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Bourbon Reforms and State Capacity in the Spanish Empire, with Giorgio Chiovelli, Luis R. Martínez, Juan David Torres, and Felipe Valencia-Caicedo, CEDE Working Paper No. 2024-11, | We study the fiscal and political consequences of state modernization in the Spanish colonial empire in Latin America. We focus on the introduction of a new corps of provincial governors called intendants in the late 18th century. Leveraging the staggered adoption of the reform and administrative fiscal microdata, we show that the intendancy system sizably increased Crown revenue by strengthening state presence in the periphery and disrupting local elite capture. Politically, the reform reduced rebellions by previously exploited indigenous peoples. However, naming patterns reveal that the intendants heightened anti-Spanish sentiment among Creole elites, plausibly contributing to the nascent independence movement. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Political incentives and corruption evidence from ghost students with Arturo Haker, Carlos Molina and Juan Camilo Yamín, Documentos CEDE, 2023. CEDE Working Paper 2023-10. | We study the effect of links between politicians on corruption under prevailing clientelism. Connections between politicians increase fabricated "ghost" students to obtain more national transfers, without raising the quality or quantity of education. Bureaucratic turnover, temporary and discretionary hiring, electoral fraud, and complaints against functionaries also increase. Effects on ghosts are larger in municipalities with more clientelism, discretion over resource spending, and weaker oversight. The findings favor a venal view of corruption, where politicians divert resources for personal gain rather than to favor their constituencies. Nonetheless, they have better future career prospects, reflecting a failure of electoral control. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Anti-social Norms, with José-Alberto Guerra and James A. Robinson, CEDE Working Paper No. 2024-25. | Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm —the “don’t be a toad” norm, as it is referred to in Colombia— that tells people to mind their own business and not snitch on others. In a set of fairness games where a third party can punish unfair behavior, but players can invoke the “don’t be a toad” norm, we find that the mere possibility of invoking this norm completely reverses the benefits of third-party sanctioning to achieve fair social outcomes. We establish this is an anti-social norm in a well-defined sense: most players consider it inappropriate, yet they expect the majority will invoke it. To understand this phenomenon we develop an evolutionary model of endogenous social norm transmission and demonstrate that a payoff advantage from adherence to the norm in social dilemmas, combined with sufficient heterogeneity in the disutility of those who view the norm as inappropriate, can generate the apparent paradox of an anti-social norm in the steady-state equilibrium. We provide further evidence that historical exposure to political violence, which increased the ostracization of snitches, raised sensitivity to this norm. | No additional resources | ||
Constitutions and Order: A theory and comparative evidence from Colombia and the United States? with Javier Mejía, James A. Robinson, Santiago Torres | We propose a framework to explain why some societies may end up with different constitutional solutions to the problem of maintaining order in the face of self-interested behavior. Though the salient intellectual tradition since Hobbes has focused on how institutional design is used to eradicate violence, our framework illustrates that equilibrium constitutions may in fact have to deliberately allow for violence. This arises because some societies are unable to use institutions to influence income distribution. In this case, a constitutional tolerance of violence emerges as a credible way for an incumbent to meet the participation constraint of a challenger. We illustrate the results with the comparative constitutional history of the US and Colombia. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Interaction of Economic and Political Inequality in Latin America, with James A. Robinson and Santiago Torres, CEDE WorkingPaper No. 2024-05 | We investigate how economic inequality can persist in Latin America in the context of radical falls in political inequality in the last decades. Using data from Colombia, we focus on a critical facet of democratization - the entry of new politicians. We show that initial levels of inequality play a significant role in determining the impact of political entry on local institutions, policy, and development outcomes, which can impact future inequality. A vicious circle emerges whereby policies that reduce inequality are less likely to be adopted and implemented in places with relatively high inequality. We present evidence that this is caused both by the capture of new politicians and barriers to institution and state capacity building, and also by the fact that politicians committed to redistribution are less likely to win in relatively unequal places. Our results, therefore, help to reconcile the persistence of economic inequality with the new political context. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Do Third-Party Guarantors Reassure Foot Soldiers? with Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Michael Weintraub, Juana García, Laia Balcells | Since the end of the Cold War, international third parties such as the United Nations (UN) have become frequent guarantors of peace agreements. Existing studies document that third parties provide assurances that help maintain peace, yet these studies nearly exclusively marshal evidence at the macro-level and focus on elites rather than foot soldiers. Also, their focus is often on the immediate aftermath of war, rather than how third parties affect agreement implementation. Using a novel phone survey of 4,435 ex-combatants from the FARC-EP, Colombia's largest rebel group, and an embedded survey experiment, we examine the role of third parties in providing guarantees to foot soldiers during the implementation of the Colombian peace agreement, five years after its signing. We find no evidence that the UN Verification Mission in Colombia increased: confidence among ex-combatants that the government would fulfill its commitment to implement the peace agreement, confidence that the FARC would do the same, perceptions of physical safety, positive perceptions of ex-combatants' future economic prospects, nor trust in institutions more generally. We discuss possible explanations for these null findings and the study's relevance to debates about conflict termination, peace agreement implementation, and international intervention. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Social media and mobilisation, with Carlos Molina. In Campante, F., Durante, R. andTesei, A. (eds), The Political Economy of Social Media, Paris and London: CEPR Press | On 25 January 2011, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to demand change. A few weeks later, Wael Ghonim, an internet activist who helped coordinate the protests and was incarcerated during the events, summarised the emotions: “if you want to liberate society, all you need is the internet”. Many shared the enthusiasm during the Arab Spring, especially with regards to one of the internet’s most disruptive innovations: online social media. One Egyptian went as far as naming his daughter Facebook, honouring the platform’s role in freeing the country from autocracy. Social media continues to feature in the news as a major contributing factor to recent waves of citizen mobilisation. Still, there is now greater recognition that some protests may be ineffective. Egypt and almost every country involved in the Arab Spring failed to deliver the democratic promises. Moreover, social media may be used to attack democracy, not just to demand or protect it. The Capitol Riots against the 2021 US democratic presidential transition provide just one example.
On the whole, how important has social media been for citizen mobilisation? What mechanisms explain its influence? Moreover, what have been the broader political implications? The answers to these questions now seem more complex than one might have imagined in 2011. When invited five years later to talk again at TED, Ghonim himself stated: “Remember I said in 2011 that if you want to liberate society, all you need is the internet? Well, I was wrong”. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Media, Secret Ballot and Democratization in the US, with Juan Felipe Riaño and B.K. Song, Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2023, 3(3): 391-425 | Can the media determine the success or failure of institutional reforms? We study the adoption of secret voting in the US and the role of media in this arguably crucial step to improve democracy. Using a difference-in-difference identification strategy and a rich dataset on local newspapers, we find that in areas with high levels of media penetration democratization outcomes improved following the adoption of the secret ballot. Specifically, the press contributed to the decrease in partisan attachment and support for dominant parties. The press also undermined the manipulation of electoral boundaries and the unintentional decline in turnout incentivized with the introduction of the secret ballot. We consider multiple concerns about our identification strategy and address the potential endogeneity of newspapers using an instrumental variable approach that exploits the introduction of wood-pulp paper technology in 1880 combined with counties’ woodland coverage during the same period. Exploring the heterogeneous effects of our results, we argue that the media mattered through the distribution of information to voters and the increase of public awareness about political misconduct. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Political Competition and State Capacity: Evidence from a Land Allocation Program in Mexico with Horacio Larreguy and Juan F. Riaño, The Economic Journal, 2022, Volume 132, Issue 648, Pages 2815–2834. Cede Working Paper, 2020-16 | We develop a model of the politics of state capacity building undertaken by incumbent parties that have a comparative advantage in clientelism rather than in public goods provision. The model predicts that, when challenged by opponents, clientelistic incumbents have the incentive to prevent investments in state capacity. We provide empirical support for the model’s implications by studying policy decisions by the Institutional Revolutionary Party that affected local state capacity across Mexican municipalities and over time. Our difference-in-differences and instrumental variable identification strategies exploit a national shock that threatened the Mexican government’s hegemony in the early 1960s. | No press content | ||
with Carlos Molina and James Robinson, Economica, 2022, 89(354): 293--331. NBER Working Paper No. 26848 and CEDE Working Paper 2020-25. | Development outcomes come in ‘clusters’ that seem difficult to exit. Using original data from Colombia, we present evidence of the interconnection between two critical political components: state weakness and clientelism. State weakness creates the right environment for clientelism to flourish. Clientelism sets in place a structure of incentives for politicians and citizens that is detrimental to building state capacity. We show that vote buying, as a measure of clientelism, and tax evasion, as a measure of state weakness, are highly correlated at the micro level. We also report evidence that both practices are widely accepted in society, a result consistent with a deeply entrenched relationship of mutually reinforcing influences. Finally, we propose a set of mechanisms that underlie the hypothesis that a weak state and widespread clientelism are part of a political equilibrium with multiple feedback loops. Our results suggest that state weakness is a trap that is likely hard to exit. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Real Winner's Curse with Pablo Querubín, Juan F. Vargas and Nelson Ruiz. American Journal of Political Science, 2021, 65(1): 52-68. Cede Working Paper, 2017-05 | Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict and lead to lower violence.However, this argument ignores the response of established elites when: i) their interests are threatened by the policy stance of new political actors, and ii) elites have a comparative ad-vantage in the exercise of violence. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the narrow election of previously excluded left-wing parties to local executive office in Colombia results in a one-standard-deviation increase in violent events by right-wing paramilitaries.We interpret this surge in violence as a reaction of traditional elites to offset the increase in outsiders’ access to formal political power. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that violence by left-wing guerrillas and other actors is unaffected, and that violence is not influenced by the victory of right-wing or other new parties in close elections | |||
with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Review of Economic Studies, 2020,87(4): 1565-1604 . (Earlier version as "Population and Civil War" NBER Working Paper No. 23322) | Medical innovations during the 1940s quickly resulted in significant health improvements around the world. Countries with initially higher mortality from infectious diseases experienced larger increases in life expectancy, population and subsequent social conflict. This cross-country result is robust across alternative measures of conflict, and is not driven by differential trends between countries with varying baseline characteristics. Asimilar effect is also present within Mexico. Initial suitability conditions for malaria varied across municipalities, and anti-malaria campaigns had differential effects on population growth and social conflict. Both across countries and within Mexico, increased conflict over scarce resources predominates and this effect is more pronounced during times of economic hardship (specifically, in countries with a poor growth record and in drought-stricken areas in Mexico). At least during this time period, a larger increase in population made social conflict more likely | No press content | ||
The Perils of High-Powered incentives: Evidence from Colombia's False Positives with Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, Darío Romero, and Juan F. Vargas. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2020, 12(3): 1-43. NBER Working Paper 22617. | We investigate the use of high-powered incentives for the Colombian military and show that it produced perverse side effects. Innocent civilians were killed and misrepresented as guerillas (a phenomenon known in Colombia as ‘false positives’). There were significantly more false positives during the period of high- powered incentives in municipalities with weaker judicial institutions and where a higher share of brigades were commanded by colonels, who have stronger career concerns than generals. In municipalities with higher share of colonels, the high-powered incentives period also coincided with a worsening of local judicial institutions and no discernible improvement in overall security. | |||
Conflict, Educational Attainment and Structural Transformation: La Violencia in Colombia with Ana María Ibáñez and Juan F. Riaño. Economic Development and Cultural Change. 2020, 69(1):335-371. Documento CEDE 2015-35 | We examine the long-term impact of violence on educational attainment, with evidence fromColombia’sLa Violencia, a period of intense political violence in the mid-XXth Century.We find that individuals exposed to violence during, and especially before, their schooling years experience a significant and economically meaningful decrease in years of schooling.Exploring consequences beyond human capital accumulation, we show that exposed cohorts also engage in economic sectors that typically employ less qualified labor and are less likely to transition to jobs in manufacturing and services (relative to agriculture). Violence thus appears to place obstacles on the process of transition to more modern sectors, potentially affecting the structural transformation that may occur as income increases | No press content | ||
CSI in the tropics. Experimental evidence of improved public service delivery through coordination with Daniela Collazos, Miguel La Rota, Daniel Mejía, and Daniel Ortega. In Carlos Solar, Carlos A. Pérez Ricart (eds), Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America, New York: Routledge, 2022. | 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, during 2016 to a new investigation procedure emphasizing these features. We find a statistically significant 30% increase in the conviction rate in the treatment group relative to the control group. Indicators of the quality of the investigative process also improve, as well as the rate at which a formal accusation is presented before a court. Complementary findings suggest that the treatment produces well-coordinated teams that can communicate more fluently. Also, a survey of investigative team members reveal that work motivation, the extent to which they receive feedback on their performance, the pertinence and effectiveness of their roles, and the perceived quality and coordination of the team all improve under the new scheme. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with Carlos Molina. Cede WP No. 2019-41 and Lacea Working Paper 2020-0041 | Using Facebook's release in a given language as an exogenous source of variation in access to social media where the language is spoken, we show that Facebook has had a significant and sizable positive impact on citizen protests. By exploiting variation in a large sample of countries during close to 15 years and combining both aggregate and individual-level data, we confirm the external validity of previous research documenting this effect for specific contexts along a number of dimensions: geographically, by regime type, temporally, and by the socioeconomic characteristics of both countries and social media users. We find that coordination" effects that rest on the social" nature of social media play an important role beyond one-way information transmission, including a liberation effect" produced by having a direct outlet to voice opinions and share them with others. Finally, we explore the broader political consequences of increased Facebook access, helping assess the welfare consequences of the increase in protests. On the negative side, we find no effects on regime change, democratization or governance. To explain this result, we show there are no effects on other political engagements, especially during critical periods, and that social media access also helps mobilize citizens against opposition groups, especially in less democratic areas. On the positive side, we find that Facebook access decreases internal conflict, with evidence that this reflects increased visibility deterring violence and that social media and the resulting protests help voice discontents that might otherwise turn more violent. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Perils of Misusing Remote Sensing Data. The Case of Forest Cover with Santiago Saavedra and Juan F. Vargas, Cede WP No. 2020-15 and Lacea Working Paper 2020-0043 | Research on deforestation has grown exponentially due to the availability of satellite-based measures of forest cover. One of the most popular is Global Forest Change (GFC). Using GFC, we estimate that the Colombian civil conflict increases ‘forest cover’. Using an alternative source that validates the same remote sensing images in the ground, we find the opposite effect. This occurs because, in spite of its name, GFC measures tree cover, including vegetation other than native forest. Most users of GFC seem unaware of this. In our case, most of the conflicting results are explained by GFC’s misclassification of oil palm crops as ‘forest’. Our findings call for caution when using automated classification of imagery for specific research questions. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with James Robinson, Ragnar Torvik, and Juan F. Vargas, The Economic Journal, 2016, 126 (593): 1018-1054. | We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting against insurgents in a civil war and derive two main empirical implications which we test using Colombian data during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. First, as long as rents from power are sufficiently important, large defeats for the insurgents should reduce the probability that politicians with comparative advantage, President Uribe, will fight the insurgents. Second, this effect should be larger in electorally salient municipalities. We find that after the three largest victories against the FARC rebel group, the government reduced its efforts to eliminate the group and did so differentially in politically salient municipalities. Our results therefore support the notion that such politicians need enemies to maintain their political advantage and act so as to keep the enemy alive. | No additional resources | ||
Media Markets, Special Interests, and Voters Journal of Public Economics, 2014, 109(C): 13-26 | This paper examines the role of mass media in countering special interest group influence. I use the concentration of campaign contributions from Political Action Committees to proxy for special interests' capture of US Senate candidates from 1980 to 2002, and compare the reaction of voters to increases in concentration in two different types of media markets: in-state media markets and out-of-state media markets. Unlike in-state media markets, out-of-state markets focus on neighboring states' politics and elections. Thus, if citizens punish political capture, increases in concentration of special interest contributions to a particular candidate should reduce his vote share in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties, where the candidate receives less coverage. I find that a one-standard deviation increase in concentration of special interest contributions to incumbents reduces their vote share by about 0.5 to 1.5percentage points in in-state counties relative to the out-of-state counties. Robustness checks suggest that these results are not driven by omitted Senator characteristics or by differences between in-state and out-of-state counties along dimensions other than the media environment. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Political Economy of Rural Property Rights and the Persistence of the Dual Economy Journal of Development Economics, 2013, 103 (July): 167-181. | Rural areas often have more than one regime of property rights and production. Large, private-property farms owned by powerful landowners coexist with subsistence peasants who farm small plots with limited property rights. At the same time, there is broad consensus that individual, well-specified and secure property rights over land improve economic outcomes. If property rights in land are so beneficial, why are they not adopted more widely? I put forward a theory according to which politically powerful landowners choose weak property rights to impoverish peasants and force them to work for low wages. Moreover, because weak property rights force peasants to stay in the rural sector protecting their property, the incentives to establish poor property rights are especially salient when peasants can migrate to an alternative sector, such as when urban wages increase with industrialization. | No additional resources | ||
He Who Counts Elects: Economic Elites, Political Elites, and Electoral Fraud with Isaías Chaves and James Robinson, Economics and Politics, 2015, 27(1): 124-159. | What determines the extent of electoral fraud? This paper constructs a model of the tradeoff between fraud and policy concessions (public good provision) which also incorporates the strength of the state. In addition, we parameterize the extent to which economic elites (to whom fraud is costly) and political elites (to whom fraud is advantageous) “overlap.” The model predicts that fraud will be lower and public good provision higher when land inequality is higher, the overlap between elites lower, and the strength of the state higher. We test these predictions using a unique, municipal-level dataset from Colombia's 1922 Presidential elections. We find empirical support for all the predictions of the model. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Consumers as VAT "Evaders": Incidence, Social Bias, and Correlates in Colombia with Carlos A. Molina and Juan F. Riaño, Economia, 2019, 19(2):21-67. | Tax evasion lies at the core of the relationship between citizens and the state: it reflects the level of trust in the state and compliance with society's implicit `social contract'. However, empirically analyzing it is challenging, with few direct and reliable measures. This has hampered the advancement of the theoretical and empirical literature, which is especially underdeveloped in the case of indirect tax evasion. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of value added tax (VAT) evasion, as well as the extent of social desirability bias in respondent answers. Around 20% of respondents engage in evasion and, surprisingly, they are not ashamed to recognize this openly. Evasion is more prevalent in places with more informality and less physical presence of the state, as well as among poorer, less educated individuals, and those who disregard the rule of law. | No additional resources | No press content | |
I Sell My Vote, and So What? Incidence, Social Bias and Correlates of Clientelism in Colombia with Carlos A. Molina and Juan F. Riaño. Economia, 2018, 19(1): 181-218. | Exchanging one's vote for particularistic benefits - practices usually grouped under `clientelism' - is often thought to weaken programmatic links between citizens and politicians and disincentivize public good provision, as well as undermine voter autonomy and the ideal role of elections. However, empirically analyzing this key phenomenon for the working of democracies entails formidable challenges. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of clientelistic vote buying, as well as the extent to which respondents refrain from openly recognizing this behavior. Nearly one out of every five respondents engage in clientelism and, surprisingly, they do not feel ashamed to admit it. Using the literature to guide our analysis, we examine the robust correlates of clientelism, finding that vote buying increases with poverty, reciprocity, disregard for the rule of law and, challenging several theories, interest in politics.Keywords: Clientelism, vote buying, social desirability bias, list experiments. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Who Wants Violence? The Political Economy of Conflict and State Building in Colombia Cuadernos de Economía, 30(Spe78):671--700. | 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 elsewhere. First, a public goods trap" implies that a low supply of public goods (including security and order) produces a low demand for public goods, and vice versa. This trap is grounded on, and reproduces, political and economic inequality. Second, conflict and a weak state create economic and political rents, producing vested interests in the status quo. I argue that political rents are a particularly strong obstacle, partly because reformers face a sort of curse of dimensionality: many things have to work well for state capacity and stable peace to consolidate. Politically powerful groups take advantage of any weak spot to defend their rents, producing countervailing negative effects following state building efforts. Finally, the very clientelistic pattern of political exchange in many societies consolidates a weak state, and weak states are fertile ground for clientelism to flourish. This vicious circle of clientelism and state weakness is another reason for persistence. I conclude discussing some lessons for reformers, though the very nature of the argument implies that there are no easy recipes for success. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with Paolo Buonanno and Juan F. Vargas. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2017, 33(4): 753-782 | We document the existence of a Crime Kuznets Curve in US states since the 1970s. As in come level shave risen, crime has followed an inverted U-shaped pattern, first increasing and then dropping. The Crime Kuznets Curve is not explained by income inequality. In fact, we show that during the sample period inequality has risen monotonically with income, ruling out the traditional Kuznets Curve. Our finding is robust to adding a large set of controls that are used in the literature to explain the incidence of crime, as well as to controlling for state and year fixed effects. The Curve is also revealed in nonparametric specifications. The Crime Kuznets Curve exists for property crime and for some categories of violent crime. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Institutions for Financial Development: What are They and Where do They Come From? Journal of Economic Surveys, 2006, 20 (1): 27-70 | Among the fundamental causes of long‐run economic performance, differences in ‘institutions’ have received considerable attention in recent years. At the same time, a large body of theoretical and empirical work shows that financial development can have a big effect on economic performance. This raises the more fundamental question as to why some countries have developed financial markets while others do not. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical research on this issue and shows that one of the channels whereby better institutions may have an effect on economic development is through the consolidation of larger and better financial markets. An issue that is left aside in this paper relates to what regulations and policies lead to better functioning capital markets. At some level, one can think of regulations and policies as particular types of institutions. Nonetheless, institutional problems are deeper causes leading to poor economic performance; bad policies might simply be part of the channels through which they influence performance. Thus, addressing the question of what determines the emergence of ‘good’ institutions – i.e. institutions that promote financial development – seems particularly important. Recent research providing some answers to this question is also reviewed. | No additional resources | No press content | |
‘Dollar’ Debt in Colombian Firms: Are Sinners Punished During Devaluations? with Juan Carlos Echeverry, Roberto Steiner and Camila Aguilar. Emerging Markets Review, 2003, 4(4): 417-449 | During the 1990s, the performance of several emerging economies was linked to their access to foreign capital. Colombia was no exception, experiencing a boom and bust cycle associated with an initial period of real exchange rate appreciation followed by a sharp depreciation. Although several studies have discussed the recent underperformance of the Colombian economy, few attempts have been made at analyzing firm-level data. We rely on information for a large sample of firms during 1995–2001 and examine the determinants of foreign indebtedness and the effects on firm performance of holding dollar debt amid real depreciations (i.e. the so-called ‘balance sheet effect’). In our data set, matching does seem to take place to the extent that firms in more open sectors and exporting firms have higher shares of dollar debt. Our estimations also reveal a negative balance sheet effect on firms’ profitability, while the effect on investment is generally not significant. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Política y Reconciliación: Una coyuntura crítica para la construcción de Estado con Francisco Eslava y Andrés Moya. Castaño, Lina (comp), Colombia en Movimiento 2010 - 2013 - 2016, Bogotá, Ediciones Uniandes | Describimos algunas características del ambiente político en Colombia, a partir de una base de datos panel única con cerca de 10,000 hogares. Comparando respuestas en 2013 y 2016, documentamos una persistente falta de interés en política y un clientelismo prevaleciente, con vínculos personales dominando a las afinidades partidistas. El involucramiento en la compra clientelista de votos, en cambio, es bastante variable en el tiempo, y los hogares entran y salen de estas relaciones. Contradiciendo las más simples y optimistas teorías de la modernización, no encontramos que incrementos en la riqueza del hogar estén correlacionados con el abandono del clientelismo. En cambio, los cambios en la debilidad del estado (medida con la evasión tributaria) sí se correlacionan fuertemente con cambio en el clientelismo. Fortalecer el estado parece, por lo tanto, una tarea prioritaria. Entendiendo los esfuerzos de construcción de paz como un paso en esta dirección nos conduce a examinar las actitudes hacia el reciente proceso de paz entre el gobierno y las Farc, el grupo guerrillero más grande en Colombia. Con unas preguntas especiales incluidas en el 2016, evaluamos las opiniones de los hogares sobre estos temas. Los datos muestran una curiosa combinación de indiferencia y polarización hacia el proceso de paz. Una porción grande de la población siente que el proceso de paz implica pocos cambios para su vida, y entre aquellos que esperan cambios aproximadamente la mitad tienen expectativas positivas y el restante negativas. Los que viven en áreas con mayor presencia de grupos armados tienden a ser menos indiferentes, pero no son simplemente más pesimistas o más optimistas. La mayoría de los encuestados reportan poca resistencia a tener ex-combatientes como vecinos o empleados, pero rechazan relativamente más la participación política y financiar los beneficios para los rebeldes (dos aspectos cruciales del acuerdo de paz). | No additional resources | No press content | |
Politics and Reconciliation: A Critical Juncture for State Building with Francisco Eslava and Andrés Moya. Castaño, Lina (comp), Colombia en Movimiento 2010 - 2013 - 2016, Bogotá, Ediciones Uniandes | 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 partisan affinity. Engagement in clientelistic vote buying, instead, is quite variable in time, with households getting into and out of these exchanges. Rejecting the simplest and more optimistic theories of modernization, we do not find that increases in household wealth correlate with the abandonment of clientelism. Instead, changes in the weakness of the state (as proxied with tax evasion) correlate strongly with changes in clientelism. Strengthening the state therefore seems a priority. Viewing peace-building efforts as one key step in this direction naturally leads to the examination of the attitudes towards the recent peace process between the government and the Farc, Colombia's largest guerrilla group. With a special set of questions included in 2016, we also study households' perspectives on this topic. The data reveals a rare combination of indifference and polarization towards the peace process. A large share of people feel the peace process implies no substantial changes for their lives, and those that do are approximately equally divided between those expecting positive and negative changes. Those who live in areas in which non-state armed groups were present are relatively less indifferent, yet they are not simply more pessimistic or optimistic. Most respondents report no discomfort with having former rebels as neighbors or employees, but they do reject political participation and financing benefits for rebels (two key aspects of the peace treaty) comparatively more. | No additional resources | No press content | |
La política colombiana a la luz de la Elca: entre el desinterés y el clientelismo con Juan F. Riaño. Cadena, Ximena (comp), Colombia en Movimiento 2010 - 2013, Bogotá, Ediciones Uniandes | Este artículo presenta algunas características de la forma como los colombianos se relacionan con la política, a partir de información recopilada en la ELCA por primera vez en el año 2013. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Impuestos, Crecimiento Económico y Bienestar en Colombia (1970-1999) Desarrollo y Sociedad, 2003, 52: 145-204 | Estudiar los efectos macroeconómicos de los impuestos, en particular en un país con un sistema tributario complejo y frecuentemente reformado como el colombiano, puede resultar en extremo engorroso. No obstante, la importancia del tema no puede menospreciarse: la teoría económica sugiere que los impuestos, al distorsionar la toma de decisiones individuales, pueden reducir el bienestar y el crecimiento económicos. En este trabajo se calculan las tasas efectivas promedio de tributación sobre el consumo y sobre el ingreso de los factores de producción en Colombia, en el período 1970-1999, utilizando la metodología propuesta por Mendoza, Razin y Tesar (1994). Además de constituir una caracterización de la política tributaria en el período, esas tasas se utilizan para cuantificar los costos en bienestar y crecimiento de la tributación con base en un modelo sencillo de equilibrio general dinámico y previsión perfecta. Los resultados indican que desde 1970, y en particular en la segunda mitad de la década del noventa, la política tributaria ha impuesto sobre la economía colombiana costos crecientes de eficiencia. Aunque los resultados también sugieren que se ha sacrificado crecimiento, la magnitud de ese sacrificio es cuantitativamente despreciable en la mayoría de los casos, con la excepción de la segunda mitad de la década del noventa. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Actitudes de exintegrantes de las Farc–EP frente a la reincorporación con A. Arjona, N. Garbiras, J. García, T. Hiller, L. Polo y M. Weintraub. Documento CEDE 2020-24 | En agosto del 2019 se cumplieron dos años de la reincorporación de las Farc-EP. Este proceso es uno de los principales desafíos de la implementación del Acuerdo Final firmado entre el Estado colombiano y la organización guerrillera en noviembre de 2016. Los avances en materia de reincorporación garantizarán su sostenibilidad. En este documento analizamos las actitudes de los exintegrantes frente al proceso en esta primera etapa, tomando los resultados del Registro Nacional de Reincorporación (RNR), realizado entre la Agencia Nacional de Reincorporación (ARN) y el componente Farc del Consejo Nacional de Reincorporación (CNR). Tras mostrar que hay aspectos positivos en las actitudes de las personas en proceso de reincorporación, y algunos que deben mirarse con preocupación, estudiamos qué características de los exintegrantes y su entorno se aso- cian con mejores actitudes y condiciones para la implementación del proceso de reincorporación. Complementamos este análisis contrastando las actitudes de la población en proceso de reincorporación con las de la población civil, haciendo paralelos, en términos de los retos de política pública, para ambos grupos. La evidencia presentada sirve para canalizar esfuerzos en donde más parecen necesitarse. | No additional resources | ||
¿Cómo nos reconciliamos? El papel de la violencia en las actitudes frente a la reconciliación with Tatiana Hiller, Ana María Ibáñez, Andrés Moya. In Botero, Sandra and García-Sánchez, Miguel (eds), Paz y opinión pública en Colombia, Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, pp. 43-71, Also Cede WP No. 2018-53 | La firma del acuerdo de paz colombiano resultó en la desmovilización y reincorporación a la vida civil de más de 12.000 excombatientes de las FARC. El conflicto, que estuvo activo casi 60 anos, causó más de ocho millones de víctimas y una sociedad dividida. No abordar estos legados sociales y psicológicos puede derivar en el resurgimiento de nuevos ciclos de violencia. Entender la disposición de la población civil a compartir la vida cotidiana con los excombatientes y su actitud hacia la reconciliación es crucial para disenar políticas públicas que promuevan un posconflicto sostenible. Este artículo analiza las actitudes de la población colombiana hacia las interacciones cotidianas con los excombatientes de las FARC y sus percepciones sobre la importancia y viabilidad del proceso de reconciliación. Para esto, usamos una encuesta a una muestra de 4.497 hogares, representativa de los municipios más afectados por el conflicto. Nuestro análisis explora cómo estas actitudes y percepciones se relacionan con tres dimensiones: (i) las experiencias de violencia vividas durante el conflicto; (ii) la confianza hacia el sistema judicial, la policía y el ejército; y (iii) las conexiones con redes políticas y comunitarias. Los resultados indican que los legados de violencia están asociados con actitudes pesimistas hacia la reconciliación. Sin embargo, las personas que viven en territorios altamente afectados por la violencia parecen estar dispuestas a compartir las actividades cotidianas con los excombatientes. Mayores niveles de confianza en instituciones como el sistema judicial, la policía y el ejército, así como la participación en organizaciones comunitarias y las conexiones con redes políticas, están correlacionadas con actitudes más favorables hacia la reconciliación. Estos resultados indican que las intervenciones para promover la reconciliación durante el posconflicto deben tener en cuenta la heterogeneidad en las experiencias de violencia, las necesidades y las posiciones políticas en estos municipios. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Colombia: Democratic but Violent? with Juan Fernando Vargas., In Felipe Valencia-Caicedo(ed.) Roots of Underdevelopment: A New Economic and Political History of LatinAmerica and the Caribbean, Springer Link, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 285-316 | Colombia is a Latin American outlier in that it has traditionally been a very violent country, yet at the same time remarkably democratic. This chapter explores Colombia’s puzzle from a political economy perspective, shedding light on the broader relationship between democracy and violence. The chapter studies some of the most important democratization reforms since Colombia’s independence 200 years ago. It argues that the reforms often failed to curb violence and sometimes even actively, though perhaps unintendedly, exacerbated violent political strife. Democratic reforms were unable to set the ground for genuine power-sharing. They were often implemented amidst a weak institutional environment that allowed powerful elites, the reforms’ ex-ante political losers, to capture the State and offset the benefits of the reforms for the broader society. We conclude by highlighting the implications of the argument for other countries facing democratic reforms, as well as for Colombia’s current peace-building efforts. | No additional resources | No press content | |
con N. Garbiras, J. García, y M. Weintraub. Documento CEDE 2022-38 | Este capítulo describe las trayectorias de atención en el proceso de reincorporación de las Farc-EP. Analizamos una base de datos única de la Agencia de Reincorporación y Normalización (ARN) con información mensual de las interacciones y atenciones entre más de 13.000 exintegrantes y los facilitadores de reincorporación (estos últimos encargados de garantizar la atención y el cumplimiento de los beneficios establecidos en el proceso de reincorporación). Caracterizamos, por un lado, las atenciones entregadas por la ARN a la población en reincorporación y, por el otro, las variables asociadas con un contacto más constante sus facilitadores. Este ejercicio nos permite estudiar cuáles son las características y actitudes (medidas en el Registro Nacional de Reincorporación) de las personas más propensas a participar activamente en el proceso. Este capítulo contribuye a entender algunas dinámicas de reincorporación y algunas tendencias alrededor de las atenciones ofrecidas. Así, ayuda a identificar los segmentos poblacionales donde debe focalizarse la atención para fortalecer la implementación del Acuerdo en Colombia | No additional resources | No press content | |
con N. Garbiras, J. García, C. Suescún y M. Weintraub. In Betancur-Restrepo, Laura y Rettberg, Angelika(eds.), Después del acuerdo: Cómo va la paz en Colombia, Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes,pp. 43-71. Documento CEDE 2022-39. | Después de más de seis anos de la firma del Acuerdo Final y más de cinco anos del comienzo de la reincorporación de las Farc-EP, este proceso sigue siendo un reto fundamental para el éxito de la implementación del Acuerdo Final y la consolidación de la paz. En este documento de trabajo, caracterizamos las actitudes y percepciones de la población en reincorporación en varias dimensiones en una etapa avanzada dentro su proceso. Para esto, nos basamos en los resultados de una encuesta telefónica a 4.435 personas en proceso de reincorporación realizada entre diciembre de 2021 y enero de 2022 por el equipo de investigadores en colaboración con la Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización (ARN) y el componente Farc del Consejo Nacional de Reincorporación (CNR). Los resultados de este estudio demuestran que existen aspectos positivos en cuanto a las actitudes de las personas en reincorporación, pero también algunos que deben ser considerados con especial atención y cautela. También analizamos qué características de los exintegrantes y su entorno están asociadas con mejores percepciones en diferentes dimensiones como confianza, seguridad y reconciliación, entre otros. Este análisis fue complementado con información de la población colombiana, información del Registro Nacional de Reincorporación a fecha del 2019 y datos administrativos de la ARN. El objetivo principal de este documento es proponer recomendaciones de política pública para orientar los esfuerzos en las dimensiones y personas que parecen necesitarlos más. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Proponemos reformas de fondo en los impuestos a las empresas, las personas naturales, los verdes y saludables, entre otros. Los cambios propuestos, que tomarían cerca de diez anos en entrar todos en vigor, permitirían un estatuto más progresivo, más eficiente y justo y recaudarían más de 3 % del PIB adicional. | No additional resources | No press content | ||
Sunlight Disinfects? Free Media in Weak Democracies with Juan Fernando Vargas and Mauricio Vela. | Free media may not favor political accountability when other democratic institutions are weak,and may even bring undesirable unintended consequences. We propose a simple model in whichpoliticians running for office may engage in coercion to obtain votes. A media scandal thatexposes these candidates increases their coercion eff ort to o ffset the negative popularity shock.This may result in the tainted politicians actually increasing their vote share. We provideempirical evidence from one recent episode in the political history of Colombia, the `parapolitics' scandal featuring politicians colluding with illegal armed paramilitary groups to obtain votes. We show that colluding candidates not only get more votes than their clean competitors, but also concentrate them in areas where coercion is more likely (namely, areas with more paramilitary presence, less state presence, and more judicial inefficiency). Harder to reconcile with other explanations and as a direct test of the eff ects of media exposure, we compare tainted candidates exposed before elections to those exposed after. We fi nd that those exposed before elections get as many votes as those exposed once elected, but their electoral support is more strongly concentrated in places where coercion is more likely. Our results highlight the complementarity between diff erent dimensions of democratic institutions. | No additional resources | ||
Growth and inclusion trajectories of Colombian functional territories with Tatiana Hiller and Ana María Ibáñez. Cede WP No. 2018-58 | We describe the patterns of economic growth and social progress in Colombian “functional territories". Unlike political/administrative divisions that emerge at least partly for historical reasons unrelated to economic interactions, functional territories reflect the patterns of spatial agglomeration and economic interactions in a territory. Using a novel definition of functional territories, our analysis reveals significant fragmentation of economic interactions: close to 66% of municipalities (holding about 20% of the country's population) have no significant links to neighboring areas. A set of comparatively more (but still only partially) integrated and more populous municipalities have stronger links between them. This rural-urban" space holds just around 31% of total population. The rest of Colombians are in urban" or Metropolitan" highly-populated and more integrated clusters. We describe these territories along two dimensions: economic growth or dynamism" and progress in social indicators or inclusion". To do so we propose a simple conceptual framework that organizes the diverse inputs that might help boost these outcomes. Larger and more urbanized agglomerations exhibit visible advantages in these inputs. Moreover, long-run institutional determinants best help differentiate territories. Consistent with this, larger and more urbanized agglomerations have better outcomes, especially when measuring economic activity. Also, more dynamic places tend to be the more inclusive ones, even though recent improvements in dynamism do not correlate with improvements in inclusion. | No additional resources | No press content | |
The Long Shadow of the Past: Political Economy of Regional Inequality in Colombia with Carlos A. Molina, James A. Robinson and Juan F. Vargas | We study the nature of regional inequality in Colombia over the past 200 years. The main empirical fact is that regional inequality has been highly persistent despite the large changes that have taken place and the modernization of the society. We show that regional inequality is highly correlated with significant within-country differences in economic and political institutions, which are themselves highly persistent over the same period. We propose a tentative political economy theory of why the spatial distribution of institutions and economic outcomes has been so persistent over time. | No additional resources | No press content | |
Encuesta Longitudinal Colombiana de la Universidad de los Andes- ELCA 2013 con Raquel Bernal, Adriana Camacho, Ximena Cadena, Juan Camilo Cárdenas, Ana María Ibáñez, Ximena Peña y Catherine Rodríguez | La Encuesta Longitudinal Colombiana de la Universidad de los Andes tiene por objetivo seguir a lo largo de una década a más de 10 mil hogares en zonas urbanas y rurales en Colombia. | No additional resources | No press content | |
with Darío Romero and Juan F. Vargas | Despite a growing body of literature on how environmental degradation can fuel civil war, the reverse effect, namely that of conflict on environmental outcomes, is relatively understudied. From a theoretical point of view this effect is ambiguous, with some forces pointing to pressures for environmental degradation and some pointing in the opposite direction. Hence, the overall effect of conflict on the environment is an empirical question. We study this relationship in the case of Colombia. We combine a detailed satellite-based longitudinal dataset on forest cover across municipalities over the period 1990-2010 with a comprehensive panel of conflict-related violent actions by paramilitary militias. We first provide evidence that paramilitary activity significantly reduces the share of forest cover in a panel specification that includes municipal and time fixed effects. Then we confirm these findings by taking advantage of a quasi-experiment that provides us with an exogenous source of variation for the expansion of the paramilitary. Using the distance to the region of Urabá, the epicenter of such expansion, we instrument paramilitary activity in each cross-section for which data on forest cover is available. As a falsification exercise, we show that the instrument ceases to be relevant after the paramilitaries largely demobilized following peace negotiations with the government. Further, after the demobilization the deforestation effect of the paramilitaries disappears. We explore a number of potential mechanisms that may explain the conflict-driven deforestation, and show evidence suggesting that paramilitary violence generates large outflows of people in order to secure areas for growing illegal crops, exploit mineral resources, and engage in extensive agriculture. In turn, these activities are associated with deforestation. | No additional resources | No press content | |
This paper studies the effect of strengthening democracy, as captured by an increase in voting rights, on the incidence of violent civil conflict in nineteenth-century Colombia. Empirically studying the relationship between democracy and conflict is challenging, not only because of conceptual problems in defining and measuring democracy, but also because political institutions and violence are jointly determined. We take advantage of an experiment of history to examine the impact of one simple, measurable dimension of democracy (the size of the franchise) on conflict, while at the same time attempting to overcome the identification problem. In 1853, Colombia established universal male suffrage. Using a simple difference-indifferences specification at the municipal level, we find that municipalities where more voters were enfranchised relative to their population experienced fewer violent political battles while the reform was in effect. The results are robust to including a number of additional controls. Moreover, we investigate the potential mechanisms driving the results. In particular, we look at which components of the proportion of new voters in 1853 explain the results, and we examine if results are stronger in places with more political competition and state capacity. We interpret our findings as suggesting that violence in nineteenth-century Colombia was a technology for political elites to compete for the rents from power, and that democracy constituted an alternative way to compete which substituted violence. | No additional resources | No press content | ||
The study of budgetary institutions has long been an important topic in the economic literature. Nonetheless, the degree of rigidity or inflexibility in budget preparation, a prime preoccupation for policy makers and in particular for finance ministers since a long time ago, has been relatively unexplored. In this paper we show that budget inflexibility can take several forms and argue that it is likely to be closely related to various types of political conflict present in the budget process. Moreover, we study one particular form of budget inflexibility and its connection with one specific (but perhaps the most important) political force driving the budget process. More specifically, we discuss some of the consequences of "expenditure inflexibility," defined as the existence of transfers to special interests enjoying constitutional or legal protection which impede their modification in the short run, in a simple model of legislative bargaining that captures the Tragedy of the Commons present in public budget allocation. | No additional resources | No press content | ||
La explicación del ciclo económico fue uno de los intereses principales de los economistas en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Tal empeño dejó de ser prioritario en la agenda de la profesión entre fines de la segunda guerra mundial y el advenimiento del primer choque sobre los precios petroleros a mediados de los setenta. Desde entonces el ciclo económico volvió a ocupar una posición prominente en la investigación económica. Este ensayo destaca grandes líneas de investigación sobre el ciclo emprendidas a lo largo del siglo, se cita la controversia acerca de los eventuales cambios del ciclo en la segunda parte de la centuria anterior, y se introduce la discusión de los vínculos entre ciclos de diferentes economías. Este último tópico sirve de introducción al tema de las correlaciones entre ciclos de economías, y a su aplicación a las posibles correlaciones entre los Estados Unidos y Colombia durante el último siglo. | No additional resources | No press content | ||
La Batalla Política por el Presupuesto de la Nación: Inflexibilidades o Supervivencia Fiscal con Juan Carlos Echeverry y Pablo Querubín | El gobierno colombiano tiene un escaso margen de maniobra al preparar el Presupuesto General de la Nación ya que un alto porcentaje de los gastos que debe hacer cada ano está predeterminado por un numeroso conjunto de leyes y de artículos constitucionales. En este trabajo se hace un diagnóstico sobre la magnitud y origen de la inflexibilidad" presupuestal, y se discuten posibles soluciones. La inflexibilidad compromete la capacidad de los representantes elegidos para ejecutar sus planes de gobierno, puede poner en peligro la estabilidad macroeconómica, favorece el exceso de apropiaciones por parte de grupos de interés, dificulta la posibilidad de llevar a cabo ajustes en situaciones fiscales deficitarias, dificulta la definición de prioridades, favorece la duplicidad de erogaciones para un mismo fin y le resta transparencia al proceso presupuestal. En buena medida, las inflexibilidades surgen del interés del legislativo de garantizar rentas específicas para determinados sectores y regiones, contrarrestar su falta de acceso formal al presupuesto y limitar la discrecionalidad del ejecutivo. Las medidas orientadas hacia la flexibilización aplicarían sanos principios presupuestales, reconocidos a lo largo de cien anos de historia de hacienda pública en Colombia. Para solucionar estos problemas, se sugiere modificar el esquema actual de asignación de transferencias y rentas de destinación específica, aplicar cabalmente el principio de unidad de caja en el presupuesto, establecer reglas de ahorro contingente para algunos fondos especiales, promover una administración unificada de la tesorería del estado, revivir los denominados "auxilios parlamentarios" con el fin de hacer explícita (poner por encima de la mesa) la búsqueda de presupuesto por parte del legislativo, y alejarlo de la práctica de incluir gastos por vía de leyes, como ha sido la tradición. El presupuesto anual debe partir de un límite de largo plazo al endeudamiento público, y una senda de disminución prefijada. Es necesario que el Ministerio de Hacienda se concentre en la definición del monto de gasto coherente con un nivel deseado de deuda pública, y que sean el Presidente y el Consejo de Ministros los responsables de la asignación sectorial, en interacción con el Congreso de la República." | No additional resources | No press content | |
Determinants and Consequences of Foreign Indebtedness In Colombian Firms con Juan Carlos Echeverry, Roberto Steiner and Camila Aguilar | During the nineties the performance of many emerging economies was linked to their access to foreign capital and its impact on the real exchange rate. Colombia was not an exception, as it experienced a sharp boom and bust cycle during the period. | No additional resources | No press content |
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