Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Colombian labour market: Disentangling the effect of sector-specific mobility restrictions.

We assess the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and particularly the sector-specific mobility restrictions on the Colombian labour market. We exploit the sectoral and temporal variation of the restriction policies to identify their effect. Mobility restrictions significantly reduced employment, accounting for approximately a quarter of the total job loss between February and April of 2020. The remaining three quarters of the job losses could be attributed to the disease's regional patterns and other epidemiological and economic factors affecting the whole country. Therefore, we should expect important employment losses even in the absence of such restrictions. We also assess the effect of restrictions on the intensive margin, finding negative, although smaller effects on the number of hours worked and wages. Most of the employment effect is driven by salaried workers, while self-employment was more responsive to the disease spread. Finally, we find that women are disproportionally affected: mobility restrictions account for a third of the recent increase of the gender gap in salaried employment.

Effets de la pandémie de COVID­19 sur le marché du travail colombien : analyse des répercussions liées aux restrictions de mobilité par secteur. Dans cet article, nous évaluons les répercussions de la pandémie de COVID­19, et notamment des restrictions en matière de mobilité propres à chaque secteur, sur le marché du travail colombien. Nous nous appuyons sur les variations temporelles et sectorielles des politiques de restriction pour déterminer leurs effets. Les restrictions de mobilité ont sensiblement détérioré l'emploi en détruisant environ un quart du nombre total d'emplois supprimés entre février et avril 2020, les trois­quarts restants pouvant être imputés aux caractéristiques régionales de la pandémie ainsi qu'à d'autres facteurs épidémiologiques et économiques touchant l'ensemble du pays. Nous pourrions donc nous attendre à d'importantes destructions d'emplois, même en l'absence de telles restrictions. Nous évaluons également les effets des restrictions à la marge intensive, et nous constatons des effets négatifs mais plus faibles sur le nombre d'heures travaillées ainsi que sur les salaires. Les effets de ces restrictions sur l'emploi sont motivés en grande partie par les travailleurs salariés, les travailleurs indépendants se montrant plus réactifs face à la propagation de la maladie. Enfin, nous constatons que les femmes sont touchées de façon disproportionnée, les restrictions de mobilité comptant pour un tiers de l'accentuation récente de l'écart hommes­femmes en matière d'emploi salarié.

Obesity and health-related decisions: An empirical model of the determinants of weight status across the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.

We estimate a structural dynamic model of the determinants of obesity. In addition to including many of the well-recognized endogenous factors mentioned in the literature as obesity determinants, we also model the individual's residential location as a choice variable, which is the main contribution of this paper to the literature. This allows us to control for an individual's self-selection into communities that possess the types of amenities in the built environment, which in turn affect their obesity-related behaviors such as physical activity (PA) and fast food consumption. We specify reduced form equations for a set of endogenous demand decisions, together with an obesity structural equation. The whole system of equations is jointly estimated by a semi-parametric full information log-likelihood method that allows for a general pattern of correlation in the errors across equations. Our model predicts a reduction in adult obesity of 7 percentage points as a result of a continued high level PA from adolescence into adulthood; a reduction of 0.7 (3) percentage points in adult obesity as a result of one standard deviation reduction in weekly fast food consumption for women (men); and a reduction of 0.02 (0.05) in adult obesity as a result of one standard deviation change in several neighborhood amenities for women (men). Another key finding is that controlling for residential self-selection has substantive implications. To our knowledge, this has not been yet documented within a full information maximum likelihood framework.