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 2025-33
JEL: D63, D91, I31
El clasismo sigue siendo una forma de discriminación poco estudiada y a menudo poco cuestionada. Comprender la forma en que se percibe, se vive y se desafía el clasismo es un paso importante para transformar esta realidad social. Para analizar cómo las personas conceptualizan el clasismo y cómo se puede aumentar la conciencia sobre él, llevamos a cabo un experimento de laboratorio sobre el terreno en Colombia. Basándonos en la literatura que destaca el potencial de la educación, las narrativas y las artes para desafiar los perjuicios discriminatorios, diseñamos dos intervenciones y probamos sus efectos en las percepciones sobre el clasismo. La primera intervención fomentó reflexiones externas sobre el clasismo a través de las narrativas de los personajes representados en un documental único sobre la clase social. Diseñamos una segunda intervención para estimular reflexiones internas guiando a los participantes a través de una experiencia inmersiva utilizando herramientas artísticas, como las artes visuales, la narración de histonas y el movimiento. Nuestros hallazgos muestran que, a pesar de su brevedad, ambas intervenciones aumentaron eficazmente la conciencia sobre el clasismo. Medimos la conciencia como una cuestión relevante a nivel individual y como una cuestión relevante a nivel social, y encontramos efectos estadísticamente significativos en ambos casos. Estos resultados contribuyen a la literatura sobre las percepciones sociales de la discriminación, el clasismo y la sensibilización, y proporcionan pruebas del potencial de las herramientas reflexivas que utilizan la narrativa y las artes para fomentar el cambio social.
23-10-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-32
JEL: 013, 054, Q15, Q23, Q33, Q34, R14
Rural economies in frontier regions of many countries in the Global South share institutional configurations in which legal and illegal economies, non-state armed actors, and fragile or selective forms of state presence overlap. This is the case in large areas of Colombia, where rural economies have historically developed and transformed under the social orders established in the context of armed conflict. This article examines transitions between coca, cattle ranching, and gold mining in two municipalities ofthe Amazonian deforestation arc Puerto Guzmán (Putumayo) and Vista Hermosa (Meta)—where coca has lost economic centrality after processes of deconcentration following the Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP. Based on a mixed methodology that combines geospatial analysis, interviews, social mapping, and fieldwork, we show that the transition from coca to cattle ranching and gold mining is accompanied by armed regulations that reconfigure land, capital, and labor, and deepen deforestation. The central argument is that these transitions do not entail an exit from conflict or an economic formalization, but rather the emergence of new forms of criminal governance that regulate economic activities in gray zones of legality. These forms build on the legacies of the armed conflict and on mechanisms of social legitimation, enabling armed actors to regulate activities that appear to be licit. Engaging with the concepts of gray economies and criminal politics, the article shows how such hybrid configurations deepen economic informality in the territory and exacerbate deforestation, revealing the limits of the post-agreement period as a transition toward state order.
22-09-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-31
JEL: H55, J26, J14, C15
This article presents the CEDE Pension Model, a microsimulation tool designed to project key variables of Colombia’s pension system. The model integrates administrative data, household surveys, and institutional parameters to simulate labor histories using Markov chains and to project the number of older adults who will receive pension benefits through 2100. Its design enables the evaluation of policy options for old-age economic protection, highlighting trade-offs across coverage, equity and progressivity, adequacy, and fiscal sustainability.
21-09-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-30
JEL: I20, R40
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the education of approximately 1.6 billion students globally, exacerbating existing inequalities by leading to increased dropout and failure rates, as well as a significant decline in learning outcomes. This article evaluates the impact of the Viva la Escuela program, a nationwide initiative that mobilized university volunteers in rural schools, emerging from public policy aimed at alleviating the pandemic's consequences. Using a difference-in-differences design that capitalizes on the staggered implementation of the program, we estimate its causal effect on dropout and pass rates in primary education. The results indicate that the program reduced the dropout rate by 1.33 percentage points, representing a 45 % decrease from the control group mean, and increased the pass rate by 1.96 percentage points, corresponding to a 2.1 % increase. These findings highlight a. significant short-term impact. This research contributes to the literature on emergency education and volunteer engagement in schools, providing robust evidence from a middle-income context in Latin America. The results suggest that targeted interventions, which integrate volunteer support with effective pedagogical design, can effectively address educational setbacks resulting from emergencies and enhance education systems overall through collaboration among government entities, universities, and schools.
20-09-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-29
JEL: I22, I24, C21
Este estudio examina el impacto del programa de mérito Ser Pilo Paga, un crédito-beca para estudiantes con necesidades socioeconómicas; en él, se evalúa el acceso a etapas avanzadas de estudiantes rurales colombianos en la educación superior. Mediante un diseño de regresión discontinua, se utiliza como proxy la presentación del examen Saber Pro y se estima el efecto causal del programa utilizando datos de 214.423 egresados rurales de grado 11 en los años 2014 y 2015. Los resultados revelan que Ser Pilo Paga aumentó la probabilidad de acceso a etapas avanzadas en 33,65 puntos porcentuales (82%) en 2014 y en 15,10 puntos porcentuales (33,5%) en 2015, en comparación con el grupo de control. A su vez, se estimó el efecto agrupando los años donde los resultados son un aumento de 20,89 puntos porcentuales (48,6%). Estos hallazgos sugieren que un programa de mérito tiene un impacto considerable en la reducción de las desigualdades educativas para los estudiantes rurales, evidenciando que es una herramienta efectiva para mejorar la equidad educativa en contextos de alta vulnerabilidad.
19-09-2025
Documento CEDE 2025-28
How do you like what you like? The role of consumer preferences in manufacturing plants’ performance
JEL: L25, L60, O47, D22, D24
This paper investigates the role of consumer preferences in shaping the performance of manufacturing firms in Colombia. I use data from Colombian manufacturing firms between 2000 and 2012 to decompose the contribution of consumer preferences into those attributable to preferences for certain goods (horizontal differentiation) and for particular providers of those goods (vertical differentiation). Employing a model that integrates consumer demand, following a nested CES structure, with firm production, I use key demand parameters to decompose the variance of firm sales into technical efficiency, input costs, and vertical and horizontal differentiation. I find that vertical differentiation plays a dominant role in explaining sales variance (85.9%), while horizontal differentiation and technical efficiency contribute to a lesser extent (26.2% and 29.2%, respectively). These findings underscore the importance of consumer preferences in determining firm outcomes, showing that demand-driven factors, frequently subsumed in productivity measures, outweigh traditional supply-side drivers that explain firms’ performance.
18-09-2025
