Research
Own Archive - Banco de la República
Selected Publications
Where Did the Global Elite Go to School?
Salas, R. and K. Young. (2024). Global Networks, Link to Data
We examine the educational backgrounds of the global elite, using new data on a diversity of organizational leadership roles as well as the population of the super-rich across the world. Four trends emerge when examining the university education of the global elite. First, we find a small number of globally prestigious universities to take on super prominent roles, suggesting a strongly hierarchical distribution of credentials among the global elite. Second, we find a consistent and unique place for Harvard University within this system. Third, we find evidence for a significant yet variable ‘home-bias’ in the education of the global elite. This is moderated by the fourth regularity, the hegemony of Anglo-American credentials. These four global regularities can enhance ongoing research on global elite populations. Our findings are robust to both the removal of all American elites in the sample, to dynamic stratified sampling of the network boundary and to disaggregating the sample into different elite roles. The analysis of this article is the first of its kind to offer a large-scale descriptive mapping of central tendencies in global elite university education.
Presented in SASE Rio de Janeiro 2023
Press: Forbes, BIG THINK, SciencesPo, Money.com
Environmental justice beyond race: Skin tone and exposure to air pollution
Aguilar, S; Cárdenas, J. C.; and R. Salas. (2025) PNAS.
Recent research, focused mostly on the United States and Western Europe, shows that marginalized communities often face greater environmental degradation. However, the ethnoracial categories used in these studies may not fully capture environmental inequality in the Global South. Moving beyond conventional ethnoracial variables, this study presents findings exploring the link between skin tone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure in Colombia. By matching household geolocations from a large-scale longitudinal survey with satellite-based PM2.5 estimates, we find that skin tone predicts both initial pollution exposure levels and their changes over time. Although average exposure levels remained stable during our study period, the environmental justice (EJ) landscape in Colombia contemporaneously underwent a complete transformation. In 2010, lighter-skinned individuals faced higher PM2.5 exposure, but darker-skinned individuals experienced steeper increases in the following years. By 2016, the EJ gap had reversed, with people with the darkest skin tones exposed to PM2.5 levels nearly one SD higher than those faced by people with the lightest skin tones. These patterns remain robust when controlling for a comprehensive set of theoretically relevant covariates, including ethnoracial self-identification and income. Disproportionate exposure to pollution from fires partially explains the observed disparities. Decomposition analysis shows that this variable, local collective action, and economic marginalization account for a sizeable share of the EJ gap. However, one-third of the gap remains unexplained by observable characteristics. With climate change intensifying fire incidence, the disproportionate disease burdens that vulnerable groups face might deepen unless policy measures are taken to reverse this trend.
Press: El Espectador, El Tiempo
This paper examines the evolution of the regional and educational backgrounds of Banco de la República’s board members from 1923 to 2023, showing that governance shifts did not necessarily alter social power and regional influence. It challenges the literature’s focus on central banks in high-income economies after the 1950s by offering insights into the dynamics of a central bank in a developing country. Using a prosopographic analysis of board members, this research draws on archival data to trace the board’s shifting composition over a century. The findings reveal a fluctuating yet persistent dominance of board members from Bogotá and the coffee region, with many attending Catholic high schools. There was a shift from public to private university graduates, with the leading alma maters changing from Universidad de Antioquia and Universidad Nacional to Universidad Javeriana and then to Universidad de los Andes. Changes in qualifications for board membership—from business, law, and engineering expertise to advanced degrees from Anglo-Saxon universities—reflect broader trends in social power and central bank governance in developing economies.
Presented at IEA World Congress, Medellín, 2023, II Colombian Economic and Entrepreneurial History, Cartagena, 2023
Birthplace of the Board Members, 1923-2023
Own calculations, proprietary datasets
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
-
This chapter contributes to the analysis of economic ideas in Colombia by narrating the life histories of the board members of the Banco de la República across the different governance structures during the first century of the bank. The biographical dataset for this study uses data from the board members’ public CVs, press and other secondary sources, minutes of the board meetings from 1923 to 1991, and extracts from the Revista del Banco de la República, an institutional journal that has circulated monthly without interruption since 1927.
-
This chapter shows the slow incorporation of women in economic public debates and decision-making in the 20th century. Following Goldins’s (2006) analysis, concrete and visible legislation and inclusive actions marked an evolutionary path. Women’s particular experiences about their perceptions made a revolutionary path. Nevertheless, only 36 women occupied top economic positions in the public sector and academia during the century. Presented ALAHPE, Montevideo, 2022; ASSA, San Antonio, 2024.
-
This study examines the evolution of the composition of the boards of the central banks from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru throughout the 20th century. Although the initial boards of those central banks were similar, they included representatives from different institutions, such as labor unions, bankers, business associations, and governments. Over eighty years, governments implemented several reforms that changed the composition of the boards, increasing the weight of business associations, while rapidly decreasing the participation of labor unions and bankers. In the 1960s and 1970s, government representatives took over the boards until the independence reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite facing political turmoil and undergoing several restructurings, these five “Kemmerer” central banks evolved in parallel up to the new century.
-
Over the last twenty years, access to higher education has grown extraordinarily in Latin America. Higher education systems have been challenged to improve their efficiency while strengthening quality assurance processes. In Colombia, the government and the researchers developed models to assess the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Nevertheless, the current scholarship does not have a model that allows the system to measure multiple efficiencies in a diverse environment. In this study, we address the challenge of evaluating the efficiency of HEIs taking into account different goals of the Colombian education system. To this aim, we extend a cross-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to evaluate the efficiency of Colombian HEIs in the presence of flexible measures. While some HEIs are efficient in terms of teaching or employment, others are efficient in terms of research. Therefore, the model suggests broader policies to achieve the efficiency of the institutions under multiple goals.
-
In 2015, as members and advisors of the Ministry of Education of Colombia, the authors developed an academic ranking with a multidimensional approach (MIDE), with the objective of measuring the quality performance of higher education institutions. Throughout the course of the design and implementation of the model, they had to overcome different challenges, from issues of information and choice of indicators to the actual process of disclosure to stakeholders. In this article, they present five main challenges that they faced and the solutions they adopted for the design and implementation of the ranking.
-
This paper analyzes the gender wage gap among rural-urban migrant in 13 cities and their metropolitan areas in Colombia. In particular, it is demonstrated that the difference between male and female wages is wider when the comparison is made exclusively with rural-born women. This suggests that wages paid to rural women are the consequence of a double penalty, one for being a woman and another one for coming from a rural district. An additional observation in the article is obtained from taking a centile approach, in which it is observed that the gender wage gap is not uniform across population income with higher differentials at the bottom.
Contact me for an English version.
WORKING PAPERS
[ES] Salas, R; Sanabria-Pulido, P; Rodríguez, C; and P. Torres. (2022). Mérito, representatividad, y asimetrías en nombramientos de altos funcionarios públicos en Colombia 1991-2021. Documentos de Trabajo Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo. No 91.
Desde la Constitución de 1991 Colombia ha tenido seis presidentes y 238 personas al frente de los ministerios. En este documento, a partir del análisis de las hojas de vida de los ministros y ministras en estas tres décadas, analizamos diferentes aspectos de representatividad y asimetría en la conformación de los altos cargos de dirección de la administración pública colombiana. Para tal fin recolectamos trayectorias profesionales y codificamos diversos aspectos sociodemográficos, profesionales y laborales que nos ayudaron a caracterizar el alto ejecutivo colombiano de la Colombia moderna. Nuestro análisis indica que la representación en los gabinetes en Colombia es asimétrica para diferentes variables. El sexo, el lugar de nacimiento, los estudios de pregrado, el lugar de posgrado y la vida profesional definen trayectorias y una mayor probabilidad de pertenecer a ciertos grupos en el camino hacia los altos cargos del sector público en Colombia. La participación de las mujeres incrementó, pero estas aún están subrepresentadas y se observa repetición en las mismas carteras. El 60 % de los ministros y ministras nacieron en cinco ciudades con una prevalencia sustancial de la capital del país. El lugar de estudios de pregrado y posgrado resulta determinante, tres de cada cinco personas estudiaron en Bogotá y una de cada cinco en el exterior. Los datos revelan importantes líneas de política sobre las cuales el sector público colombiano debe trabajar para mejorar la combinación de mérito y representatividad requerida en la alta dirección colombiana.
Contact me for the English version.
Feminization of the Colombian Portfolio, 1991-2023
Own calculations, proprietary dataset
WORK IN PROGRESS
With Javier Corrales. Intentional Polarization. Using extreme policies and discourse to promote democratic backsliding. Presented in APSA 2024, Philadelphia. R&R Democratization.
With Alejandra Rodas, Mauricio Astudillo, and Pablo Sanabria. It´s more than political adjustments: When cabinet reshuffles affect government performance. Presented at SECOPA 2023, Atlanta; APPAM 2023, Atlanta.
Why do central bankers promote cultural institutions? National heritage meets economic policy: Six events in the history of the Banco de la República. Presented at HES 2024, Santiago; ASE 2024, Boston. Here is a Research Seminar regarding this topic [In Spanish].
With Kevin Young and Izaura Solipa. Race and Differentiated Elite Functions in International Political Economy.
With Juan Carlos Acosta and Rebeca Gómez Betancourt. Scientization and the Banco de la República, from its foundation to the 2000s. Presented at HES 2023, Vancouver; ALAHPE 2023, Medellín.
Affinity vs. Stability: What weighs more on the appointment of Central Bankers?
With Kevin Young. Minority Status and Central Bank leadership. Evidence from the Federal Reserve and the Banco de la República.
With Kevin Young and Jorge Quesada Velazco. Who is to Blame for inflation? Randomized Experiments around the United States midterm elections in 2022.