In 2016, during the largest targeted security intervention ever witnessed in Bogotá, 2,700 additional law enforcement officers intervened The Bronx: a three-block area that hosted the main drug cartels and criminal gangs of the city, and where the state was largely absent. Security measures that deter crime may unwittingly displace it to neighboring areas. The policy and criminological consensus is that such place-based programs decrease crime and have positive spillovers to nearby streets, but evidence of displacement is still scarce. Should then police activity be narrowly focused and high force, or could it lead to crime moving to other areas? To answer this, I evaluate the spillover effects of The Bronx intervention by using local polynomial regressions, spatial decay functions, event studies, and heatmaps. The results show that the intervention did not generate any statistically detectable spillover effects. I also measure the intervention’s impact on The Bronx itself by using synthetic controls. According to this, in the following two years, the intervention caused a 28% decrease in violent crime and a 15% decrease in property crime.

The main objective of this document is to evaluate the distributive impact of taxes and social spending in Colombia in 2010 and 2014, applying the tax incidence analysis described in Lustig (2018) and using the 2010 and 2014 Quality of Life Survey. In particular, this document analyzes social spending and taxes in Colombia and seeks to answer two questions: What is its impact on inequality and poverty? How progressive are they?

With Valentina Martinez and Marcela Melendez

The poverty rate has decreased considerably in Colombia, but there are still three million Colombians who do not have enough income to meet their basic needs. In this article, we present descriptive characteristics of Colombian households living on monetary poverty, in the spirit of Banerjee and Duflo (2007). We use four different databases to cover various economic indicators. While the average value of the indicators in Colombia is better than in other developing countries, the most worrying fact is the inequality between regions, and between rural and urban areas.

With Santiago Saavedra

With Carolina Gonzalez-Velosa

Inter-American Development Bank Technical Notes, 2019