The estimation of production functions suffers from an unresolved identification problem caused by flexible inputs, such as intermediate inputs. We develop an identification strategy for production functions based on a transformation of the firm's short-run first order condition that solves the...

The armed conflict over economic and political power in Colombia has led to the massive displacement of people living in the areas of violence. The design of appropriate policies of prevention, assistance, and resettlement requires improved information on the determinants and effects of...

The models of Lucas (1993), Krugman (1987), Stokey (1988, 1991) and Young (1991) predict that productivity growth is associated with the production of increasingly sophisticated products, and that high-end goods should exhibit more productivity growth than low-end goods. This paper investigates...

Income inequality can be measured at different levels of aggregation such as global, continental, international and national levels. Here we consider income inequality at the national level but the focus is on the within country regional inequality. Regional inequality in income distribution in...

We evaluate the impact of firm-specific export subsidies on exports in Colombia. Using a two-stage Heckman selection procedure, we obtain firm-specific predicted subsidy amounts that can be explained by the characteristics that determine the firms' eligibility for the government support and its...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980?s and 1990?s 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...

This paper surveys gender earnings gaps in Colombia from 1994 to 2006, using matching comparisons to examine the extent to which individuals with similar human capital characteristics earn different wages. Three sub-periods are considered: 1994-1998; 2000-2001; and 2002- 2006, corresponding to the...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the existence or not of a wage curve in Colombia, paying special attention to the differences between formal and informal workers, an issue that has been systematically ignored in the wage curve literature. The obtained results using microdata from the...

This paper investigates convergence in social indicators among Colombian departments from 1973 to 2005. We use census data and apply both the regression approach and the distributional approach (univariate and bivariate kernel density estimators). Using literacy rate as a proxy for education, we...

Social protection systems in developing countries are typically composed of a bundle of benefits, the major ones being health insurance and pensions. Benefit bundling may increase informality and decrease welfare. Indeed, if some of the benefits are valued at substantially less than their cost,...