Facultad de Economía

Fecha: 25/03/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Francesco Bogliacino

Autor: Bogliacino, Francesco

Co-autor: Christian Posso y Juanita Villaveces

We estimate the causal effect of the Colombian land restitution program on access to microcredit for agriculture. We use the timing of the restitution as the source of identification in an event study approach. Using administrative data from the program and all formal credit transactions, we show a significant increase in access to agricultural microcredit. The effects are stronger two years after the restitution when individuals acquire full property rights. Impacts are mainly driven by loans through the Agrarian Bank and supported by guarantees from the Agricultural Guarantee Fund, which are institutions specifically designed to promote investment in agriculture.

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Fecha: 08/04/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Samuel Lordemus

Autor: Lordemus, Samuel

Co-autor:  
Noemi Kreif -Rodrigo Moreno-Serra

How do government counterinsurgency efforts affect local public financing during civil conflicts? We investigate this question in the context of the protracted conflict in Colombia. Using data on antinarcotics operations and health transfers from the central government to municipal governments, we employ both panel estimations and instrumental variables to address concerns of endogeneity and omitted variables. We find no clear evidence that counterinsurgency operations causally affect health transfers to municipalities. However, we find indicative evidence that counterinsurgency operations undertaken in a given year increase the intensity of non-state violence in the following year. Our findings suggest that armed counterinsurgency interventions by the State should be accompanied by renewed measures to support public healthcare financing for the affected local populations; otherwise, such interventions risk exacerbating the negative consequences of conflict exposure on population health.

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Fecha: 15/04/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Manuel Barron (Universidad del Pacifico)

Autor: Barron, Manuel

This paper studies how the high school's identity affects students' sorting in the higher education market in Peru, a country without standardized tests at the end of high school. We first examine whether providing low-income students with mechanisms to signal their ability improves their higher education outcomes. Our results show that graduating from an elite public high school increases higher-education enrollment and quality even without noticeable gains in human capital among marginally admitted students. Likewise, obtaining the IB diploma by the minimum margin increases enrollment and admissions at top private institutions. These effects are more pronounced on a special admissions mode, under which  universities waive admission tests to selected applicants. We also estimate value-added models on higher education outcomes and find consistent evidence with top private institutions statistically discriminating based on sending high schools.

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Fecha: 29/04/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Alex Solis

Autor: Solis, Alex

This paper estimates the effects of university loans and grants availability on educational and labor market outcomes, examining the eligibility cutoffs in the Chilean financial aid system that enable a regression discontinuity design. Results show that access to university loans increases degree completion among women, and creates negative effects on labor experience and earnings that revert over time. Also, loans allow students to choose higher-quality programs in fields of study with higher earning prospects. In the long run, women experience positive and significant earnings impact. In contrast, equivalent access to grants does not affect degree completion or labor market outcomes to the extent observed for loans. The limited sensitivity to a reduction in tuition costs observed at the grant cutoff, and the higher effects among students from poorer backgrounds suggest that the effects are driven by credit constraints.

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Fecha: 04/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Eduardo Ferraz (URosario)

Autor: Ferraz, Eduardo

This paper studies the causal effect of stronger legislative support for the mayor on governance and on the interplay between executive and legislative. First, we propose a microfounded way to define whether a candidate to the city council has won his seat by a slim margin. Then, we use this method to determine elections in Brazil in which the mayors' coalition won or lost a seat in the city council by a slim margin. We find that having stronger support gives mayors more flexibility, increases the probability of mayors' reelection, and reduces corruption. These effects are heterogeneous on whether the mayor can be reelected. Our results are compatible with a political tit-for-tat in which legislative members facilitate rent extraction in exchange of a larger share of the rents.

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Fecha: 13/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Yasir Khan (Haas Business School-UC Berkeley)

Autor: Khan, Yasir

This paper studies whether public sector organizations can strengthen the mission motivation of their workers and get them to exert effort on the job. I implement a field experiment in partnership with the Department of Health in Pakistan, where I randomly emphasize the public health mission to community health workers, provide performance-linked financial incentives, or do both. The mission treatment improves worker performance across incentivized (home visits) and non-incentivized tasks, while financial incentives improve performance only on the incentivized task. Financial incentives also become less effective at increasing home visits when combined with the mission treatment. Finally, the mission treatment improves downstream child health outcomes---there is a lower prevalence of diarrhoea and higher vaccination rates. These results highlight that promoting an organization's mission can be a powerful motivator for public workers, especially in weakly institutionalized environments.

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Fecha: 20/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Nathaniel Lane (Oxford)

Autor: Lane, Nathaniel

Civil society is essential to governance, especially where laws and authority are weak. We study how a core strategy of international civil society groups - informing and publicizing human rights abuses - impacts those tied to abuse. Our study focuses on a major trend at the center of on-going international media campaigns: the assassination of civil society activists involved in mining activity. Collecting and coding 20 years of data on assassination events, we use Event Study Methodology to study how publicity of these events impact the asset prices of firms associated with abuse. We show that publicizing abuses has a significant impact on multinationals. Firm's associated with an assassination have large, negative abnormal returns following the event. We calculate a median loss in market capitalisation of over 100 million USD, ten days following violence. We highlight the role of media publicity in our results. We show negative returns from assassinations are stronger during periods of low media pressure, versus when they coincide with competing newsworthy events. As well, we argue our results are driven by events where companies are explicitly named in media publicity, using a set of placebo events where no firms were identified by news coverage. Furthermore, we reject that our results are driven by other forms of unrest and conflict. Last, we show activist assassinations are positively related to the royalties paid by firms to domestic governments.

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Fecha: 27/05/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Martin Williams

Autor: Williams, Martin

Organizational culture is an important driver of organizational performance, but there is little evidence on how to improve it. We partnered with Ghana’s Civil Service to design a training module geared towards such culture change and delivered it to mid-level bureaucrats at scale on a randomized basis in two arms. The individual-focused, classroom-style training arm significantly improved organizational culture 6-18 months post-training. However, the team-focused arm had no impact. Qualitative evidence suggests that managers’ presence inhibited discussion and may have reinforced existing team culture. Simple and scalable interventions can thus improve organizational culture, but their design matters.

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