We describe some features of the political environment in Colombia, drawing from a unique panel dataset of about 10,000 households. Contrasting responses in 2013 and 2016, we document a persistent lack of interest in politics and prevailing clientelism, with personalistic links dominating...

Enduring violent conflict is the flip side of the coin of a weak state. In this article, I propose some political economy underpinnings for the persistence of conflict (and the weak state). Focusing on the case of Colombia, I discuss three broad sets of mechanisms that are also relevant...

Previous work has documented a negative correlation between internal conflict and state capacity. We attempt to shed light on mechanisms that underlie this relationship, using data for Colombian municipalities. We rely on identifying heterogeneous effects of different types of violent events on...

Spanish Abstract: Este trabajo describe las relaciones entre el entorno institucional, la economía, la distribución del ingreso y la productividad en Colombia. En particular, existe un problema de diseño institucional que fomenta la informalidad, dificulta la inclusión, inhibe la...

We estimate the health costs of supply-side barriers to accessing medical care. The setting is Colombia, where citizens have a constitutional right to health care, but insurance companies that manage delivery impose restrictions on access. We use administrative data on judicial claims for health...

Spanish Abstract: La transparencia y la competencia se han enmarcado como las herramientas fundamentales para combatir la corrupción en la contratación estatal. Por consiguiente, se han implementado diferentes políticas públicas encaminadas a fortalecer las mismas. Un ejemplo claro de esto...

This paper studies the effects of disclosing information about politician misbehavior on trust in public institutions. I use news bulletins from the main anti-corruption agency in Colombia announcing disciplinary prosecutions against municipal mayors. I exploit the timing of the bulletin's...

Spanish Abstract: Esta investigación busca evaluar el uso de algoritmos de aprendizaje de máquinas en la detección temprana de actos de corrupción en la administración pública municipal de Colombia. Esto se desarrolla a partir de dos enfoques: (i) una evaluación de algoritmos de...

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with...

This paper evaluates the impacts of increased coordination, accountability, and leadership among teams of responsible public officials, with evidence from homicide investigations in Colombia. We randomly assigned the investigations of 66% of the 1,683 homicides occurring in Bogotá, Colombia,...