While there is a large literature on how conflict affects entrepreneurship and investment, little is known about how the end of a conflict affects businesses and firms’ creation. The direction of the effect is not obvious as conflicts bequest poverty and inequality –reducing the returns of investment–and the territorial vacuum of power inherent to most post-conflict situations may trigger new violent cycles. Studying Colombia’s recent peace agreement and using a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we document that dynamics of entrepreneurship in traditionally violent areas closely mapped the politics that surrounded the peace agreement. When the agreement was imminent after a 5-decade conflict and violence had plummeted, local investors from all economic sectors established new firms and created jobs. Instead, when the agreement was rejected by a tiny vote margin in a referendum and the party that promoted this rejection raised to power, the rate of firms’ creation rapidly reversed.
ResumenEste artículo evalúa uno de los componentes fundamentales de la política más icónica del gobierno de Álvaro Uribe: la Seguridad Democrática. En particular, se evalúa el impacto sobre la intensidad del conflicto armado de los despliegues y refuerzos de policía en municipios con poca o nula presencia policial antes de agosto de 2002. Para ello se utiliza el estimador de diferencia en diferencias, que compara el cambio en la dinámica del conflicto una vez asignados los nuevos efectivos a los municipios receptores, relativo al cambio ocurrido simultáneamente en los municipios no receptores. Nuestros resultados, que son robustos a estimar los modelos sobre una muestra emparejada, sugieren Revista Desarrollo y Sociedad 69I semestre 2012 * Se agradecen los comentarios de Ximena Peña y dos evaluadores anónimos, y la colaboración de Mauricio Vela y Giselle Vesga. Esta investigación fue financiada por la Universidad del Rosario, por medio del Proyecto FIUR DVG-086.
the fall of 2009, where J. Vargas is a Professor of Economics. All articles in this special issue deal with the case of Colombia, a country that since its independence some 200 years ago might well be said never to have known a period of 'nonconflict,' certainly not in the past 50 or 60 years during which politically and criminally motivated violence has wracked city and countryside alike.All articles have been peer-reviewed, first at a day-long workshop with formal presentations, discussants, and debates held at the Universidad del Rosario on 16 November 2010, and for which we gratefully acknowledge and thank the sponsors at Rosario, and then via anonymous external peer review as well. Although specific to Colombia in their application, all articles carry messages that are relevant beyond Colombia's specific case. This is by design: we wished not only to highlight the professional abilities of Colombian economists, but more importantly to pick topics, issues, ideas, and methods that would be relevant and could be adopted elsewhere.The article by Mauricio Rodriguez and Nancy Daza -'Determinants of Civil Conflict in Colombia: How Robust are They?'examines the statistical stability of coefficient estimates when data sets, conflict measures, or estimation methods are varied. Using municipal-level data, they find that signs and statistical significance of the marginal effects of the explanatory variables change in response to variations in any of the three dimensions and that only few robust explanatory variables can be identified. They suggest that their results thus may place specific findings and interpretations of other published papers in doubt. Consequently, they recommend that researchers should perhaps routinely apply varied data, measures, and methods in order to examine the robustness of putative findings.A second article, by Paola Palacios -'Forced Displacement: Legal versus Illegal Crops'develops a formal model to study the differential patterns of forced migration that the establishment of palm oil plantations and of coca crops generate in regions in Colombia. Allowing for crop production to differ in labor intensity, she argues that less laborintensive crops make it more likely that potential producers (who are allied with an armed group) try to evict peasants instead of hiring them. By doing so, the author provides an interesting explanation of the fact that the establishment of (legal) palm oil plantations generates more forced migration than the introduction of (illegal) coca crops in Colombia. This is an important article with potentially wide applicability as crop substitution pro-
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