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 key trends emerge within the university education of the global elite. First, we find a super prominent position of a small number of elite universities with a strongly hierarchical distribution of credentials. Second, we find a consistent and unique place for Harvard University within this system. Third we find evidence for a persistent yet variable ‘home-bias’ in the education of the global elite, which is moderated by a fourth regularity, thehegemony of Anglo-American credentials. 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 to different elite roles.

Presented in SASE Rio de Janeiro 2023

Press: Forbes, BIG THINK, SciencesPo

Link to paper, Link to Data,

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.

Link to Routledge Site

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.

Link to Routledge Site

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.

Link to paper

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.

Link to paper

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.

Link to paper

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.

Link to paper

Contact me for an English version.