Suchergebnisse

This dissertation explores three different but related economic issues in the country of Colombia. The first chapter determines the impacts of the prolonged civil conflict suffered in Colombia on its unemployment rate compared to other similar Latin American economies. The second chapter explores the effect of the presence of illegal leftist and rightist armed groups on municipal investments into education, health, infrastructure and environment. The third chapter determines the effect of the municipal location relative to a border, on the municipal investment decisions into wastewater management. Chapter I., co-authored with Alexander Alegría Castellanos PhD., assesses the impact of the Colombian conflict on the unemployment rate for the period 1995-2014. Calderon-Mejia and Ibañez (2016) assess the effects of forced displacement on the labor market, specifically on wages. Our study relies on their findings, and additionally explores the effect of the conflict on the unemployment rate in Colombia. To estimate this effect, we use a difference-in-differences regression analysis to establish the average treatment effect relative to similar countries. Similarly, we use the Synthetic control method to estimate the effect of the conflict on the unemployment rate. Using both methods, we find a higher unemployment rate in Colombia relative to a counterfactual formed by Latin American countries, after an increase in the intensity on the conflict in 1995 due to changes in the drug war strategy. We demonstrate the significance of our results using a placebo tests. Overall, our results identify the incidence of the violent conflict on the total unemployment rate. Chapter II. This study assesses the effects of leftist guerrilla groups and rightist paramilitary groups on investments made by the municipal governments in the country of Colombia between 2000 and 2010. Specifically, how the presence of illegal armed groups affects levels of municipal investments into education, health, infrastructure, environmental protection, ...

With respect to the climate change, and more generally to the energy problem, in the laboratories working on the subject, scientists contribute to clarify the situation and to help decision makers by yielding and updating factual physical informations, and also by modelling. This conceptual work is mainly done in the language of economics. This discipline, which appears therefore in the core of the reflecting process in action at present, is however rather peculiar is the sense that it uses mathematics in order to think social phenomena. It is on this methodological configuration that we hold a philosophical enquiry. Our analysis focuses on risks, incertitude and on the role of mathematics to represent them. It concludes on the importance of a certain type of modelization, investigation modelling, which reveals new significations. This study attempts to enlighten some part of the limit between mathematized knowledge, as economics, and interpretative meaning used in every day life and social and human sciences

Contributed articles in the Indian context

Interest in economic issues at Bologna goes back to the earliest period of University history. It is among law scholars that economic life became a subject for intellectual inquiry.