The study of the asymmetric behavior of macroeconomic variables over the business cycles phases has had a long tradition in economics. In this work we find evidence in favor of the hypothesis of having a Star-type nonlinear asymmetric behavoir of the economy activity, over the last two decades,...

This paper investigates whether developed countries export taxes to developing countries, contributing to the deterioration of their terms of trade and welfare; that is to what extent the distribution of gains from trade is being affected not by existing tariffs in developed countries, which are...

We compute the world- wide efficiency gaings from the elimination of global restrictions on labour mobility using a multiregional CGE model. A distinctive feature of our analysis is the introduction of a segmented labour market, as two types of labour are considered: Skilled and unskilled....

This paper provides an empirical analysis of Colombian integration with East Asia using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model, in which we assess the effects of several trade liberalization scenarios on trade flows and welfare. The results show that there is an important potential for the...

This paper quantifies the welfare effects of decentralisation in Colombia, using a multiregional CGE model.We investigate to what extent will the Colombian Population be better off when goods such as health and education, are delivered locally as against centrally. A provision scheme based on...

This paper uses a survey on wage formation that was applied to 1,305 Colombian firms to study wage-setting decisions with respect to newly hired employees. The Colombian case is interesting, since the country’s labour market performance, especially its unemployment rate and level of...

This paper estimates an asymmetric error correction model to analyse the dynamic behaviour of the Colombian unemployment rate. We find evidence that wages above their long- run equilibrium level do increase unemployment, but wages below this level do not reduce it.

The construction of coincident indexes for the economic activity of a country is a common practice since the fifties. The methodologies vary from heuristic methods to probabilistic or statistical ones. In this paper, we present a new procedure for estimating a coincient index of the state of the...

In this paper,we propose a methodology for calculating a leading index of the economic activity based on a modification of Stock and Watson's (1989, 1991, 1992) approach. We use Kalman filter techniques for estimating the state space representation of the leading index model. The methodology is...