This article contributes to the literature on the impact of transitional justice measures using microfoundational evidence from experiments. We argue that there is a distributional dilemma at the heart of transitional justice programs, given that the State must allocate goods and services both...

Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak, and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in which politicians running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal that exposes these...

This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual...

En Colombia la democracia ha sido el mecanismo normal para acceder al poder. Sin embargo, desde los albores de la república los enfrentamientos bélicos partidistas y los cambios constitucionales fueron una constante. Este trabajo muestra cómo en el siglo XIX en Colombia, los cambios...

This article highlights a nefarious effect of elections during civil wars by demonstratingthat they can facilitate the displacement of civilians. This occurs through two main mechanisms: they reveal information about civilians' loyalties directly to armed groups; and they threaten the status quo...

In this paper, we study how between-group wealth and size heterogeneity affectsuccess probabilities as well as aggregate rent-seeking efforts when two groups compete for the allocation of a pure public good. Unlike with previous models, we measure the utility cost of rent-seeking in terms of the...

La relación entre la percepción de seguridad y el crimen no siempre está atada a la victimización ni al el riesgo real de ser objeto de un acto delictivo, sino también al miedo de ser víctima de un delito. A partir de una encuesta orientada a la población de la Universidad de los Andes se...

This paper applies clustering analysis to the Colombian armed conflict. Indeed, when applied to a FARC terrorist act database, this statistical procedure finds a natural clustering of the different FARC units according to the different types of terrorist acts they commit and identifies the...

En el presente documento se analizan y evalúan, desde una perspectiva jurídica, el desarrollo y eficiencia del proceso penal en los delitos de secuestro extorsivo y extorsión en Bogotá y Cundinamarca para el período 1998-2004. A partir de un estudio multivariado, en el que se controla por...

Colombia is an interesting case study within emerging countries. Through 150 years of democratic tradition and seven decades of sound fiscal and monetary policies, the country has displayed institutional strength and economic growth, in spite of strong external shocks, rent- seeking by sectoral...