Suchergebnisse

En este artículo evaluamos si existen diferencias en las variables de desempeño de niños y adultos entre hogares casados y hogares en unión libre, una vez que se controla por diferencias observadas entre los dos tipos de familias y se controla por posibles problemas de endogeneidad debidos a la autoselección con base en la utilización de la técnica de variables instrumentales. Utilizamos una variedad de bases de datos colombianas que tienen información acerca de variables de desempeño de los niños. Los resultados indican que los hogares en unión libre están peor que los hogares casados en varias dimensiones, incluidas la tenencia de bienes duraderos y el bienestar infantil. Además, intentamos entender las razones por las cuales estas diferencias emergen y encontramos que los hogares en unión libre exhiben comportamientos menos estables, con menor planeación del futuro, se caracterizan por menor especialización y riesgo compartido entre la pareja, y exhiben comportamientos menos saludables y peores prácticas parentales.

Contents include Regulatory Reform: Integrating ParadigmsAugusto de la Torre (World Bank) and Alain Ize (World Bank) Labor Market Rigidities and Informality in ColombiaXimena Peña (Universidad de los Andes), Camilo Mondragon-Velez(International Finance Corporation-World Bank), and Daniel Wills(Universidad de los Andes) Reforming Pensions: Lessons from Economic Theory and Some Policy DirectionsNicholas Barr (London School of Economics) and Peter Diamond (MIT)

This semiannual journal from the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) provides a forum for influential economists and policymakers from the region to share high-quality research directly applied to policy issues within and among those countries

The 2012 Colombian tax reform reduced payroll taxes and employer contributions to
health insurance by 13.5 percent, while also increasing corporate income taxes and
leaving untouched the benefits to workers financed through these taxes. Shifting
taxation from formal employment to other business activities is a policy recipe under
heated discussion in Latin America. The reform offers an ideal laboratory for studying
empirically the potential distortions against formal employment associated with payroll
taxes in contrast to other taxes on firms. We analyze the impact of the reform on
employment and wages using monthly firm-level data on all formal employment in nonpublic
firms in the country and a difference-in-differences approach that takes advantage of
the fact that a few sectors were exempt from the 2012 tax reform. We find a positive
average effect of 4.3 percent on employment and 2.7 percent on average firm wages, for
the average firm. The employment effect is found only for micro and small firms, whereas
the bulk of the employment is concentrated in medium and large firms, which show no
significant effect. According to these estimates, about 145,000 new jobs were created
between January and May of 2015 by virtue of the reform. These results are generally
supportive of efforts to reduce payroll taxes, though our findings on employment are
less robust than those on wages, and large firms do not seem to have benefitted. The
apparent lack of effect for medium and large employers is also a source of concern. We
speculate that it may be due to these firms' being more sensitive to the increase in
corporate taxation that financed the reduction in payroll taxes, but lack of access to
the relevant data prevents us from offering solid evidence regarding this
hypothesis. JEL Codes: H25, H32