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 2026-04
JEL: D63, D91, I31
This study examines whether cooperative perceptions, preferences, skills, and behaviors can be shaped through structured, game-based interventions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment centered on a cooperative card game, we tested whether game play, paired with reflective learning, can foster both the motivation and the ability to cooperate. We find that while belief change was limited by ceiling effects among participants with strong baseline prosocial views, the intervention significantly increased preferences for cooperation, improved cooperative skills, and led to more cooperative behavior, particularly when a game experience is paired with reflective learning. We also observe variation in treatment effects by socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, with impacts being stronger among participants with higher education and income levels, and among those already concerned with inequality and climate change (examples of cooperative social challenges).Our findings highlight the relevance of understanding cooperation as a learnable practice, and points to the importance of combining both action and reflection in the design of cooperation-building tools.
04-01-2026
Documento CEDE 2026-03
JEL: L81, Q18, L66
En Bogotá cerca de 1,8 millones personas enfrentan algún grado de inseguridad alimentaria. La ciudad también es escenario de un acentuado crecimiento de las Tiendas de Descuento Duro (TDD), que buscan ofrecer precios bajos y una mayor cercanía a los hogares. A partir de rastrear la ubicación y la fecha de apertura de las tiendas junto con la información de la Encuesta Multipropósito de Bogotá, en este artículo se estudia el efecto que ha tenido la expansión de estos negocios sobre la inseguridad alimentaria a partir de un modelo de Diferencias en Diferencias usando los sectores catastrales como unidades de tratamiento. Los resultados sugieren que la entrada de una tienda incrementa el gasto en alimentos en 4,4 puntos porcentuales y reduce la participación de los alimentos en el gasto total en 1 punto porcentual. La evidencia sugiere que las TDD al disminuir los precios (efecto directo) y reducir los costos de desplazamiento y aumentar la competencia en los canales de comercialización (efecto indirecto) mejoran el acceso a los alimentos de los hogares bogotanos.
03-01-2026
Documento CEDE 2026-02
JEL: D31, H24, H26
Accurate measurement of income inequality remains a critical challenge in developing economies, particularly due to the underreporting of top incomes in traditional household surveys. In Colombia, while previous research has improved income measurement through tax records, these approaches fail to capture undistributed corporate profits that constitute a significant portion of top earners’ economic resources. This study addresses this limitation by employing Colombia’s Beneficial Ownership Registry (BOR), a novel administrative dataset linking corporate entities to their ultimate individual beneficiaries. I assess the BOR’s strengths in revealing ownership transparency and its limitations. Building on this foundation, I develop a economic income measure that allocates undistributed corporate profits to individuals, revealing that incomes of the top 0.01% nearly double when these profits are included. Extending this framework to effective tax rates (ETRs) shows that ETRs increase throughout the personal income distribution, while the overall shape of the ETR profile remains unchanged. In particular, effective tax rates continue to decline at the very top of the distribution. Thus, corporate taxes act as a partial backstop by raising effective tax rates throughout the distribution, even though the regressive pattern at the very top persists. Finally, comparisons with France and Brazil highlight similar regressive patterns and the potential of administrative datasets like the BOR to enhance fiscal transparency and equitable tax policy.
02-01-2026
Documento CEDE 2026-01
JEL: C90, D63, J15, Z13, O15
Do accents—the way that language is pronounced—shape social and economic interactions? We answer this question using an experiment embedded in an online survey of 6,000 Colombian adults. Respondents evaluated paired profiles in which audio introductions were randomly assigned to feature either a high- or low-class accent, while income, education, and other attributes were independently randomized. We find a sizable accent premium: speakers with high-class accents are 5–16 percentage points more likely to be chosen as friends, business partners, colleagues, or bosses. This premium is significantly larger among respondents with high socioeconomic status, consistent with an in-group favoritism capable of reproducing inequality. By varying the information we present to respondents, our experiment allows us to conclude that the premium cannot be attributed solely to inferences about income or education. We further show that the premium vanishes for high-class foreign accents, suggesting that class cues are culturally specific and difficult for outsiders to detect. Finally, we document that respondents systematically associate high-class accents with multiple proxies of social status and that they elicit more deferential treatment. Overall, our findings reveal that accents function as a form of capital: culturally specific linguistic signals that reproduce social hierarchies, with implications for labor markets and efforts to promote mobility and integration.
01-01-2026
Documento CEDE 2025-41
JEL: I12, J11, J13, N36, 015
This paper identifies Bogotá as a demographic sink during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The almost permanent contraction of its natural population resulted from low birth rates and heightened death rates. After the Thousand Days’ War (1899–1902), this condition was reversed. Rapid population growth ensued for over a century, as the city added, to the regular flows of immigrants, annual surpluses of its own natural population. Bogotá thus turned into a demographic source. This historical shift from sink to source was closely linked to changes in health. This research demonstrates that three traits of the early health transition (EHT) were present during this transformation: death-rate stabilization, improvements in life expectancy, and structural changes in the causes of death. It reconstructs historical statistics for crude death, birth, marriage, and natural-increase rates, and develops life tables, including survival rates based on abridged and period data from largely unpublished or unexplored archival sources. These empirical findings substantiate the contributions made to the literature on the city’s social and demographic past and broaden the perspectives for other scholars to apply the EHT and naturalpopulation frameworks to the historical evolution of cities in Latin America and beyond.
11-12-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-40
JEL: D74, J23, J71, K42
This work studies how drug trade-related violence affects individuals’ employment prospects. Using an experimental design, I find that candidates residing in areas associated with drug trade-related violence face significant labor market discrimination. Willingness to hire decreases a 16 % in candidates from a ”narco” neighborhood. Education acts as a mitigating factor, and candidates from a narco neighborhood who finish secondary school do not face discrimination. The results are not driven by employers’ perceptions of the candidates’ quality. I find that discrimination is higher among more experienced employers and that employers who are more concerned about public safety are not more likely to discriminate, which does not support statistical discrimination as the mechanism driving the effect.
20-11-2025
