This paper uses historic data from Cundinamarca, Colombia to empirically assess the impact of land inequality persistence, inherited from the colonial rule, on economic development in the long run. Based on the Engerman & Sokoloff hypothesis and the use of GIS, I use plausible exogenous...

Over the last quarter of a century, inflation targeting has become a popular monetary regime. Nevertheless, empirical evaluations of IT have shown contradictory results. Part of the reason is that IT in and of itself constitutes an endogenous decision and thus needs to be properly instrumented....

There is abundant empirical evidence testing models where comparative advantage arises from firm heterogeneity. As of today it is relatively clear who exports and why a firm decides to export. But, what determines the survival of a firm in the export market? This paper exploits a detailed...

In this paper I discuss the major approaches to happiness in the economics of happiness: hedonism and life-satisfaction approaches. It is possible to identify a tension between two important principles in this literature: 1) individuals are the best judges of their own happiness, and 2) the...

Hedonic pricing models use property value differentials to value changes in environmental quality. If unmeasured quality attributes of residential properties are correlated with an environmental quality measure of interest, conventional methods for estimating implicit prices will be biased....

This paper studies the use of labor markets to mitigate the impact of violent shocks on households in rural areas in Colombia. It examines changes in the labor supply from on-farm to off-farm labor as a means of coping with the violent shock and the ensuing redistribution of time within...

Motivated by the fact that, over the business cycle, labor dynamics in emergingeconomies differ in nontrivial ways from those observed in developed economies, we assess the relative importance of trend shocks in emerging economies in the business cycle model of Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) when...

I use the measures of frequency of price adjustment in Nakamura and Steinsson(2008) to show that stickier price industries have higher levels of output response to monetary policy shocks. Using a Vector Auto-regression model, I build different measures of response to a monetary policy shock of...

Can frictionless small open economy models driven solely by technology shocksaccount for business cycles in developing countries? We don't find evidence of it. We build a DSGE model that jointly includes a variety of real perturbations in addition to technology shocks, such as procyclical fiscal...

In spite of the use of a utilitarian language in Rational Choice Theory, economists do not acknowledge any link to this current of moral philosophy, and have made great efforts to rid economics from its legacy. In this document we aim at assessing these efforts retracing their history from...