Effective government leadership demands skills in planning, budgeting, and personnel management, areas where business experience may be valuable. Business owners could apply their management skills in public administration to optimize resources, enhance public service delivery, or promote private sector growth. However, these skills may not translate to the public sector, where different rules prevail, and a lack of political expertise could ultimately undermine the delivery of public services. This paper studies the impact of electing business owners as mayors in Brazilian municipalities.

El Informe Nacional de Competitividad (INC) 2024-2025 nos invita a construir juntos una visión de futuro: ¿cuáles son las tendencias globales en las que se enmarcan nuestras oportunidades de desarrollo?, ¿qué tenemos que hacer para transformarnos y aprovecharlas?, ¿cuál es el país que construiremos con este esfuerzo conjunto? En el INC 2024-2025 identificamos tres macrotendencias —cambio demográfico, cambio tecnológico y cambio climático— que nos motivan a diseñar acciones y estrategias para materializar dicha visión compartida.

Terminations of health plans are common in managed care systems around the world. This paper examines how to reassign consumers to incumbent insurers after such terminations. We propose an equilibrium model of competition in which insurers can respond to the reassignment rules through their provider networks. The setting is Colombia where the largest health insurer was terminated by the government in December 2015 and where insurers compete mainly on provider network breadth.

What drives opposition to affirmative action policies? We test whether individuals' college admissions outcomes, relative to their expectations, influence their attitudes toward affirmative action policies and inequality more broadly. Using a retrospective survey, we find that disappointed individuals---those who were admitted to fewer schools than anticipated---believe that affirmative action played an outsized role in their admissions outcomes, have the lowest support for affirmative action policies, and are more willing to donate to anti-affirmative action organizations.

This study examines the relationship between land inequality and tax collection. Contrary to traditional models that emphasize the redistributive role of taxation, we focus on its role in providing public goods that help develop markets, increasing productivity--i.e. enforcement of property rights, coordination, roads, electricity, etc.

We estimate the labor and health effects of the menopause transition for U.S. women. Using data from the NLSYW and the SWAN and applying an event study methodology which exploits the individual-level variation in the time of menopause, we find that women undergoing this transition have a lower probability of employment of almost 20 percentage points, and a higher probability of working part-time if they remain employed. We do not find significant impacts on their monthly earnings or hourly wage.

This paper examines the impact of Internet expansion on banking competition and credit access in rural Colombia. Using a staggered rollout of the National Fiber Optic Program from 2013 to 2016, we analyze the effects of broadband availability on public and private bank lending. We find that Internet connectivity reduced loan disbursements from the state-run Banco Agrario de Colombia (BAC) while increasing private bank lending, particularly for small enterprises. The shift was initially driven by reduced information frictions and later reinforced by new private bank entry.