Essays on economics of education and inequality

El documento resume los resultados de los tres ensayos sobre economía de la educación y de igualdad de oportunidades que se realizaron para el caso de Colombia.

La política exterior de la Unión Europea y los Laboratorios de Paz en Colombia entre el 2000 y 2010

La presente monografía tiene por objetivo analizar a través de la corriente constructivista de Alexander Wendt, cómo a partir de la política exterior de la Unión Europea, se crea una identidad europea que tiene efectos sobre Colombia a través de los Laboratorios de Paz. La creación de dicha identidad estuvo condicionada por la apropiación de ciertos mecanismos dentro de su política exterior, como la ayuda para el desarrollo y la diplomacia preventiva. Es de esta manera como la identidad europea afecta a Colombia a través de la creación de los Laboratorios de Paz por medio de mecanismos como actividades económicas alternativas y fuente de ingresos y empleo, sustitución de cultivos ilícitos, transferencia de conocimientos tecnológicos y administrativos, apoyo a procesos de paz al interior de la población, fortalecimiento institucional y participación ciudadana.

Reflections about Complicity and its Application in some Socio Economics Crimes

In Colombia, the definitions of crimes are found in the special part of the Criminal Code. They are set out as though the only way of to commit them was by being the author of the punishable conduct there described. Nevertheless, in the general part of the Criminal Code, we find other forms of criminal responsibility for the conduct described in the special part. Complicity is one of those ways. Although complicity is established in the Criminal Code, it does not appear as a criminal definition and, as such it is ignored or, worse, applied incorrectly. For those reasons, this article tries to reflect upon the validity of complicity. Accordingly, this article analyzes: what is complicity, what is the difference between complicity and co-authorship and how would complicity work in some practical cases related to socio-economic crimes, in which it has being overlooked or, has been used incorrectly. The article concludes that complicity is still valid, and that the correct application of complicity materializes the ideal of justice.

Labor supply, biased technological change and economic growth

Se utiliza un modelo de innovaciones sesgadas para estudiar los efectos de cambios exógenos en la oferta laboral. En un contexto de innovaciones sesgadas, a medida que las economías acumulan capital, el trabajo se hace relativamente más escaso y más caro, por este motivo, hay incentivos para adoptar tecnologías ahorradoras de trabajo. Del mismo modo un cambio en la oferta laboral afecta la abundancia de factores y sus precios relativos. En general, una reducción de la oferta laboral, hace que el trabajo sea más caro y genera incentivos para cambio tecnológico ahorrador de trabajo. Así, el efecto inicial que tiene el cambio en la oferta laboral sobre los precios de los factores es mitigado por el cambio tecnológico. Finalmente, los movimientos en la remuneración a los factores afectan las decisiones de ahorro y, por lo tanto, la dinámica del crecimiento. En este trabajo se exploran las consecuencias de una reducción de la oferta laboral en dos contextos teóricos diferentes: un modelo de agentes homogéneos y horizonte infinito y un modelo de generaciones traslapadas.

Partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism

In this paper I investigate the optimal level of decentralization of tasks for the provision of a local public good. I enrich the well-known trade-off between internalization of spillovers (that favors centralization) and accountability (that favors decentralization) by considering that public goods are produced through multiple tasks. This adds an additional institutional setting, partial decentralization, to the classical choice between full decentralization and full centralization. The main results are that partial decentralization is optimal when both the variance of exogenous shocks to electorate’s utility is large and the electorate expects high performance from politicians. I also show that the optimal institutional setting depends on the degree of substitutability / complementarity between tasks. In particular, I show that a large degree of substitutability between tasks makes favoritism more likely, which increases the desirability of partial decentralization as a safeguard against favoritism.

Unemployment insurance in the presence of an informal sector

We study the effect of UI benefits in a typical developing country where the informal sector is sizeable and persistent. In a partial equilibrium environment, ruling out the macroeconomic consequences of UI benefits, we characterize the stationary equilibrium of an economy where policyholders may be employed in the formal sector, short-run unemployed receiving UI benefits or long-run unemployed without UI benefits. We perform comparative static exercises to understand how UI benefits affect unemployed worker´s effort to secure a formal job, their labor supply in the informal sector and leisure time. Our model reveals that an increase in UI benefits generates two opposing effects for the short-run unemployed. First, since search efforts cannot be monitored it generates moral hazard behaviours that lower effort. Second, it generates an income effect as it reduces the marginal cost of searching for a formal job and increases effort.The overall effect is ambiguous and depends on the relative strength of these two effects. Additionally, we show that an increase in UI benefits increases the efforts of long-run unemployed workers. We provide a simple simulation exercise which suggests that the income effect pointed out is not necessarily of second-order importance in comparison with moral hazard strength. This result softens the widespread opinion, usually based on the microeconomic/partial equilibrium argument that the presence of dual labor markets is an obstacle to providing UI in developing countries.

Cartoons and economics: general analysis based on colombian economic cartoons

May cartoons be considered as a viable and credible source for the study of economics? There is hardly any research on the subject, even though there is a quite significant amount of cartoons with economic content. This suggests that economics (and economists) have not paid enough attention and do not incorporate in their analysis a relevant primary source. The present paper aims to explore the value of using cartoons as a complementary primary source in economic analysis. We present a way of analyzing economic history through cartoons; first, reviewing cartoons which describe particular historical circumstances and second, examining cartoons that represent generic economic situations and are not necessarily linked to a historical period. We choose 17 cartoons, from different cartoonist, especially Colombian cartoonists that may give us an idea of economic matters and economic history.

Elasticity of Substitution in the U.S. Market with Endogenous Transport Costs: a Sectoral Approach.

En este artículo se presentan estimaciones de la elasticidad de sustitución de bienes importados al mercado de los EEUU en el periodo 1990 - 2003, siguiendo a Anderson y Wincoop (2004). Estas estimaciones aprovechan la disponibilidad de la información sobre costos de transporte de bienes publicada por la Oficina del Censo de los Estados Unidos, desagregándola a seis digitos. Se obtienen dos estimaciones diferentes de la elasticidad de sustitución: una a nivel agregado promedio y otra a nivel sectorial. Como puede esperarse, las estimaciones que tienen en cuenta la endogeneidad de los costos de transporte son estadisticamente diferentes en un punto porcentual a los resultados obtenidos cuando no se contempla la estructura de los costos de transporte. Esta diferencia es incluso superior cuando comparamos los resultados obtenidos utilizando la clasificacion sectorial a nivel de dos digitos de la clasificacion ISIC revisión 2.