Facultad de Economía

Fecha: 15/10/2020, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Pablo Lavado (Universidad del Pacifico)

Autor: Lavado, Pablo

Financial knowledge is critical for making sound decisions that foster financial health and protect consumers from predation. A widely-used tool for building this capability is financial education. Yet evidence suggests that conventional approaches which teach concepts in classroom-style settings are ineffective and expensive at scale, especially for lower-income users. More recent findings indicate that customizing financial education to the needs, interests, and location of participants may increase impact, though doing so in a cost-effective and scalable way remains challenging. This randomized evaluation of a tablet-based financial education program with mostly female recipients of a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Colombia offers evidence for how to design and scale an effective digital-based financial education program. Results indicate that the LISTA Initiative had significant positive impacts on financial knowledge, attitudes, practices, and performance, increasing for poorer, less educated, and more rural populations, with users exhibiting increased financial health over two years later. Critical mechanisms included well-designed content and a social learning component. Yet the longer-term impact on formal financial inclusion was limited, suggesting the possible benefits of combining supply-side solutions with financial education interventions.

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Fecha: 22/10/2020, 08:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Gonzague Vannoorenberghe (UC Louvain)

Autor: Vannoorenberghe, Gonzague

We consider a trade model where countries set standards to solve the externalities associated with the consumption of goods. Countries differ in their regulatory preferences over these externalities and choose different standards under autarky. When opening to trade, countries can stick to their standard or adjust it to reflect the preferences of other countries. Benefits accrue if the gains arising from technological efficiency outweigh their asymmetric concerns over these externalities and countries with similar views about externalities trade more in equilibrium. In this setup, the purpose of a trade agreement is the coordination of countries on their standards (harmonization). In the presence of highly-dispersed regulatory preferences, the gains from a multilateral trade policy are small, which leads to the emergence of trade blocs. The recent evolution from multilateral trade liberalization to the formation of trade blocs is in line with a world where consumption externalities become more prevalent.

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Fecha: 29/10/2020, 08:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Arlen Guarin (UC Berkeley)

Autor: Guarin, Arlen

A random assignment of recently graduated physicians to their first job— through a nationwide public service program in Colombia — provides a test for effect of being treated by a more skilled physician on birth outcomes. Using administrative data from the program, Vital Statistics Records and individual records from the mandatory field-specific college graduation exams, we find that more-skilled physicians improve health at birth. An increase of one-standard-deviation in our measure of skills causes a 7.4 percent reduction in the incidence of low birthweight, a 12.7 percent reduction in the incidence of prematurity, and an 18.3 percent decrease in the probability of low APGAR scores. We provide evidence that these effects are concentrated among hospitals with high pre-experiment incidence of LBW and hospitals with strong financial health, and mothers who spent their entire gestational period with the new physicians. The evidence suggests that the program fostered health at birth in depressed urban and rural populations with difficult access to health services.

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Fecha: 05/11/2020, 08:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Joseph Vecci (U of Gothenburg)

Autor: Vecci, Joseph

Farmers, who make up the majority of poor and extreme poor in developing countries are very vulnerable to climate change. It is therefore important that they adapt their behaviour in order to become climate resilient. In this paper we investigate potential psychological impediments that make it difficult for farmers to change behaviour. In particular, this paper evaluates the impact of a multi-pronged psychological intervention that targets locus of control--an individual’s belief in their own ability to influence their outcomes-- and studies it effect on aspirations and the adoption of climate smart technologies. We use a sample of 2100 farmers from 200 villages in Odisha India. We find that at baseline, the majority of farmers do not believe they can influence their own outcomes or improve their standing by changing their behaviour. Our intervention, which targets multiple aspects of locus of control has mixed results on aspirations and decision making including the adoption of new stress resistant varieties or the take up of agricultural insurance.

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Fecha: 12/11/2020, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Alvaro Riascos (Universidad de los Andes)

Autor: Riascos , Alvaro

In this paper we address the accuracy vs. fairness trade-off in state of the art machine learning algorithms for crime prediction. We propose a novel conditional GANs architecture for crime (robberies) prediction in Bogota, capital city of Colombia. The model uses several layers of ConvLSTM neural nets in both the generative and the discriminatory networks. We further condition on past crime intensity maps, weekdays, and holidays. The trained network is able to capture spatio-temporal patterns and outperforms state-of-the-art predictive models such as spatio-temporal Poisson point process, as well as other models trained with the same dataset. Model’s accuracy reaches an area under the Hit Rate – Percentage Area Covered by Hotspots curve of 0.86. However, our predictions suggest that there is a potential bias with heterogeneous effects on vulnerable populations. We address the fairness consequence of this model in low income vs. high income residents by estimating a calibration test conditional to these protected variables. Finally, we introduce a fairness – accuracy balancing technique that quantifies the trade-offs between accuracy and fairness in this type of models. This technique notably reduces bias with a marginal effect on accuracy. The previous model addresses the accuracy vs. fairness trade-off when the protected variable is low income vs. high income populations. However, this distinction is quite artificial in our data set since we use a proxy of income based on administrative data records. Therefore, we consider a data driven urban characterization based on city images that better reflect the living, socioeconomic and environmental conditions of the city. To do this we use state-of-the-art crime prediction models of spatio-temporal clustering including environmental covariates extracted through convolutional networks from street-level images. Our model using image features as covariates outperforms a standard model of self-exciting point process and it’s well calibrated, even before we try to fix it using ex post Platt scaling.

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Fecha: 19/11/2020, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Anna Bindler (U of Cologne)

Autor: Bindler, Anna

This paper evaluates the effect on crime of creating a fundamental modern-day institution: centralized professional police forces tasked with preventing crime. We study the 1829 formation of the London Metropolitan Police – the first professional force worldwide. Using newly digitized and geocoded crime and police data together with difference-in-differences and pre-post designs, we find evidence of a significant reduction in violent crimes (despite the possibility of off-setting increases in clearance and reporting rates). In contrast, a reduction in property crime is not visible.

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Fecha: 26/11/2020, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Luis Baldomero-Quintana (William & Mary)

Autor: Baldomero-Quintana, Luis

This paper provides evidence that domestic trade costs are a source of national comparative advantage. I build a model of international trade and internal geography that considers both international shipping routes and input-output linkages. I use the model to simulate how a large infrastructure project, Ruta del Sol, affects the specialization of Colombia, a country whose exports are highly concentrated in the mining sector. This road improves access to global markets for both mining and manufacturing regions. To quantify the model and estimate its parameters, I use customs administrative records, a transportation survey, and geospatial data generated from both physical and digital road maps. My results indicate that the road project shifts the comparative advantage of Colombia away from mining, and towards manufacturing. Lastly, I show that the change in comparative advantage is larger when industry linkages are considered because access to tradable intermediate inputs benefits the manufacturing sector more than the mining sector. The results demonstrate that national comparative advantage is shaped materially by domestic trade costs, beyond the elements typically analyzed in the literature such as factor endowments, technology and institutions.

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Fecha: 18/03/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Nelson Ruiz (URosario/Oxford)

Autor: Ruiz, Nelson

Co-autor:  Miguel Rueda (Emory)

What motivates citizens to donate to a political campaign? The literature has characterized donors as those who wish to receive a direct benefit from an elected official or as citizens who just want to express their affinity for a candidate through a donation. We argue that, in a context of weak parties and term limits, donation patterns over time should differ for both types of donors. Using a close election regression discontinuity design in a sample of Colombian municipalities, we find that donating to the winner of the mayoral race significantly reduces the probability of donating in the next election. Consistent with our theory, such an effect is larger for family members---a group of donors with strong expressive motivations---than for private donors. Moreover, unlike family member donors, private donors are more likely to receive public contracts when donating to an election winner and more likely  to donate in the next election after receiving a public contract.

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