El sistema multifondos de pensiones colombiano bajo las nuevas teorías del comportamiento financiero

En Colombia, después de casi dos décadas de la creación del régimen de cuentas privadas, se implementó una reforma donde se pasa de un sistema con un único fondo a uno multifondos. Este tipo de reformas se vienen implementando en diferentes países europeos y de Latino América. A la luz de las teorías clásicas dicha reforma trae mejoras en el bienestar de los individuos; sin embargo, la literatura sobre las nuevas teorías del comportamiento sugiere que los individuos no siempre toman decisiones que están de acuerdo con los supuestos de las teorías clásicas. Este trabajo estudia esta reforma en Colombia bajo algunas de las teorías del comportamiento financiero. Se encuentra que aún cuando el afiliado se quede en la opción default , o actúe con aversión a la pérdida, va a obtener valores en sus cuentas privadas mayores a las que obtendría con un sistema de un único fondo.

Land Restitution and Prevention of Forced Displacement in Colombia

The armed conflict in Colombia, which has generated over three million internally displaced persons, has dramatic humanitarian consequences and raises serious issues regarding the protection of displaced peoples’ rights. The underlying reasons for the displacement often lie in the dynamics associated with territorial control and land seizures undertaken for strategic, military or purely economic purposes. Domestic and international legal provisions have established the victims’ right to the restitution of their homes and property as the “preferred remedy” in cases of displacement. However, policies dealing with displacement, both those of the Colombian government and of several international institutions, fail to take this sufficiently into account. A comprehensive reparation policy for victims must necessarily entail the reversion of lands, territories and goods seized in Colombia under the pretext of the internal armed conflict.

Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs, por Michael Lipton, Londres: Routledge, 2009

Reseña

Sexual Violence Against Women as a Strategy to Dispossess Land in the Colombian Armed Conflict

This article reviews the evidence collected by diverse national and international organizations regarding the relationship between sexual violence against women, forced displacement, and dispossession in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. To this end, it uses the concept of “sexual violence regimes” to highlight that the endspursued by sexual violence are not always exhausted by simple consummation (that is, the act of sexual violence itself), but depending on the context, can be connected with broader strategic goals of armed actors. At the same time, this document admits the difficulty of proving this relationship with respect to judicial procedures, and thus sets out the possibility of creating a rebuttable presumption, in the framework of “unconstitutional state of affairs” created by judgment T-025 of 2004, that alleviates the burden of proof of the victims, and serves as a catalyst to promote new genderbased mechanisms of reparations.

Ley de Víctimas de Colombia y la responsabilidad de las personas jurídicas por violaciones de derechos humanos

En el año 2011, después de cuatro años de cabildeo y forcejeo político, Colombia aprobó la Ley 1448, más conocida como la Ley de Víctimas. Los objetivos perseguidos por esta ley son bastante amplios, en la medida en que pretende ser una regulación comprensiva para enfrentar los efectos que el conflicto armado ha infligido en la población civil. En este sentido, la ley incluye las reformas legales que fueron consideradascomo necesarias para restablecer el estado de derecho a través de la proteccióny cumplimiento de los derechos de las víctimas. Actualmente, el gobierno, la sociedad civil y la academia se han enfocado en el análisis de los dilemas y grandes temas dela ley. Sin embargo, esta nueva regulación, con sus 208 artículos, es más amplia y compleja, razón por la cual es indispensable hacer un análisis más detenido de sus múltiples provisiones. Una de estas, que parece no haber llamado la atención y que, por lo tanto, no ha sido objeto de estudio pormenorizado es el artículo 46. A primera vista, este parece estar encaminado a reforzar la investigación y juzgamiento de las personas jurídicas relacionadas con violaciones de derechos humanos y derecho internacional humanitario en el contexto colombiano. Este texto examina específicamente los alcances reales y dilemas del artículo, y propone algunas soluciones para llenar la laguna que existe actualmente en el país en la materia.

The Bureaucratic Impact of the mobilization for Land. Lessons from the Liberal Republic

The State-building process must be understood through the study of the agencies in charge of each of its regulatory functions. One such function is the regulation of property rights. During the Liberal Republic, as a reaction to the massive mobilization,new tools to better regulate property rights were promoted: colonization, parceling, the award of public lands and, at the end, a new legal framework. In spite of its purposes, they faced and failed to solve the challenges every organization experiences when growing: resource scarcity, controlling its agents, and keeping technical simplicity.

The project of land restitution in Colombia: an illustration of the civilizing force of hypocrisy?

This article offers a theoretical interpretation of the dispositions on land restitution contained in the famous “Victims’ Bill”, which was debated in the Colombian Congress during the year 2008. The bill included specific mechanisms aimed at guaranteeing the restitution of land to victims of the Colombian armed conflict. At the time, the bill was endorsed by all the main political actors in the country –notably the government and the elites that support it, on the one hand, and victims’ and human rights organizations and other opposition groups, on the other–. The fact that the restitution of land to victims of the Colombian armed conflict was being considered as a serious possibility by all political actors in the country seemed to indicate the existence of a consensus among actors whose positions are ordinarily opposed, on an issue that has traditionally led to high levels of polarization. This consensus is quite puzzling, because it seems to be at odds with the interests and/or the conceptions of justice advocated by these political actors, and because the restitution of land faces enormous difficulties both from a factual and a normative point of view, which indicates that it may not necessarily be the best alternative for dealing with the issue of land distribution in Colombia. This article offers an interpretation of said consensus, arguing that it is only an apparent consensus in which the actors are actually misrepresenting their interests and conceptions of justice, while at the same time adopting divergent strategies of implementation aimed at fulfilling their true interests. Nevertheless, the article concludes that the common adherence by all actors to the principle of restorative justice might bring about its actual realization, and thus produce an outcome that, in spite (and perhaps even because) of being unintended, might substantively contribute to solving the problem of unequal land distribution in Colombia. Even though the article focuses in some detail on the specificities of the 2008 Bill, it attempts to make a general argument about the state of the discussion on how to deal with the issue of land distribution in the country. Consequently, it may still be relevant today, especially considering that a new Bill on land restitution is currently being discussed in Congress, which includes the same restitution goals as the Victims’ Bill and many of its procedural and substantive details, and which therefore seems to reflect a similar consensus to the one analyzed in the article.

Informal access to urban land. Housing policies devoted to vulnerable sectors implemented in Cordoba-Argentina

The urban growth in Latino American cities, in a neoliberal context, has led to several population groups to having no possibilities to the access to urban land. Informal and irregular urban settlements increase, requiring attention from local governments, with actions and strategies in order to achieve both the regularization of such situation and further prevention. In the city of Córdoba different informal and irregular operations have taken place promoted by different actors. Furthermore, policies focused on regularization which have been promoted, have few intervention mechanisms, a fact that becomes critical, especially for the urban problems it causes. The main aim of this article is to present a classification over different modes of urban land acquirement taking place out of both urban and civil legislations. Afterwards, different informal settlement typologies are described, as well as the policies focused on them, together with their respective effects and impacts.

Social housing and land use planning in Medellin during the period 2006-2011. Steps towards socio economic and residential segregation

This paper presents an approach to the relationship between land use planning and socioeconomic residential segregation, from the location of social housing in Medellin, Colombia, during the period 2006-2011. The first part introduces the land use regulations regarding the location of social housing, identifying ambiguities in the current spatial plan. Next, we present the intersection of  regulatory information and the location of the projects that were under construction during the  study period, highlighting the need to consider the location as an important characteristic of social housing and residential segregation as a phenomenon that must be recognized and worked on land  use planning in our cities.

Informal housing in the XXI century. Characteristics of the informal land and housing supply in Bogota during the first decade of the XXI century

This article characterizes the conditions of the informal land and housing supply during the first decade of the xxi century in Bogota, regarding magnitude and location of the informal urban growth (new occupations in the periphery and informal densification of consolidated areas), housing  conditions in recent occupations and the characteristics of the land market. The situation of the  last decade has been reconstructed based in aerial photography analysis, census data quantification  and data analysis from planning and control public entities. Results suggest that due to the relative  land scarcity in Bogotá, among other aspects, the informal market dynamics have experimented changes compared to previous decades, because the growth in consolidated urban areas becomes  more important than the informal urbanization of the peripheries, but at the same time informality  transcends the municipal perimeter to the neighboring municipalities.

Allocation rules on networks

When allocating a resource, geographical and infrastructural constraints have to be taken into account. We study the problem of distributing a resource through a network from sources endowed with the resource to citizens with claims. A link between a source and an agent depicts the possibility of a transfer from the source to the agent. Given the supplies at each source, the claims of citizens, and the network, the question is how to allocate the available resources among the citizens. We consider a simple allocation problem that is free of network constraints, where the total amount can be freely distributed. The simple allocation problem is a claims problem where the total amount of claims is greater than what is available. We focus on consistent and resource monotonic rules in claims problems that satisfy equal treatment of equals. We call these rules fairness principles and we extend fairness principles to allocation rules on networks. We require that for each pair of citizens in the network, the extension is robust with respect to the fairness principle. We call this condition pairwise robustness with respect to the fairness principle. We provide an algorithm and show that each fairness principle has a unique extension which is pairwise robust with respect to the fairness principle. We give applications of the algorithm for three fairness principles: egalitarianism, proportionality and equal sacrifice.

Asymmetrically fair rules for an indivisible good problem with a budget constraint

We study a particular restitution problem where there is an indivisible good (land or property) over which two agents have rights: the dispossessed agent and the owner. A third party, possibly the government, seeks to resolve the situation by assigning rights to one and compensate the other. There is also a maximum amount of money available for the compensation. We characterize a family of asymmetrically fair rules that are immune to strategic behavior, guarantee minimal welfare levels for the agents, and satisfy the budget constraint.

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.

Gender differences in time allocation of poor children in Colombia

This paper studies the effect of credit constraints and constraints on transfers between parents and children, on differences in labor and schooling across children within the same household, with an application to gender. When families are unconstrained in these respects, differences in labor supply or education are driven by differences in wages or returns to education. If the family faces an imperfect capital market, the labor supply of each child is inefficient, but differences across children are still driven by comparative advantage. However, if interfamily transfers are constrained so that parents cannot offset inequality between their children, they will favor the human capital accumulation of the more disadvantaged child -generally the one who works more as a child. We use our theory to examine the gender gap in child labor. Using a sample of poor families in Colombia, we conform our predictions among rural households, although this is less clear for urban households. The gender gap is largely explained by the wage gap between girls and boys. Moreover, families with the potential to make capital transfers to adult children (e.g. those with large animals), can compensate adult sons for their greater child labor and reduced educational attainment. In such families, as predicted, the male/female labor gap is greater.

Congress composition and electoral advantage

In 2003, an electoral reform changed the mechanism to assign seats in the Colombian Congress. I simulate the 2006 Senate elections using the previous assignment mechanism to determine which senators benefited from the reform, i.e. would have not been elected had the reform not been made. With the results of the simulation, I use a regression discontinuity design to compare the senators that would have been barely elected anyways with those who would have lost, but were near to be elected. I check the differences in the amount of law drafts presented, the attendance to voting sessions, and a discipline index for each senator as proxy of their legislative behavior. I find that the senators benefiting from the reform present a different legislative behavior during the 4-year term with respect to the senators that would have been elected anyways. Since the differential legislative behavior cannot be interpreted as being better (worse) politician, I examine if the behavioral difference gives them an electoral advantage. I find no difference in the electoral result of 2010 Senate election in terms of the probability of being (re)elected in 2010, the share of votes, the share of votes within their party list, and the concentration of their votes. Additionally, I check the probability of being investigated for links with paramilitary groups and I find no differences. The results suggest that political reforms can change the composition of governing or legislative bodies in terms of performance, but it does not necessarily translate into an electoral advantage.