Durante el periodo comprendido entre 1993 y 2002 Bogotá experimentó una disminución del 65% en la tasa de homicidio y una disminución del 33% en la tasa de atraco. De la misma forma las tasas de hurto de vehículos y de residencias experimentaron una caída del 26% y 35% respectivamente....

We develop a model that shows that inefficient legal protections, disproportionately increase financial restrictions for debtors that have less wealth. Due to fixed monitoring costs in equilibrium banks will not monitor small firms and therefore these firms will adopt risky technologies that...

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo identificar las variables que contribuyen a explicar la capacidad actual del sistema penal para aclarar los delitos de secuestro extorsivo, terrorismo y peculado. La capacidad mencionada se llamo éxito. Para lograr el objetivo planteado se tomó y analizó una...

In Bogotá the 1991 reforms obstructed a market for votes. Clientelism lost itseffectiveness; citizens developed a vote of opinion and the city showed an outstanding performance in the provision of public goods and social services. This story is illustrated with a novel panel data at the...

Powerful local elites are quite common in developing countries. Thus, whether decentralization reduces or not the level of corruption in the presence of these elites is a relevant issue for these economies. We motivate this paper with some empirical evidence. Using cross-country information we...

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with...

Despite a growing body of literature on how environmental degradation can fuel civil war, the reverse effect, namely that of conflict on environmental outcomes, is relatively understudied. From a theoretical point of view this effect is ambiguous, with some forces pointing to pressures for...

This paper measures the impact of crime on firm investment by exploiting variation in kidnappings in Colombia from 1996 to 2002. Our central result is that firms invest less when kidnappings target firms. We also find that aggregate crime rates-homicides, guerrilla attacks, and general...

Between 1998 and 2003 production increases in Brazil and Vietnam drove down the price of coffee by 73 percent in global markets, triggering the international coffee crisis". We examine the effect of this exogenous price shock on Colombia´s civil war, exploring whether politically-motivated...

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...