Emerging economies are characterized by an extremely high prevalence of informality, small-firm employment and jobs not fit for working from home. These features factor into how the COVID-19 crisis has affected the economy. We develop a framework that, based on accounting identities and actual...

Previous studies for developed countries show negative short-run impacts of automation on employment and earnings. In this paper, we instead examine whether automation by a key trading partner can hurt workers in a developing country. We specifically focus in Colombia's labor market, and how the...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980s and 1990s affected the labor market. Our estimates indicate that formal wages fall by between 1.4% and 2.3% as a result of a 10% rise in payroll taxes. This "less-than-full-shifting"...

We analyze employment and capital adjustments using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey. We estimate adjustment functions for capital and labor as a non-linear function of the gaps between desired and actual factor levels, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the...

This paper estimates the heterogeneous labor market effects of enrolling in higher education short-cycle (SC) programs. Expanding access to these programs might affect the behavior of some students (compliers) in two margins: the expansion margin (students who would not have enrolled in higher...