School management and sexual behavior of teenagers

This paper asks whether school based management may help reducing risky sexual behavior of teenagers. For this purpose we use student level data from Bogot´a to identify students from Concession School (CS), who are enrolled in public education system with a more school management autonomy at school level, and to compare them with those students at the traditional public education system. We use propensity score matching methods to have a comparable sample between pupils at CS and traditional schools. Our results show that on average the behavior of students from CS do not have a sexual behavior that differs from those in traditional public schools except for boys in CS who have a lower probability of being sexual active. However, there are important differences when heterogeneity is considered. For example we find that CS where girls per boys ratio is higher have lower teenage pregnancy rates than public schools with also high girls per boys ratios. We also find that teachers’ human capital, teacher-pupil ratio or whether school offers sexual education are also related to statistically significant differences between CS and traditional public schools.

Seguros de desempleo: revisión de literatura y propuesta para Colombia

En este artículo se estudia la posibilidad de introducir seguros de desempleo en Colombia. En una primera parte, se propone una revisión de literatura de los seguros de desempleo en la cual se exponen las ventajas generadas por una cobertura contra este riesgo, así como sus inconvenientes. En una segunda parte, se estudian varios escenarios para introducir seguros de desempleo en Colombia. Después de haber presentado el contexto del mercado laboral y de las normas que lo vigilan, se proponen varios diseños que abordan la gestión y la administración del riesgo de desempleo en Colombia. Igualmente se presentan algunas consideraciones teóricas para la valoración del costo del aseguramiento, las cuales incorporan los efectos del riesgo moral sobre la duración y la incidencia del desempleo.

Why labor income shares seem to be constant?

The common assumptions that labor income share does not change over time or across countries and that factor income shares are equal to the elasticity of output with respect to factors have had important implications for economic theory. However, there are various theoretical reasons why the elasticity of output with respect to reproducible factors should be correlated with the stage of development. In particular, the behavior of international trade and capital flows and the existence of factor saving innovations imply such a correlation. If this correlation exists and if factor income shares are equal to the elasticity of output with respect to factors then the labor income share must be negatively correlated with the stage of development. We propose an explanation for why labor income share has no correlation with income per capita: the existence of a labor intensive sector which produces non tradable goods.

Determinantes estructurales de la sindicalización en Colombia

Las causas y los efectos de la asociación sindical han sido ampliamente estudiados por la literatura económica; no obstante en el caso colombiano existe un claro sesgo hacia el estudio de los efectos sobre el salario. Este documento presenta un estudio de los determinantes estructurales de la tasa de densidad sindical para Colombia incluyendo algunos aspectos particulares como los efectos regionales y sectoriales utilizando la Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares 2007. Se encuentra que la densidad sindical está determinada por factores semejantes a los de otros mercados de trabajo con patrones similares de negociación sindical, como los reportados por Johnson (2005). Finalmente, dadas sus cifras de asesinato de sindicalistas, consideramos que los determinantes de la afiliación sindical para el caso Colombiano son más complejos que los de otros países latinoamericanos

Corrupción y delitos contra la administración pública especial referencia a los delitos cometidos en la contratación

La corrupción sigue siendo uno de los principales problemas del Estado de Derecho en el siglo XXI. Su incidencia reduce la eficacia de la inversión, aumenta el valor de los bienes y servicios, reduce la competitividad de las empresas, vulnera la confianza de los ciudadanos en el ordenamiento jurídico y sobre todo condena a la miseria a quienes deben ser destinatarios de las políticas públicas.Sin embrago, la lucha que han realizado muchos gobiernos y funcionarios judiciales contra este fenómeno ha modificado sus formas de aparición, pues es cada vez menos frecuente la apropiación directa de los caudales públicos o la entrega de sobornos a los funcionarios, prefiriéndose métodos mucho más sutiles como los sobrecostos, la subcontratación masiva o la constitución de complicadas sociedades, en las cuales tienen participación los funcionarios públicos o sus familias.Este libro constituye un esfuerzo por el estudio jurídico y criminológico de la corrupción y los delitos contra la administración pública en Europa y Latinoamérica y reúne la selección de los temas penales más relevantes de la tesis doctoral del profesor Carlos Guillermo Castro Cuenca, denominada Aproximación a la Corrupción en la contratación pública y defendida en la universidad de Salamanca en febrero de 2008, con lo cual obtuvo la calificación de sobresaliente por unanimidad.

Catholic worker movement: un análisis desde la acción política no violenta y la lógica transnacional de los movimientos sociales

El Catholic Worker Movement se ha caracterizado por enmarcarse en las dinámicas de movilización social y acción política no violenta, que respondían, desde su creación en 1933, a un conjunto de problemáticas sociales y económicas sobre las cuales la sociedad civil se interesó y dio inicio a su actividad en escenarios de la política doméstica de Estados Unidos. Pese a ser un movimiento que surgió en un contexto nacional con fundamentación religiosa, el CWM alcanzó el desarrollo de lógicas transnacionales que contribuyeron a la defensa de su causa y a la reivindicación de valores y principios que motivarían posteriormente a la búsqueda de recursos para reforzar su lucha. Así, el proceso de evolución del movimiento tomó dirección en torno a fenómenos como la difusión, la adquisición de repertorios de acción colectiva correspondientes a la no violencia, y al aprovechamiento de factores exógenos y endógenos representados en distintas formas de oportunidad política y capacidad organizativa.

Economic shocks and crime: evidence from the crash of ponzi schemes

In November 2008, Colombian authorities dismantled a network of Ponzi schemes, making hundreds of thousands of investors lose tens of millions of dollars throughout the country. Using original data on the geographical incidence of the Ponzi schemes, this paper estimates the impact of their break down on crime. We find that the crash of Ponzi schemes differentially exacerbated crime in affected districts. Confirming the intuition of the standard economic model of crime, this effect is only present in places with relatively weak judicial and law enforcement institutions, and with little access to consumption smoothing mechanisms such as microcredit. In addition, we show that, with the exception of economically-motivated felonies such as robbery, violent crime is not affected by the negative shock.

Natural resources, redistribution and Human capital formation

How do resource booms affect human capital accumulation? We exploit time and spatial variation generated by the commodity boom across local governments in Peru to measure the effect of natural resources on human capital formation. We explore the effect of both mining production and tax revenues on test scores, finding a substantial and statistically significant effect for the latter. Transfers to local governments from mining tax revenues are linked to an increase in math test scores of around 0.23 standard deviations. We find that the hiring of permanent teachers as well as the increases in parental employment and improvements in health outcomes of adults and children are plausible mechanisms for such large effect on learning. These findings suggest that redistributive policies could facilitate the accumulation of human capital in resource abundant developing countries as a way to avoid the natural resources curse.

Survival at the frontier of Holy War: political expansion, crusading, commerce and the medieval colonizing settlement at Biała Gora, North Poland

Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD, the Lower Vistula valley represented a permeable and shifting frontier between Pomerelia (eastern Pomerania), which had been incorporated into the Polish Christian state by the end of the tenth century, and the territories of western Prussian tribes, who had resisted attempts at Christianization. Pomeranian colonization eventually began to falter in the latter decades of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, most likely as a result of Prussian incursions, which saw the abandonment of sites across the borderland. Subsequently, the Teutonic Order and its allies led a protracted holy war against the Prussian tribes, which resulted in the conquest of the region and its incorporation into a theocratic state by the end of the thirteenth century. This was accompanied by a second wave of colonization, which resulted in the settlement pattern that is still visible in the landscape of north-central Poland today. However, not all colonies were destroyed or abandoned in between the two phases of colonization. The recently excavated site of Biała Góra, situated on the western side of the Forest of Sztum overlooking the River Nogat, represents a unique example of a transitional settlement that included both Pomeranian and Teutonic Order phases. The aim of this paper is to situate the site within its broader landscape context which can be characterized as a militarized frontier, where, from the later twelfth century and throughout much of the thirteenth century, political and economic expansion was combined with the ideology of Christian holy war and missionary activity. This paper considers how the colonists provisioned and sustained themselves in comparison to other sites within the region, and how Biała Góra may be tentatively linked to a documented but otherwise lost outpost in this volatile borderland.

Managing artisanal and small-scale mining in forest areas: perspectives from a poststructural political ecology

Artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) is an activity intimately associated with social deprivation and environmental degradation, including deforestation. This paper examines ASM and deforestation using a broadly poststructural political ecology framework. Hegemonic discourses are shown to consistently influence policy direction, particularly in emerging approaches such as Corporate Social Responsibility and the Forest Stewardship Council. A review of alternative discourses reveals that the poststructural method is useful for critiquing the international policy arena but does not inform new approaches. Synthesis of the analysis leads to conclusions that echo a growing body of literature advocating for policies to become increasingly sensitive to local contexts, synergistic between actors at difference scales, and to be integrated across sectors.

Three decades of policy layering and politically sustainable reform in the European Union’s Agricultural Policy

The study of policy reform has tended to focus on single-stage reforms taking place over a relatively short period. Recent research has drawn attention to gradual policy changes unfolding over extended periods. One strategy of gradual change is layering, in which new policy dimensions are introduced by adding new policy instruments or by redesigning existing ones to address new concerns. The limited research on single-stage policy reforms highlights that these may not endure in the postenactment phase when circumstances change. We argue that gradual policy layering may create sustainability dynamics that can result in lasting reform trajectories. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has changed substantially over the last three decades in response to emerging policy concerns by adding new layers. This succession of reforms proved durable and resilient to reversal in the lead-up to the 2013 CAP reform when institutional and political circumstances changed.

Linking alkaline phosphatase activity with bacterial phoD gene abundance in soil from a long-term management trial

Changes in land management practices may have significant implications for soil microbial communities important in organic P turnover. Soil bacteria can increase plant P availability by excreting phosphatase enzymes which catalyze the hydrolysis of ester-phosphate bonds. Examining the diversity and abundance of alkaline phosphatase gene harboring bacteria may provide valuable insight into alkaline phosphatase production in soils. This study examined the effect of 20 years of no input organic (ORG), organic with composted manure (ORG + M), conventional (CONV) and restored prairie (PRA) management on soil P bioavailability, alkaline phosphatase activity (ALP), and abundance and diversity of ALP gene (phoD) harboring bacteria in soils from the northern Great Plains of Canada. Management system influenced bioavailable P (P < 0.001), but not total P, with the lowest concentrations in the ORG systems and the highest in PRA. Higher rates of ALP were observed in the ORG and ORG + M treatments with a significant negative correlation between bioavailable P and ALP in 2011 (r2 = 0.71; P = 0.03) and 2012 (r2 = 0.51; P = 0.02), suggesting that ALP activity increased under P limiting conditions. The phoD gene abundance was also highest in ORG and ORG + M resulting in a significant positive relationship between bacterial phoD abundance and ALP activity (r2 = 0.71; P = 0.009). Analysis of phoD bacterial community fingerprints showed a higher number of species in CONV compared to ORG and ORG + M, contrary to what was expected considering greater ALP activity under ORG management. In 2012, banding profiles of ORG + M showed fewer phoD bacterial species following the second manure application, although ALP activity is higher than in 2011. This indicates that a few species may be producing more ALP and that quantitative gene analysis was a better indicator of activity than the number of species present.

Circadian Pattern of Wheel-Running Activity of a South American Subterranean Rodent (Ctenomys cf knightii)

Circadian rhythms are regarded as essentially ubiquitous features of animal behavior and are thought to confer important adaptive advantages. However, although circadian systems of rodents have been among the most extensively studied, most comparative biology is restricted to a few related species. In this study, the circadian organization of locomotor activity was studied in the subterranean, solitary north Argentinean rodent, Ctenomys knightii. The genus, Ctenomys, commonly known as Tuco-tucos, comprises more than 50 known species over a range that extends from 12S latitude into Patagonia, and includes at least one social species. The genus, therefore, is ideal for comparative and ecological studies of circadian rhythms. Ctenomys knightii is the first of these to be studied for its circadian behavior. All animals were wild caught but adapted quickly to laboratory conditions, with clear and precise activity-rest rhythms in a light-dark (LD) cycle and strongly nocturnal wheel running behavior. In constant dark (DD), the rhythm expression persisted with free-running periods always longer than 24h. Upon reinstatement of the LD cycle, rhythms resynchronized rapidly with large phase advances in 7/8 animals. In constant light (LL), six animals had free-running periods shorter than in DD, and 4/8 showed evidence of splitting. We conclude that under laboratory conditions, in wheel-running cages, this species shows a clear nocturnal rhythmic organization controlled by an endogenous circadian oscillator that is entrained to 24h LD cycles, predominantly by light-induced advances, and shows the same interindividual variable responses to constant light as reported in other non-subterranean species. These data are the first step toward understanding the chronobiology of the largest genus of subterranean rodents.

Oncostatin M is a novel glucocorticoid-dependent neuroinflammatory factor that enhances oligodendrocyte precursor cell activity in demyelinated sites

The innate immune reaction to tissue injury is a natural process, which can have detrimental effects in the absence of negative feedbacks by glucocorticoids (GCs). Although acute lipopolysaccharide (LPS) challenge is relatively harmless to the brain parenchyma of adult animals, the endotoxin is highly neurotoxic in animals that are treated with the GC receptor antagonist RU486. This study investigated the role of cytokines of the gp130-related family in these effects, because they are essential components of the inflammatory process that provide survival signals to neurons. Intracerebral LPS injection stimulated expression of several members of this family of cytokines, but oncostatin M (Osm) was the unique ligand to be completely inhibited by the RU486 treatment. OSM receptor (Osmr) is expressed mainly in astrocytes and endothelial cells following LPS administration and GCs are directly responsible for its transcriptional activation in the presence of the endotoxin. In a mouse model of demyelination, exogenous OSM significantly modulated the expression of genes involved in the mobilization of oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), differentiation of oligodendrocyte, and production of myelin. In conclusion, the activation of OSM signaling is a mechanism activated by TLR4 in the presence of negative feedback by GCs on the innate immune system of the brain. OSM absence is associated with detrimental effects of LPS, whereas exogenous OSM favors repair response to demyelinated regions. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

On common agency with informed principals

This thesis consists of three chapters that have as unifying subject the frame-work of common agency with informed principals. The first two chapters analyze the economic effects of privately informed lobbying applied to tariff protection (Chapter 1) and to customs unions agreements (Chapter 2). The third chapter investigates the choice of retailing strutures when principals (the producers) are privately informed about their production costs. Chapter 1 analyzes how lobbying affects economic policy when the interest groups have private information. I assume that the competitiveness of producers are lobbies private information in a Grossman and Helpman (1994) lobby game. This allows us to analyze the e¤ects of information transmission within their model. I show that the information transmission generates two informational asymmetry problems in the political game. One refers to the cost of signaling the lobby's competitiveness to the policy maker and the other to the cost of screening the rival lobby's competitiveness from the policy maker. As an important consequence information transmission may improve welfare through the reduction of harmful lobbying activity. Chapter 2 uses the framework of chapter 1 to study a customs union agreement when governments are subject to the pressure of special interest groups that have better information about the competitiveness of the industries they represent. I focus on the agreement's effect on the structure of political influence. When join a customs union, the structure of political pressure changes and with privately informed lobbies, a new effect emerges: the governments can use the information they learn from the lobby of one country to extract rents from the lobbies of the other country. I call this the "information transmission effect". This effect enhances the governments'bargaining power in a customs union and makes lobbies demand less protection. Thus, I find that information transmission increases the welfare of the agreement and decreases tari¤s towards non-members. I also investigate the incentives for the creation of a customs union and find that information transmission makes such agreement more likely to be politically sustainable. Chapter 3 investigates the choice of retailing structure when the manufacturers are privately informed about their production costs. Two retailing structures are analyzed, one where each manufacturer chooses her own retailer (exclusive dealing) and another where the manufacturers choose the same retailer (common agency). It is shown that common agency mitigates downstream competition but gives the retailer bargaining power to extract informational rents from the manufacturers, while in exclusive dealing there is no downstream coordination but also there are no incentives problem in the contract between manufacture and retailer. A pre- liminary characterization of the choice of the retailing structure for the case of substitute goods shows that when the uncertainty about the cost increases relatively to the size of the market, exclusive dealing tends to be the chosen retailing structure. On the other hand, when the market is big relatively to the costs, common agency emerges as the retailing structure. This thesis has greatly benefited from the contribution of Professors Humberto Moreira and Thierry Verdier. It also benefited from the stimulating environment of the Toulouse School of Economics, where part of this work was developed during the year of 2007.