Government intervention in the construction sector as a way to boost the economy has been a constant in Colombia for the past 90 years. This paper explicitly tests the impact of the most recent of such interventions: a subsidy to the mortgage interest rate. The results show that the subsidy...

Based on the counting of Help-wanted advertisements in print newspapers, we present national vacancy indexes and vacancy rates for Colombia. These series will allow tackling a myriad of questions related to the functioning of the labor markets in emerging economies, where such datasets were not...

Using a rich dataset of Colombian manufacturing establishments, we illustrate scarring effects of recessions operating through inefficient exit induced by heterogeneous credit constraints. We show that financially constrained businesses may be forced to exit the market during recessions even if...

In recent years, five of the main economies in Latin America - Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Peru - have adopted Inflation Targeting regimes. In the context of these converging monetary strategies, would the IT nations in the region be better o adopting a common currency? Would they be...

There is abundant empirical evidence showing that asymmetric price adjustments exist in a wide variety of markets. Prices tend to grow faster when costs rise relative to the rate at which prices drop when costs fall. The objective of this paper is to empirically test whether asymmetric price...

Recent evidence shows that there is great heterogeneity in the price setting frequency across sectors, and that those changing prices frequently do so even under low inflation. What happens to price setting strategies of sticky price goods under moderate inflation? We built a dataset of monthly...

By the time the Colombian government closed DMG and DRFE, two Ponzi schemes that were operating in Colombia until 2008, over half a million customers had deposited funds corresponding to 1.2% of Colombia's annual GDP. We show that the individuals who invested in DMG and DRFE obtained close to...

Spanish Abstract: Parece haber consenso alrededor de los dividendos de la paz en términos del impacto de ésta en el PIB: la tasa de crecimiento de la economía saltará entre 1 y 2 puntos porcentuales, por siempre. En este ensayo argumento que de haber efectos en la actividad económica...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

Many emerging economies have regulatory limits on foreign exchange rates net open positions of banks. We show that such limits leave the capital adequacy ratios of banks with investments in foreign subsidiaries more exposed to exchange rate fluctuations. We discuss alternative policies for...