Browsing by Autor "Santiago Tobón"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

Building Trust in State Actors: A Multi-Site Experiment with the Colombian National Police
(2023) Verónica Abril; Ervyn Norza; Santiago M. Perez‐Vincent; Santiago Tobón; Michael Weintraub
Low trust in state actors constrains state capacity, hindering growth and development. This paper studies how state actors can build public trust by improving the quality of their interactions with citizens. We first propose a mechanism linking improved interactions to public trust, defined as the belief that the state actor implements welfare-enhancing policies. Improved interactions lower the expected burden of engaging with the state actor, promoting compliance. This motivates citizens to believe compliance is worthwhile, increasing trust in the state actor. We then empirically assess the relationship between the quality of interactions and public trust in the Colombian National Police. We experimentally evaluate an intervention that retrains officers across five major cities in procedural justice principles such as fairness and respect while intensifying police-citizen interactions. The intervention was purposefully designed to be low-cost in terms of financial and human resources. We find that the intervention improved public trust, willingness-to-pay for police services, and citizens perceptions of fair treatment, suggesting low-cost interventions can help build trust between police and communities. We also find a limited impact on officers trust in citizens and their beliefs about citizens public trust, implying that institutional culture change may require more profound efforts.
Building Trust in the Police: Evidence from a Multi-Site Experiment in Colombia
(RELX Group (Netherlands), 2025) Santiago Tobón; Verónica Abril; Ervyn Norza Céspedes; Santiago M. Perez‐Vincent; Michael Weintraub
Crises conducting stakeholder salience: shifts in the evolution of private universities’ governance in Latin America
(Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021) María Alejandra González-Pérez; Miguel Córdova; Michel Hermans; Karla María Nava Aguirre; Fabiola Monje-Cueto; Santiago Mingo; Santiago Tobón; Carlos Rodríguez; Érica Salvaj; Dinorà Eliete Floriani
Purpose This study aims to build on embedded approaches to stakeholder management and examines how organizational decision-makers consider social responsibility toward proximal stakeholders in crises that encompass an entire system of stakeholder relationships. Design/methodology/approach Within a criterion-based sample of eight Latin American private universities, this paper develops in-depth exploratory case studies to examine the prioritization of stakeholders in higher education institutions’ decision-making during the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis. Findings Contrary to the notion that during crises organizations prioritize stakeholders that provide resources that are critical to survival, this study finds that in contextual crises stakeholder management is informed by social responsibility. In addition, the findings suggest that crises may be tipping points for changes toward mission-driven approaches to governance. Practical implications Acknowledging the roles of social responsibility and proximity in stakeholder management during contextual crises allows for more informed governance of organizations that face disruptions in their system of stakeholder relations. Originality/value This study contributes unique insights into the decision-maker’s prioritization of stakeholders during the COVID-19 crisis. The uncertainty associated with the emerging “new normal” allowed for an extreme test of socially embedded versus resource-oriented approaches to stakeholder management.
Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance
(2021) Christopher Blattman; Benjamin Lessing; Santiago Tobón; Gustavo Duncan
Criminal groups govern millions worldwide. Even in strong states, gangs resolve disputes and provide security. Why do these duopolies of coercion emerge? Often, gangs fill vacuums of official power, suggesting that increasing state presence should crowd out criminal governance. We show, however, that state and gang rule are sometimes complements. In particular, gangs could minimize seizures and arrests by keeping neighborhoods orderly and loyal. If true, increasing state presence could increase incentives for gang rule. In Medellín, Colombia, criminal leaders told us they rule to protect drug rents from police. We test gang responses to state presence using a geographic discontinuity. Internal border changes in 1987 assigned blocks to be closer or further from state security for three decades. Gangs exogenously closer to state presence developed more governance over time. They primarily did so in neighborhoods with the greatest potential drug rents. This suggests new strategies for countering criminal governance.
Statebuilding in the City: An Experiment in Civilian Alternatives to Policing
(2022) Christopher Blattman; Gustavo Duncan; Benjamin Lessing; Santiago Tobón
State penetration varies widely within cities, with well-governed areas abutting persistently neglected ones. Governments are seeking ways to improve penetration, local security, and state legitimacy. We experimentally evaluate a 20-month non-police intervention in Medellín, Colombia, that dramatically increased municipal personnel and agency attention to 40 neighborhoods. Despite the intensity, average impacts on security and perceived legitimacy were negligible. Prespecified subgroup analysis reveals important heterogeneity, however. Where state governance began relatively lower, impacts were null to negative, but in initially high-governance sectors, security and state legitimacy significantly improved. These divergent impacts apparently resulted from city staff and agencies systematically underdelivering in low-initial-governance sectors. Bureaucratic capacity and incentives to deliver often depend on baseline state engagement, trust, and accountability. This could result in increasing marginal returns to statebuilding, which in turn would lead to persistent "neglect traps"—political attention and investment where state presence is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.
The Rational Expectations Hypothesis: An assessment on its real world application
(EAFIT University, 2014) Santiago Tobón; Santiago Tobón
The Rational Expectations Hypothesis was first developed as a theoretical technique aimed at explaining agents’ behavior in a given environment -- In particular, it describes how the outcome of a given economic phenomenon depends to a certain degree on what agents expect to happen -- Subsequently, it was introduced into macroeconomic models as a way to explain the ineffectiveness of monetary policy -- Since then, most of these models have been based on the rational expectations assumption -- This paper assesses the real life application of this feature based on two arguments: the determination of an objective reality through beliefs and subjective expectations; and the exclusion of the evolution of human knowledge and innovation in macroeconomic models