Ensayos Sobre Politica Economica最新文献

This document presents a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous technical change. The model is used to guide an interpretation of the Colombian case for the period 1925-2012. The main conclusions are the following: the steady state technical change and economic growth rates depend upon a balance between the individual benefit for innovation and its opportunity cost. Random shocks causing a gap between the steady state technical change rate and its effective level have a permanent effect on the product level in the opposite direction to the prediction by the Cass-Koopmans-Ramsey model. After 1930, in Colombia, fiscal and foreign trade policies have generated permanent negative effects on output. According to the paper's model the channel has been the promotion of diversion of productive resources towards the present production at the expense of innovation activities.

In this paper we expanded the closed economy model by Bernanke and Gertler (1999) in order to account for the macroeconomic effects of an asset price bubble in the context of a small open economy model. During the nineties emerging market economies opened their financial accounts to foreign investment but generated growing macroeconomic imbalances in these economies. Our goal in this paper is twofold: first we want to analyze if the conclusions of Bernanke and Gertler (1999) remain in the case of a small open economy. And second, we want to compare the results in terms of macroeconomic volatility of the model for a closed economy versus the model for a small open economy. Our results show that the conclusion about the fact that the Central Bank should not react to asset price remains as in the case of a closed economy model, and that small open economies are more vulnerable to asset prices bubbles due to capital inflows and the exchange rate mechanism of the monetary policy. Therefore in small open economies the business cycle is deeper. Finally, in the face of a boom followed by a bust in an asset price bubble, macroeconomic volatility would be dampened if the monetary authority focuses only on inflation.

This paper analyzes the gender wage gap among rural-urban migrants in 13 cities and their metropolitan areas in Colombia. In particular, it is demonstrated that the difference between male and female wages are wider when the comparison is made exclusively with the rural-born women. This suggests that wages paid to rural women are consequence of a double penalty; one for being women and another one for coming from a rural district. An additional observation in the article is obtained from taking a centile approach, in which it is observed that gender wage gap is not uniform across the population income, with higher differentials at the bottom.

Central banks in G7 countries shifted to unconventional policy measures in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis, when faced with economic slack, financial instability and fiscal trouble. This shift ended a spell of rules-based time consistent monetary policy that started in the mid-1980s. I argue that substantial economic, political and financial risks put pressures on the continued support for a monetary regime. Central banks may be forced to adopt policies with no option to reset those options later on. I demonstrate with duration models – on a sample of industrialized and emerging economies from 1970 to 2012 – that the policy switch to inflation targeting happened after episodes with high inflation and public debt, reflecting broad support for stability-oriented monetary (and fiscal) policy. More generally, changes in monetary regimes occur after a crisis. High inflation makes central banks pursue active monetary policies, while they forsake those same policies in the wake of fiscal or financial crises.

This paper presents a neoclassical dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to determine the effect of conventional and non-conventional monetary policy on economic activity and prices. The results show that in a small open economy with a flexible exchange rate, a negative shock of non-conventional monetary policy, generated through a decrease in international reserves, reduce output and employment, deteriorates the trade balance, and has effects on prices via increasing the money supply. Meanwhile, an increase in the interest rate negatively affects the product, decreases inflation, and generates a revaluation of the exchange rate. The aforementioned is evidence that the central banks do not only use interest rates as the main policy instrument, but also non-conventional interventions via the balance sheet, which can also affect other variables such as the exchange rate.

This paper studies the allocation of the functions and responsibilities of prudential supervision on public authorities, including the central bank. In particular, it is argued that there are interdependencies in the design of institutions; political decisions on the supervisory structure are not taken in isolation. Analyzing a panel data set of prudential supervision regimes in 98 countries over the period from 1999 to 2010, I find that central banks play a smaller role in supervision and tasks are more decentralized if the central bank is independent and transparent. Measures of firm and fiscal decentralization are typically associated with a greater centralization of supervisory functions outside of the central bank.

The disclosure of the minutes of the Boards of Directors of central banks (procedural transparency within the inflation targeting (IT) literature) implies the challenge of sending a clear message. Regardless of whether the document released is a brief, moderate, or highly detailed (verbatim) account of a Board's discussion, its contents often align expectations and define an effective monetary policy to curb inflation. This paper provides a quantitative perspective of procedural transparency by performing a text analysis of the minutes of Board meetings in the central banks of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. The study examined the lengths of the minutes, their frequent vocabulary (including its association with a predefined central-bank terminology), and their readability (through a reading ease index).

After the international crisis, it was suggested that inflation targets should be raised in order to allow more space to monetary policies during contractionary product times. The present study proposes that the limit to raise the inflation target should be threshold inflation, defined as the rate above which price variability is detrimental to economic growth. Bayesian methods are proposed to estimate this threshold. Results suggest that over the threshold there is a negative and statistically significant relationship between inflation and variations in the product.