DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Past Events

View past seminars and other events sponsored by the department of Economics. Events can be viewed by date or filtered by seminar series. 

Additionally, view the drop down menu on the left.

Date & Time	Seminar Series	Speaker and Title
December 1, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Mansa Saxena (Northwestern University): "Effects of Female Education on Dowry in India"
December 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Davis Kedrosky  Title: Expropriation, Reallocation, and Political Selection: Evidence from the Rise of the English Gentry Abstract: I study the emergence of Parliamentary government in England during the early modern period. In the century preceding the Civil War (1540-1640), Parliament was gradually transformed from an occasional assembly into a regular institution, developing formal operating procedures and the first stirrings of an independent legislative agenda. Which economic interests in the House of Commons drove this shift? To answer this question, I use biographical data on British MPs to investigate the effects of a shock to the distribution of landholding—the dissolution of the English monasteries—on the composition of Parliament. Sales of monastic land led to the expansion of the gentry and thus an increase in the number of gentlemen competing for seats. This presentation will discuss descriptive statistics and preliminary evidence on the changing social backgrounds and political activities of Parliamentarians. AND Speaker: Guohui Jiang Title: Trickle Down Cooperation: Draft Fairness and Voluntary Enlistment in World War II Abstract: This paper investigates the role of fairness in shaping voluntary enlistment decisions during World War II in the United States. Exploiting draft lotteries, I explore how individuals' draft affected their neighbors' voluntary enlistment.  I find that the drafting of higher-income individuals resulted in increased neighborhood enlistment, while drafting lower-income individuals discouraged their neighbors' enlistment. This divergence can be explained by fairness views. As higher-income individuals had more access to draft deferments, a relatively higher draft rate among them enhanced perceptions of draft fairness, thereby boosting enlistment of their neighbors. Administrative data and survey evidence confirm these. These findings highlight the importance of equity and fairness in sustaining social cooperation.
November 30, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Ludovica Mosillo Title: The impact of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa embarked on an ambitious electrification effort, connecting nearly 90% of its population to the electrical grid. However, the aging coal-powered supply system has struggled to meet the growing demand for electricity, resulting in a persistent threat of countrywide blackouts. To mitigate this risk in 2007, Eskom, the national power utility, introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“Load Shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply. initially infrequent and of shorts duration, starting in 2019 Power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. This project aims to analyze the consequences of this phenomenon on South African households and firms
November 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Pisauro Title: "The Determinants and Consequences of Telehealth"
November 29, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Leticia Arroyo Abad (CUNY): “Gambling for America: The First Wave of Migration to the Americas, 1492-1540”.
November 29, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pablo Sanchez "Credit Access and Housing Quality", joint with Kwok Yan Chiu and Diego Cid.
November 29, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Giacomo Marcolin (Northwestern University): "Gig Work as Income Insurance During Unemployment: Evidence from Germany"
November 28, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Carlos Lamarche (University of Kentucky): “Quantile Regression with an Endogenous Misclassified Binary Regressor”
November 28, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Ricardo Perez-Truglia (Berkeley Haas): "What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking" with Zoe B. Cullen and Shengwu Li
November 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Nano Barahona (UC Berkeley): Title TBD
November 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Dalton Zhang (Northwestern University): "De-anchored Inflation? Flattened (and Steepened) Philips Curve"
November 21, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Ashesh Rambacham (MIT): "From Predictive Algorithms to Automatic Generation of Anomalies" with Sendhil Mullainathan Abstract: Economic theories often progress through the discovery of “anomalies.” Canonical examples of anomalies include the Allais Paradox and the Kahneman-Tversky choice experiments, which are constructed menus of lotteries that highlighted particular flaws in expected utility theory and spurred the development of new theories for decisionmaking under risk. In this paper, we develop algorithmic procedures to automatically generate such anomalies. Our algorithmic procedures take as inputs an existing theory and data it seeks to explain, and then generate examples on which we would likely observe violations of our existing theory if we were to collect data. As an illustration, we produce anomalies for expected utility theory using simulated lottery choice data from individuals who behave according to cumulative prospect theory. Our procedures recover known anomalies for expected utility theory in behavioral economics and discover novel anomalies based on the probability weighting function. We conduct incentivized experiments to collect choice data on our algorithmically generated anomalies, finding that participants violate expected utility theory at similar rates to the Allais Paradox and Common Ratio Effect. While this illustration is specific, our anomaly generation procedures are general and can be applied in any domain where there exists a formal theory and rich data that the theory seeks to explain.
November 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Zhen Huo (Yale): "Noisy Global Value Chains" with Ha Bui, Andrei Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar Abstract: We study international propagation of both fundamental and non-fundamental shocks in a global production network model with information frictions. Producers in a sector do not perfectly observe other country-sector fundamentals, and their production decisions depend on their beliefs about worldwide exogenous states as well as other producers’ behavior. In this environment, “noise” shocks – errors in the public signals about fundamentals – propagate internationally and generate aggregate fluctuations. Using a novel panel dataset containing the frequencies of country-industry-specific economic news reports by 11 leading newspapers in the G7 plus Spain, we show that greater news coverage is associated with both smaller GDP forecast errors, and less disagreement among forecasters. We use these empirical regularities to discipline the parameters governing the severity of information frictions. We find that noise shocks are a quantitatively important source of international fluctuations. Noise shocks propagate relatively more powerfully to the more distant parts of the network, while TFP shocks propagate less powerfully to the more distant sectors in the presence of informational frictions.
November 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pablo Sanchez (Northwestern University): "Title TBA"
November 17, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tom Fisher (Northwestern University): "Destructive Reputational Bargaining"
November 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 16, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sebastian Sardon Title: TBD
November 16, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: “Illicit economies and economic growth”
November 15, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Margaret Jones (Emory University): "Institutional Drift, Property Rights, and Economic Development: Evidence from Historical Treaties" with Donn Feir and Rob Gillezeau Abstract: For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated everywhere, including in regions subsequently settled by Europeans. Consequentially, there is substantial regional variation in the legal status of occupied lands, jurisdiction over natural resources, and state commitments to Indigenous nations. We study how these legal institutions have shaped the path of economic development in Indigenous communities. Using restricted-access census data, we show that historical treaties substantially lower income in Indigenous communities today. We argue that this results from the constitutional and legal recognition of Aboriginal rights and title, which have dramatically increased bargaining power and, consequently, income growth in non-treaty Indigenous communities.
November 15, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Michael Cai
November 15, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Takaaki Sagawa (Northwestern University): "Sovereign Liquidity Shocks"
November 14, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Kohei Yata (UW Madison): "Optimal Decision Rules Under Partial Identification" Abstract: I consider a class of statistical decision problems in which the policy maker must decide between two alternative policies to maximize social welfare based on a finite sample. The central assumption is that the underlying, possibly infinite-dimensional parameter, lies in a known convex set, potentially leading to partial identification of the welfare effect. An example of such restrictions is the smoothness of counterfactual outcome functions. As the main theoretical result, I derive a finite-sample, exact minimax regret decision rule within the class of all decision rules under normal errors with known variance. When the error distribution is unknown, I obtain a feasible decision rule that is asymptotically minimax regret. I apply my results to the problem of whether to change a policy eligibility cutoff in a regression discontinuity setup, and illustrate them in an empirical application to a school construction program in Burkina Faso.
November 14, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Gustavo Bobonis (University of Toronto): "A Helping Hand Goes a Long Way: Long-Term Effects of Counselling and Support to Workfare Program Participants" with Aneta Bonikowska, Phillip Oreopoulos, W. Craig Riddell, and Steven P. Ryan
November 13, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Lulu Wang (Northwestern): "Regulating Competing Payment Networks”    Abstract: Payment markets are two-sided. Networks like Visa and Mastercard charge merchant fees to fund consumer rewards. I study how regulation, private entry, and public entry in this market affect prices, distribution, and welfare in equilibrium. I model consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of multiple cards, merchant pricing, and network competition. I estimate the model by matching data on consumers’ card holdings, merchant acceptance, network pricing, and the effects of debit rewards reductions. The estimated model matches external evidence on networks’ costs, merchants’ margins, and the effects of AmEx’s 2016 – 2019 cuts in merchant fees. Using the estimated model, I compare the effects of capping credit card merchant fees, increasing entry of private credit card networks, and introducing a low-fee public option like FedNow. Capping credit card merchant fees is progressive and increases annual welfare by $29 billion by reducing rewards, retail prices paid by cash and debit consumers, and credit card use. In contrast, because I estimate consumers’ reward sensitivity is ten times merchants’ fee-sensitivity, incumbents respond to competition by raising fees to fund rewards. A public option struggles to gain consumer adoption without rewards, limiting welfare gains.
November 13, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Labor Seminar: Amanda Pallais	Amanda Pallais (Harvard University)
November 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Pascual Restrepo Mesa (Boston University): "Automation and Rent Dissipation: Implications for Inequality, Productivity, and Welfare" with Daron Acemoglu
November 13, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Johanna Rayl (Northwestern University): "Energy Subsidies and Cash Transfers: Redistributive Policy in Indonesia"
November 10, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Evan Majic (Northwestern University): "Think Big: Solving Large-Scale Heterogenous Agent Models in Sequence Space"
November 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development	Tommaso Porzio (Columbia): "Self-employment within the firm" with Vittoria Bassi, Jung Hyuk Lee, Alessandra Peter, Ritwika Sen, and Esau Tugume Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a general equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it with our data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close, in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmark in which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing a production space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits from alleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most African firms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable.
November 9, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Matteo Ruzzante Title TBD
November 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Claire Mackevicius Title: "Plugging Holes or Hoarding More? Toward an Understanding of Fundraising PTA Spending Dynamics at Public Schools"  Abstract: “Decades of policy efforts have aimed to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources across K-12 public schools, weakening the link between community wealth and government resources at schools (Chingos & Blagg, 2017). At the same time, fundraising PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), Organizations (PTOs), and “Friends of” groups) have grown dramatically in number and size (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). These nonprofit organizations provide supplemental funds at some public schools, though school funding research and policy do not systematically take fundraising PTAs into account–they represent an understudied source of discretionary funds at public schools. The limited extant literature rests on an untested presumption that these groups exist and spend money at public schools in response to government budget shortfalls. In this study, I test this presumption and do not find evidence that on average, fundraising PTA spending responds to shifts in government spending at schools. I use regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences event study approaches to estimate the causal effect of school budget referenda elections on fundraising PTAs, analyzing a dataset I constructed that links all fundraising PTAs in California to the public schools they support from 2005-2018. I find suggestive evidence that in racially homogenous districts, PTAs may be responsive to government spending at schools. I also consider whether PTAs may operate in ways more consistent with theorizing that suggests they facilitate community engagement and establish district identities as places that invest in public schools and/or reify economic and racial stratification. I discuss the potential portability of findings across other states and settings, describe implications for school funding research and policy more broadly, and deepen understandings of fundraising PTA organizations.”
November 8, 20237:30 PM - 9:00 PM	Leon N. Moses Distinguished Lecture in Transportation	Patrick Harker (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia): "Perspectives on Economics Trends and Global Supply Chains"
November 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Yishay Yafeh (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): "The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America" with Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Konstantin Kosenko, and JK Suh
November 8, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kilian Rieder  Title: Central Bank Communication by ??? The Economics of Public Policy Leaks
November 7, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Lihua Lei (Stanford GSB): "Model-Agnostic Covariate-Assisted Inference on Partially Identified Causal Effects" with Wenlong Ji and Asher Spector
November 7, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Abigail Adams-Prassl (University of Oxford): "The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships" with Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang Abstract: Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviours beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. This paper provides the first evidence on the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victim’s economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role played by economic suppression and coercive control in such relationships. Using administrative data and a matched control event study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner, which translates into a total household income loss. Second, this decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women’s pre-cohabitation outside options. Third, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to use coercive control to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship. We show that this model is consistent with all three empirical facts. We harness the model’s predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women’s outside options is crucially linked to breakup dynamics.
November 6, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Chris Conlon (NYU Stern): "Estimating Preferences and Substitution Patterns from Second-Choice Data Alone" with Julie Holland Mortimer and Paul Sarkis Abstract: We consider identification and estimation of a model of consumer choice where the main source of variation is in the set of products made available to consumers. Instead of relying on variation in the choice environment (prices, product characteristics) we require first-choice probabilities and a subset of (conditional) second-choice probabilities. We develop a semiparametric low-rank approximation to the matrix of second-choice probabilities that is consistent with mixed logit models of demand but is defined in “product space” and does not require that product characteristics explain substitution patterns. In Monte Carlo experiments we show that our model can replicate a nested logit or random coefficients logit model. We apply our model to a single year of automobile data from Grieco et al. (2021) and show that we can fit substitution patterns with higher accuracy.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Dept. of History presents "China and the West" with Professor Joel Mokyr	We invite you to a moderated discussion between University of Chicago Prof. Pomeranz and Northwestern Prof. Mokyr. On the Early Modern "Great Divergence" between the economies of China and of the West. Lunch starts at 12pm and the talk promptly at 12:30pm.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Manuel Amador (University of Minnesota): Title TBD
November 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 3, 20238:00 AM - 8:00 PM	Conference in Honor of Eddie Dekel	This is a conference in celebration of Eddie Dekel's 65th birthday, bringing together the work of fellow economic theorists.
November 2, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ludovica Mosillo  Title: The impact of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa embarked on an ambitious electrification effort, connecting nearly 90% of its population to the electrical grid. However, the aging coal-powered supply system has struggled to meet the growing demand for electricity, resulting in a persistent threat of countrywide blackouts. To mitigate this risk in 2007, Eskom, the national power utility, introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“Load Shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply. initially infrequent and of shorts duration, starting in 2019 Power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. This project aims to analyze the consequences of this phenomenon on South African households and firms
November 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title: "The Second Specialist:  How Does Vertical Integration Affect Specialist Switching" (joint with Xingyue Xin) Abstract: “Vertical integration is particularly pervasive in healthcare markets.  In this work, we study vertical integration between generalist (primary care) and specialist physicians and establish a relationship between the vertical integration status of a primary care provider and the likelihood that patients switch specialist providers.  The ease with which a patient can switch specialist providers may be related to the health outcomes they experience in the future.  We propose ways to examine this as well as ways to examine underlying mechanisms for our results on vertical integration and switching.”
November 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kwok Yan Chiu
November 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrea Di Giovanni Paolo (Northwestern University): "Intermediation: Screening Sellers Through Buyer Persuasion"
October 31, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Peng Ding (UC Berkeley): "Causal inference in network experiments: regression-based analysis and design-based properties" with Mengsi Gao
October 31, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP") and Development	Yoshi Katayama (Northwestern): "Readmission Penalty under Nonlinear Payment Schedules" Abstract: I examine how hospitals respond to financial incentives. In Japan, the per diem payment is designed to decrease as the length of stay increases to incentivize early discharge. However, under these nonlinear payment schedules, hospitals can increase reimbursements with repeated discharges and readmissions. Using administrative claims data, I study hospital responses to a national policy that penalizes immediate post-discharge readmissions to limit repeated admissions. Exploiting variations created by the program introduction, I find that hospitals delay readmissions to avoid the penalty for elective patients. In contrast, for non-elective patients, readmissions immediately after discharge decrease due to selective readmission. Moreover, there are no detectable effects on health outcomes. These findings suggest that hospital responses to financial incentives depend on patient health status.
October 30, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Francisco Pareschi (Northwestern): Title: Reducing Consumer Inertia in Tobacco Markets We study how industry structure influences the effect of tobacco control policies. Despite decades-long efforts to discourage smoking, the tobacco industry remains resilient. One of the main reasons is consumers' attachment to the products they smoke, which we call consumer inertia. We explore two reasons consumers are inert: they get addicted to nicotine and develop lasting brand loyalty to their products. Recently, regulators have proposed policies that would eliminate the addictive components of cigarettes and make consumers less loyal to their brands. Although such policies would directly impact consumers, we must understand firms' responses to assess the programs' overall impact on consumption. Inert consumers introduce dynamic incentives for the firms since future customers' choices depend on which product they patronize today. As a result, consumers become a valuable asset for the firm; capturing new customers is more costly, and exploiting existing ones is more attractive, significantly affecting how firms price, introduce, and discontinue products. To assess the empirical effect of reducing inertia in tobacco markets, we develop a model that accounts for consumers and firm responses: consumers have addiction and loyalty, and firms choose prices and product portfolios. We estimate the model leveraging rich variation from the Uruguayan industry and solve the equilibrium of the dynamic game for multiple levels of inertia. Our results indicate that industry responses can attenuate and even revert the positive impact of reducing inertia on smoking rates due to lower prices and more product availability. However, if the long-term profits generated by a person with tobacco addiction diminish enough, firms lower their investment in attracting new customers, which reinforces the direct effect policies have on consumers. These policies can be used together with taxation to reduce consumption without increasing the burden on tobacco consumers as much.
October 30, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Labor Seminar: Simon Jäger	Simon Jäger (MIT)
October 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloquium: Silvia Vannutelli: Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection	"Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection" by Silvia Vannutelli, Assistant Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow So-called revolving door laws restrict public servants from representing private interests before the government after they leave office. While they mitigate potential conflicts of interest by imposing constraints on post-public service employment, these restrictions also bring about trade-offs as they might reduce the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the overall benefits of holding office. Vannutelli and her colleagues study the consequences of revolving-door laws for the selection of legislators across U.S. states, exploiting the staggered roll-out of revolving door laws between 1962 and 2017. They first show that, as anticipated, the laws reduce the probability that a legislator registers as a lobbyist after leaving office. More substantively, they show that treated states experience an increase in the probability of uncontested elections, driven primarily by a reduction in the entry of potential challengers and an increase in incumbents' probability of re-running. The researchers provide a simple model of politician career incentives to interpret the results. This event is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Fall 2023 Colloquium Series, where IPR researchers from around the University share their latest policy-relevant research. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
October 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Yuriy Gorodnichenko (UC Berkeley): Title TBD
October 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tim Seida (Northwestern University): "Vertical Integration of Screening and Monitoring in US Mortgage Markets"
October 27, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jana Obradovic (Northwestern University): "Mortgage Lock-In Effect and Housing Prices: Implications for Monetary Policy"
October 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kilian Rieder (European Central Bank) Title: Taming Credit Booms: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Federal Reserve Policies in 1920-21 Abstract: How should policy-makers tame excessive credit growth? I exploit a single natural experiment to estimate the comparative causal effects of different financial stability policies on bank-level credit. In 1920, four Federal Reserve Banks hiked their interest rate indiscriminately to safeguard financial stability. Another four Reserve Banks employed targeted rate action aimed at over-leveraged banks instead. The remaining Federal Reserve districts did not take any measures. For identification, I draw on geographic border discontinuities across districts with different policy choices. In direct horse races, the uniform rate hike dampened the boom more successfully than targeted policies. Yet, contemporary local shocks also interacted with financial stability interventions to induce substantial heterogeneity in credit supply responses across the United States.
October 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development	Elias Papaioannou (London Business School): "Private Colonialism in Africa" with Giorgio Chiovelli, Etienne Le Rossignol and Stelios Michalopoulos
October 26, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Mahounan Yedomiffi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Title: Does Parental Involvement Improve Student Learning? The Role of Monitoring Abstract: Sub-Saharan African nations are grappling with low school completion, marked by 44% completion rate in middle school. This study presents the findings of a randomized controlled trial that I conducted in Benin which investigates the effects of providing parents with information about their role in their child’s education through weekly phone calls. Including 2094 8th-grade students in 20 secondary schools, the intervention led to a substantial 6 percent increase in grade comple- tion. This stems from a statistically significant 0.11 standard deviation increase in the year-end GPA, driven by STEM subjects. The benefits of this intervention are especially pronounced for academically weaker students, elevating their likeli- hood of progression by 33 percent. These educational gains can be attributed to heightened parental awareness regarding their child’s academic performance, aug- mented parental involvement both within the school and at home, and a reduction in the burden of household chores placed upon the children. My intervention is highly cost-effective, with a negative net cost. These results offer a promising and cost-effective strategy to elevate educational outcomes for sub-Saharan Africa while saving on costs.
October 26, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sergio Lopez-Araiza Title: ”Border Walls, Drug Routes, and Violent Crime in Mexico” Abstract: “Violence related to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has dramatically escalated in Mexico since 2007. However, beyond the increase in the nation-wide homicide rate lies a huge time and spatial variation across Mexico’s 2,456 municipalities. One potential source of such heterogeneity is how valuable it is for DTOs to control a municipality for drug trafficking purposes. Using the expansion of the US-Mexico border wall that resulted from the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and leveraging the fact that it made trafficking drugs into the US more difficult, I study changes in the value of the municipalities shifted violence in Mexico.”
October 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Davide Coluccia (Northwestern University): "Closing Ranks: Immigration and Organized Labor" with Gaia Dossi Abstract: How does innovation diffuse across countries? In this paper, we document that out-migration promotes the diffusion of innovation from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. Between 1870 and 1940, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the United States. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents over 1853–1899. Using a new shift-share instrument for bilateral migration and a triple-differences design, we document that migration ties contribute to technology diffusion from the US to the UK. Through highdimensional text analysis, we find that emigrants promote technology transfer, but they also nurture the production of original innovation. Physical return migration is an important driver of this “return innovation” effect. However, we find that the interactions between emigrants and their origin communities promote technology diffusion, even absent return migration. Additionally, we show that migration ties propel knowledge flows by fostering cross-border market integration.
October 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matias Bayas (practice job talk)
October 25, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Avner Kreps (Northwestern University): "Monopsony Power, Airline Mergers, and the Pilot Shortage"
October 24, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Deborah Kim (Northwestern University): "Test for Sign Agreement"
October 24, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP") and Development	Genia Rachkovski (Northwestern): "Beyond Test Scores: Does Public Information on School Satisfaction and Violence Levels Affect Parental School Choice?" Abstract: In 2012, a Supreme Court ruling mandated the public release of school-level test scores and non-academic school attributes in Israel. Leveraging this exogenous event, I investigate its impact on student school choice. Employing a discrete choice model, event study, and difference-in-difference approach, I find that in regions with multiple school options, parents increasingly opt for 'better' schools post-disclosure. Notably, this shift is primarily attributed to factors like violence and students' school satisfaction ratings, rather than test score information. Additionally, lower socio-economic status households exhibit greater responsiveness to non-test-related information. I also explore information sharing networks, as well as the connection to school value-added measures and implications for socio-economic integration and mobility.
October 23, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Jingyuan Wang (Northwestern): "Subsidizing Industry Growth in a Market with Lemons: Evidence from the electric vehicle market in China" Abstract: Consumer subsidies are common policies to foster growth in emerging green industries, such as electric vehicles (EVs). Ideally, such policies can expand the market and improve welfare by promoting firm entry and inducing technology spillovers to related industries. However, a poorly designed subsidy can attract ``lemon'' entrants with low and imperfectly observed quality, undermine the industry's reputation, and impede industry growth. Using data from the Chinese electric vehicle market from 2012 to 2018, this paper examines how subsidies affect the growth of a nascent industry. We develop a structural model of vehicle demand, firm entry and expansion, and EV collective reputation dynamics to analyze the subsidy’s equilibrium impact. Results suggest that the net welfare impact of the subsidy is nearly zero, and the reputation impact reduces subsidy benefits by 10.8%. Decreasing the subsidy level can improve policy efficiency and mitigate the reputation impact, and stringency in the attribute-based subsidy can serve as a screening tool that effectively filters lemons. This paper develops the framework for designing green industrial policies, highlighting the critical yet often neglected role of the reputation channel.
October 23, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Giuseppe Moscarini (Yale): "The Job Ladder: Inflation vs. Reallocation" with Fabien Postel-Vinay
October 23, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Thu Tran (Northwestern University): "Power, Commitment, and Safety Net: Modeling Indian Women's Hidden Gold"
October 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker Myera Rashid Title: Engine of Mobility: The Typewriter and Women's Outcomes   Abstract: While much is known about the gendered effects of household technological changes, little is known about the impact of workplace technological changes on women's outcomes. In this project, I study the effect of the adoption of the typewriter into the US labor force on women's outcomes in the 20th century. Exploiting variation in the demand for typists across industries coupled with the geographic composition of industries, I document that the adoption of the typewriter and the resulting gendering of the typist occupation cause an increase in women's labor force participation and a decrease in their likelihood of being married and having children. I show that while the rapid adoption of the typewriter causes White women to leave the household and enter offices, it also increases the labor participation of Black women who replace White women by working in the household services industry. Lastly, I find that the typewriter acts as an engine of mobility for women through marriage. The typist occupation offers women the opportunity to work alongside and later marry men of higher socioeconomic status, a benefit not provided by alternate occupations for women at the time.
October 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")	Jimmy Lee (Northwestern): "Costly Communication and Miscoordination in Agricultural Households: Experimental Evidence from Liberia" Abstract: Costly communication inhibits coordination in households. In a randomized evaluation of a school-based agricultural extension program in Liberia, this paper shows how costly communication leads households to miscoordinate responses to new information and restrict improvements in adolescents’ education and livelihoods. In a random subset of program schools, I randomize households into two informational treatments. The first provides promotional videos to students’ elders. The second, in addition, reveals elders’ expectations to students, which indicate elders anticipate positive program impact on their farming skills. After one year, many program effects are only detected when information is provided. While videos are effective in changing some household decisions, the revelation treatment improves additional outcomes, including students’ farm choices, incomes, school enrollment, and food security. Persistent effects of revelation imply costly communication within the household. I provide evidence that revelation improves coordination between students and elders, interpret the results in a household model with costly communication and asymmetric decision rights between students and elders, and test its implications.
October 19, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Matheus Sampaio Title: The Ripple Effects of Floods on Long-term Financial Technology Adoption Abstract: Can adversity lead to long-term financial technology adoption? Can the adoption of one technology lead to the adoption of other financial technologies? Using identifiable data on bank transactions of every person and firm in Brazil, we studied how floods affect the long-term use of a new transfer technology, Pix. We find that, after a flood, the number of active Pix users increases by 3% for people and by 5% for firms. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting that people and firms adopt other types of financial technologies. Firms started accepting other forms of payment such as credit and debit cards, while people started to increase their use of digital bank accounts.
October 19, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Hyein Cho Title: "Value of Long-Term Care: Facility vs. Home" Abstract: “I quantify and compare value of two approaches to long-term care: facility-based care and home-based care. In order to control for patients' selection into different types of care, I exploit a natural experiment in the South Korean national long term care insurance scheme and its detailed administrative data. I find that facility-based care increases mortality by 8 percentage points (baseline mortality rate is 30%), and the effect is larger for individuals who previously had access to informal care. On the other hand, home-based care reduces medical care usage without sacrificing individuals' health outcomes.”
October 18, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Carlo Medici (Northwestern University): Title TBD
October 18, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Diego Huerta (practice job talk)
October 17, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Evan Rose (UChicago): "A Discrimination Report Card" with Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters
October 16, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Tomas Wilner (Northwestern): Title TBD
October 16, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Labor Seminar: Chinhui Juhn	Chinhui Juhn (University of Houston)
October 16, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Luminita Stevens (University of Maryland): "Nominal Rigidities in U.S. Business Cycles" with Camilo Morales-Jimenez
October 14, 20239:00 AM - 12:30 PM	Nemmers Prize in Economics: Conference	Nemmers Conference.  This is associated with the awarding of the Nemmers Prize in Economics to Ariel Pakes.  Day 2 of 2.  Free registration required.
October 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
October 13, 20239:00 AM - 5:30 PM	Nemmers Prize in Economics: Conference	Nemmers Conference.  This is associated with the awarding of the Nemmers Prize in Economics to Ariel Pakes.  Includes Professor Pakes' Nemmers lecture at 4pm. Day 1 of 2.  Free registration required.
October 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")	Ritwika Sen (Northwestern): TBD
October 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: "The Ripple Effects of Floods on Long-term Financial Technology Adoption." Abstract: “Can adversity lead to long-term financial technology adoption? Can the adoption of one technology lead to the adoption of other financial technologies? Using identifiable data on bank transactions of every person and firm in Brazil, we studied how floods affect the long-term use of a new transfer technology, Pix. We find that, after a flood, the number of active Pix users increases by 3\% for people and by 5\% for firms. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting that, people and firms adopt other types of financial technologies. Firms started accepting other forms of payment such as credit and debit cards, while people started to increase their use of digital bank accounts.”
October 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Guido Alfani (Bocconi University): "Wealth inequality and the prevalence (and composition) of the rich, ca. 1300-today”
October 11, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Fergal Hanks (practice job talk)
October 11, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Max Pienkny (Northwestern University): "From the Dial to the Aisle: Media Deregulation, Talk Radio, and Political Polarization"
October 10, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Bruce Hansen (UW Madison): "Jackknife standard errors for clustered regression"
October 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Matt O'Keefe (Northwestern): "Firm Boundaries and External Costs in Marcellus Shale Wastewater Management"
October 9, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Labor Seminar: Gordon Dahl	Gordon Dahl (University of California, San Diego)
October 9, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Jesus Fernández-Villaverde (UPenn): "Exploiting Symmetry in High-Dimensional Dynamic Programming" with Mahdi Ebrahimi Kahou, Jesse Perla, and Arnav Sood
October 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aaron Wolf (Northwestern University): "Residential Schools and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma"
October 7, 20238:00 AM - 2:00 PM	20th Annual CSIO/TSE Conference on Industrial Organization	Organized by the Center for the Study of Industrial Orgnization and the Toulouse School of Economics, the objective of the conference is to discuss recent advances in Industrial Organization. In keeping the spirit of previous years, the conference will foster collaboration between TSE and Northwestern's researchers, featuring contributions in theoretical and empirical IO. The event is invitation only.
October 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Davide Coluccia Title: Return Innovation: The Knowledge Spillovers of the British Migration to the United States, 1870-1940 Abstract: How does innovation diffuse across countries? In this paper, we document that out-migration generates a flow of technology from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. During the Age of Mass Migration, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the US. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents over 1853-1899. Through a new shift-share instrument for bilateral migration and a triple-differences design, we document that exposure to US technology through migrant ties contributes to the diffusion of innovation to the UK in 1870-1940. Using high-dimensional text analysis, we find that migrant ties promote technology transfer, but they also nurture the production of original innovation. The individual-level analysis indicates that this "return innovation" effect does not require the physical return of emigrants. Instead, we find that migration linkages generate information flows that facilitate the cross-border diffusion of knowledge.
October 6, 20238:00 AM - 5:30 PM	20th Annual CSIO/TSE Conference on Industrial Organization	Organized by the Center for the Study of Industrial Orgnization and the Toulouse School of Economics, the objective of the conference is to discuss recent advances in Industrial Organization. In keeping the spirit of previous years, the conference will foster collaboration between TSE and Northwestern's researchers, featuring contributions in theoretical and empirical IO. The event is invitation only.
October 5, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Jose Flor Toro Title TBD
October 5, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: David Almog Title: “Algorithmic Oversight: Evidence from Centre Court” Abstract: “We leverage the introduction of the Hawkeye system in professional tennis as a natural experiment to assess the impact of algorithm oversight on workers – in this case, line judges in high pressure tennis matches. In subsequent lab experiments we intent to study how humans react to having their ”mistakes” corrected by algorithms.”
October 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez (Yale University): Title TBD
October 4, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Clement Bohr (practice job talk)
October 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): "Engine of Mobility: The Typewriter and Women’s Outcomes"
October 3, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Ahnaf Rafi (Northwestern University): “Nonparametric inference for a class of functionals in the random coefficients logit model”
October 3, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP"), Development, and IO	Anran Li (Northwestern): "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
October 3, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP"), Development, and IO	Anran Li (Northwestern): "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
October 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Gaston Lopez (Northwestern): “Price Discrimination under State-Ownership: Evidence from the Argentine Gasoline Industry"
October 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Saki Biglio (UC Los Angeles): "A Model of Credit, Money, Interest, and Prices"
October 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Therese Bonomo (Northwestern University): "Minimum Wages, Price Ceilings, and Access to the Safety Net"
September 29, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Miguel Jorquera (Northwestern University): "Wholesale Market Structure and Dynamic Retail Pricing in Electricity Markets"
September 29, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker Carlo Medici Title: Closing Ranks: The Effect of Immigration on Organized Labor Abstract: This paper shows that immigration caused the development of labor unions in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. I digitize archival data to construct a new dataset on unionization during 1900-1920 and use a shift-share instrument to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in immigration. My analysis yields several novel findings. I document that counties that received more immigrants experienced an increase in the share of unionized workers. Immigration also increased the number of union branches, their size, and the probability that a county had any labor union. Further, I show that the effect was driven by increased participation of U.S.-born workers. I explore the mechanisms behind this effect and find that unionization did not grow larger in counties more exposed to the immigrants' labor market competition. Instead, I provide evidence that cultural concerns drove unionization. First, the increase was more prominent for unions that adopted nativist positions during this period. Second, unions developed due to the arrival of culturally distant immigrants. Third, this effect was most prevalent in places with worse attitudes towards immigration. These findings identify an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of organizations that aim to protect workers' status in the labor market. They also highlight immigration as a novel driver of unionization in the early twentieth century United States.
September 28, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Gina Eckhoff Title Putting Simplicity Back into New Economic Geography
September 28, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xizhao Wang Title: “Human Capital and Firm's Innovation Direction” Abstract: “This paper studies how the sudden loss of personnel affects the direction of innovation in firms. This paper introduces three different measures (cosine distance, total variation distance, and Wasserstein distance) to quantify changes in firm's innovation direction. I exploit a difference-in-difference approach to assess the change in innovation direction within U.S. public firms following sudden deaths of personnel. I find that the loss of upper-tail inventors significantly alters a firm's innovation trajectory, whereas losses of lower-tail inventors and losses at the management level do not. The findings highlight the hard-to-replace nature and the role of inventive human capital, exploring the dynamic capabilities of firms.”
September 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Megumi Murakami (Northwestern University): "Demand and Supply of Medical Knowledge"
September 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Diego Cid (practice job talk)
September 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Rui Sousa (Northwestern University): "Doing Justice to Monti-Klein: Market Power and the Sensitivity of Bank Lending to Monetary Policy"
September 26, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Florian Gunsilius (University of Michigan): "Free Discontinuity Design" with David Van Dijcke
September 26, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	William Evans (Notre Dame): "Prescription for Disaster:  The Changing Treatment Patterns of Physicians and the Drug Crisis"
September 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	John Vickers (University of Oxford): Title TBD
September 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Eric Swanson (UC Irvine): Title TBD
September 23, 20238:30 AM - 3:00 PM	8th Annual Interactions Workshop	The Interactions Workshop brings together the research of junior and senior Economists in the fields of Applied Microeconomics and Econometrics. This annual conference is sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
September 23, 20238:00 AM - 12:30 PM	Fifteenth Annual Conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition Policy	Co-presented by the Pritzker Center on Law, Business, and Economics and the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, this year’s conference will feature: Keynote Addresses by Carl Shapiro, (UC Berkeley), Susan Athey, (Stanford GSB), Aviv Nevo (UPenn), and Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School) And a Panel Discussion on The New U.S. Merger Guidelines with Carl Shapiro (UC Berkeley) as moderator, Michael Katz (UC Berkeley), Nancy L. Rose (MIT), Howard Shelanski (Georgetown Law), and Michael Whinston (MIT Sloan).
September 22, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker Micah Villarreal (UC Santa Barbara) Title: Wealth Windfalls and Descendants of the Enslaved Abstract: Recent research contends that the largest determinant of the large and persistent wealth gap between Black and white Americans today is the extreme difference in initial wealth that the two groups held following the abolition of slavery in 1865 (Derenoncourt et al., 2022). In this project, I ask whether a “policy” that redistributed large stocks of wealth to the formerly enslaved and their descendants, fifty years following the end of slavery, may have reduced racial wealth inequality in the immediate and long-term. Due to Federal Indian policy of the late 1800s, thousands of acres of land fell into Freedman hands in Oklahoma around the year 1900. My initial data work indicates that oil would be discovered under at least 12 percent of this land over the following thirty years, and that these discoveries appear to be random. I characterize discovery of oil under a Freedman land allotment as a policy of wealth redistribution and test whether recipients of the policy look the same on observables as non-recipients. I interpret later statistical differences between the descendants of recipients and non-recipients as the causal effect of wealth redistribution.   If there is time, I will discuss proposed extensions to this analysis, such as exploring the effect of minority wealth on majority group backlash.
September 22, 20238:30 AM - 5:00 PM	8th Annual Interactions Workshop	The Interactions Workshop brings together the research of junior and senior Economists in the fields of Applied Microeconomics and Econometrics. This annual conference is sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
September 22, 20237:45 AM - 7:30 PM	Fifteenth Annual Conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition Policy	Co-presented by the Pritzker Center on Law, Business, and Economics and the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, this year’s conference will feature: Keynote Addresses by Carl Shapiro, (UC Berkeley), Susan Athey, (Stanford GSB), Aviv Nevo (UPenn), and Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School) And a Panel Discussion on The New U.S. Merger Guidelines with Carl Shapiro (UC Berkeley) as moderator, Michael Katz (UC Berkeley), Nancy L. Rose (MIT), Howard Shelanski (Georgetown Law), and Michael Whinston (MIT Sloan).
September 21, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")	Marie-Louise Decamps (Northwestern): "Shifting Landscapes: The Impact of Agricultural Innovation on Deforestation"
September 21, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Presenter: Sultan Mehmood Title: Reform Multiplier Abstract: When and how can a reform create an amplifying effect? This paper provides evidence that a judge selection reform in Pakistan, which shifted the appointment power of judges from the President to a committee of judges had a multiplier effect on pro-government rulings in the decade following its implementation. As the first generation of committee appointee judges (first-degree of separation from the President) are replaced by the second generation of committee appointees (second-degree separation), the effect of the reform compounds judicial independence from the government. Nevertheless, as the reform amplifies anti-government rulings, it also results in a trade-off of fostering a network of patronage within the judge community: a compounding in the practice of hiring judges from the same law firms as the committee responsible for selecting new judges is observed. Despite this increase in patronage within the judiciary, there is no apparent deterioration in the quality of judicial decisions: a comparable multiplier effect on measures of decision quality is also observed. Rulings based on case merits and adherence to due process of law increase with each degree of separation from Presidential appointment. Career incentives to issue more anti-government and merit-based rulings appear to be an important explanation for the reform compounding: judges who are most likely to issue anti-government rulings are most likely to be promoted to the Supreme Court. Overall, our results underscore that measures increasing the independence of the judiciary can have enduring effects on judicial autonomy and decision quality, even when they concurrently alter the composition of the judicial elite by making it more concentrated.
September 21, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Netanel Ben Porath Title: "Gender Politics in the Roe vs Wade Era: Female Leaders and the Prevalence of Abortions" Abstract: “This work documents that during 1973-2020, electing a woman to be a state legislator or governor in the U.S. increased the prevalence of abortions in her state. We identify the causal effect of electing a female governor by using a Regression Disconti- nuity Design. For legislators, we establish causality by introducing a novel application of the Regression Discontinuity Aggregation methodology (Borusyak and Kolerman, n.d.). We do not find an effect on abortions when electing a Democrat to either role, suggesting leaders’ gender matters. When we focus on legislators, we uncover that the effect is driven by a change in regulation. In contrast, female governors make public discourse, as manifested in local newspapers, more favorable toward abortions. Since abortions are highly disputed in the U.S., this shift in public perceptions may make abortions less socially costly, explaining our main results.”
September 20, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Katherine Hauck (Northwestern University): ""The Homesteading Act and the Process of Learning to Farm in the Late 19th Century" with Tiemen Woutersen"
September 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Gerard Maideu Morera
September 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Zhen Xie (Northwestern University): "Adversarial Sieve Estimation of Counterfactuals in Auction Models"
September 19, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Eric Mbakop (University of Calgary): "Identification in some discrete choice models: A computational approach"
June 12, 202312:00 PM - 2:00 PM	Senior Lunch & Awards Ceremony	Every year the department holds a senior awards celebration to honor the students who were granted honors for their senior theses, students who received the Coen, Deibler, or Eisner Awards, and students who completed the BA/MA degree. We are excited to welcome the class of 2023 and their guests to this year's Senior Lunch & Awards Ceremony!
June 9, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Nick Ziebarth (Auburn University) Title: Racial Differences in Childhood Mortality during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries  Abstract: We study racial differences in childhood mortality between 1870 and 1940 in the rural South. We build a sample of children linked over time and infer child mortality based on whether we are unable to locate a child in the subsequent census. We find that the racial gap is relatively unchanged through 1900 before declining by around 5 percentage points in 1930. Adjusting for racial differences in underenumeration does not explain the gap. Neither does controlling for the father’s observable characteristics such as occupation. Finally, campaigns in the early 20th century to eradicate malaria and hookworm did not explain these changes either.
June 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Laura Murphy
June 8, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Carlo Medici Title: Immigration and Labor Unions Abstract: Increased immigration is commonly met with negative reactions from natives. One unexplored consequence of immigration is how it affects workers’ mobilization through participation in labor unions. In this paper, I assemble a novel dataset from newly digitized historical documents, and exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. counties between 1900 and 1920, to study the effect of immigration on unionization. I find that immigration caused an overall increase in union membership. Exploring the mechanisms, I document that unions developed as a reaction to the labor competition exerted by recently arrived immigrants on native workers.
June 7, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Mallesh Pai (Rice University): Title TBD
June 6, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Rosa Matzkin (UCLA): “Unobservables in Structural Models”
June 5, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan (University of Maryland): "Collateral Heterogeneity and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from Loans to SMEs and Large Firms" with Cecilia R. Caglio, R. Matthew Darst Abstract: Using matched firm-bank level administrative data for the U.S., we document new facts on heterogeneity in firms' financing conditions and quantify its effects on monetary policy transmission. Most private firms in the U.S. are small-medium-size-enterprises (SMEs), whose entire balance sheet debt comes from banks and is collateralized mostly with earnings and intangibles, i.e., their enterprise value. Highly leveraged SMEs' respond to monetary expansions more by increasing their credit demand. They borrow more at lower spreads by pledging earnings-based collateral, whose value increases with monetary expansions. Our results link the bank lending and firm investment channels of monetary policy and show that the impact of policy on investment is stronger in an environment with a large number of small firms, whose borrowing depends on earnings-based constraints.
June 2, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Felipe Berrutti Rampa (Northwestern University): "Price Regulation of Agricultural Technology"
June 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Carlo Medici (Northwestern) Title: Immigration, Labor Movement, and Workers’ Rights Abstract :    Increased immigration is commonly met with negative reactions from native workers, because of fear of job competition and lower salaries. As a direct consequence, immigration can affect workers’ mobilization efforts through increased participation in labor unions and strikes. In this paper, I assemble a novel dataset from digitized historical documents to study the effect of immigration on labor organizations in the context of the Age of Mass Migration. Exploiting exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. counties between 1900 and 1920, based on immigrants' pre-existing settlement patterns, I find that immigration caused an overall increase in unionization. I document that labor unions developed as a reaction to the labor competition brought by immigrants to native workers, and as a result of the rising discrimination towards Southern and Eastern Europeans prevailing in this period.
June 1, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Recruitment Job Talk	Till Marco von Wachter (UCLA): "UI Benefit Generosity and Labor Supply from 2002-2020: Evidence from California UI records" with Alex Bell, TJ Hedin, and Geoff Schnorr
June 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ryu Matsuura Title: "Access to Finance and Political Connections for Firms" Abstract: Firms in developing countries often suffer from the lack of access to finance. Some firms consequently substitute for political connections to ease financial constraints. However, there is limited evidence on whether banking sector reforms are effective at mitigating the degree of clientelism between business and politics. Moreover, political connections inhibit market competition, which distorts capital allocation in the economy. It is thus important to understand how an increase in access to finance changes the dependence of firms on political connections. However, there is limited evidence on what kind of economic policies are effective at mitigating the degree of clientelism between business and politics. In this project, I investigate how improved financial access affects the performance of politically connected firms. I will first document the effects of political connections on firm performance and then estimate the causal impacts of an exogenous increase in financial access on political connections effects.
June 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Maria Betto (Northwestern): Title TBD
June 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Fergal Hanks Title: TBA
June 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Presenter: Halefom Nigus Title: Leveraging technology to improve youth employment in Ethiopia Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of three labor market interventions on youth's job search behavior, labor market beliefs, and employment outcomes using a randomized control trial. First, it aims to examine the impact of providing job seekers with access to job vacancy information, with the aid of a job aggregator website, on their job search behavior and employment. Second, the study will investigate the impact of helping job seekers signal their skills to prospective employers by certifying their cognitive \& non-cognitive skills, which are hard to observe for employers, on job seekers' employment prospects. Finally, this study aims to gauge the impact of rectifying job seekers' beliefs by providing actual labor market information on their labor market outcomes. The intervention targets unemployed university graduates in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. To this end, the study will leverage HahuJobs' technological setup.  Speaker:  Ludovica Mosillo Title: TBA
May 31, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Ron Siegel (Penn State): Title TBD
May 31, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Stephan Heblich (Toronto): Title TBD
May 31, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Charlie Murry (Boston College): Title TBA
May 30, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	V. Joe Hotz (Duke): "Race Differences in the Impact of Parental Resources on Children’s College Attendance & Its Financing"
May 26, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Vageesha Bainwala (Northwestern University): "Bank Expansion & Formal-Informal Household Debt"
May 26, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Tan Hui Ren (National University of Singapore) Title: TBA
May 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Fiona Burlig (UChicago): "The value of forecasts: Experimental evidence from developing-country agriculture" with Amir Jina, Erin Kelley, Greg Lane, and Harshil Sahai Abstract: Climate risk is a key driver of low agricultural productivity in poor countries. We use a cluster-randomized trial to evaluate a novel risk-mitigation approach: long-range forecasts that provide information about the onset of the Indian summer monsoon well in advance of its arrival. In contrast to traditional ex post risk coping approaches, this novel ex ante technology provides accurate information significantly before the monsoon's arrival, enabling farmers to alter major up front input decisions. Moreover, forecasts have the potential to be disseminated cheaply, even at scale. We assign 250 villages to one of three groups: a control group; a group that receives an opportunity to purchase the forecast; and a group that is offered insurance. We present preliminary results, including on farmers' willingness-to-pay for forecasts; how forecasts affect farmer beliefs, up-front investments, and welfare; and benchmark these preliminary effects against the canonical ex post loss mitigation tool: index insurance.
May 25, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Nicoló Tomaselli Title: Licensed to Deal: A Lab in the Field Experiment with Auctioned Business Opportunities
May 25, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Nemanja Antic (Northwestern): Title TBD
May 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Matias Bayas Title: Optimal public debt and redistribution
May 25, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Devis Decet  Title: The Geography of State Capacity Abstract:  In this preliminary work, I employ census data to map the extent of public sector presence across 10 African countries and 1,203 regions. I show some descriptive facts about public sector workers' human capital and their allocation across regions. I conclude by proposing possible ways of using this measure to better understand the organization of the State in the Global South.  ////// Speaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: Transfer Cost and Financial Access: evidence from Brazil Abstract: Low-cost instantaneous transfer systems are being developed all over the world, and at the same time that central banks are worried that these technologies could increase bank deposit competition and destabilize the banking industry, these technologies could increase financial access and strengthen the financial sector. In this paper, We explore how the introduction of a free transfer system in Brazil, called Pix, disrupted individuals' financial access. We use rich confidential data from the Brazilian Central Bank on every individual and firm in Brazil, and a natural experiment in which 21 million families had to access governmental assistance either through Pix or at some determined withdrawal locations. The distance to those locations becomes an instrument to determine Pix's causality on several outcomes.
May 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Michihiro Kandori (University of Tokyo): "Using Big Data and Machine Learning to Uncover How Players Choose Mixed Strategies" (with T. Hirasawa and A. Matsushita) Abstract: How do humans behave in a situation where (i) one needs to make one’s own behavior unpredictable and (ii) one needs to predict an opponent’s behavior? This is an important class of strategic situations, formulated as games with a mixed strategy equilibrium. If humans are put in such a situation, it is obvious that, rather than calculating the mixed equilibrium strategy, they use their hunches and some heuristics to achieve the aforementioned goals (i) and (ii). Exactly what kind of mechanisms are employed has not been fully understood. To address this issue, we use our unique big experimental data set about a game with a mixed strategy equilibrium, which has about 75,000 observations, and compare conventional behavioral economics models with some leading machine learning models. The use of big data enables us to examine the external validities of those models, i.e., compare the predictive powers of those models in data sets that are not used for parameter estimation. We found that machine learning models, most notably a version of the deep learning model LSTM, substantially outperform the leading behavioral model (EWA), and this happens only when the size of the data set for parameter estimation is sufficiently large. Finally, we try to improve the EWA model by incorporating the insights gained from the machine learning models.
May 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Vellore Arthi (UC Irvine): "Financial Scarring and the Failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank" with Gary Richardson & Mark Van Orden
May 24, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Michael Dickstein (NYU Stern): Title TBA
May 24, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Radhika Ramakrishnan (Northwestern University): "Economic conditions and the mortality decline, Italy 1901-1951"
May 23, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Takuya Ura (UC Davis): "Slow Movers in Panel Data" with Yuya Sasaki Abstract: Panel data often contain stayers (units with no within-variations) and slow movers (units with little within-variations). In the presence of many slow movers, conventional econometric methods can fail to work. We propose a novel method of robust inference for the average partial effects in correlated random coefficient models robustly across various distributions of within-variations, including the cases with many stayers and/or many slow movers in a unified manner. In addition to this robustness property, our proposed method entails smaller biases and hence improves accuracy in inference compared to existing alternatives. Simulation studies demonstrate our theoretical claims about these properties: the conventional 95% confidence interval covers the true parameter value with 37-93% frequencies, whereas our proposed one achieves 93-96% coverage frequencies.
May 23, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Michael Best (Columbia): "Greener on the Other Side: Inequity and Tax Compliance" with Luigi Caloi, François Gerard, Evan Kresch, Joana Naritomi, and Laura Zoratto Abstract: Do perceptions of unfairness and inequality in property tax liabilities contribute to delinquency? We study the urban property tax in Manaus, Brazil, one of the city’s main revenue sources. Households’ tax liability depends on which sector of the city they live in, but this can lead neighbors on opposite sides of a street, but who are in different sectors, to owe wildly different taxes, which is widely perceived as unfair. Combining administrative data on tax liabilities, payments and property transfers; reforms to the tax and liabilities in the different sectors, and an experiment informing households of the tax liabilities of other sectors, we study whether perceived unfairness affects tax payments.
May 22, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Nick Buchholz (Princeton): "Rethinking Reference Dependence: Wage Dynamics and Optimal Taxi Labor Supply" with Matthew Shum and Haiqing Xu Abstract: Workers with variable earnings and flexible hours offer unique opportunities to evaluate intertemporal labor supply elasticities. Existing static analyses, however, have generated well-known puzzles, suggesting evidence of downward sloping labor supply curves. Using a large sample of shifts of New York City taxicab drivers, we estimate a dynamic optimal stopping model of drivers’ work times and quitting decisions. Our model exploits a set of sufficient statistics for equilibrium interactions between supply and demand, allowing us to estimate driver opportunity costs via a single agent problem. Our results demonstrate that several apparent behavioral biases documented in the literature can be reproduced using entirely standard preferences. We use our model to provide new estimates of individual earnings elasticities and show that taxi drivers have similar elasticities to workers in markets where experimental evidence has been obtained. Finally, we use data spanning a 2012 fare change to estimate labor supply elasticities with respect to market prices, accounting for the equilibrium impact of prices on supply and demand. We find market elasticities to be approximately a tenth of the size of individual elasticities, suggesting that existing estimates of the benefits to recent earnings legislation in the taxi and ride-hail industries are overstated
May 22, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Peter Buisseret (Harvard): "Politics Transformed? Electoral Competition under Ranked Choice Voting" Abstract: We compare multi-candidate elections under plurality rule versus ranked choice voting (RCV). In our framework candidates choose whether to pursue a narrow campaign that targets a segment of voters, or instead pursue a broad campaign that can appeal to the entire electorate. Relative to plurality, we find that RCV can intensify candidates’ incentives to pursue targeted rather than broad campaigns. The opportunity to secure voters' second preferences without being their most-preferred candidate can strengthen this incentive, rather than mitigate it. Our findings challenge widely-held contentions about the benefits of adopting RCV.
May 22, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Francesco Bianchi (JHU): "Monetary-Based Asset Pricing: A Mixed-Frequency Structural Approach" with Sydney Ludvigson and Sai Ma Abstract: We integrate a high-frequency monetary event study into a mixed-frequency macro-finance model and structural estimation. The model and estimation allow for jumps at Fed announcements in investor beliefs, providing granular detail on why markets react to central bank communications. We find that the reasons involve a mix of revisions in investor beliefs about the economic state and/or future regime change in the conduct of monetary policy, and subjective reassessments of financial market risk. However, the structural estimation also finds that much of the causal impact of monetary policy on markets occurs outside of tight windows around policy announcements.
May 22, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Elizabeth Jaramillo Rojas (Northwestern University): "Illegal Economies and Economic Growth"
May 19, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Hershdeep Chopra (Northwestern University): "Managing Trust"
May 19, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Christopher Sims (Northwestern) Title: Product innovation during the Industrial Revolution Jinlin Wie (University of Warwick) Title: Branching for caution: Banks in England and Wales during a Financial Crisis
May 18, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Center of Economic Theory Student-Invited Seminar	Marina Halac (Yale): "Optimal Unique-Implementation Schemes"
May 18, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Nicolo Tomaselli (visiting from the University of Florence) Title: TBA
May 18, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Shallabh Tiwari (Northwestern): Title TBD
May 18, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Miguel Santana
May 18, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Anastasiia Evdokimova  Title: Does the Internet Improve Health Behavior? Costly Information Acquisition Under Heterogeneity in Health-Related Risk Perception Abstract: This study explores the impact of online health information (OHI) acquisition on health-related behavior and investigates the underlying mechanism to address heterogeneity in its effects. The phenomenon of cyberchondria, characterized by unwarranted concerns based on online search results, has raised doubts regarding the potential benefits of OHI. I propose that the acquisition of OHI is a costly process influenced by individuals' heterogeneous risk perception of health-related information. Some individuals find it more difficult to be convinced of their healthiness compared to others, irrespective of the information source. To examine this, I develop a rational inattention model incorporating a novel cost function that captures heterogeneity in health-related risk perception and results in confirmation bias. Empirical evidence supports our theoretical framework, revealing that OHI usage is associated with increased health utilization overall. Furthermore, we find that individuals with lower risk tolerance regarding their health status exhibit even higher rates of health utilization when utilizing OHI. Speaker: Roma Poberegski Title: “Interlocking directorates, competition, and innovation” Abstract: “Holding concurrent seats on boards of rival firms, 'horizontal directors' dampen competition and increase firm performance. In the cross-section of public US firms, losing an interlock with a competitor decreases returns by 2 to 3 percentage points. I propose a mechanism of market segmentation where horizontal directors steer firms away from fierce direct competition. Using data on patenting, I show that horizontal interlocks help firms maintain distance in the competitive space and reduce redundancy, increasing innovation quantity and quality by 15 to 35 percent.”
May 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Marina Halac (Yale): Title TBD
May 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Allison Shertzer (Pitt): "The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006" with Ronan C. Lyons, Rowena Gray, and David Agorastos
May 17, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Kenneth Fu (Northwestern University): "Kernel Regression for Graphon Estimation"
May 16, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	David Hughes (Boston College): "Estimating Nonlinear Network Data Models with Fixed Effects"
May 16, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	David Dorn (University of Zurich): "No Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States" with David Autor, Anne Beck, and Gordon Hanson Abstract: We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other U.S. trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to U.S. import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and U.S. compensation programs. The trade-war has not so far provided economic help to the U.S. heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered U.S. employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory U.S. agricultural subsidies. Nevertheless, consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears to have benefited the Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress. Foreign retaliatory tariffs only modestly weakened that support.
May 15, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Ariel Pakes (Harvard): "Unobserved Heterogeneity, State Dependence, and Health Plan Choices" with Jack Porter, Mark Shepard, and Sophie Calder-Wang Abstract: We provide a new method to analyze discrete choice models with state dependence and individual-by-product fixed effects, and use it to analyze consumer choices in a policy-relevant environment (a subsidized health insurance exchange). Moment inequalities are used to infer state dependence from consumers’ switching choices in response to changes in product attributes. We infer much smaller switching costs on the health insurance exchange than is inferred from standard logit and/or random effects methods. A counterfactual policy evaluation illustrates that the policy implications of this difference can be substantive.
May 15, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Emily Sellars (Yale): Title TBD
May 15, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq. with J. Collins (Feinberg) - The Racial Disparity in Adverse Birth Outcomes	"The Racial Disparity in Adverse Birth Outcomes: Putting the Spotlight on Structural Racism"* by James W. Collins, Jr., Zeisler Family Neonatology Leadership Professor and Professor of Pediatrics This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
May 15, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Kilian Huber (UChicago): "Corporate Discount Rates" with Niels Joachim Gormsen
May 15, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Danil Fedchenko (Northwestern University): "On the Inconsistency of Recursive Partitioning with Continuous and Discrete Data"
May 12, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Federico Crippa (Northwestern University): "Optimal Threshold Policies"
May 12, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Grant Goering (Boston University) Title: The Progressive Era War on Vice: Public Health Consequences of Closing Red-Light Districts Bin Huang (University of Zurich) Title: TBA
May 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Job Market Orientation for Economics Graduate Students	Students who are thinking about going on the market next year should attend an introductory meeting with Professor Alessandro Pavan, the Director of Graduate Placement. Any student in the third year and beyond who is curious about the job market process is welcome.
May 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Nick Bloom (Stanford): "How Hybrid Working From Home Works Out" with Ruobing Han and James Liang Abstract: Hybrid working from home (hybrid), whereby employees work a mix of days at home and at work each week, has become common for graduate employees. This paper evaluates a randomized control trial of hybrid on 1612 graduate engineers, marketing and finance employees of a large technology firm. There are four key results. First, hybrid was highly valued by employees on average, reducing attrition by 33% and improving job-satisfaction measures. Second, hybrid reduced working hours on home days and increased them on office days and the weekend, altering the structure of the working week. Third, hybrid increased messaging and video calls, even when all employees were in the office, reflecting a move towards more electronic communication. Finally, there were large differences in the valuations of hybrid between managers and non-managers. Non-managers were more likely to volunteer into the hybrid experiment, to work from home on eligible days, to predict positive impacts on productivity, and to reduce their attrition under hybrid. In contrast, managers were less likely to volunteer, less likely to work from home on eligible days, predicted a negative average impact of hybrid on productivity, and saw increased attrition rates under hybrid
May 11, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ashagrie Demile Moges (CEGA fellow) Title: Liquidity shock and bank lending: Evidence from a natural experiment in Ethiopia Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the lending channel of liquidity shock by exploiting the mandatory regulatory requirement in the least developing country, Ethiopia. The result from the difference-in-difference strategy using bank's balance sheet data shows that the policy change had an immediate and stronger negative effect on the bank's most liquid asset, cash on hand,  on banks that are larger and more liquid, and persisted for quite some time. The same estimation strategy using the loan-level data also reveals that the liquidity shock propagated to the bank's loan supply five months after the implementation of the regulation. The result is robust after controlling for the possible difference in credit demand by sectors, regions, and borrower types that banks face. The study further indicates that banks' response to the liquidity shock varies by borrowers’ industries suggesting that banks adjust their loan portfolio towards less risky loans.
May 11, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Peter Kilbanoff (Northwestern): "Persuasion with Ambiguous Communication" with Xiaoyu Cheng, Sujoy Mukerji and Ludovic Renou
May 11, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Diego Cid Title: TBA
May 11, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Presenter: Genia Rachkovski Title: Going Beyond Test Scores: Does Public Information about School Satisfaction and Violence Levels Affect Parental School Choice? Abstract: A 2012 Supreme Court ruling ordered the Ministry of Education in Israel to make school level test score information public, as well as publicizing a set of non academic school attribute survey information. This setting provides a natural and exogenous context to examine the effects of this information on student school choice. Using both an event study and a difference in difference analysis, I find that, in regions where parents had more than one school option, the share of parents sending their kids to `better’ schools has increased following the information reveal. This effect is mostly driven by violence and school satisfaction ratings, rather than test scores.  Finally, heterogeneity by parental education and the implications on socio economic integration are discussed.
May 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Ina Taneva (University of Edinburgh): "Strategic Ignorance and Information Design" with Tom Wiseman Abstract: We study information design in strategic settings when agents can publicly commit to not view their private signals. Ignoring the constraints that agents must be willing to view their signals may lead to substantial divergence between the designer’s intent and actual outcomes, even in the case where the designer seeks to maximize the agents’ payoffs. We introduce the appropriate equilibrium concept — robust correlated equilibrium — and characterize implementable distributions over states and actions. Requiring robustness to strategic ignorance can explain qualitative properties that standard information design cannot: the designer may provide redundant or even counterproductive information, asymmetric information structures may be strictly optimal in symmetric environments, providing information conditional on players’ choices rather than all at once may hurt the designer, and communication between players may help her. Optimality may require that players ignore their signals with positive probability.
May 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Vicky Fouka (Stanford): Title TBD
May 10, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Raffaella Sadun (HBS): Title TBA
May 10, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Kyohei Okumura (Northwestern University): "Sample Design Under Fairness Concerns"
May 9, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Tetsuya Kaji (UChicago Booth): "Assessing Heterogeneity in Treatment Effects" Abstract: Treatment heterogeneity is often assessed with quantile treatment effects, which lack clear interpretation without rank preservation. We propose three new bounds on heterogeneity that complement quantile treatment effects. First, we bound on the average treatment effects for subgroups defined by Y0 < c for a user-specified value c. This is useful when we are interested in the treatment effect on one tail of the outcome, such as in poverty assistance programs, health insurance, and educational aids. Second, we establish bounds on the proportions of winners for the same subgroups. This bound is useful, e.g., when a policymaker wants to assess the share of winners from a policy change or when doctors want to make sure no patient is harmed by the treatment. Third, we derive a second-order stochastic dominance bound on the distribution of individual treatment effects. This is helpful when we are interested in a non-utilitarian welfare that is concave in the treatment effects.
May 9, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	David Cutler (Harvard): "Why Has the Opioid Epidemic Lasted So Long?" with J. Travis Donahoe Abstract: Between 1990 and 2021, opioid overdose death rates in the U.S. rose nearly continuously. Such a long period of sustained increase goes against conventional theory, which suggests that the public and private policies that respond to harmful drug epidemics should reduce deaths over time. This paper examines why opioid deaths rose so greatly and for so long. We develop and estimate a model of addictive drug use dynamics which incorporates spillovers across people, which we refer to as “thick market externalities.” Thick markets may result from information spillovers across people, changes in the cost of using drugs as more people use them, and positive peer effects in consumption. When goods are addictive and there are spillovers across people, temporary shocks may lead to long-term increases in use. To test for the presence of these spillovers, we estimate our model using data on county opioid overdose death rates linked to geographic distance and peer connectedness, as measured by Facebook friendships. We find evidence of large spillovers in opioid use, particularly through friend relationships but also through geographically close areas. Our estimates imply the majority of opioid deaths in recent years are due to spillovers from historical dissemination of prescription opioids, rather than exogenous factors affecting the present.
May 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Jihye Jeon (Boston University): "Why Do Index Funds Have Market Power? Quantifying Frictions in the Index Fund Market" with Zach Brown, Mark Egan, Chuqing Jin, and Alex Wu
May 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq. with K. Jackson (IPR/SESP/Econ) - What Impacts Can We Expect From School Spending Policy? Evidence From Evaluations in the U.S.	"What Impacts Can We Expect From School Spending Policy? Evidence From Evaluations in the U.S." by Kirabo Jackson, the Abraham Harris Professor of Education and Social Policy, Professor of Economics, and IPR Fellow This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
May 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Adam Guren (Boston University): “Do Credit Conditions Move House Prices?” with Dan Greenwald
May 8, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sebastian Poblete Coddou (Northwestern University): "Do Mergers Change Costs? Why?Evidence from U.S. Airlines’ Networks"
May 5, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Giovanni Pisauro (Northwestern University): "The Causes and Consequences of Physicians Hiring Frictions: Evidence from Physicians Market in Italy"
May 5, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Carlo Medici (Northwestern University) Title: The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy Matteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University) Title: Revenge is best served cold: Brigandage and Monarchical Legitimacy in Southern Italy  Carlo Medici Abstract: This paper examines the economic effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States, across US counties between 1860 and 1940. The Act reduced the size of the Chinese population and employment in all major economic sectors, and lowered the quality of jobs among the Chinese who remained. Contrary to the expectations of its proponents, the Act also reduced the employment and the income of white workers, both native and foreign-born ones, and had sharp negative effects on manufacturing and agriculture. The negative impact of the Act was concentrated in the western United States, where the majority of Chinese immigrants lived in 1880, and persisted until at least 1940.  Matteo Ruzzante Abstract: Abstract: The power and tenure of kings rest upon the ability of providing order when coordination costs are high. Yet, cultural and institutional incongruities can weaken their traditional authority and lead to revolts. This paper studies whether an historical shock in the legitimacy of monarchic rule can have long-term, intergenerational consequences on political attitudes. The unification of Italy ignited a violent reaction against the new ruler in its Southern provinces, known as the  “Great Brigandage”. This uprising was effectively quelled by repressive military operations but left an indelible mark in the collective memory. We show that, ceteris  paribus, municipalities exposed to brigandage in the 1861-1870 period had lower turnout in the 1946 Institutional Referendum and were significantly less likely to vote for the survival of the monarchy. These results are reflected in increased support for anti-monarchist parties in the simultaneous Constituent Assembly election. We interpret our findings as evidence that latent preferences toward political systems are endogenously shaped by historical events and can be brought to the surface by changes in the institutional environment.
May 5, 202311:30 AM - 12:00 PM	Town Hall Meeting for Third Year Economics Graduate Students	DGS Marciano Siniscalchi, and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
May 5, 202311:00 AM - 11:30 AM	Town Hall Meeting for Second Year Economics Graduate Students	DGS Marciano Siniscalchi, and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
May 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Imran Rasul (UCL): “Families as Drivers of Inequality: Experimental Evidence from an Early Childhood Intervention” with Pedro Carneiro and Francesca Salvati (paper link)    Abstract: Families shape inequality across individuals, by determining whether initial endowment differences across children are magnified or equalized through the intrahousehold allocation of resources over time. We study the link between early life circumstances, parental investments and child outcomes, over time and across multiple siblings in families in rural Northern Nigeria, where households reside in extreme poverty and sibling rivalry effects can be first order. We do so by evaluating a pre-natal intervention providing information and cash transfers to families triggered by the verified pregnancy of a target child. We track outcomes and child-specific parental inputs across older and younger siblings of the target child in 3600 families over four years. We find that unlike for the target child, stunting outcomes for older siblings do not improve, because they are too old when the intervention begins to gain from it in terms of height. We also document muted gains on height for younger siblings, and show this is because of endogenous responses to the intervention through shorter birth spacing between the target child and younger siblings, labor supply responses of mothers, and fade out of knowledge on specific peri-natal practices. However, on a raft of other outcomes such as health, nutrition and parental inputs more relevant outside the first 1000-days of life window, outcomes significantly shift forward for all siblings. Our results show parents behave as if to equalize inputs across siblings, despite differences in their physical endowments. Calculating the annualized IRR to the intervention based on this fuller set of family impacts, leads them to rise ten-fold over those based on target child outcomes alone. JEL: I15, O12.
May 4, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sergio Lopez-Araiza Title: "US Border Wall and Organized Crime in Mexico" Abstract: Violence related to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has dramatically escalated in Mexico since 2007. However, beyond the increase in the nation-wide homicide rate lies a huge time and spatial variation across Mexico's 2,456 municipalities. One potential source of such heterogeneity is how valuable it is for DTOs to control a municipality for drug trafficking purposes.  Using the expansion of the US-Mexico border wall that resulted from the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and leveraging the fact that it made trafficking drugs into the US more difficult, I study how changes in the value of the municipalities shifted violence in Mexico. Using a TWFE estimator, I observe that municipalities whose closest border municipality get a wall segment see a decrease of 0.35 (44% with respect to the mean) in their homicide rate. The effect is concentrated in municipalities with DTO presence by 2005 and it seems to be present for at least 5 years.
May 4, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Ehud Kalai (Northwestern): "Beyond Dominance and Nash: Ranking Equilibria by Critical Mass" with Adam Kalai Abstract: We study critical-mass equilibrium concepts for n-person strategic games. These concepts explain observed strategic interactions that are not explained by dominant strategy equilibrium (DSE), Nash equilibrium (NE), and their refinements. This presentation would focus mostly on applications that go beyond standard game theory.
May 4, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Kwok Yan Chiu Title: Household Heterogeneity in MPC and Attention
May 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Presenter: Yoshimasa Katayama Title: Readmission Penalty under Nonlinear Payment Schedules: Evidence from Japan Abstract: I study how hospitals respond to financial incentives. In Japan, the per diem payment is designed to decrease as the length of stay increases to incentivize early discharge. To discourage repeated discharges and readmissions, readmissions immediately after discharge have been penalized. Exploiting changes in readmission penalties, I find that overall readmission rates remain unchanged as hospitals change the timing of readmissions. All of the changes in readmission timing are driven by patients whose health status is unlikely to be affected. Among those who would be affected, immediate post-discharge readmissions decrease without such delays, which I interpret as a quality improvement.
May 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Leonie Baumann (McGill University): “Strategic Evidence Disclosure in Networks and Equilibrium Discrimination” with Rohan Dutta Abstract: A group of agents with ex-ante independent and identically uncertain quality compete for a prize, awarded by a principal. Agents may possess evidence about the quality of those they share a social connection with (neighbours), and themselves. In one equilibrium, adversarial disclosure of evidence leads the principal to statistically discriminate between agents based on their number of neighbours (degree). We identify parameter values for which an agent’s ex-ante winning probability is monotone in degree. All equilibria that satisfy some robustness criteria lie between this adversarial disclosure equilibrium and a less informative one that features no snitching and no discrimination.
May 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Dror Goldberg (Open University of Israel): "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (abstract) Summary: Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention. Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.
May 3, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Wesley Yin (UCLA): “Randomized Acts of Kindness: Effects of Medical Debt Relief” Abstract: One in six Americans has unpaid medical debt in collections amounting to more than $140 billion nationally, yet there is limited understanding of its impacts on households. We analyze the effects of randomized medical debt relief totaling $175 million across more than 80,000 households using three data sources: (1) administrative data on future debt sent to collections; (2) quarterly credit report data spanning at least two years before and after debt relief; and, (3) survey measures of self-reported health (clinically-validated screenings for depression, anxiety, and general health), health care utilization, and financial well-being elicited one year after treatment. We detect no significant effects of debt relief on credit score or access to credit, and no  effects on mental or general health 12 months after the intervention. However, we estimate an increase in future medical bills sent to collections by the original health care provider, which are not reported to credit bureaus. Together, our results imply that reducing an individual's stock of medical debt has limited benefits, particularly for individuals facing a continued flow of health expenditures that are unmitigated by health insurance. (Please note abstract is currently for internal use only, do not post online).
May 3, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Ohi (Northwestern University): "A Model of Scientific Models"
May 2, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Max Cytrynbaum (Yale): “Optimal Stratification of Survey Experiments"
May 2, 20232:15 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Nancy Qian (Northwestern): Black-White Income Inequality During Jim Crow:  Evidence from “Passing” for White Abstract: This paper investigates the phenomenon of “passing” for white by documenting several new descriptive facts. Exposure to racial discrimination was positively associated with Black men “passing” for white. Passing was associated with large income gains and increased economic mobility. However, passing was also associated with high social costs; beyond the loss of one's Black identity, passing was associated with higher separation rates from a person's community and family. Using the income of Black men who passed for white, we construct a range of Black-white income gaps to shed light on the extent to which discrimination against Black men curtailed their incomes during this period. The estimates imply that removing contemporaneous labor market discrimination would have increased the Black-to-white income ratio by at least 3 to 14 percentage-points.
May 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Gerard Padro i Miquel (Yale): Title TBD
May 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq. with E. Tipton (IPR/Statistics) - Modern Meta-Analysis	"Modern Meta-Analysis"* by Elizabeth Tipton, Associate Professor of Statistics, Co-Director of the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center, and IPR Fellow This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
May 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Pablo Ottonello (University of Michigan): "External Crises and Devaluations: A Heterogeneous-Firm Perspective" with Caitlin Hegarty, Matias Moretti, and Diego Perez
May 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jose Higueras Corona (Northwestern University): "Regulating Firms Access to Consumer Data"
April 28, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Lakshmi Iyer (University of Notre Dame) Alex Lehner (UChicago) Lakshmi Iyer title: No Taxation Without Representation? Evidence from Colonial India Alex Lehner Title: Culture, Institutions, and the Roots of Gender Inequality: 450 Years of Portuguese Colonialism in India  Lakshmi Iyer Abstract: I describe the construction of two new databases which track local government expenditures in urban and rural colonial India, respectively. The completed database will include more than 500 cities across 200 districts and four decades. We plan to use these data to investigate questions related to the fiscal effects of elected representation, to track the evolution of property wealth and inter-city trade and to examine how capital accumulation and human development respond to local taxation and spending decisions. Preliminary results from a small part of the database suggest that greater elected representation is associated with a greater share of local spending devoted to education.  Alex Lehner Abstract: When are economic phenomena persistent over time, and when are they not? If they are, do inequalities persist forever, or do they converge, and if so, at what speed? By analyzing the Indian state of Goa, this research makes use of a historical quasi-natural experiment to study the effect of Portuguese (catholic) colonialism. To achieve econometric identification, I apply a spatial regression discontinuity design alongside a border that was abandoned in the 18th century. I establish that historical disparities in female education can be overcome, albeit much slower than for males. In contrast, male-biased sex ratios stay virtually unchanged - highlighting the differential degree persistence of deeply rooted preferences. This provides a rare opportunity to isolate and identify the effect of culture, holding constant geography, income, and institutions.
April 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Chris Woodruff (Oxford): "Interventions to improve the quality of lawyer matches: Evidence from labour courts in Mexico"
April 27, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Wojciech Olszewski (Northwestern): "Local Version Tarski Theorem and Monotone Comparative Statics" Abstract: Local versions of Tarski (1955) theorem are provided. Tools similar to those used in the proofs are proposed for comparative statics in monotone settings. The concepts and results generalize Samuelson (1947) and Echenique (2002). The usefulness of the results is illustrated by applications to networks, network effects in imperfectly competitive markets, and dynamics of income distribution.
April 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Diego Huerta
April 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ashagrie Demile Moges Title: Liquidity shock and bank lending: Evidence from a natural experiment in Ethiopia. Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on how a liquidity shock induced by regulation affects banking lending behavior in a developing country, exploiting the mandatory regulatory requirement of bill purchase as a natural experiment. We find that the effect of the policy change on the bank's most liquid asset, cash on hand, is immediate, stronger, and persisted for quite some time for banks that are larger and more liquid. The effects of the shock, however, propagated to the bank's loan supply five months after the implementation of the regulation. The result is robust after controlling for credit demand that may vary by sectors, regions, and loan types for some banks relative to others. The study further shows that banks' response to the liquidity shock varies by borrowers’ industries suggesting that banks adjust their loan portfolio towards less risky loans. and  Speaker: Giacomo Marcolin Title:  Giacomo Marcolin presenting “Gig Work as Income Insurance during Unemployment: Evidence from Germany"
April 26, 20236:30 PM - 9:30 PM	Chicagoland Friends of Economic History Dinner	Please join the Department of Economics and the Center for Economic History for our biannual Chicagoland Friends of Economic History Dinner. Kevin O'Rourke (NYU Abu Dhabi) will present "The Ends of 27 Big Depressions".
April 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	David Dillenberger (UPenn): Title TBD
April 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Kevin O'Rourke (NYU): "The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada"
April 26, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Hans-Joachim Voth (Zurich): Title TBA
April 26, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrea Ferrara (Northwestern University): "Optimal Monetary Policy Under Partial Information"
April 25, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Karun Adusumilli (UPenn): "How to sample and when to stop sampling: The generalized Wald problem and minimax policies"
April 25, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Crystal Yang (Harvard): “Algorithmic Recommendations and Human Discretion” with Victoria Angelova and Will Dobbie
April 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Yunmi Kong (Rice University): "Liquid Markets: An Empirical Analysis of a Water Exchange" Abstract: This paper empirically analyzes the performance of one of the world’s most developed water exchanges, which operates as a primitive limit order market. Upon modeling participants’ incentives to shade their order prices and their choice between limit and market orders, I identify the distribution of participants’ willingness to pay (or accept) from the observed orders and trades. The model flexibly allows for dynamics, risk aversion, and default behavior. Counterfactual simulations suggest the observed exchange attains substantially lower trade surplus than periodic uniform-price market clearing. Droughts exacerbate the gap in surplus per unit traded. The exchange exhibits noticeable price dispersion, which enables suboptimal buyer-seller matching and incentivizes price shading
April 24, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Sanjay Singh (UC Davis/SF Fed): "The long-run effects of monetary policy" with Oscar Jorda and Alan M. Taylor Abstract: We document that the real effects of monetary shocks last for over a decade. Our approach relies on (1) identification of exogenous and non-systematic monetary shocks using the trilemma of international finance; (2) merged data from two new international historical cross-country databases; and (3) econometric methods robust to long-horizon inconsistent estimates. Notably, the capital stock and total factor productivity (TFP) exhibit strong hysteresis, while labor does not. Allowing for asymmetry, we find these effects are present when interest rates tighten, but not when they loosen. We also compare our findings to other monetary shocks studied in the literature.
April 24, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrei Iakovlev (Northwestern University): "Optimal Information Loss"
April 21, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sebastian Sardon (Northwestern University): "Commodity Booms, Local State Capacity, and Development"
April 21, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Megumi Murakami (Northwestern) Title: A history of medical knowledge in the market
April 20, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: TBA
April 20, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Kota Saito (Northwestern): "Axiomatization of Random Utility Model with Unobservable Alternatives" Abstract: The random utility model is one of the most fundamental models in discrete choice analysis in economics. Although Falmagne (1978) obtained an axiomatization of the random utility model, his characterization requires strong observability of choices, i.e., that the frequency of choices must be observed from all subsets of the set of alternatives. Little is known, however, about the axiomatization when a dataset is incomplete, i.e., the frequencies on some choice sets are not observable. In fact, it is known that in some cases, obtaining a tight characterization is NP hard. On the other hand, datasets in reality almost always violate the requirements on observability assumed by Falmagne (1978). We consider an incomplete dataset in which we do not observe frequencies of some alternatives: for all other alternatives, we observe frequencies. For such a dataset, we obtain a finite system of linear inequalities that is necessary and sufficient for the dataset to be rationalized by a random utility model. Moreover, the necessary and sufficient condition is tight in the sense that none of the inequalities is implied by the other inequalities, and dropping any one of the inequalities makes the condition not sufficient.
April 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Joao Guerreiro Title: TBA
April 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Sibling Spillovers in Education: The Impact of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students
April 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Kota Saito (Cal Tech): "Approximating Choice Data by Discrete Choice Models" with Haoge Chang and Yusuke Narita Abstract: We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which random-coefficient discrete choice models such as the mixed logit models are rich enough to approximate any nonparametric random utility models across choice sets. The condition turns out to be very simple and tractable. When the condition is not satisfied and, hence, there exists a random utility model that cannot be approximated by any random-coefficient discrete choice model, we provide algorithms to measure the approximation errors. After applying our theoretical results and the algorithms to real data, we found that the approximation errors can be large in practice
April 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Jared Rubin (Chapman): "Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Science in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis"
April 19, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Ekaterina Khmelnitskaya (Virginia): “Competition and Attrition in Drug Development” Abstract: With fewer than 10% of new drugs reaching the market, the drug development process is notorious for its high attrition rate. It is well-known that drugs get discontinued after clinical failures. However, surveys suggest that firms also withdraw drugs for commercial reasons. Disentangling the sources of attrition is necessary for predicting the impact of government policy on pharmaceutical innovation. This paper separately estimates the two components of attrition using a continuous-time dynamic model of the drug development process. I find that commercial withdrawals account for 8.4% of all discontinuations, and up to 35% for some diseases. Without commercial withdrawals, the rate at which new drugs reach consumers would be 23% higher. Large subsidies for clinical trials help realize some of that gain, but the effect is small. Regulatory adjustments that marginally lower the probability of late-stage clinical failures can achieve the same results.
April 18, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Lidia Kosenkova (University of Virginia): "Inference in strategic-interaction models with censored action spaces"
April 18, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Sonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick): "Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence" with Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio Abstract: We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence in Brazil. We merge employer-employee and social welfare registers with administrative data on domestic violence cases from criminal courts, public shelters and health provider records. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in domestic violence. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design, we show that unemployment benefits do not reduce domestic violence while benefits are being paid, and that they lead to higher domestic violence once benefits expire. We argue that these findings can be explained by the negative income shock brought by job loss and by increased exposure of victims to perpetrators, as partners tend to spend more time together after either is displaced. Although unemployment benefits partially offset the income drop following job loss, they reinforce the exposure shock as they increase unemployment durations.
April 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Nicola Rosaia (Columbia GSB): "Competing Platforms and Transport Equilibrium"
April 17, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Federica Izzo (USCD): Title TBD
April 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Hassan Afrouzi (Columbia): “Inflation and GDP Dynamics in Production Network: A Sufficient Statistics Approach”
April 17, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Nina Fluegel (Northwestern University): "Dynamic Adverse Selection, Endogenously Persistent Types, and Commitment"
April 14, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Bruno Nunes Fava (Northwestern University): "Beyond the Average: Estimating Distributional Treatment Effects"
April 14, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Sonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick) Title: Investments Over the Life Course and the Black-White Earnings Gap    Abstract:    The stability of the race pay gap highlights the importance of systemic disadvantages faced by blacks, which weaken the force of one-off investments in single domains. We examine investments across two domains and two stages of the lifecourse: a positive early life health shock owing to the arrival of the first antibiotics in 1937, and a positive labor market shock owing to minimum wage legislation in 1967. We find evidence of complementarities between the two in producing adult earnings, with larger interaction effects for black than for white men. Our estimates suggest that the complementarity reduced the racial earnings gap by 13.4%. In addition, exposure to minimum wage increases in adulthood reversed the widening of the racial earnings gap among cohorts benefiting from the early health shock.
April 13, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Halefom Nigus (CEGA fellow) and Sebastián Sardón Title: TBA
April 13, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Bag Lunch	Romans Pancs (Northwestern): "Two-Sided Markets and Restricted Boltzmann Machines" with Tetsuya Hoshino Abstract: We extend the standard two-sided market model by allowing benefits from pairwise interactions to differ across all pairs of agents. These benefits, along with agents’ standalone values from joining the market, can be estimated in a computationally efficient manner by observing agents’ repeated decisions whether to participate in the market. Computational efficiency owes to the methods we borrow from the study of restricted Boltzmann machines, a prominent class of neural networks. The estimated parameters can be used in the construction of rich but tractable pricing schemes.
April 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli Title: TBA
April 13, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ryu Matsuura Title: Public Services Delivery to Muslim Villages by BJP Government Abstract: We have seen the rapid rise of populism across the globe. However, the impacts of populist parties on the socio-economic status of minority groups have been understudied in developing countries partly due to the lack of microdata. By utilizing the newly available microdata in India, I provide suggestive evidence of the negative effects of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on public services delivery to Muslim villages. My findings suggest that villages with a high Muslim population share receive fewer public facilities as well as public jobs in the states ruled by the BJP.
April 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint CET/CMS-EMS Theory Workshops	Evan Sadler (Columbia): "Making a Swap: Network Formation with Increasing Marginal Costs" Abstract: I propose a simple theory of strategic network formation that accounts for many empirical patterns. Three parts help forge the theory: i) convex linking costs, ii) local linking benefits, and iii) swap-proofness, a new refinement of pairwise stability. If players agree about who is a more desirable neighbor, then a unique swap-proof stable graph generically exists, and stability robustly begets homophily and clustering. With similar assumptions on players' desire for links, stable graphs take on structures---strong hierarchies or ordered overlapping cliques---that mirror real networks in different domains. Strong hierarchies in particular compel certain patterns in network games with strategic complements, highlighting a mechanism through which status rankings replicate themselves across unrelated contexts. A more general existence theorem unifies several results in the matching literature, and a statistical model to which it applies suggests one approach to preference estimation.
April 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Brian Marein (Toronto): "Migration in the Early 20th Century Caribbean: Evidence from Dominican Residency Permits"
April 12, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Marco Ottaviani (Bocconi): “Grantmaking” with Jerome Adda Abstract: The paper develops a model of non-market allocation of resources through grantmaking. On the supply side, the available budget of grants is awarded to applicants who are evaluated most favorably according to the noisy information available to reviewers. On the demand side, stronger candidates are more likely to obtain grants and thus self-select into applying. Leveraging a technique based on the quantile function, we characterize a broad set of allocation rules under which an increase in evaluation noise in a field raises applications in that field—and reduces applications in all other fields. We illustrate the practical relevance of the model by exploiting a change in the budget allocation rule at the European Research Council, showing that a one standard deviation increase in own evaluation noise leads to a 0.3 standard deviation increase in the number of applications and budget share. We also derive some subtle implications for the design of grantmaking institutions in terms of the endogenous choice of noise by fields and the optimal pooling of fields into panels.
April 12, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Laura Murphy Title: TBA
April 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Christopher Sims (Northwestern University): "Fertilizing Industry: Guano in 19th Century Britain"
April 11, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Chen Qiu (Cornell): “Treatment choice with nonlinear regret”
April 11, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Katherine Meckel (UCSD): “Dependent Coverage and Parental Job Mobility: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act” with Hanna Bae and Maggie Shi  Abstract: A common feature of employer-sponsored insurance is coverage for dependents. While prior evidence suggests that employees trade o  job mobility for their own cov- erage--a phenomenon known as job lock--there is less evidence on the extent to which employees value dependent coverage. This study examines the e ects of an ex- pansion in dependent coverage using a large panel of private insurance claims that links family members and records job tenure. We develop a regression discontinuity design that exploits variation in coverage length by dependent birth date. We  nd that a one percent increase in dependent coverage likelihood increases parental job retention by 0.28 percent. The elasticity of parental job duration to dependent coverage duration is 0.09. We  nd larger elasticities for parents on plans without additional dependents, for parents nearing early retirement age, and for parents of dependents with higher pre-period medical spending.
April 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Will Rafey (UCLA): "Conservation priorities and environmental offsets: Markets for Florida wetlands" (with Daniel Aronoff)
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq. with M. Schanzenbach (Pritzker/IPR) - What Is the University-Student Contract?	"What Is the University-Student Contract?"* by Max Schanzenbach, the Seigle Family Professor of Law and IPR Associate This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Fay Lomax Cook Monday Colloquia	Max Schanzenbach (Pritzker/IPR): "What Is the University-Student Contract?"
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Corina Boar (NYU): "Nonlinear Inflation Dynamics in Menu Cost Economies" with Andres Blanco, Callum Jones, and Virgiliu Midrigan
April 10, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Gabriel Jardanovski (Northwestern University): "Carbon Leakage in the EU ETS"
April 10, 202310:00 AM - 11:00 AM	Young Scholar's Webinars on Climate Finance and Economics: How Much Will Global Warming Cool Global Growth?	Young Scholars Webinars on Climate Finance and Macroeconomics Speaker: Ishan Nath, Economist at The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Moderator: Diego Känzig, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University This paper combines indirect evidence on economic growth with new empirical estimates of the dynamic effects of temperature on GDP to argue that warming has persistent, but not permanent, effects on growth.  Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9016799961958/WN_7hmQPHnZQXmXUUD4N93l8w#/registration
April 7, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Shuyan Huang (Northwestern University): "Adaptive Treatment Assignment in Sequential Experiments towards Optimal Targeting Policy"
April 7, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Netanel Ben-Porath (Northwestern University) Title: Financial Crisis in a Socialist Setting: Impact on Political Behavior, Social Trust, and Economic Values Abstract:    Research on the political and social impacts of financial crises has focused chiefly on free market economies, hindering our understanding of their effects in other settings. We exploit an episode of a financial crisis that hit the Israeli kibbutzim to study its impact in a socialist context. Contrary to findings in capitalistic economies, the crisis led to increased support of liberalized labor markets and reduced support for leftist political parties. These effects persisted in the long run, especially among the young. The crisis also reduced trust in leadership, but trust was restored shortly after agreements to settle the debt were signed, relieving the severity of the crisis. Our findings suggest that economic shocks may have different effects in a free market and socialist systems, in both cases leading individuals to question their current system.    Contact for zoom link.
April 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Clement Bohr Title: TBA
April 6, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xizhao Wang  Title: Innovation Commercialization and Patent Disclosure Abstract: This paper studies how the commercialization of innovation affects patent disclosure. I measure the innovation disclosure by using textual analysis methods to construct the readability scores of each patent's detailed description, claims, and brief summary texts. To identify the causal impact of innovation commercialization on innovation disclosure, this paper uses the difference-in-difference approach.  First, this paper uses the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act which gave universities a potential realization of the economic benefits of the invention as an exogenous shock and leverages the readability change of university patents and non-university patents. Second, this paper considers the technology transfer office establishment as an exogenous shock of innovation commercialization to patent inventors. This paper finds a decrease in readability in patent detailed description by inventors affiliated with universities after the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and the TTO's establishment. Such decrease in readability did not apply to patent claims and patent brief summary. This paper points out a possible strategic innovation disclosure behavior, a finding that when inventors foresee patent commercialization, they would strategically decrease the readability of patent detailed descriptions and lower openness in sharing how to make and use the invention.
April 5, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Mara P. Squicciarini (Bocconi): "Dealing with Adversity: Religiosity or Science? Evidence from the Great Influenza Pandemic" Abstract: How do societies respond to adversity? After a negative shock, separate strands of research document either an increase in religiosity or a boost in innovation efforts. In this paper, we show that both reactions can occur at the same time, driven by different individuals within society. The setting of our study is the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in the United States. To measure religiosity, we construct a novel indicator based on naming patterns of newborns. We measure innovation through the universe of granted patents. Exploiting plausibly exogenous county-level variation in exposure to the pandemic, we provide evidence that more-affected counties become both more religious and more innovative. Looking within counties, we uncover heterogeneous responses: individuals from more religious backgrounds further embrace religion, while those from less religious backgrounds become more likely to choose a scientific occupation. Facing adversity widens the distance in religiosity between science-oriented individuals and the rest of the population, and it leads to the polarization of religious beliefs.
April 5, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Kyle Myers (HBS): Title TBA
April 5, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Valerio Di Tommaso (Northwestern University): "Estimating the Average MPC Under Minimal Assumptions"
April 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Shengmao Cao (Northwestern): "Equilibrium Effects of Pharmaceutical Bundling: Evidence from India"
April 3, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Alessandra Casella (Columbia): Title TBD
April 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq. with W. Brady (Kellogg/IPR) - Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility	"Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility"* by William Brady, Donald P. Jacobs Scholar, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, and IPR Associate This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
April 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Martin Beraja (MIT): "Inefficient Automation" with Nathan Zorzi Abstract: How should the government respond to automation? We study this question in a heterogeneous agent model that takes worker displacement seriously. We recognize that displaced workers face two frictions in practice: reallocation is slow and borrowing is limited. We analyze a second best problem where the government can tax automation but lacks redistributive tools to fully alleviate borrowing frictions. The equilibrium is (constrained) inefficient and automation is excessive. The reason is that there is a conflict between how firms and displaced workers value the effects of automation over time. The government finds it optimal to tax automation on efficiency grounds, even when it does not value equity. Slowing down automation increases aggregate consumption and redistributes early on during the transition, precisely when displaced workers value it more. Using a quantitative version of our model, we find that the optimal speed of automation is considerably lower than at the laissez-faire. The optimal policy improves efficiency and achieves substantial welfare gains.
April 3, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Ludovica Mosillo (Northwestern University): "Gender in Leadership"
March 31, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Matteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University): "Soil Heterogeneity and Agricultural Innovation: Evidence from Africa"
March 31, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Narly Dwarkasing (Erasmus University) Title: The Evolution and Economic impact of African American banks: The USA from 1900 to present.  Abstract: This study presents new empirical findings on the long-term economic effects of African American owned banks. We collect data on nearly all African American Banks that have operated in the United States between 1900 and 2020. We examine the impact of African American Banks on various economic indicators for African Americans living in the same county, including Black home ownership rates. Additionally, we employ an instrumental variable approach based on Freedman Banks' branches to address endogeneity issues that may arise from the selection of African American banks into certain communities and geographical locations. Contrary to existing consensus, as suggested by Baradaran (2017), that African American Banks had no significant impact on economic outcomes for African Americans, the results of this study indicate that these banks did in fact stimulate Black home ownership rates, which is a primary indicator of wealth accumulation, in the counties where they were active.
March 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Speaker: Santiago Camara Title: TBA
March 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Clément Brébion  Title: Unemployment Insurance Eligibility and Employment Duration Abstract: While the literature on unemployment insurance (UI) has extensively documented the role of benefit level and duration, little is known about the effect of UI eligibility conditions. These conditions often impose a minimum work history to qualify for UI benefits. In this paper, we exploit a French reform that softened this requirement after 2009 to evaluate the impact of UI eligibility conditions on employment duration. Using administrative panel data matching employment and unemployment spells, we provide evidence that the reform induced a jump in employment exits at the new threshold. Our results show that firms’ hiring decisions are instrumental in this separation response: they schedule fixed-term contracts such that their duration coincide with the new minimum work history condition. The reform also affects the employment duration of workers beyond those seeking UI eligibility, which indicates the emergence of a new norm in contract length.
March 29, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Pierre Dubois (TSE): “Bargaining and International Reference Pricing in the Pharmaceutical Industry" with Ashvin Gandhi and Shoshana Vasserman Abstract: The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing policy that would cap prices in US markets by those offered in reference countries. We estimate a structural model of demand and supply for pharmaceuticals in the US and reference countries like Canada where prices are set through a negotiation process between pharmaceutical companies and the government. We then simulate the counterfactual equilibrium under such international reference pricing rules, allowing firms to internalize the cross-country externalities introduced by these policies. We find that in general, these policies would result in much smaller price decreases in the US than price increases in reference countries. The magnitude of these effects depends on the number, size and market structure of references countries. We compare these policies with a direct bargaining on prices in the US.
March 28, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Cristoforo Pizzimenti (Northwestern University): "Falling Interest Rates and Rising Risk: The Case of U.S. Public Pension Funds"
March 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Gregor Matvos (Northwestern): Title TBD
March 27, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Torsten Persson (Stockholm University): Title TBD
March 20, 202310:00 AM - 11:00 AM	Young Scholar's Webinars on Climate Finance and Economics	Tuomas Tomunen (Boston College) will present his paper “Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress”.   Moderator: Michael Barnett, Assistant Professor of Finance, Arizona State University - W. P. Carey School of Business This study looks at regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. During this webinar, Tuomas Tomunen will examine the impact of physical climate risks – heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes and sea level rise – on financial asset prices, focusing attention specifically on the pricing of heat stress risk. The E-axes Forum is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization on macroeconomic policies and sustainability. If you are interested, you can register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616783993274/WN_qYdDPx4uRqylb2cVM8LtCw.
March 15, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Jonathan Dingel (Booth): Market Size and Trade in Medical Services Abstract: We quantify the roles of increasing returns and trade costs in medical services. Using Medicare claims data, we document that "imported" medical procedures — services produced by a medical provider in a different region — constitute about one-fifth of US healthcare consumption. Larger regions specialize in producing less common procedures, and these procedures are traded more. These patterns reflect economies of scale: larger regions produce higher-quality services because they serve more patients. Because of increasing returns and trade costs, policies to improve access to care face a proximity-concentration tradeoff. Production subsidies and travel subsidies impose contrasting spillovers on neighboring regions.
March 14, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Joel Horowitz (Northwestern): “Bootstrap based asymptotic refinements for high dimensional nonlinear models”
March 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	With Kelly Gail Strada and Bin Huang Speaker: Kelly Gail Strada (Northwestern University) Title: Climbing the Ranks and Breaking the Mystique: WWII Female Veterans’ Post-War Lives Abstract:   Although over 150,000 women served during World War II and were entitled to veteran benefits, little is known about their return to civilian life. Using original Census transcripts combined with marriage and military records, I show how these women’s paths dramatically differed from the reactionary gender-conforming expectations of the 1950s in terms of labor force participation and their marital/fertility choices. I address issues of selection into the military by using propensity score matching methods and argue for mechanisms through which the G. I. Bill and service itself might have made women financially self-sufficient and empowered them to take up non-traditional gender roles. and Speaker: Bin Huang (University of Zurich) Title: Institutions Shape the Economic Impact of Diversity: Lessons from China's Administrative Village System Abstract: What is the impact of diversity on economic development? This paper offers micro-level evidence in the case of China's "Administrative Village System" (AVS), a program of forced integration in rural communities from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Aiming to foster inter-group cooperation and increase economic efficiency, the AVS program brought together farmers with diverse identities to live and work together for agricultural production and public goods construction. Using a regression discontinuity design, this paper demonstrates that the effects of diversity depend on institutional contexts. During the AVS program when personal freedom of decision-making was denied, diversity had little effect on economic development and even led to negative consequences, such as increased mortality during the Great Leap Famine and conflicts during the Cultural Revolution. However, after the program ended and China transitioned to a market economy, the impact of diversity reversed. In regions that experienced stronger forced integration, better inter-group interaction emerged as people tended to trust strangers more and interact more frequently with those of different identities in labor and land markets. Consequently, increased diversity led to better economic development. This paper highlights the importance of institutions in shaping the developmental consequences of diversity.
March 9, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Santiago Camara
March 9, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Montenbruck Title: TBA
March 9, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Clement Bohr
March 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Anastasiia Evdokimova Title: Does the Internet Improve Health Behavior? Costly Information Acquisition Under Heterogeneity in Health-Related Risk Perception Abstract: Information asymmetry in the healthcare market leads to several undesirable outcomes in the healthcare system, for example, underutilization of preventive care and requests for redundant services from the optimal treatment perspective. Health-related information on the Internet (e-Health) could potentially address this problem. However, the documented phenomenon of cyberchondria, unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomology based on online search results, put the potential benefits of e-Health under question. Our research focuses on the mechanism of e-Health acquisition to address heterogeneity in the impact of e-health on health-related behavior. We assume that the e-Health acquisition process is costly and depends on the patients’ heterogeneous risk perception of health-related information. Whatever the information source, it is more difficult for some individuals to be convinced that they are healthy rather than sick compared to others. First, we construct a rational inattention model with a novel cost function that accounts for the heterogeneity in health-related risk perception and results in confirmation bias. Second, we provide empirical evidence that e-Health usage acts as an intensifier of the hypochondria.
March 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Peter Nencka (Miami University, Ohio): "The democratization of opportunity: The effects of the U.S. high school movement" with Ezra Karger and Alison Doxey Koetting
March 8, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Saumitra Jha (SGSB): Title TBA
March 7, 20234:00 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Chuck Manski (Northwestern): "Using Limited Trial Evidence to Choose Drug Dosage when Efficacy and Toxicity Increase with Dose".
March 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Richard Saller (Stanford) Title: Pliny’s Natural History and Rome's culture of technical innovation
March 2, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Murphy
March 2, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kaman Lyu Title: Child Labour, Human Capital and Beliefs
March 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Hyein Cho Title: Benefit design of long-term care insurance (LTCI), long term care utilization, and health outcomes   Abstract: This paper examines how benefit design of long-term care insurance affects long term care utilization and health outcomes. I study a national Long Term Care Insurance program in South Korea, where its coverage generosity is determined by the recipients’ health status and multiple cutoffs. Combining administrative data with a regression discontinuity design, I show that increasing coverage generosity increases utlization for moderately sick recipients, but not for significantly sick recipients. I further examine whether increased LTC utilization affects short- and long-term medical care usage and health outcomes.
March 1, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Edoardo Teso (Northwestern): "State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State over 100 Years” with Nicola Mastrorocco Abstract: We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817-1905. We first establish three sets of descriptive facts on the growth and organization of the U.S. state. First, there was a slow growth in state capacity until the 1850s, with a rapid growth thereafter, driven mainly by the state reaching more locations. Second, economic growth is positively associated with state presence, but distance from the headquarter (DC) limits state presence. Third, the state organization changes after the 1850s, with a lower reliance on employee turnover, a less tight link between the career of workers and that of their supervisors, and greater delegation of power outside DC. We hypothesize that technological innovations that reduce communication and transportation costs, and thus increase the government’s monitoring capacity, are an important driver of these facts. To test this hypothesis, we exploit the staggered expansion of the railroad and telegraph networks across time and space, which decreased monitoring costs between DC and different locations. We show that locations that become better connected to DC experience an increase in state presence, an increase in delegation of power, a decrease in employee turnover, and a decrease in reliance on trust as a way to staff the bureaucracy. The results suggest that high monitoring costs go hand in hand with a small, personalistic state organization based on networks of trust, while technological shocks lowering these costs are conducive to the emergence of modern bureaucratic states.
March 1, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Alessandra Voena (Stanford): Title TBA
February 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	New Chair Investiture Ceremony	This event will include presentations highlighting honorees' research and will conclude with a champagne toast. Honoring the following: Francesca Cornelli Donald P. Jacobs Chair in Finance Georgy Egorov James Farley/Booz, Allen & Hamilton Research Professorship in Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences Carola Frydman Harold L. Stuart Chair in Finance
February 24, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Attn: Room change. This seminar will take place in Kellogg L070.  Speaker: Matthias Weigand (Harvard University) Title: The Rise of Fiscal Capacity Abstract:    This paper studies the role of fiscal capacity in European state consolidation. Our analysis is organized around novel data on the territories and cities of the Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period. Territories implementing an early fiscal reform were more likely to survive, increased in size, and achieved a more compact extent. We provide evidence for the causal interpretation of these results and show key mechanisms: revenues, military investments, and marriage success. The imposition of Imperial taxes, quasi-random in timing and size, increased the benefits of an efficient tax administration on the side of rulers, driving the implementation of fiscal centralization. Within territories, Chambers became the dominant administrative institution, tilting the consolidating states toward absolutism.
February 23, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Michael Cai
February 23, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jimmy Lee Title: TBA
February 23, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Eugenie Rose Fontep Title: Lasting effects of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) on Education and labor market outcomes in Sierra Leone Abstract: “Although many studies have assessed the immediate effect of Ebola virus disease (EVD) on the healthcare system, its indirect medium- and long-term consequences have received less attention in the literature. The current study aims to assess the lasting impact of quarantine measures on school dropout, language literacy and labor force dynamics in Sierra Leone nearly four years after the epidemic ended. We use repeated cross-sectional data collected before and after the outbreak by Statistics Sierra Leone and the World Bank. Our identification strategy is the differences-in-differences fixed effects. The results show that post-EVD school dropout,  and national language literacy are higher in the five districts that were locked down between June and December 2014 (Kailahun, Kenema, Moyamba, Bombali and Port Loko) compared to non-quarantined districts. We also find that the labor force shifted from high-paid jobs (wage earners) to low-paid jobs (contributing family workers) after the EVD outbreak. The impact is more pronounced in the first two districts quarantined at the start of the epidemic, Kailahun and Kenema than in Moyamba, Bombali and Port Loko districts which entered quarantine nearly four to three months before it ended”. Contact for Zoom Link
February 22, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Jacopo Ponticelli (Northwestern): “Eclipses and the Memory of Revolutions: Evidence from China” with Meng Miao
February 22, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Seminar Series	Michael Gibbs (Booth): Title TBA
February 21, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Ivan Canay (Northwestern): "Decomposition and Interpretation of Treatment Effects in Settings with Delayed Outcomes”
February 20, 20233:30 PM - 4:45 PM	Winter 2023 Distinguished Public Policy Lecture	Raj Chetty (Harvard): Creating Equality of Opportunity in America: New Insights from Big Data
February 20, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PM	PoliEcon Seminar Series	Tommaso Nannicini (Bocconi): “Fighting Populism on Its Own Turf: Experimental Evidence” with Vincenzo Galasso, Massimo Morelli, and Piero Stanig Abstract: We evaluate how traditional parties may respond to populist parties on issues that are particularly fitting for populist messages. The testing ground is the 2020 Italian referendum on the reduction of members of Parliament (MPs). We implement a large-scale field experiment, with almost one million impressions of programmatic advertising in 300 small municipalities. Our treatments are video ads against voting “Yes” to the MPs reduction, a constitutional reform pushed forward by the populist Five Stars Movement. We administer both an “informative” video on the likely costs of cutting MPs—aimed at deconstructing the populist narrative—and a “reducing-trust” video—aimed at attacking the credibility of populist politicians. Our field experiment shows that the latter video is more effective at capturing the viewers' attention. Both videos decrease voters’ turnout and, to a lesser extent, the “Yes” votes. These results show that programmatic advertising is a cost-effective tool to demobilize voters. And that it is easier to convince voters leaning toward populist parties to abstain, rather than winning them back to vote for traditional parties. In other words, demobilization works better than persuasion, although this strategy may have detrimental effects on political participation and social cohesion.
February 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jinlin Wei (Warwick) Title: Financial development and patents during the First Industrial Revolution: England and Wales.    Abstract:    Using a district-level dataset on patents and banks in England and Wales during the First Industrial Revolution, I show that better access to financial services increased patents of invention between 1750 and 1825. My baseline estimation includes district and year fixed effects. I also construct an instrumental variable based on the locations of historical post towns before country banks appeared. Better banking access increased patents by lowering local financial costs. The effects are larger for the patents in the manufacturing sector that lacked credit, and in districts where credit supply was insufficient.
February 16, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Miguel Moreira Santana Freire
February 16, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Devis Decet Title: Water Wars: Evidence from Africa (with Andrea Marcucci)   Abstract: We study the impact of competition for the control of water resources on local violence across Africa. We use high-resolution data on rivers’ network to measure the heterogeneity in the control of water resources across areas. Leveraging changes in rivers' flows and rainfalls as shocks to the value of water resources in a region, we show that lower water availability in neighboring areas induces a larger increase of conflicts in areas characterized by higher control of water resources. We argue that this difference arises because an increase in the value of water, induced by a decrease in rivers' flows or low rainfall, makes it more profitable to fight over the control of water resources.
February 16, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Marie-Louise Decamps Title: Agricultural Productivity and Deforestation Abstract: I examine the effects of increasing agricultural productivity on the reallocation of agricultural activity across space, and on deforestation. I leverage the heterogeneous effects that the introduction of genetically engineered (GE) soybean seeds had on agricultural productivity across areas with different soil and weather characteristics, and satellite data on land use in Brazil from 1996-2010. I show that local increases in soy productivity leads to changes in the local composition of agricultural land use as soy replaces pastures, which leads to no change in forests. Next I examine whether the displacement of pasture leads to non-local deforestation. I show that cattle ranching activity is not reallocated to nearby areas, due to agglomeration in soy production. I explore the role that roads play in the displacement of cattle ranching activity away from soy producing areas, and consequently on the loss of forest area.
February 14, 202312:30 PM - 2:00 PM	Department of History Job Talk	Anne Ruderman (LSE): Title TBA
February 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	This week's lunch is moved to Kellogg room 2410A&B Speaker: Jesse McDevitt-Irwin (Columbia) Title: US Infant Mortality in the Nineteenth Century: New Evidence from Childhood Sex Ratios Abstract: High rates of infant mortality tend to skew childhood sex ratios toward females, so sex ratio data offer a basis for characterizing infant mortality in populations lacking vital statistics. Using sex ratios from the US census, we find infant mortality for US whites was just over 80 deaths per 1000 births in the mid-nineteenth century. Less than one-half the level found by existing estimates, our results suggest a major revision to prevailing views of nineteenth-century US infant mortality, with white IMR less than one-quarter that of enslaved Blacks.
February 9, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matias Bayas-Erazo
February 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Devis Decet Title: Structural Transformation and State Capacity Abstract: This paper studies how the transition from agriculture into manufacturing affects the growth in fiscal capacity and the formality rate in the economy. In the context of Brazil, I establish some stylized facts about the relationship between tax revenues, formality, and economic structure. I find that counties with more manufacturing are characterized by higher tax collection and formality rates. In order to establish causality, I use technical changes in agriculture between 2000 and 2010 as an instrument for manufacturing share of employment. Results suggest that a 1 pp increase in manufacturing share is associated with a 0.9 pp increase in the formality rate.
February 8, 202311:00 AM - 12:15 PM	Kellogg Marketing Dept Speaker Series	Kristina Brecko (University of Rochester): "Pro-Social Change for the Most Challenging: Marketing and Testing Harm Reduction for Conservation" with Wesley Hartmann Abstract: This paper investigates the effectiveness of pursuing conservation goals by promoting harm reduction, a once controversial approach to health care that aims to reduce the harmful impacts of unhealthy behaviors without promoting full abstinence or stigmatizing said behaviors. Conservation proponents often heavily promote solutions more akin to full abstinence, which do not recognize the inherent preference trade-off the heaviest users face when giving up a behavior that may be harmful to the environment, such as driving a car, eating meat and dairy or watering a lawn. We employ two sequential field experiments to market and test effectiveness of a smart irrigation controller, a lawn watering efficiency device. This solution has an ex-ante lower expected impact on conservation than turf removal, the highest impact solution in this context, but is nevertheless more aligned with the preferences of the heaviest users. We show that marketing this preference-aligned solution induces the highest adoption among the heaviest irrigators and those previously disinclined to conserve. Given these compliance patterns, our interventions lead to large and long-lasting individual and social benefits: water savings from the device recover its cost in half a year and are of the magnitude of one household's basic (indoor) water needs. We find no meaningful increase in water usage among those irrigating less and no evidence of reduced turf removal, suggesting that the harm reduction intervention grows, rather than cannibalizes, the adoption of water conservation alternatives. Our results underscore the importance of considering heterogeneous preferences when designing interventions aimed at fostering pro-social behaviors such as conservation and shed light on how to use marketing to engage the least pro-socially inclined.
February 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Panel on COVID's Impacts on Children and Teens with IPR/SESP Faculty	Panel Discussion on "How Has COVID-19 Impacted Children and Adolescents and How Are They Recovering?" * with Emma Adam, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Director of the COAST (Contexts of Adolescent Stress and Thriving) Lab, and IPR Fellow Jonathan Guryan, Lawyer Taylor Professor of Education and Social Policy, IPR Fellow, and Chair of IPR's Program on Education Policy, and Terri Sabol, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy, Director of the DEEP (Development, Early Education, and Policy) Lab, and IPR Fellow. Moderated by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, IPR Director and Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Human Development and Social Policy. This panel discussion is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Winter 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia and events this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
February 6, 202310:30 AM - 12:00 PM	Kellogg Finance Dept Seminar Series	Johnny Tang (Harvard): "Regulatory Competition in the US Life Insurance Industry" with Michael Blank and Johnny Tang Abstract: Competition between jurisdictions is a central feature of many public policy problems. I examine the consequences of such competition in the US life insurance industry, where states vie to attract insurers by setting lower capital requirements, but the costs of such actions are borne by consumers in other states. I document empirical evidence of competition between state regulators and its effects on the supply of life insurance. I then develop a quantitative model of the insurance market to evaluate the effects of this competition. I find that competition leads regulators to set lower capital requirements, which increases default risks but also increases consumer surplus by lowering prices. On net, these effects decrease regulators' utility based on regulators' revealed-preference objective functions.
February 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Eleanor Wiseman (UC Berkeley): "Border Trade and Information Frictions: Evidence from Informal Traders in Kenya". Abstract: In low- and middle-income countries, a large share of trade is conducted by small-scale informal traders – mostly women – and is missing from official trade statistics. Using the natural experiment of a border closing, a randomized controlled trial, and panel data collection, I study the role of information frictions in traders’ choices of markets and border crossings at the Kenyan-Ugandan border and the consequences for livelihoods and prices in agriculture markets. First, I show that traders’ choice of markets and routes is sticky. Second, some of this stickiness is driven by limited information about profitable arbitrage opportunities and true (tariff) costs of crossing the border. Third, I build a model incorporating these frictions, which I test using an RCT. I find that giving information on tariff costs and local prices to traders (via a cellphone platform) increases switching across markets and routes, leading to large increases in traders’ profits and significant formalization of trade. Consistent with the model, information provision has general equilibrium effects – specifically, a reduction in consumer prices in agricultural markets. Taken together, the results point to the centrality of information frictions in informal trade and highlight the promise of new information technology to ameliorate them.
February 3, 202310:30 AM - 12:00 PM	Kellogg Finance Dept Seminar Series	Spencer Kwon (Harvard): "The Public Option and Optimal Redistribution" with Michael Blank and Johnny Tang Abstract: Do stock price run-ups predictably revert? We develop a model of financial markets with two types of investors: rational investors and "oversensitive" investors who react excessively to salient public news. The model yields a summary statistic for the degree to which a stock price has overreacted to news: the gap in holdings between oversensitive and rational investors. We compute this measure empirically using quarterly institutional holdings data. We first measure each investor's news sensitivity using their tendency to purchase stocks that have experienced positive earnings announcements. Consistent with our model's premise, we find that news sensitivity is a persistent investor characteristic. We next aggregate our investor-level measure to the stock level to compute the asset-level holdings gap between oversensitive and rational investors. A larger holdings gap forecasts less continuation in stock prices and greater reversals in the long-run, especially for extreme price run-ups. Furthermore, our holdings gap aggregates several distinct channels of overreaction, including both price extrapolation and overreaction to non-price information.
February 2, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Damián Vergara (UC Berkeley): "Minimum Wages and Optimal Redistribution". Abstract: This paper analyzes whether a minimum wage should be used for redistribution on top of taxes and transfers. I characterize optimal redistribution for a government with three policy instruments -- labor income taxes and transfers, corporate income taxes, and a minimum wage -- using an empirically grounded model of the labor market with positive firm profits. A minimum wage can increase social welfare when it increases the average post-tax wages of low-skill labor market participants and when corporate profit incidence is large. When chosen together with taxes, the minimum wage can help the government redistribute efficiently to low-skill workers by preventing firms from capturing low-wage income subsidies such as the EITC and from enjoying high profits that cannot be redistributed via corporate taxes due to capital mobility in unaffected industries. Event studies show that the average US state-level minimum wage reform over the last two decades increased average post-tax wages of low-skilled labor market participants and reduced corporate profits in affected industries, namely low-skill labor-intensive services. A sufficient statistics analysis implies that US minimum wages typically remain below their optimum under the current tax and transfer system.
February 2, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sun Yong Kim Title: The Dollar, US Fiscal Capacity and the US Safety Puzzle    Contact for Zoom link
February 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Montenbruck Title: Public Goods, Taxation, and Political Participation: A Field Experiment in Freetown, Sierra Leone   Abstract: “I use a large-scale randomized controlled trial among property owners and tenants in Freetown, Sierra Leone to investigate the link between public service provision and taxation. In an intervention over the phone, I provide individuals with information on local level public service provision. To understand the role of citizens’ preferences, I vary the content of the information message, notifying respondents about service improvements related to either their most (match) or their least (mismatch) preferred public service. Using a combination of self-reported endline data and administrative tax data, I analyse how this information affects tax compliance. Preliminary findings show that treated and untreated individuals have similar attitudes towards taxation, but treated individuals are significantly more compliant than the control group."   Contact for Zoom link
February 1, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Flyout Seminar	Virginia Minni (LSE): "Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and the Allocation of Workers to Jobs" Abstract: Why do managers matter for firm performance? This paper provides evidence of the critical role of managers in matching workers to jobs within the firm using the universe of personnel records from a large multinational firm. The data covers200,000 white-collar workers and 30,000 managers over 10 years in 100 countries. I identify good managers as the top 30% by their speed of promotion and lever-age exogenous variation induced by the rotation of managers across teams. I find that good managers cause workers to reallocate within the firm through lateral and vertical transfers. This leads to large and persistent gains in workers’ career progression and productivity. Seven years after the manager transition, workers earn 30% more and perform better on objective performance measures. In terms of aggregate firm productivity, doubling the share of good managers would increase output per worker by 61% at the establishment level. My results imply that the visible hands of managers match workers’ specific skills to specialized jobs, leading to an improvement in the productivity of existing workers that outlasts the managers’ time at the firm.
January 31, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Awa Ambra Seck (Harvard): "En Route: The French Colonial Army, Emigration and Development in Morocco". Abstract: Between 1830 and 1962, six million Africans living under colonial rule served in the French army. Most were deployed internationally to maintain order or fight French wars. After independence, all were repatriated and granted the right to move to France. We estimate the effect of military deployment on the soldiers' long-term outcomes, as well as on their communities of origin, using historical data on Moroccan soldiers, and exploiting the arbitrary assignment of troops to international locations. We show that, within a municipality, cohorts with a higher share of soldiers deployed to France were more likely to relocate there after independence. In contrast, deployment to other locations did not affect emigration. Consistent with the establishment of emigration networks, we find that the effects persist for decades after independence. Furthermore, communities with a higher share of soldiers deployed to France have experienced better economic outcomes and a shift from the agricultural to the service sector today. These results highlight the role that colonial rule played in shaping emigration networks from the colonies and in contributing to persistent changes in their patterns of economic development.
January 30, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Giacomo Lanzani (MIT): "Dynamic Concern for Misspecification". Abstract: We consider an agent who posits a set of probabilistic models for the payoffrelevant outcomes. The agent has a prior over this set but fears the actual model is omitted and hedges against this possibility. The concern for misspecification is endogenous: If a model explains the previous observations well, the concern attenuates. We show that different static preferences under uncertainty (subjective expected utility, maxmin, robust control) arise in the long run, depending on how quickly the agent becomes unsatisfied with unexplained evidence and whether they are misspecified. The misspecification concern’s endogeneity naturally induces behavior cycles, and we characterize the limit action frequency. This model is consistent with the empirical evidence on monetary policy cycles and choices in the face of complex tax schedules. Finally, we axiomatize in terms of observable choices this decision criterion and how quickly the agent adjusts their misspecification concern.
January 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Xincheng Qiu (UPenn): "Vacant Jobs". Abstract: Canonical theories of frictional labor markets conceptualize separations as job destruction and vacancies as job creation. Yet, workers exiting the labor force hence vacating their positions, dubbed the vacating channel, is an empirically important source of both employment outflows and vacancy inflows. It is absent in standard models that treat vacancies  as recruiting efforts, while I document facts on vacancy dynamics that point to an alternative view of vacancies as part of the job life cycle. I develop a model that incorporates the vacating channel and quantitatively replicates properties of labor market flows. It brings novel insights into the business cycle theory of unemployment: Procyclical employment-to-nonparticipation quits contribute to vacancy fluctuations due to the vacating channel, accounting for about one-third of unemployment fluctuations. Understanding the source of vacancies also has important policy implications: While creating a new job as an investment activity is responsive to the interest rate, reposting a vacated position is not. This sheds new light on the possibility of a “soft landing”—raising interest rates without causing high unemployment—during the “Great Resignation,” a period of elevated vacating.
January 26, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Diego Huerta
January 26, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title: Impacts of Health Insurance Acquisition for Immigrants Abstract: "Legislation in the 1990s restricted immigrant access to benefits from the social safety net.  Later legislation, in 2009, allowed states to elect into expanded access to Medicaid and CHIP for immigrants.  I use this variation to examine the impacts of health insurance acquisition for immigrants.  Preliminary descriptive evidence indicates substantial heterogeneity in uptake.  This heterogeneity underlies average increased uptake associated with expanded eligibility."
January 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Garima Sharma (MIT): "Monopsony and Gender". Abstract: I investigate the role of labor market power in driving the gender wage gap in Brazil. Exploiting firm-level shocks induced by the end of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, I show that women are substantially less likely than men to separate from their employer following a wage cut. The ensuing gender difference in monopsony power would explain 42% of the gender wage gap (an 18pp difference). To probe the source of higher monopsony power over women, I develop and estimate a discrete choice model featuring two explanations: women strongly prefer their specific employer (horizontal difference) or have fewer good employers (vertical difference). Of the 18pp gender gap due to monopsony, I estimate 10pp as attributable to the former and 8pp to the concentration of good jobs for women in the textile sector. This concentration in turn reflects amenities/disamenities present in different sectors and not gender-specific comparative advantage: specifically, eliminating gender gaps in productivity across sectors erodes 4pp of the monopsony gender gap whereas leveling amenities entirely erodes the 8pp gap due to concentration. My findings demonstrate that although the textile industry provides women desirable jobs, this desirability confers its employers with higher monopsony power. By contrast, desirable jobs for men are not similarly concentrated.
January 25, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Flyout Seminar	Cristóbal Otero (UC Berkeley): "Managers and Public Hospital Performance" with Pablo Muñoz Abstract: We study whether, and how, managers can increase government productivity in the context of public health provision. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we document that top managers (CEOs) account for a significant amount of variation in hospital mortality. We then use a staggered difference-in-differences design, and show that a reform which introduced a competitive selection system for recruiting CEOs in public hospitals reduced hospital mortality by approximately 8%. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition and is robust to several alternative explanations. The financial incentives included in the reform—performance pay and higher wages—do not explain our findings. Instead, we show that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing older doctors with no management training in favor of younger CEOs who had studied management. The mortality effects were driven by hospitals in which the new CEOs had managerial qualifications. These CEOs improved operating room efficiency and reduced staff turnover.
January 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Patrick Kennedy (UC Berkeley): "The Efficiency-Equity Tradeoff of the Corporate Income Tax: Evidence from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" with Christine Dobridge, Paul Landefeld, and Jake Mortenson.  Abstract: This paper studies the effects of an historically large federal corporate income tax cut on U.S. firms and workers, leveraging quasi-experimental policy variation from the 2017 law known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. To identify causal effects, we use employer-employee matched federal tax records and an event study design comparing similarly-sized firms in the same industry that faced divergent tax changes due to their pre-existing legal status. Reductions in marginal income tax rates cause increases in sales, profits, investment, and employment, with responses driven by firms in capital-intensive industries. Workers’ earnings gains are concentrated in executive pay and in the top 10% of the within-firm income distribution, while workers in the bottom 90% of the distribution see no change in earnings. Interpreted through the lens of a stylized model, our estimates imply that a $1 marginal reduction in corporate tax revenue generates an additional $0.10 in output, with 78% of gains flowing to the top 10% of the income distribution.
January 23, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Michael Sullivan (Yale): "Price controls in a multi-sided market" Abstract: This paper evaluates caps on the commissions that food delivery platforms (e.g., DoorDash) charge to restaurants. Commission caps benefit restaurants that partner with platforms, all else equal. This may entice restaurants to join platforms, thereby benefitting consumers who value variety in platforms’ restaurant listings. A reduction in platform commissions may also lead restaurants to lower their prices, further benefitting consumers. But commission caps may lead platforms to raise their consumer fees, thereby reducing consumer ordering on platforms and consequently platforms’ value to restaurants. The net effects of caps on restaurant and consumer welfare are thus uncertain. To estimate caps’ effects, I assemble data on consumer restaurant orders, restaurants’ platform adoption, and platform fees. An initial analysis of the data suggests that caps raise platforms’ consumer fees, reduce consumer ordering on platforms, and lead restaurants to join platforms. To analyze these effects and their welfare implications, I develop a model of platform pricing, restaurant pricing, platform adoption by restaurants, and consumer ordering. Counterfactual simulations using the estimated model imply that commission caps bolster restaurant profits, but they do so at the expense of consumers and platforms. I estimate a total welfare reduction of caps equal to 6.2% of participant surplus from platforms.
January 20, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Thi Mai Anh Nguyen (MIT): "Long-Term Relationships and the Spot Market: Evidence from US Trucking" (with Adam Harris) Abstract: Long-term informal relationships play an important role in the economy, capitalizing on match-specific efficiency gains and mitigating incentive problems. However, the prevalence of long-term relationships can also lead to thinner, less efficient spot markets. We develop an empirical framework to quantify the market-level tradeoff between long-term relationships and the spot market. We apply this framework to an economically important setting—the US truckload freight industry—exploiting detailed transaction-level data for estimation. At the relationship level, we find that long-term relationships have large intrinsic benefits over spot transactions. At the market level, we find a strong link between the thickness and efficiency of the spot market. Overall, the current institution performs fairly well against our first-best benchmarks, achieving 44% of the relationship-level first-best surplus and even more of the market-level first-best surplus. The findings motivate two counterfactuals: (i) a centralized spot market for optimal spot market efficiency and (ii) index pricing for optimal gains from individual long-term relationships. The former results in substantial welfare loss, and the latter leads to welfare gains during periods of high demand.
January 20, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Department Flyout Seminar	Agathe Pernoud (Stanford): "How Competition Shapes Information in Auctions" with Simon Gleyze Abstract: We consider auctions where buyers can acquire costly information about their valuations and those of others, and investigate how competition between buyers shapes their learning incentives. In equilibrium, buyers find it cost-efficient to acquire some information about their competitors so as to only learn their valuations when they have a fair chance of winning. We show that such learning incentives make competition between buyers less effective: losing buyers often fail to learn their valuations precisely and, as a result, compete less aggressively for the good. This depresses revenue, which remains bounded away from what the standard model with exogenous information predicts, even when information costs are negligible. It also undermines price discovery. Finally, we examine the implications for auction design. First, setting an optimal reserve price is more valuable than attracting an extra buyer, which contrasts with the seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer (1996). Second, the seller can incentivize buyers to learn their valuations, hence restoring effective competition, by maintaining uncertainty over the set of auction participants.
January 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Job Talk	Kory Kroft (University of Toronto)  Job Talk: Imperfect Competition and Rents in Labor and Product Markets: The Case of the Construction Industry (joint with Yao Luo, Magne Mogstad and Bradley Setzler) Contact for Zoom link
January 19, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Johanna Rayl Title: How do emergency price controls affect consumers and producers? Theory and Evidence from U.S. Natural Disasters   Abstract: This paper studies policies that ban firms from raising prices, or ``price gouging", on critical goods during public emergencies. While such laws exist in 37 US states, little evidence weighs their potential benefits -- equity and the regulation of disaster-induced monopoly power -- against their potential costs -- exacerbating shortages and encouraging hoarding. We show in a stylized graphical framework that this tradeoff hinges on the slope of the supply curve and the amount of disaster-induced retailer market power. We empirically examine these features of the US retail market for natural disaster supplies, as well as the extent of price gouging. Demand for supplies spikes sharply in the first weeks of natural disasters. While average price increases are small to none, a minority of stores engage in large price hikes. We find evidence that only a subset of these violations are enforced. Meanwhile, shortages increase in probability during early disaster weeks. On the supply side, the same set of disasters lead to small increases in transportation costs via trucking, and no increases in wholesale prices.
January 16, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA Title: TBA
January 13, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Joel Flynn (MIT): "The Macroeconomics of Narratives" with Karthik Sastry Abstract: We study the macroeconomic implications of narratives, or beliefs about the economy that affect decisions and spread contagiously. Empirically, we use natural-language-processing methods to measure textual proxies for narratives in US public firms’ end-of-year reports (Forms 10-K). We find that: (i) firms’ hiring decisions respond strongly to narratives, (ii) narratives spread contagiously among firms, and (iii) this spread is responsive to macroeconomic conditions. To understand the macroeconomic implications of these forces, we embed a contagious optimistic narrative in a business-cycle model. We characterize, in terms of the decision-relevance and contagiousness of narratives, when the unique equilibrium features: (i) non-fundamental business cycles, (ii) non-linear belief dynamics (narratives “going viral”) that generate multiple stable steady states (hysteresis), and (iii) the coexistence of hump-shaped responses to small shocks with regime-shifting behavior in response to large shocks. Our empirical estimates discipline both the static, general equilibrium effect of narratives on output and their dynamics. In the calibrated model, we find that contagious optimism explains 32% and 18% of the output reductions over the early 2000s recession and Great Recession, respectively, as well as 19% of the unconditional variance in output. We find that overall optimism is not sufficiently contagious to generate hysteresis, but other, more granular narratives are.
January 12, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Diego Cid Title: TBA
January 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Valentyn Litvin Title: Tried and True or New and Improved?: Using Clinical Guidelines to Balance Innovation and Expertise Abstract: "This paper theoretically examines how clinical guidelines should balance treatment effectiveness and provider expertise. A standard goal of evidence-based clinical guidelines is to inform clinicians and encourage them to use the most effective (or cost-effective) treatments for a group of patients. Despite well-documented learning-by-doing effects in clinical practice, there is limited research about how guidelines should account for their influence on clinician expertise. I explore this question theoretically with a model with a social planner choosing a guideline policy for a group of clinicians who learn by doing and treat a heterogeneous patient population. I show that even in an idealized setting with perfect knowledge and aligned cost preferences, clinical guidelines serve a role as skill management policies.  I characterize the social planner's optimal policy as a function of both relative treatment effectiveness and clinicians' learning curves. A key finding is that in some settings, it is optimal for guidelines to recommend a treatment that is less effective on average but is well-practiced. This finding suggests that the prevailing approach of recommending the treatments with superior clinical trial results may harm patient outcomes." Reach out for Zoom link.
January 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Rahul Singh (MIT): "Causal inference with corrupted data: Measurement error, missing values, discretization, and differential privacy" (with Anish Agarwal) Abstract: The US Census Bureau will deliberately corrupt data sets derived from the 2020 US Census in an effort to maintain privacy, suggesting a painful trade-off between the privacy of respondents and the precision of economic analysis. To investigate whether this trade-off is inevitable, we formulate a semiparametric model of causal inference with high dimensional corrupted data. We propose a procedure for data cleaning, estimation, and inference with data cleaning-adjusted confidence intervals. We prove consistency, Gaussian approximation, and semiparametric efficiency by finite sample arguments, with a rate of n−1/2 for semiparametric estimands that degrades gracefully for nonparametric estimands. Our key assumption is that the true covariates are approximately low rank, which we interpret as approximate repeated measurements and validate in the Census. In our analysis, we provide nonasymptotic theoretical contributions to matrix completion, statistical learning, and semiparametric statistics. Calibrated simulations verify the coverage of our data cleaning-adjusted confidence intervals and demonstrate the relevance of our results for 2020 Census data.
January 4, 20239:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Job Market Seminar	Tianyi Peng (MIT): Experimentation Platforms and Learning Treatment Effects in Panels
December 19, 20229:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Job Market Seminar	Mingxi Xhu (Stanford University): How a Small Amount of Data Sharing Benefits Distributed Optimization and Learning
December 16, 20229:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Job Market Seminar	Sophie Yu (Duke University): Efficient Network Alignment at Otter's Tree-counting Threshold via Counting Chandeliers
December 14, 20229:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Job Market Seminar	Yunzong Xu (MIT): Bridging Online and Offline Learning Towards Improved Data-Driven Decision Making
December 12, 20229:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Job Market Seminar	Arielle Anderer (University of Pennsylvania): The Value of Logistic Flexibility in E-commerce
December 9, 20229:30 AM - 10:30 AM	Kellogg School of Management: Research Seminar	Lin Fan (Stanford University): The Fragility of Optimized Bandit Algorithms
December 8, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBA Title TBA
December 8, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Sarah Deschênes (Northwestern) - Expanding schooling access in Nigeria: impact on marital outcomes Abstract- The paper uses the Universal Primary Education Program (UPE) implemented in Nigeria in 1976 to investigate the effect of wife and husband’s education on women’s empowerment. We combine regional disparities in baseline levels of enrollment with the timing of the program and the traditionally high age difference between partners to disentangle the impact of wife’s education from husband’s education. We find that the UPE had heterogeneous effects in the South compared to the North of Nigeria. In the South, women achieve more gender-equal marriages by delaying marriage by 1.23 years, and by reducing the age gap with their husband by 2 years. These women also maintain a stable education gap with their husband. In the North, treated women also marry more educated men but the age gap remains unchanged. In the South, women are better off as the UPE decreases women’s tolerance of domestic violence and increases their say in decision-making while in the North, we find no improvement along these dimensions. The results suggest that large scale policies may unlock improvements in women’s empowerment through the marriage market if they flatten the age hierarchy between spouses.
December 7, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Cavit Baran (Northwestern University): “Poisoned Fruits: Human Capital, Health, and Economic Effects of Agricultural Pesticides in the United States”
December 6, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Jeremy Fox (Rice University): "Estimating Matching Games with Profit and Price Data" with Amir Kazempour and Xun Tang
December 6, 20222:00 PM - 3:30 PM	Senior Job Talk	Supreet Kaur (UC Berkeley): "The Social Tax: Redistributive Pressure and Labor Supply"
December 5, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Paul Grieco (Penn State): "Conformant and Efficient Estimation of Discrete Choice Demand Models"
December 2, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Carlo Medici (Northwestern University): Historical Immigration and the Labor Movement