Reparations as Development? Evidence from Victims of the Colombian Armed Conflict

Abstract

Our study is the first to investigate the effects of reparations for victims of gross human rights violations. In Colombia, victims of forced displacement, homicide, and other atrocities during the conflict received a lump-sum payment equal to three times their annual household income. Using novel linked administrative microdata and event studies, we show that reparations help victims rebuild their lives and significantly improve their well-being and that of their children. Specifically, reparations promote investment in physical and human capital, leading to enhanced living and health conditions, better educational outcomes, and increased asset-building and entrepreneurship, despite slightly discouraging labor supply.

Luck of the Draw: The Causal Effect of Physicians on Birth Outcomes

“…The SSO assignment has implications for both the professionals who are selected randomly and the communities that get assigned doctors with different qualities. The latter are the focus of the present paper; the implications for the professionals are studied in Guarin, Posso, Saravia, and Tamayo (2023). In this paper, we use the exogenous rule of assignment to compare the birth outcomes of patients in LHCs that were assigned professionals with different medical skills but are otherwise comparable.…”

“…This high heterogeneity plays in our favor, because it allows us to compare the outcomes of patients who were randomly exposed to physicians with very different baseline knowledge and skills. 26 Using the scores and demographic characteristics from the SABER PRO, Guarin et al (2023) showed that the SSO lotteries in our sample are well balanced between SSO-assigned physicians and those who were randomly exempt. They use individual regressions correlating physicians' characteristics and lottery status as well as machine learning techniques and a classification permutation test to provide evidence of equality of multivariate distributions between treatment and control groups (Gagnon-Bartsch, Shem-Tov, et al, 2019) and the randomness of the selection into the program in general.…”