Conflict, wages, and multiple equilibria

Firms’ compensation practices affect the protection of investors’ interests and the degree of economic inequality by changing the stakes of engaging in appropriation activities versus respecting the status quo. We use a general equilibrium model where workers can either work peacefully or join a guerrilla movement that expropriates entrepreneurs. If workers are peaceful, they receive a competitive wage. If they join a guerrilla movement, they receive a share of the appropriated wealth, which depends positively on the number of guerrilla members. In this framework, we find one low-income, low-wage equilibrium with guerrilla activity and one peaceful, high-income, high-wage equilibrium. The peaceful equilibrium can be reached through redistribution policies, which can be implemented at the firm level. In essence, through their compensation policies entrepreneurs, not the state might be able to protect their assets against expropriation and simultaneously control the internal principal-agent problem.

Combatant recruitment and the outcome of war

Why do some civil wars terminate soon, with victory of one party over the other? What determines if the winner is the incumbent or the rebel group? Why do other conáicts last longer? We propose a simple model in which the power of each armed group depends on the number of combatants it is able to recruit. This is in turn a function of the relative ëdistanceíbetween group leaderships and potential recruits. We emphasize the moral hazard problem of recruitment: Öghting is costly and risky so combatants have the incentive to defect from their task. They can also desert altogether and join the enemy. This incentive is stronger the farther away the Öghter is from the principal, since monitoring becomes increasingly costly. Bigger armies have more power but less monitoring capacity to prevent defection and desertion. This general framework allows a variety of interpretations of what type of proximity matters for building strong cohesive armies ranging from ethnic distance to geographic dispersion. Di§erent assumptions about the distribution of potential Öghters along the relevant dimension of conáict lead to di§erent equilibria. We characterize these, discuss the implied outcome in terms of who wins the war, and illustrate with historical and contemporaneous case studies.

Informality in the City: a Theoretical Analysis

This thesis theoretically studies the relationship between the informal sector (both in the labor and the housing market) and the city structure.

Educación de la sexualidad, prácticas docentes y conocimientos de los estudiantes: una evaluación del Programa de Educación para la Sexualidad y Construcción de Ciudadanía (PESCC)

Este documento presenta los resultados del componente cuantitativo de la evaluación del Programa de Educación para la Sexualidad y Construcción de Ciudadanía (PESCC) del Ministerio de Educación Nacional de Colombia (MEN). Para identificar el efecto, la estrategia empírica explota la variación en la implementación del componente pedagógico del PESCC entre los colegios y la variación en el componente de fortalecimiento institucional del programa a nivel departamental. El principal hallazgo de este trabajo es que el PESCC mejora las prácticas docentes de planeación y los conocimientos de los estudiantes en servicios en salud sexual y reproductiva y en derechos humanos sexuales y reproductivos. No hay efectos significativos en otros índices de Conocimientos, Actitudes o Prácticas (CAP) de profesores o estudiantes.