The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: Labor Displacement, Wages, and the Allocation of Public Spending*
We reexamine the effect of immigration on public finances by accounting for second-order effects. We exploit exogenous variation in immigration across Colombian metropolitan areas between 2013 and 2018, resulting from the large increase in Venezuelan immigrants, and instrument immigrants’ residential location using preexisting settlement patterns and the distance between origin-destination flows. Our findings indicate that […]
Immigrant Networks in the Labor Market
Using unique survey data linked to social security records and the large influx of Venezuelan immigrants to Colombia in recent years, this paper provides evidence on the empirical relationships between referral networks and labor market outcomes of immigrants by focusing on the spatial dimension of social interactions. By explicitly accounting for both the urban and […]
Matching and City Size Wage Gaps under the Shadow of Informality: Evidence from Mexico
Larger labor markets provide workers and firms with better opportunities to find each other, enhancing positive assortative matching. We measure the extent of these agglomeration externalities in Mexico, where informal work represents a large share of employment and coexists with formal labor markets. Using a matched employer-employee dataset comprising the near universe of formal workers […]
Eficiencia de la intermediación laboral de la Agencia Pública de Empleo del SENA: El caso del Valledel Cauca
Un emparejamiento laboral es el resultado de que un empleador encuentre a un buscador de empleo que llene una vacante laboral. Como no existe un espacio físico en el que este tipo de intercambios se den, existen estrategias que los hacen posible, como lo es la intermediación laboral de las agencias de empleo. En ese […]
A Peace Baby Boom? Evidence from Colombia’s Peace Agreement
Violent environments affect household fertility choices, demand for health services and health outcomes of newborns. Using administrative data from Colombia and a difference-in-differences strategy, we study how the end of the 5-decade long conflict with the FARC insurgency affected fertility outcomes in areas traditionally affected by FARC’s violence relative to the rest of the country. […]
Visualization, Identification and Estimation in the Linear Panel Event-Study Design
Linear panel models, and the «event-study plots» that often accompany them, are popular tools for learning about policy effects. We discuss the construction of event-study plots and suggest ways to make them more informative. We examine the economic content of different possible identifying assumptions. We explore the performance of the corresponding estimators in simulations, highlighting […]
The Spending Responses to Adverse Health Shocks: Evidence from a Panel of Colombian Households
We analyze the effect of adverse health shocks on households’ different expenditure shares using a difference in differences approach. We find that households engage in substitution between health and food spending in response to the negative health shocks. We find substantial heterogeneity in this trade off between current and future health mediated by access to […]
Decomposing the Gender Pay Gap in Colombia: Do Industry and Occupation Matter?
This paper aims to quantify at which extent industry and occupation characteristics explain the gender pay gap in Colombia. To quantify the role of these factors we perform counterfactual decomposition methods that allow to split the total gap into the contribution of the gender share of employment at the industry level, the demographic composition and […]
Empowering women through multifaceted interventions: Long-term evidence from a double matching design
Empowering women is a policy goal that has received a lot of interest by policy-makers in the developing world in recent years, yet little is known about effective ways to promote it sustainably. Most existing interventions fail to address the multidimensional nature of empowerment. Using a double matching design to construct the sampling frame and […]
Censo piloto alternativo. Caracterización realizada por víctimas y colombianas retornadas en la comuna 6 en Cúcuta – Norte de Santander
El ejercicio de un censo piloto realizado por víctimas y colombianas retornadas surge como una apuestapara llamar la atención sobre las necesidades a las que se enfrenta la comuna 6 en Cúcuta, Norte de Santander, y un esfuerzo de la comunidad organizada, en la búsqueda de aportar a la ampliación de la mirada del Estado […]