This paper asks how academic breaks after high school affect individuals' college and labor market outcomes. We exploit a policy that altered academic calendars in two regions of Colombia, which caused thousands of high school graduates to have to wait an extra semester to start college. Using...

How much can employers in low and middle-income countries suppress wages below marginal productivity? Using plant and customs data from Colombia, we exploit predetermined variation across plants in sales export destination combined with variation in exchange rates to generate plant-specific...

Do agricultural producers forgo otherwise profitable investments due to civil conflict? Answering this question is crucial to our understanding of the costs of violence, but requires the ability to measure farmers’ willingness to invest and access to exogenous variation in conflict intensity....

Do agricultural producers forgo otherwise profitable investments due to civil conflict?Answering this question is crucial to our understanding of the costs of violence, but requires the ability to measure farmers’ willingness to invest and access to exogenous variation in conflict intensity....

Do agricultural producers forgo otherwise profitable investments due to civil conflict? Answering this question is crucial to our understanding of the costs of violence, but requires the ability to measure farmers' willingness to invest and access to exogenous variation in conflict intensity. We...

This paper develops a new method for estimating production-function parameters that can be applied in differentiated-product industries with endogenous quality and variety choice. We take advantage of data on physical quantities of outputs and inputs from the Colombian manufacturing survey,...

This paper develops a new method for estimating production-function parameters that can be applied in differentiated-product industries with endogenous quality and variety choice. We take advantage of data on physical quantities of outputs and inputs from the Colombian manufacturing survey,...

Spanish Abstract: ¿Renuncian los productores agrícolas a inversiones rentables debido al conflicto civil? La respuesta a esta pregunta es fundamental para entender los costos de la violencia, pero requiere poder medir la voluntad de inversión de los agricultores y acceder a una fuente de...

The house-money effect – people's tendency to be more daring with easily-gotten money – is a behavioral pattern that poses questions about the external validity of experiments in economics: to what extent do people behave in experiments like they would have in a real-life situation, given...

We exploit a large and unexpected increase in the Colombian insurance threshold to investigate how depositors respond to higher deposit insurance. Monthly depositor-level records from a major bank show that the level and growth rate of deposits rise with higher coverage. Individuals who were...