This paper examines the social origins of Colombian paramilitary behavior in 2000-2006. Based on fieldwork, we hypothesize that peasant (campesinos) commanders were more likely to develop preferences characterized by reciprocity and develop a model of reciprocity which predicts that more reciprocal commanders should provide both more violence (fears) and public goods (dreams). We collect and geocode novel paramilitary data from Transitional Justice Tribunals.

Over a two-week span in December 2007 a massive spike of prescription opioids surged suddenly into retail pharmacies in 78 counties in five Southeastern U.S. states. These “spike counties” experienced an average increase in opioid deliveries of 313\% over baseline, with one Mississippi county experiencing a 1300% increase. The magnitude of this surge was over 3.4 billion morphine milligram equivalent units - more than 147 million standard doses.

This paper studies the effect of the intensive margin of a negative economic shock on crime. I collect the criminal records of 165,000 users of DMG, an informal financial sector firm that closed in Colombia at the end of 2008. I exploit the exogenous variation in users with capitalizable deposits within the days around the firm's statal intervention. The results suggest increased criminal reports for those suffering from the negative economic impact. Additionally, I found that criminal reports of the other household members increased by 3.5%.

We test for weak- and strong-form efficiency of fixed-event individual forecast revisions of Brent and WTI prices using proprietary microdata from Energy & Metals Consensus Forecasts produced by Consensus Economics. We contribute to the literature on strong-form efficiency testing by assembling a comprehensive list of empirically relevant variables that are assumed to be in the information set of the forecasters. This set includes variables that aim to capture the effects of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Se analizan los efectos de la ayuda financiera en la movilidad social. En 2014 Colombia implementó un programa de ayuda financiera a nivel nacional  -SER PILO PAGA- que cubre la matrícula de cuatro año programas de pregrado en 33 universidades de "alta calidad". Se estiman los efectos de este programa sobre resultados educativos y del mercado laboral obtenidos siete años después la terminación de la escuela secundaria.

We study the life cycle pattern of job displacement, including wage losses and displacement risk, in an Overlapping Generations economy with a frictionless labor market. In our model, finitely lived worker-firm pairs accumulate both firm specific and general human capital. Competition for zero tenure workers and the non contractible nature of specific capital implies that wages are higher than productivity for newly tenured workers, and lower for those with longer tenure.

Individual-level labor income risk is partially insured within households. The traditional focus has been on active spousal insurance, in the sense of a spouse entering the labor market in response to the other spouse losing their job (the added worker effect). With increasing female labor force participation, two earner households are more common, which implies that the traditional insurance channel is less relevant.

Using confidential credit registry data, merged with firm tax records in Chile, we evaluate the macroeconomic consequences of relationship lending. We find that longer relationships between banks and firms give access to more credit at better terms, and that more productive and larger firms have stronger relationships with banks. We find no systematic evidence of evergreening. We build a dynamic model of firms behavior where firms choose to borrow within relationships or in arms-length transactions jointly with their investment and borrowing decisions.