Gary Becker's theory of discrimination argues that increasing competition will reduce discrimination in the labor market. We use the Colombian trade liberalization episode over the period 198491 to investigate this claim on plant-level data in three ways. First, we examine whether women are...

Natural and agricultural resources for which there is a substantial black market, such as coca, opium, and diamonds, appear especially likely to be exploited by the parties to a civil conflict. Even legally traded commodities such as oil and timber have been linked to civil war. On the other...

Unemployment insurance and job protection regulations provide assistance to those who face unemployment. Unemployment insurance seems more desirable, since it does not harm flexibility in the labour markets, but it entails a moral hazard risk. Making the unemployment insurance voluntary and...

Assessing the final impact of globalisation on poverty is a difficult task: i) globalisation affects poverty through numerous channels; ii) some linkages are positive and some are negative and therefore cannot be analysed qualitatively but require quantitative assessments, i.e. formal numerical...

We use a panel of manufacturing plants from Colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980?s and 1990?s affected the labor market. Our estimates indicate that formal wages fall by between 1.4% and 2.3% as a result of a 10% rise in payroll taxes. This...

In this paper, we analyze employment and capital adjustments using a panel of plants from Colombia. We allow for nonlinear adjustment of employment to reflect not only adjustment costs of labor but also adjustment costs of capital, and vice-versa. Using data from the Annual Manufacturing Survey,...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four parts: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are important in explaining plant exit. We then use variation across sectors in tariff changes after the...

Colombia tuvo la más alta tasa de desempleo de Latinoamérica en el año 2011, 10.8% en promedio. Al interior del mercado laboral, la tasa de desempleo de las mujeres fue 1.7 veces más alta que la de los hombres para el periodo 2007 – 2011, se evidencia que los indicadores empeoran cuando se...

The estimation of production functions suffers from an unresolved identification problem caused by flexible inputs, such as intermediate inputs. We develop an identification strategy for production functions based on a transformation of the firm's short-run first order condition that solves the...

This research is part of a large evaluation effort, undertaken by a consortium formed by IFS, Econometria and SEI, which has considered the effects of Familias en Acción on a variety of outcomes one year after its implementation. In early reports, we focussed on the effects of the programme on...