Past presentations

AN ASPIRING FRIEND IS A FRIEND INDEED

On her Job Market Paper, Jessica Gagete studies peers’ influence in the process of aspirations formation. She combines novel data on Brazilian students’ networks with administrative data and investigate whether students’ college aspirations spill over to their friends.

The results show evidence of quite large peer effects on aspirations: An extra friend aspiring to go to college increases, on average, the likelihood that a student will also aspire to it by 11.25 percent.

Here you can find the slides.

ARE POLITICIANS ESSENTIAL? EVIDENCE FROM CARETAKER GOVERNMENTS

Santiago Deambrosi studies on this very early project, if having a caretaker government (or interim) has impacts on some county outcomes like GDP. Using synthetic control groups he compares GDP changes for Belgium, Spain and Netherlands.

Here you can find the slides.

THE LOCAL HUMAN CAPITAL COSTS OF OIL EXPLOITATION

On this work, Camilo and his coauthors explore the impacts of oil exploitation on human capital accumulation at the local level in Colombia, a resource-rich and developing country. They provide evidence based on detailed spatial and temporal data on oil exploitation and education. Using international oil prices and a proxy of oil endowments at the local level as an instrument, they fin that oil has a negative impact on human capital as it reduces enrollment in higher education.

Here you can find the slides. If you are interested on his work, here is his website.

THE KILLING OF SOCIAL LEADERS: AN UNINTENDED EFFECT OF COLOMBIA'S ILLICIT CROPS SUBSTITUTION

This paper studies the effect of a crop substitution program on political violence exploiting data on a recent Colombian program. It finds that the program's community agreements increased the rate of social leaders' killings by 546%. Moreover, there are larger effects on municipalities where: leaders oppose the expansion of illicit crops, organized crime does not hold consolidated power, different armed groups are present, and land conflicts exist. This paper contributes by providing empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that policies aimed at reducing illicit crops have unintended consequences for local communities.

RELIGION-BASED DISCRIMINATION IN ARGENTINA'S LABOR MARKET: EVIDENCE FROM A FIELD EXPERIMENT

In this paper, the authors study whether there is religion-based discrimination in Argentina's labor market. Through an online job board widely used in Argentina, they design a field experiment to study discrimination against people of the Jewish religion. More precisely, they study whether Jewish people are less likely to be contacted after submitting a resume. For this purpose, they randomly altered the resumes to indicate affiliation to the Jewish religion and then they calculate differences in recontact rates.

MONEY MATTERS: GLOBAL BANKS, SAFE ASSETS AND MONETARY AUTONOMY

In this paper, Sergio depicts an often-neglected monetary policy transmission channel, international safety appetite, as a key source of production and risk-taking international monetary spillovers. The author proposes a model featuring a local economy with exogenous financial frictions where banks’ asset composition and monetary policy shocks alter agents' risk pricing and balance sheet composition. The main results outline that global monetary policy tightening reduces the returns of risky global loans, inducing international banks to reduce risky loan creation, ultimately decreasing production and consumption volatility. Local monetary authorities may counteract global monetary policy spillovers, but this will entail a trade-off between boosting production and reducing consumption volatility. Global and local expansive monetary policies increase the demand for global safe assets, relaxing the budget constraint of monopolistic global secure asset issuers.

COLLEGE UNDERMATCH IN COLOMBIA: ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND REGIONAL GAPS

This paper explores the socioeconomic factors related to the probability that a student will be undermatched in higher education in Colombia, as well as how these socioeconomic factors are related to other higher education outcomes. A student is undermatched when he gets a Saber 11 score high enough to be in a Higher Education Institution (HEI) of the first quartile in their reference group, but completes their studies in an HEI of another quartile. We implement an econometric analysis using data extracted from the Saber 11 (2008-2014) and Saber Pro (2012-2018) databases. Using a linear probability and a probit model, we found that 1) individuals in high-income families are less likely to be undermatched, 2) educational level of parents, as well as other approximate measures of social capital also explain the probability of being undermatched, 3) after controlling for family characteristics and school characteristics, regional differences are still persistent. 4) Students from highest income families have higher probability to study medicine and economics, to study in a HEI whose category is University, and to study in a HEI with a higher rate of graduates who are working, but they have a lower probability to study in a public HEI.

GO YOUR OWN SLOPE! MACROECONOMIC EFFECTS OF BASEL III LIQUIDITY REGULATIONS IN EMERGING AND DEVELOPED ECONOMIES

This paper studies the effects of Basel III liquidity regulations on private credit, financial stability and the macroeconomy in developed (DM) and emerging (EM) market economies. Results are striking different between DM and EM. An increase in the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) measure has a negative, statistically significant effect on private credit and financial system default probability in EM. In contrast, an increase in the LCR measure has a positive, statistically significant effect on private credit in DM, while its financial system default probability is not affected. In order to understand such a empirical evidence, we assume different degrees of financial development, i. e. different monitoring costs, between DM and EM and asymmetric information between banks and depositors into the Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) framework. Responses of private credit and financial stability to the LCR measure are consistent with the data.