Documentos CEDE
Accede a las publicaciones que reúnen trabajos de profesores/as e investigadores/as de la Facultad de Economía, basados en información del Centro de Datos CEDE. Presentan análisis económicos y resultados preliminares que aportan evidencia y abren discusiones académicas sobre temas relevantes para el país.
Documento CEDE 2024-46
JEL: D82, D86, I18
We study a situation where physicians differing in their degree of altruism exert a diagnostic effort before deciding whether to test patients to determine the most appropriate treatment. The diagnostic effort generates an imperfect private signal of the patient’s type, while the test is perfect. At the laissez-faire, physicians exert insufficient diagnostic effort and rely excessively on testing. We show that the first-best allocation (where the degree of altruism is observable) can be decentralized by a payment scheme composed of i) a payfor- performance (P4P) part based on the number of correctly treated patients to ensure the provision of the optimal diagnostic effort, and of ii) a capitation part to ensure both the optimal testing decision and the participation of physicians. When physicians differ in their (non-observable) degree of altruism, the optimal contract is pooling rather than separating, an instance of non-responsiveness. Its uniform P4P component induces more altruistic physicians to exert a larger diagnostic effort while, to incentivize the second-best optimal testing decision, its capitation component must be contingent on the test cost.
26-11-2024
Documento CEDE 2024-45
JEL: D73, K40, N46, O12, P14
This paper examines the persistent effects of Crown versus settler colonialism. Exploiting a spatial regression discontinuity design in Mexico, I document that regions where the relative power of the colonial state over settler elites was higher exhibit higher historical and contemporary economic prosperity. In contrast to the view that Crown judges disproportionately weakened property rights, court records analyzed with natural language processing algorithms suggest they constrained settlers from expropriating indigenous lands. In the long-run, a feedback loop appears to have consolidated an emerging rural middle class, whose relative enfranchisement tied it less to patronage politics, encouraging public good provision and labor mobility out of agriculture.
25-11-2024
Documento CEDE 2024-43
JEL: J62, N36, O15, Q15
This study examines the intergenerational effects of providing land to the rural poor. I use ID numbers to track applicants to the 1968 Colombian agrarian reform and their children in various administrative data. Exploiting discontinuities in the allocation of parcels, I find that the children of recipients exhibit higher intergenerational mobility. In contrast to the view that land would tie them to the countryside, today these children participate more in the modern economy. They have better living standards and are more likely to work in formal and high-skilled sectors. These findings appear driven by a relief of credit constraints that allowed recipient families to migrate to urban centers and invest in the education of their children.
13-11-2024
Documento CEDE 2024-42
JEL: E32, Q43, O13
In recent years, Honduras has achieved the highest trade openness in Latin America. As a net importer of oil derivatives, the country’s economy is highly vulnerable to external shocks in oil prices. Due to significant differences in the use of oil derivatives across economic activities, some productive sectors are more affected by these shocks. This study analyzes how variations in oil prices influence the country’s productive structure, employing a Real Business Cycle (RBC) model adapted to a small open economy. The findings reveal that a one-standard-deviation increase in oil prices reduces overall economic output by 9.7%. Sectoral heterogeneity is notable: while the tradable and non-tradable
non-intensive sectors show reductions in output of -9.7% and -4.5%, respectively, the intensive non-tradable sector, with high dependence on oil, experiences a significant production decline of 59.3%.
22-10-2024
Documento CEDE 2024-41
JEL: E62, H71, H72, G38
This document examines the effect of expenditure limits on municipalities’ behavior regarding public debt, specifically limits based on a proportion of their own current income without a specific destination (ICPSDE, by its acronym in Spanish). These limits were established by Law 617 of 2000 in response to the significant default risk caused by high levels of subnational debt in the 1990s, which were driven by increased interest rates on internal debt that constituted the largest proportion of subnational debt.
This policy allows for the categorization of municipalities as a quasi-random experimental process. Thus, through a discontinuous regression analysis, the relationship between this policy and credit disbursements in municipalities from 1993 to 2019 was examined. The results indicate that Law 617 does not create differentiation in the borrowing behavior of municipalities and districts with ICPSDE close to the thresholds of the various categories, using different specifications and outcome variables.
21-09-2024
Documento CEDE 2024-40
JEL: C12, C13, C14
Los diseños de estudios de eventos dependen de la validez de un supuesto de identificación llamado Tendencias Paralelas Generalizadas (GPT, por sus siglas en inglés). Este trabajo se enfoca en el problema de estimar consistentemente efectos de tratamiento y llevar a cabo inferencia estadística cuando GPT solo es válida tras diferenciar la variable de resultado. Bajo este supuesto menos restrictivo, construyo un método de corrección que provee estimadores consistentes de los efectos causales de interés por medio de transformaciones lineales de un vector inicial de efectos estimados, y que consecuentemente no requiere estimar parámetros adicionales. Este método de corrección también provee un test estadístico para comprobar empíricamente la validez de GPT, el cual comparo contra dos tests alternativos comúnmente empleados en la práctica. Simulaciones bajo 12 distintos PGDs, calibrados usando artículos académicos, sugieren que mi nuevo test siempre se desempeña mejor que las otras dos alternativas, y que su función de poder es hasta 160% mayor a la de los demás tests. Finalmente, encuentro que emplear este nuevo test induce poco no ningún sesgo por pretesting cuando el análisis se condiciona a no rechazar la hipótesis nula.
20-09-2024
