-averse policyholders. Unlike standard models that focus solely on risk or examine only parts of the insurance chain, this framework captures the full structure and explicitly separates ambiguity and risk preferences. I find that: (a) ambiguity aversion and imperfect competition lead to partial coverage and premiums above actuarially fair levels; (b) when insurers become more sensitive to ambiguity, coverage falls and premiums rise; and (c) when shocks affect only policyholders, insurers offer more coverage and the effect on premiums depends on the degree of their market power. These findings show that ambiguity influences insurance outcomes in ways that risk alone cannot, providing a rationale for observed patterns that standard models fail to explain.