Suchergebnisse

Este artículo formaliza a través de un mecanismo de principal-agente la política de seguridad democrática del Gobierno de Uribe, y muestra su relación con el incremento de las víctimas de ejecuciones extrajudiciales llamados "falsos positivos". El modelo explica las fallas de la política de seguridad democrática al compararla con una política contrafáctica alterna que involucre un nivel óptimo de auditoría a las unidades militares para evitar falsos positivos. Se encuentra que esta política contrafáctica aumentaría el bienestar de la sociedad. ; This article, through a principal-agent mechanism, constructs a model of the democratic security policy of the Uribe Government, and shows its relationship with the increase in victims of extra-judicial executions called "false positives". The model explains the failures of the democratic security policy by comparing it with an alternative counterfactual policy that involves an optimum level of audit of military units to avoid false positives. It was found that this counterfactual policy could increase the well-being of society.

We analyze the interplay between economic incentives and social norms when individuals decide whether or not to engage in criminal activity. More specifically, we assume that there is a social norm against criminal activity and that deviations from the norm result in feelings of guilt or shame. The intensity of these feelings is here endogenous in the sense that they are stronger when the population fraction obeying the norm is larger. As a consequence, a gradual reduction of the sanctions against criminal activity, or of the taxation of legal incomes, may weaken the social norm against crime. Due to the potential multiplicity of equilibria in our model, such a gradual change may even induce a discontinuous increase in the crime rate. We show that law enforcement policies may have dramatic and permanent efects on the crime rate, and lead to hysteresis. We also define political equilibrium under majority rule and show how a majority of individuals, who feel no guilt or shame from violating the law, in political equilibrium can exploit a minority who do have such feelings.

Este artículo presenta una reconstrucción de la historia de la política monetaria del Banco Central de Colombia (Banco de la República) en el período 1990 a 2010 durante el cual se implementó una política explícita de metas de inflación en octubre de 2000. Para lograr nuestro objetivo, desarrollamos una regla teórica de Taylor modificada con suavización de tasa de interés para una economía pequeña y abierta; consecuentemente, estimamos un modelo de cambios de régimen (Markov switching) de dos regímenes, el cual admite que las fechas de cambio de régimen sean determinadas de manera endógena. Encontramos que uno de los regímenes, que corresponde al período 2000 a 2010, coincide con fijación explícita de las metas de inflación por parte del Banco de la República, en donde la tasa de inflación tuvo un comportamiento de serie estacionaria, consistente con que el Banco de la República cumplió con el principio de Taylor. Dicho régimen de política monetaria se había presentado en algunos trimestres antes del 2000, pero no como el régimen predominante. El otro régimen prevaleció durante la década de los noventa, pero no cumplió con el principio de Taylor en general debido a que permitió un comportamiento de raíz unitaria de la tasa de inflación. Finalmente, no encontramos evidencia de que el Banco de la República haya cambiado su comportamiento en cuanto a las fluctuaciones del producto durante el período estudiado. ; This article presents a reconstruction of the history of Colombia´s central bank´s (Banco de la República) monetary policy between 1990 and 2010, during which explicit inflation targeting was adopted by October of 2000. To do so we developed a theoretical modified Taylor rule with interest rate smoothing for an open and small economy and accordingly estimated a two regime Markov switching model which allowed the switching dates to be endogenously determined. We found that one regime had explicit inflation targeting (from the year 2000 to 2010), whereby the inflation rate became a stationary series consistent with our empirical finding that Banco de la República enforced a monetary policy that satisfied more likely the Taylor principle. This inflation stabilizing regime did present itself in some quarters before the year 2000, but not as the predominant regime. The other regime was more prevalent during the 1990s, but did not satisfy the Taylor principle as it allowed a unit root behavior of the inflation rate. Finally, we found no evidence that Banco de la República changed its behavior in terms of output fluctuations during the period studied.

En este artículo, que forma parte de un estudio más amplio, se hace una presentación del modelo Arow-Debreu-Radner y luego se le explícita una estructura monetaria. Se prueba un equilibrio monetario y se examinan sus propiedades de optimalidad. El objetivo principal del artículo es mostrar porque el modelo, aun con incertidumbre, no puede ser un modelo para consideraciones monetarias.

This paper contributes to the economic analysis of illicit activities and money laundering. First, it presents a theoretical model of long-run growth that explicitly considers illicit workers, activities, and income, alongside a licit private sector and a functioning government. Second, it generates estimates of the size of illicit income and provides simulated and econometric estimates of the volume of laundered assets in the Colombian economy. In the model, the licit sector operates in a perfectly competitive environment and produces a licit good through a standard neoclassical production function. The illicit sector operates in an imperfectly competitive environment and is composed of two different activities: The first activity produces an illicit good that nonetheless is valuable in the market (for example illicit drugs); the second does not add value to the economy but only redistributes wealth (for example robbery, kidnapping, and fraud). The paper provides a series of comparative statics exercises to assess the effects of changes in government efficiency, licit sector productivity, and illicit drug prices. From the model, the analysis derives a set of estimable macroeconometric equations to measure the size of laundered assets in the Colombian economy in the period 1985 to 2013. The paper assembles a data set whose key components are estimates of illicit income from drug trafficking and common crime. Illicit incomes increased drastically until 2001, reaching a peak of nearly 12 percent of gross domestic product and then decreasing to less than 2 percent by 2013. The decline overlaps not only in a period of high economic growth, but also after the implementation of Plan Colombia. The data set is used to estimate the volume of laundered assets in the economy by applying the Kalman filter for the estimation of unobserved dynamic variables onto the derived macroeconometric equations from the model. The findings show that the volume of laundered assets increased from about 8 percent of gross domestic product in the mid-1980s to a peak of 14 percent by 2002, and declined to 8 percent in 2013.

The harshness of punishment society chooses to impose on crime offenders is mandated by law. However, the quality of life in prison can make this punishment harsher. This creates a variation in the severity of punishment which is not legislated and may differ from society's taste for penalties. Indicators of in prison violence and conflicts seem to be appropriate proxy variables for prison conditions. Using indicators of in prison violent behavior, we use an exogenous source in education participation in educational programs in order to asses the effect of education on such measures of conflict. Applying instrumental variables techniques to census data for Argentine prisons, we find that educational programs significantly reduce indicators of property damages in prison. Such reductions amounts to a 60 percent decrease relative to the mean level of property damages. ; Trabajo a publicarse en Rafael Di Tella, Sebastián Edwards and Ernesto Schargordsky (eds.). Crime economics: lessons for Latin America . NBER, Chicago University Press. ; Centro de Estudios Distributivos, Laborales y Sociales (CEDLAS)

The harshness of punishment society chooses to impose on crime offenders is mandated by law. However, the quality of life in prison can make this punishment harsher. This creates a variation in the severity of punishment which is not legislated and may differ from society's taste for penalties. Indicators of in prison violence and conflicts seem to be appropriate proxy variables for prison conditions. Using indicators of in prison violent behavior, we use an exogenous source in education participation in educational programs in order to asses the effect of education on such measures of conflict. Applying instrumental variables techniques to census data for Argentine prisons, we find that educational programs significantly reduce indicators of property damages in prison. Such reductions amounts to a 60 percent decrease relative to the mean level of property damages.

Utilizamos el método de diferencias-en-diferencia (DD) para estimar el impacto sobre la tasa de homicidio del toque de queda para menores (TQM) aplicado (en 2012) en algunas comunas de Cali (Colombia), una de las ciudades más violentas del mundo. Encontramos que la política no causó un efecto negativo sobre la tasa de homicidio, en promedio, algo que fue contrario al objetivo de la política. Este resultado es robusto para diferentes especificaciones muestrales definidas para captar efectos locales —continuos (spillovers) o discontinuos— y sesgos en el diseño de la política. Estudiamos el DD con efectos heterogéneos y encontramos, para algunas especificaciones, que la política del TQM en barrios con estrato socioeconómico alto causó una reducción en la tasa de homicidio, aunque el efecto neto promedio de la política en zonas con y sin estos atributos no fue diferente de cero. Evidenciamos que el TQM neutralizó el efecto de otras intervenciones públicas complementarias. Racionalizamos los resultados desde la teoría económica del crimen, donde discutimos acerca de los posibles incentivos que una política como el TQM puede generar para delincuentes y no delincuentes, lo cual explica algunas de las fallas de la política en su diseño.