Marcela Ibanez

Sorting through affirmative action: Three field experiments in Colombia

The use of affirmative action policies to promote female employment remains debated. Do affirmative action policies attract female applicants, and does that come at the expense of deterring highly qualified male applicants? In three field experiments in Colombia, we compare job seekers who are informed of affirmative action selection criteria before they apply with those who are told after applying. We find that the gains in attracting female applicants far outweigh the losses in male applicants. Moreover, our results indicate that affirmative action does not decrease the quality of the top 15th percentile of the pool of applicants.

Environmental and Economic Impacts of Growing Certified Organic Coffee in Colombia

According to advocates, eco-certification can improve developing country farmers’ environmental and economic performance. However, these notional benefits can be undercut by self-selection: the tendency of relatively wealthy farmers already meeting eco-certification standards to disproportionately participate. Empirical evidence on this matter is scarce. Using original farm-level survey data along with matching and difference-in-differences matching models, we analyze the producer-level effects of organic coffee certification in southeast Colombia. We find that certification improves coffee growers’ environmental performance. It significantly reduces sewage disposal in the fields and increases the adoption of organic fertilizer. However, we are not able to discern economic benefits. The return on certified production is not significantly different from that on conventional production.

Conservation versus Equity: Can Payments for Environmental Services Achieve Both?

Based on a framed field experiment, we investigate the trade-off between conservation and equity in the use of payments for environmental services (PES). We compare the effects of two PES schemes that implicitly incorporate different distributive justice principles: a flat-rate payment per biophysical unit conserved and a redistributive payment based on the Rawls maxi-min distributional principle. The main findings indicate that the introduction of a redistributive scheme can function as a multipurpose instrument. Under the assumed condition that participants with lower endowments face higher opportunity costs of conservation, it realigns the income distribution in favor of low-endowed participants without compromising conservation outcomes. (JEL Q15, Q57)

Is the War on Drugs Working? Examining the Colombian Case Using Micro Data

Abstract The intense debate on the effectiveness of the war on drugs contrasts with the scarce quantitative evidence on its impacts on drug cultivation decisions by individual producers. Using panel data from an original survey of farmers living in coca-growing areas in Colombia, we evaluate the effectiveness of forced eradication policies implemented between 2000 and 2005. We find that one additional hectare eradicated decreases coca supply by 0.44 hectares, indicating that coca can only be eradicated at a very high cost. This suggests that alternative approaches are needed to reduce coca production.