Archivo en PDF (1.3 MB). Bogotá : Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, 2010

Does Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) have a positive effect on economic growth in recipient countries? The debate about the positive impact of FDI on economic growth remains open, and therefore the formulation of economic policy in developing regions such as Latin America and the Caribbean is still a dilemma between to adopting policies that support economic openness or implementing policies aimed at promoting the protection of domestic markets. However, in recent years Latin America has been leaning towards policies that promote FDI inflows so as to stimulate market growth and to increase the competitiveness in different branches of economic activity. From this argument, the following thesis investigates the impact of FDI on the growth of Latin American developing economies by presenting an econometric analysis through the application of an OLS pooled panel data analysis for 19 Latin American countries between 1980 and 2010. The result of the research aims to test the hypothesis that establishes a positive relation between FDI inflows and economic growth. To do so, the relation FDI-growth is examined by the use of different control variables related with macroeconomic stability, trade openness, political stability, per capita GDP, and secondary schooling. The results of this research reveal a positive effect of FDI on the economic growth rate of the countries taken in the sample of the study.

The aim of this article is to investigate the determinants of the foreign direct investment (FDI) in some European countries from 2003 to 2010. This period is interesting because it was characterized by huge investments of capital before 2008 and after this date a cooling of the economy due the subprime mortgage implosion. Panel Data of 23 European countries were analyzed among the several FDI macroeconomic triggers proposed by the UNCTAD in the United Nations Conference For Trade and Development report of 2012. Our empirical results are consistent with the objectives of the UNCTAD model. The FDI has become in a very important goal for all the countries because it has positive spillovers that act as boosters for the growing of their economies. Within the positive effects we highlight the transferring of technology to domestic firms, the creation of new and better jobs, the increasing in the number of tax payers and, besides, these investments are a clean source of income with the benefit of not assuming the risk linked to the debt. Consequently, the governments have the need and the duty to promote policies for attracting FDI. If we analyze the case of Europe, one can differentiate three groups of development and several kind of challenges, i.e., the high unemployment rates that some Mediterranean countries are facing, the adverse selection problem that hinders the credit flow across the productive value chain and the migration of the manufacturing to developing countries. Hence nowadays the understanding of the factors determining the FDI is a key issue to link the policy making with the potential investors.

This paper studies the hedging activities of 104 non-financial UK MNEs from 2005 to 2009 to examine their potential effect on the cost of equity. We use the Fama and French Three Factor Model to estimate the cost of equity and we collect detailed information on hedging and risk management activities directly from the annual reports. Although we evidence a negative relation between the cost of equity and hedging activities, we find that the cost of equity is not significantly affected by whether firms are hedgers or non-hedgers. We further use different subsamples and we are able to observe that: (i) size and leverage are important factors in the analysis of hedging and cost of equity, and (ii) the financial crisis plays an active role in the way firms understand and react towards unexpected volatility and risk. Finally we find that controlling for endogeneity of the hedging decision and for potential sample selection bias our results are more robust and are supporting evidence for the negative and significant relationship between hedging and cost of equity.

My dissertation proposes new ways to study decisions in the housing market with structural models that deliver a consistent connection between house values and rents, incorporating investment and consumption motives for housing consumption, and allowing for preference heterogeneity. The models also take into account the difficulty of measuring complete housing quality in estimation by treating it as latent. The dissertation includes applications where I analyze issues like the size of agglomeration benefits of larger cities (New York City vs Chicago), and the dynamics of rent and prices as a reaction to household financial and demographic conditions during the re- cent housing crisis (in Miami). I find that New York has relatively lower qualities of housing and higher prices than Chicago, which implies positive compensating variations required by households moving from the latter to the former; and that there was a disconnect between the rent and ownership markets that suggest that the crisis mainly affected the asset and not the real market, respectively. Also, I find that heterogeneity in tastes plays an important role in the behavior of households in the housing market. I also present models that introduce heterogeneity in tastes to analyze the interaction between households with different demographics. Going beyond a single type of household presents additional challenges for estimation and identification that are addressed. I define types as households with and without children, and asses the effect of the presence of children on how sensitive households are to changes in the market. I obtain the robust result that the presence of children reduces the sensitivity of demand for housing quality to changes in the market. Additionally, I also use machine learning clustering methods to categorize house- holds into different demographic types based on age, number of children and expenditure in the housing market. With these types, I per- form analyses that contrast the implied demands for housing quality in the different obtained clusters. The methods developed in the different chapters are of interest to policy makers and agents who want to follow the evolution of rental rates and prices at different levels of the quality distribution, as well as for those interested in making welfare evaluations of policies that affect local housing markets differently for households with different demographics. Also, they give insight on agglomeration benefits of larger cities and compensations required when moving a household from one area to another.

Conjunto de argumentos a partir de los cuales se busca aclarar el estado de la legislación sobre los tratados de Colombia con Venezuela en 1834. A lo largo del documento, que conserva la ortografía de la época, se explican los aspectos constitucionales en materia de relaciones internacionales que legislan el repartimento de la deuda externa, así como el nombramiento de representantes de cada uno de los paises involucrados.

Documento presentado por los apoderados de los acreedores extranjeros al Congreso de Colombia, en el que se manifiestan respecto a las distintas dificultades que existen para que la Nueva Granada pueda pagar la deuda externa.

Documento en el que se compilan los estudios de Tomás Quevedo Restrepo, respecto a la situación económica de los Estados Unidos de Colombia a fines del siglo XIX. El documento está dividido en tres partes: en la primera se habla de la crisis de la economía, en la segunda se comenta el proyecto de ley sobre la creación de un Banco Nacional encargado de la emisión de moneda en todo el territorio nacional y en la última se discute sobre las diversas dinámicas económicas y la forma como deben aplicarse para conseguir el equilibrio de esta disciplina.

El Banco de la República realiza un homenaje al líder político Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, asesinado el 9 de abril de 1948, al emitir y circular su imagen en la nueva versión del billete de mil pesos. La institución buscó inmortalizar a este icónico personaje de la historia nacional, por su comprometida orientada a disminuir la inequidad social y ser un defensor de los derechos de los trabajadores (especialmente por su denuncia y seguimiento a la Masacre de las Bananeras). En este documento se puede encontrar una breve biografía de Gaitán, la descripción del billete y las marcas de seguridad del mismo.

This thesis contributes to the existing literature on personality traits and economic preference parameters by analyzing the stability of some of the main traits and parameters. Specically, I investigate whether (1) they change as individuals age in the cross-section and by individual, and (2) whether they are affected by an individual's personal situation changes. I use data from a large Dutch household panel survey (DHS) that includes measures for two key economic preference parameters: Risk Aversion and Future Orientation. On personality traits, the dataset contains information on the “Big Five”, a set of five general traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) that are said to capture individual differences in personality, and Economic Locus of Control, a lower-level (i.e. more specic; narrower) trait that measures the extent to which an individual believes economic outcomes are a result of her own actions. My results using pooled cross-section analysis suggest that most preference parameters and personality traits are not stable over time and are changed by many of the events investigated; in particular, there is strong evidence that Big Five Openness is negatively affected by marriage and widowing. Using fixed effects and random effects methodologies on a sub-sample of the data, most of the changes attributed to the events are no longer signifficant but the coefficients of marriage and widowing on Openness remain signifcant of similar size. If personality is modeled as a unit root process and their differences over four years are regressed against event dummies and age group indicators, the effects that are statistically signiffcant reduce to only a few, and the evidence on age instability is also contested. Overall, the evidence suggest that the hypothesis of age stability for most personality traits can be rejected (with the exception of Locus of Control) and only Openness seems to be negatively affected by marriage and widowing.