Consumption baskets vary across households and inflation rates vary across goods. As a result, standard consumer price index (CPI) inflation may provide a misleading measure of the inflation actually faced by poor households, more so the more unequal the distribution of aggregate consumption...

Colombia has the seventh highest Gini coefficient of income inequality in the world. The Santos Administration is aware of this challenge and is taking important measures to reduce disparities. The government is also aspiring to join the OECD, which exhibits much lower income disparities, mainly...

The objective of this paper is to shed light on current trends and policy challenges in the financing of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) by banks in Colombia. The paper is motivated by the well-documented financing gap for SMEs, whose causes are complex and multi-dimensional. Based on...

This paper presents an evaluation of multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost education in developing countries - the conditional cash transfer - with a student level randomization that allows the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network variation. The analysis tests...

Households in rural Colombia are confronted with a variety of violent threats: attacks and displacement threats by guerrillas and paramilitaries, gang violence among drug traffickers, and high common delinquency. In this context, households have to adjust their day-to-day decisions, including...

Using data from the International Benchmarking NETwork database, the authors estimate measures of density and scale economies in the water industry in four countries (Brazil, Colombia, Moldova, and Vietnam) that differ substantially in economic development, piped water and sewerage coverage, and...

A firm's absorptive capacity, human capital and linkages with knowledge institutions have been shown to increase the firm's probability of innovating in OECD economies. Despite its importance for national- and firm-level competitiveness, few papers examine the impact of the same variables for...

The authors look at the depth of the financial sector in Bogota in terms of the "financial exclusion" of those, particularly poorer citizens, who operate without accounts in formal financial institutions-the unbanked. They begin with a review of the overall decline in financial intermediation...

There is a growing literature that investigates the effect of trade liberalization on productivity. Nearly all such studies assume that trade policy is determined independently of productivity, hence it is exogenous. The author shows that this assumption is not valid in general, both...

Cost-benefit analysis is a standard tool for determining the efficiency of planned projects. But one of the major difficulties in risk mitigation investments is that benefits are by nature uncertain. In this context, the standard approach relying on the average value of benefits may provide an...