Jorge Tamayo is an assistant professor of business administration in the Strategy Unit. He teaches the Strategy course in the MBA required curriculum.
Professor Tamayo is an applied microeconomist primarily interested in industrial organization and development economics. His research focuses on theoretical modeling and structural estimation of firm decision-making and productivity. Professor Tamayo examines the market responses to settings in which firms use price discrimination (i.e. subscriptions, or membership fees) for goods and services. His research also focuses on the ways in which managers contribute to the productivity dynamics of their teams.
Professor Tamayo earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Southern California. He has a B.A. in economics and an M.S. in applied mathematics from Eafit University in Medellin, Colombia. Before pursuing his doctoral degree, he worked at the Central Bank of Colombia and as an adjunct professor in the department of economics at Eafit University.
Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
Which managerial skills, traits, and practices matter most for productivity? How does the observability of these features affect how appropriately they are priced into wages? Combining two years of daily, line-level production data from a large Indian garment firm with rich survey data on line managers, we find that several key dimensions of managerial quality, like attention, autonomy, and control, are important for learning-by-doing as well as for overall productivity but are not commensurately rewarded in pay. Counterfactual simulations of our structural model show large gains from screening potential hires via psychometric measurement and training to improve managerial practices.
Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
Canonical models of criminal behavior highlight the importance of economic incentives and employment opportunities in determining participation in crime (Becker, 1968). Yet, deriving causal corroborating evidence from individual-level variation in employment incentives has proven challenging. We link rich administrative micro-data on socioeconomic measures of individuals with the universe of criminal arrests in Medellin over a decade. We test whether increasing the relative costs to formal-sector employment led to more crime. We exploit exogenous variation in formal employment around a socioeconomic score cutoff, below which individuals receive generous health benefits if not formally employed. Our regression discontinuity estimates show that this popular policy induced a fall in formal-sector employment and a corresponding spike in organized crime. This relationship is stronger in neighborhoods with more opportunities for organized crime. There are no effects on less economically motivated crimes.
Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, Theresa Molina and Jorge Tamayo
Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the interaction between early endowments and investments in children. We find that adverse rainfall in the year of birth decreases grade attainment, post-secondary enrollment, and employment outcomes. But children whose families were randomized to receive conditional cash transfers experienced a much smaller decline: each additional year of program exposure during childhood mitigated more than 20 percent of early disadvantage.
