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. 

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Date & Time	Seminar Series	Speaker and Title
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 In this paper, I assemble a novel dataset from newly digitized historical documents, and exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. counties between 1900 and 1920, to study the effect of immigration on unionization.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
December 1, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Fergal Hanks (Northwestern University): Title TBA
December 1, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Jimmy Lee (Northwestern University) - Evaluating a System of Agricultural Extension around Schools in Liberia Abstract: Developing countries often face intertwined challenges in agricultural extension, rural education, and youth empowerment. I conduct a two-year randomized evaluation of a school-based agricultural education program in Liberia that leverages existing resources to tackle the challenges – schools, teachers, and students for agricultural extension; school gardens and student agricultural projects for promoting experiential learning in science; and extra-curricular activities for promoting vocational and life skills. This talk will focus on results from the midline survey on the randomized evaluation, together with results from complementary sub-treatments that amplify the effects of the program.
December 1, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Title: TBA Speaker: TBA
November 30, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Claudia Olivetti (Dartmouth College): "Structural Transformation over 150 years of Women’s and Men’s Work” joint with Rachel L. Ngai and Barbara Petrongolo Abstract: We build a consistent measure of male and female work for the US for the period 1880-2019 – encompassing intensive and extensive margins – by combining data from the US Census and several early sources. The resulting measure of hours, including paid work as well as unpaid work in family businesses, displays an asymmetric U-shape for women, with a modest decline up to mid-20th century and a sustained rise afterwards. For men, hours fall throughout the sample period. We empirically and theoretically relate these trends to the process of structural transformation, and namely the reallocation of labour across agriculture, manufacturing and services, and the marketization of home production. We propose a multisector model of the economy with uneven productivity growth, income effects, and consumption complementarity across sectoral outputs. At early stages of development, declining agriculture leads to rising services (both in the market and the home) and leisure, implying a fall in market work for both genders. At later stages of development, structural transformation reallocates labor from manufacturing into services, and a large service economy implies an important marketization process, progressively reallocating work from home to market services. Given gender comparative advantages, the first channel is more relevant for men, implying a decrease in male hours, and the second channel is more relevant for women, implying an increase in female hours.
November 30, 202212:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Kellogg Operations Department: Research Seminar Series	Adam Elmachtoub (Columbia University): "Simple and Fair Pricing Strategies"
November 30, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Christopher Sims (Northwestern University): "(De-)Industrialization and Trade: Evidence from the Danish Sound Dues"
November 30, 202211:00 AM - 12:15 PM	Kellogg Finance Department: Research Seminar Series	Juliane Begenau (Stanford University): Title TBA
November 29, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Anna Bykhovskaya (Duke) - "Cointegration in high-dimensional VARs"
November 29, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Manasi Deshpande (UChicago): "The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment" with Rebecca Dizon-Ross Abstract: How does the expectation of government benefits in adulthood affect human capital investments in childhood? In a simple economic model, expected future benefits decrease childhood human capital investments through income and substitution effects. Experts we surveyed also predicted a large decrease. We test this prediction by conducting a randomized controlled trial with families of children who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a cash welfare program for children and adults with disabilities. The vast majority of parents whose children receive SSI overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. We provide randomly-selected families with information on the predicted likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood and use this randomized information shock to identify the effect of expectations about future benefits. We find that reducing the expectation that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children's human capital. This zero effect is precisely estimated, and we strongly reject the null hypothesis from our expert survey. Potential explanations for the zero effect include parents increasing their own work effort, financial or time constraints preventing further investment, and non-financial goals influencing investment decisions.
November 29, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Senior Job Talk/Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Manasi Deshpande (UChicago): "The (Lack of) Anticipatory Effects of the Social Safety Net on Human Capital Investment" with Rebecca Dizon-Ross Abstract: How does the expectation of government benefits in adulthood affect human capital investments in childhood? In a simple economic model, expected future benefits decrease childhood human capital investments through income and substitution effects. Experts we surveyed also predicted a large decrease. We test this prediction by conducting a randomized controlled trial with families of children who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a cash welfare program for children and adults with disabilities. The vast majority of parents whose children receive SSI overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. We provide randomly-selected families with information on the predicted likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood and use this randomized information shock to identify the effect of expectations about future benefits. We find that reducing the expectation that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children's human capital. This zero effect is precisely estimated, and we strongly reject the null hypothesis from our expert survey. Potential explanations for the zero effect include parents increasing their own work effort, financial or time constraints preventing further investment, and non-financial goals influencing investment decisions.
November 29, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Kellogg Finance Department: Bag Lunch Seminar Series	Zhengyang Jiang (Kellogg School of Management): Title TBA
November 28, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Michael Dinerstein (UChicago): "Teacher Labor Market Equilibrium and the Distribution of Student Achievement"
November 28, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrei Iakovlev (Northwestern University): "Puppy Giveaway Design"
November 21, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Fernando Alvarez (UChicago): "Strategic Complementarities in a Dynamic Model of Fintech Adoption" with Davide Argente, Francesco Lippi, Esteban Mendez, and Diana Van Patten Abstract: "This paper develops a dynamic model of technology adoption featuring a network effect, in which the benefits for users increase with the number of adopters. We argue that such an effect is an inherent feature of several technologies, such as means of payments. We show that network effects give rise to multiple equilibrium paths, multiple steady states, and suboptimal allocations. The model generates slow adoption, as individuals optimally wait for others to adopt before doing so. We apply the theory to the adoption of SINPE, an electronic means of payment developed by the Central Bank of Costa Rica. Transaction-level data on the use of SINPE and a battery of administrative data sets on the network structure allow us to document sizable network effects exploiting plausibly exogenous variation. A calibrated version of the model shows that the optimal subsidy pushes the economy to universal adoption."
November 21, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Gabriel Jardanovski (Northwestern University): "Carbon Leakage"
November 18, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Matteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University): "Local Industrial Production, Input Availability, and Technology Adoption"
November 18, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Cavit Baran (Northwestern Economics): Poisoned Fruits: Human Capital, Health, and Economic Effects of Agricultural Pesticides in the United State
November 17, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Pascaline Dupas (Stanford): Title TBA
November 17, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Matias Bayas-Erazo (Northwestern University): Title TBA
November 17, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Ritwika Sen (Northestern University) - Title TBA
November 17, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Roman Rivera (Columbia University): Release, Detain, or Surveil? The Effect of Electronic Monitoring on Defendant Outcome Abstract: This paper studies the effect of pretrial electronic monitoring (EM) as an alternative to both pretrial release and pretrial detention (jail) in Cook County, Illinois. EM often involves a defendant wearing an electronic ankle bracelet that tracks their movement and aims to deter pretrial misconduct. Using the quasi-random assignment of bond court judges, I estimate the effect of EM versus release and EM versus detention on pretrial misconduct, case outcomes, and future recidivism. I develop a novel method for the semiparametric estimation of marginal treatment effects in ordered choice environments, with which I construct relevant treatment effects. Relative to release, EM increases new cases pretrial due to bond violations while reducing new cases for low-level crimes and failures to appear in court. Relative to detention, EM increases low-level pretrial misconduct but improves defendant case outcomes and reduces cost-weighted future recidivism. Finally, I bound EM's crime reduction effect. I find that EM is likely an adequate substitute for pretrial detention. However, it is not clear that EM prevents enough high-cost crime to justify its use relative to release, particularly for defendants who are more likely to be released.
November 16, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Felipe Gonzalez (UC Berkley): "Public health policies and political support in turbulent times: Historical evidence from Salvador Allende's milk program" (joint with Mounu Prem)
November 16, 20222:00 PM - 3:30 PM	Senior Job Talk	Nicolas Ryan (Yale University): "Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India"
November 16, 202212:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Kellogg Operations Department: Research Seminar Series	Jing Dong (Columbia University): "Optimal routing under demand surge: the value of future arrival rate information"
November 16, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Shuyan Huang (Northwestern University): "Panel Data Estimation with the Recurrent Neural Network: Estimation and Inference for Policy Relevant Derivative Effects"
November 16, 202211:00 AM - 12:15 PM	Kellogg Finance Department: Research Seminar Series	Andreas Neuhierl (Washington University in Saint Louis): "Structural Deep Learning in Conditional Asset Pricing"
November 15, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Vincent Boucher (Université Laval) - "Toward a General Theory of Peer Effects" with Michelle Rendall, Philip Uschev, and Yves Zenou
November 15, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Desmond Ang (Harvard Kennedy School): "Black Veterans and Civil Rights after World War I" with Sahil Chinoy Abstract: In 1919, hundreds of thousands of Black soldiers returned home to face widespread racial violence and discrimination. Leveraging the World War I draft lottery and millions of newly-digitized records, we document the pioneering role that these individuals played in advancing civil rights over the following decades. While military service provided little causal economic benefit, Black men who were randomly inducted into the U.S. Army were significantly more likely to take part in the ascendant NAACP. Heterogeneity analysis suggests that effects were largest for men from higher-skilled occupations and those who served in combat roles. Detailed analysis of the first African-American officer candidate class similarly reveals that commissioned officers were more likely to become civil rights leaders and other prominent members of civil society.
November 15, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Kellogg Finance Department: Bag Lunch Seminar Series	Ian Dew-Becker (Kellogg School of Management): Title TBA
November 14, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Kevin Williams (Yale): "Dynamic Price Competition: Theory and Evidence from Airline Markets"
November 14, 202212:15 PM - 1:30 PM	Kellogg School of Management: Political Economy Seminar Series	Ernesto Dal Bo (UC Berkeley): "From Rivals to Partners: Capital, State Coercion, and the Rise of Modern Economic Growth"with Lukas Leucht and Noam Yuchtman Abstract: The conventional wisdom on the source of economic growth emphasizes inclusive institutions and technical change: constraints on state elites, which allow open access to political and economic power, guarantee secure property rights and investment returns. Yet, in many contexts where economic growth has emerged, we see the partnership of private enterprise and powerful, coercive (often nondemocratic) states: from Industrial Revolution Britain, to the post-WWII Asian economic tigers, to post-Mao China. Focusing on the emergence of modern growth in Britain, we propose a model of a partnership between coercive states and private actors: merchants acquire and deploy commercial skills and the state fights wars that expand trade opportunities for merchants. The source of aligned incentives is the joint surplus made possible when, in a mercantilist world, the state projects violence outward, to create opportunities for private profit. A successful partnership is not inevitable, however: a significant complementarity between coercion and trade is required, as is the development of a fiscal capacity that will act as a technology to share the surplus. Empirically, we use secondary evidence as well as original archival research, to substantiate some of the key conditions for a partnership equilibrium in Britain: a strong commercial orientation in economic activity and in foreign conflict, i.e.,a strong government who fights wars that create market access as commercial elites expand trade, and substantial fiscal returns from war-induced commerce.
November 14, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Felix Tintelnot (UChicago): "Foreign Demand Shocks to Production Networks: Firm Responses and Worker Impacts" Abstract: We quantify and explain the firm responses and worker impacts of foreign demand shocks to domestic production networks. To capture that firms can be indirectly exposed to such shocks by buying from or selling to domestic firms that import or export, we use Belgian data with information on both domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions. Our estimates of firm responses suggest that Belgian firms pass on a large share of a foreign demand shock to their domestic suppliers, face upward-sloping labor supply curves, and have sizable fixed overhead costs in labor. Motivated and guided by these findings, we develop and estimate an equilibrium model that allows us to study how idiosyncratic and aggregate changes in foreign demand propagate through a small open economy and affect firms and workers. Our results suggest that the way the labor market is typically modeled in existing research on foreign demand shocks—with no fixed costs and perfectly elastic labor supply—would grossly understate the decline in real wages due to an increase in foreign tariffs.
November 14, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Federico Crippa (Northwestern University): "Manipulation Test in Multidimensional Regression Discontinuity Design"
November 11, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Radhika Ramakrishnan (Northwestern University): "The Second Specialist. How Does Vertical Integration Affect Specialist Switching?"
November 11, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Cara Ebert (RWI Essen) with Leander Heldring (Northwestern University): Wealth Inequality and Social Mobility in Industrializing England
November 11, 202210:30 AM - 4:45 PM	IDEAL Challenges in Data Economics Workshop	The IDEAL workshop series brings in experts on topics related to the foundations of data science to present their perspective and research on a common theme. Chicago area researchers with an interest in the foundations of data science. The workshop is part of the IDEAL Fall 2022 Special Quarter on Data Economics. This workshop is organized by Nicolas Lambert (Univ. of Southern California), Annie Liang (Northwestern Univ.), and Haifeng Xu (UChicago).
November 10, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Lakshmi Iyer (Notre Dame): "The Importance of Being Local: Administrative Decentralization and Human Development" with Latika Chaudhary Abstract: We examine the human development consequences of transferring responsibility for public service provision to local governments in India, using state-level variation in the timing of administrative decentralization reforms. We find that devolution of the responsibility for health functions from state to local governments, without concomitant authority over personnel or taxation, results in a worsening of neonatal, infant and under-5 child mortality. States that conducted such partial devolution exhibit worse indicators of public health provision, as well as lower rates of primary school completion. Our results cannot be attributed to differential pre-trends, omitted variables bias, or heterogeneous treatment effects.
November 10, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Kwok Yan Chiu (Northwestern University): Rational Inattention and Household Heterogeneity
November 10, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Sebastian Poblete (Northwestern University): School Value-Added and the Math Gender Gap in Chile
November 10, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates 1850-1910 Abstract: The invention of the typewriter provided entry into the labor force and offices for many young American women in the early 1900s. I find evidence that the typewriter contributed to a persistent increase in women’s labor force participation and other socioeconomic outcomes for women. Beyond access to work in new industries, the technology change also provided women access to a new marriage market that they previously did not have access to. It allowed them to marry men of higher socioeconomic status and subsequently achieve socio-economic mobility. Hyein Cho (Northwestern University): Limiting For-profit Provision in Nursing Home Markets Abstract: We study the welfare implication of limiting for-profit provision in the US nursing home industry, a recent policy debate spurred by findings that for-profit providers provide lower quality service than their not-for-profit counterparts. We document that there is a quality and access trade-off, which makes the answer theoretically ambiguous. On the one hand, for-profit providers choose lower quality inputs, which may result in lower quality outcomes. On the other hand, for-profit providers provide access by disproportionately serving the Medicaid population and maintaining larger facilities with more beds. To simulate counterfactual policies, we develop a two-stage game, where providers make entry decisions in the first stage and price and quality choices in the second stage. We show modeling differences in preferences and cost structure is important to capture the primitives driving different observed choices.
November 9, 20227:00 PM - 10:00 PM	2022 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. Leah Boustan will present "Does America offer 'Streets of Gold' for all? Refugees, Criminals and the Poor".
November 9, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Leah Boustan (Princeton University): "Automation After the Assembly Line: Computerized Machine Tools, Employment and Productivity in the United States"
November 9, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Kenneth Fu (Northwestern University): "Improved Partial Identification for Average Treatment Effect with Cross Design Synthesis"
November 8, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Pedro Sant'Anna (Microsoft): "Selection and Parallel Trends" joint with Dalia Ghanem and Kaspar Wüthrich
November 8, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Marcus Dillender (Vanderbilt): "Evidence and Lessons on the Health Impacts of Public Health Funding from the Fight against HIV/AIDS" Abstract: A key approach used by federal governments to address public health issues is to allocate federal funds to support local responses, but little is known about the effectiveness of this approach for improving health. This study examines the impact of federal public health funds allocated to U.S. cities through the U.S. government’s primary mechanism for combating HIV/AIDS for the past three decades. The empirical approach identifies the impact of this funding by studying funding variation that comes from policy features that resulted in large funding differences among cities that were originally on parallel HIV/AIDS trajectories. The findings indicate that an HIV/AIDS death has been prevented for every $334,000 allocated through the city-level funding and that the $19 billion allocated to cities through this program through 2018 has saved approximately 57,000 lives, which represents over $560 billion of value in terms of lives saved assuming a value of a statistical life of $10 million. The findings also indicate that funding differences across cities have been a major contributor to the uneven progress in combating HIV/AIDS currently observed across the United States that has alarmed public health leaders. Thus, while this analysis supports allocating federal funds to local areas as part of a public health strategy, these funds being effective means that sustained differences in areas’ receipt of federal public health funds can contribute to the development of health disparities across areas, as has occurred with HIV/AIDS.
November 7, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization (CANCELLED)	Jihye Jeon (Boston University): "Patient Costs and Physicians' Information"
November 7, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Elena Pastorino (Stanford): "The Distributional Impact of the Minimum Wage in the Short and Long Run"
November 7, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Hershdeep Chopra (Northwestern University): "News Selection Under Uncertainty"
November 4, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): Marriage and the Intergenerational Mobility of Women: Evidence from Marriage Certificates  Abstract:  The literature finds a high degree of economic mobility for men in the 19th century in comparison to today. However, due to data limitations, changes in female economic mobility over time are not well understood. Using a set of marriage certificates from Massachusetts over the period of 1850-1910, we link men and women to their childhood and adult census records to obtain a measure of occupational standing across two generations. We find that women are more mobile than men between 1850-1880. Between 1880-1910, men's mobility increases to converge with that of women. We also find evidence of assortative mating based on the correlation in occupational income score and real estate wealth between the husband's and wife's fathers. Absent the increase in marital sorting, married women would have experienced the same increases in intergenerational mobility as did men in the sample.  and Brian Beach (Vanderbilt University) with Karen Clay and Martin Saavedra: Contagious Ideas: Universities and the Spread of Germ Theory in American Newspapers   Abstract:  The discovery, development, and dissemination of germ theory in everyday life dramatically improved the quantity and quality of human life by influencing private and public health practices. While the scientific development of germ theory is well documented, existing studies rely on qualitative data or small data sets to examine how germ theory moved from discovery to practical implementation. This has made it difficult to evaluate the importance of germ theory as a driver of health improvements. We document the diffusion of germ theory in the United States through patents and printed material. The diffusion process appears to gain momentum after 1877 and is largely complete by 1900. We show that the germ theory of disease arrived sooner in counties with universities.
November 3, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Michael Kremer (UChicago): "Can Education be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya" with Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keets, Isaac Mbiti, and Owen Ozier Abstract: We examine the impact of enrolling in schools that employ a highly-standardized approach to education, using random variation from a large nationwide scholarship program. Bridge International Academies not only delivers highly detailed lesson guides to teachers using tablet computers, it also standardizes systems for daily teacher monitoring and feedback, school construction, and financial management. At the time of the study, Bridge operated over 400 private schools serving more than 100,000 pupils. It hired teachers with less formal education and experience than public school teachers, paid them less, and had more working hours per week. Enrolling at Bridge for two years increased test scores by 0.89 additional equivalent years of schooling (EYS) for primary school pupils and by 1.48 EYS for pre-primary pupils. These effects exceed the 90th percentile of studies examined by Evans and Yuan (2020) and the 99th percentile of treatment effects of large sample studies reviewed in the same study. Enrolling at Bridge reduced both dispersion in test scores and grade repetition. Test score results do not seem to be driven by rote memorization or by the income effects of the scholarship.
November 3, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Edoardo Maria Acabbi (Charles III University of Madrid): A Labor Market Sorting Model of Scarring and Hysteresis
November 3, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Lakshmi Iyer (University of Notre Dame) - Religion and Demography: The Influence of Papal Visits on Fertility  Abstract:  We examine the role of religious influences on fertility decisions. Using data from 12 Latin American countries, we document widely-varying effects of the Pope's visits on subsequent fertility decisions, with some areas showing little or no effects and others showing large increases in fertility. We investigate several mechanisms to explain such heterogeneous effects, including the role of per capita income, religiosity and stage of demographic transition.
November 3, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Anran Li (Northwestern University): Limited Commitment and Preventive Care Provision Abstract: This paper analyzes the effects of limited commitment on preventive care provision in health insurance. Limited consumer commitment generates dynamic inefficiencies and discourages insurers to provide preventive care because the returns of current health investment may not be recovered in future periods as consumers leave the insurer. I exploit a shift-share instrument for consumer turnover and find that a 10% increase in turnover decrease preventive utilization rates by 6%, and insurers’ preventive investment by $53 per enrollee. I develop a model of dynamic insurer competition on preventive care quality and premiums to quantify the welfare impacts of limited consumer commitment and evaluate the tradeoff between market power and investment cost savings from competition. A 10% increase in consumer turnover increase $116 total discounted consumer out of pocket expenses. A single payer increases total discounted consumer welfare by $740 and decreases $630 total discounted OOP compared to the status quo.
November 2, 20224:00 PM - 6:00 PM	Accounting for Slavery: A Conversation with Caitlin Rosenthal	Caitlin Rosenthal (UC Berkeley), will give remarks about her book Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, which shows how the development of modern management and accounting practices find their origins in slavery. These remarks will be followed by a conversation between Dr. Rosenthal and faculty member Dr. Ivy Onyeador from Kellogg’s Management and Organizations Department, a question and answer session with the audience, and a reception with the speaker and the audience members.  We invite you to register in advance by the end of the day on October 26, 2022 to secure a spot.
November 2, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	David Weil (Brown University): "Land Quality"
November 2, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Felipe Berrutti Rampa (Northwestern University): "Market Structure, Innovation and Prices: The Case of Agricultural Biotechnology"
November 1, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Whitney Newey (MIT): "Constrained Conditional Moment Restriction Models" with Victor Chernozhukov and Andres Santos Abstract: Shape restrictions have played a central role in economics as both testable implications of theory and sufficient conditions for obtaining informative counterfactual predictions. In this paper we provide a general procedure for inference under shape restrictions in identified and partially identified models defined by conditional moment restrictions. Our test statistics and proposed inference methods are based on the minimum of the generalized method of moments (GMM) objective function with and without shape restrictions. Uniformly valid critical values are obtained through a bootstrap procedure that approximates a subset of the true local parameter space. In an empirical analysis of the effect of childbearing on female labor supply, we show that employing shape restrictions in linear instrumental variables (IV) models can lead to shorter confidence regions for both local and average treatment effects. Other applications we discuss include inference for the variability of quantile IV treatment effects and for bounds on average equivalent variation in a demand model with general heterogeneity. We find in Monte Carlo examples that the critical values are conservatively accurate and that tests about objects of interest have good power relative to unrestricted GMM.
November 1, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Michael Mueller-Smith (UMichigan): "Estimating the Impact of the Age of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments in a Regression Discontinuity Framework" with Benjamin Pyle and Caroline Walker
October 31, 20223:30 PM - 4:45 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Charles Hodgson (Yale): "Information Externalities, Free Riding, and Optimal Exploration in the UK Oil Industry"
October 31, 202212:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Institute for Policy Research Colloquium with Hannes Schwandt (IPR/SESP) - The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on U.S. Fertility	Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University) -The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on U.S. Fertility* Hannes Schwandt, Associate Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and IPR Fellow. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
October 31, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Christian Hellwig (Toulouse): "A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work: Optimal tax design as redistributional arbitrage" with Nicolas Werquin.
October 31, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Ohi (Northwestern University): "News Regulation with Political Costs"
October 28, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Chris Sims (Northwestern University) - (De-)Industrialization and Trade: Evidence from the Danish Sound Dues  Abstract: Using a large historical data set on trade in Europe, I document that the Baltic region saw declining export shares and increasing trade deficits in manufactured goods between 1700 and 1850, becoming more pronounced over the course of the British Industrial Revolution, which I interpret as evidence of de-industrialization. I will also discuss future strategies for understanding the causes of de-industrialization based on exposure to the British Industrial Revolution Matteo Giugovaz (Northwestern University) - Forced Migration and Political Outcomes: Insights from the Istrian Dalmatian Exodus after WWII Abstract: I study the effects of same-ethnicity forced migration on political outcomes by exploiting a unique historical setting: the Istrian Dalmatian Exodus. After WWII, 290,000 individuals flew formerly Italian areas that had passed under Yugoslavian control. This outmigration, supported by the new socialist Yugoslavian state, was spurred by ethnic persecutions and was perceived as political oppression; these persecutions left strong anti-communist marks on migrants. By leveraging previously unexplored data, I study the impact of refugees’ arrival on political views. My results show that the presence of a refugee camp is associated with greater political polarization and an increase in national election turnout between 1946 and 1958. I document a strong and significant increase in support for the right-wing parties and a decrease for the moderate centrist block. These results are consistent with either a “red scare” mechanism or horizontal transmission of anti-communist values between immigrants and natives.
October 27, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Sarah Deschênes (Northwestern): "Expanding Access to Schooling in Nigeria: Impact on marital outcomes"
October 27, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Cara Ebert (RWI Essen) : "Migration Mentoring and Its Networked Effects in Senegal"
October 27, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Santiago Camara (Northwestern University): Title TBA
October 27, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Siddhant Agarwal: Workhour Regularity and Gender Gaps: Evidence from Brazilian Exporters Abstract: Following Goldin (AER, 2014), I conjecture that women have a higher preference for the amenity of workhour regularity (due to the gendered division of labour at home, childcare, and safety concerns), and this explains a significant part of the gender gaps we see in employment, promotions, and wages. Using a panel of employer-employee matched data from Brazil, I empirically test the importance of this factor by exploiting variation in the time zones of the trading partners of exporting firms. I find that firms that trade with further away clients employ fewer female employees. Since exporting firms also pay a significant premium over domestic firms, this helps explain a large portion of the gender wage gap.
October 26, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Elisa Jácome (Northwestern University): “Mobility for All: Representative Intergenerational Mobility Estimates over the 20th Century”, with Ilyana Kuziemko, and Suresh Naidu. Abstract: We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the U.S.-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of non-whites and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s
October 26, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Giovanni Pisauro (Northwestern University): "Health Care Related Determinants of Fertility and Health: the Case of Pharmacists’ Scope of Practice "
October 25, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Yong Cai (Northwestern) - "Linear Regression with Centrality Measures"
October 25, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Rob Fairlie (University of California, Santa Cruz): "Affirmative Action, Quality of Instruction and Lower-Caste Student-Faculty Interactions: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Classes in Engineering Colleges in India"
October 24, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Jean-Francois Houde (Yale): "Asymmetric Information and the Supply Chain of Mortgages: The Case of Ginnie Mae Loans” with Ken Hendrics, Jonathan Becker and Diwakar Raisingh
October 24, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Oleg Itskhoki (UCLA): "Optimal Exchange Rate Policy" with Dmitry Mukhin Abstract: We develop a general policy analysis framework that features nominal rigidities and financial frictions with endogenous PPP and UIP deviations. The goal of the optimal policy is to balance output gap stabilization and international risk sharing using a mix of monetary policy and FX interventions. The nominal exchange rate plays a dual role. First, it allows for the real exchange rate adjustments when prices are sticky, which are necessary to close the output gap. Monetary policy can eliminate the output gap, but this generally requires a volatile nominal exchange rate. Volatility in the nominal exchange rate, in turn, limits the extent of international risk sharing in the financial market with risk averse intermediaries. Optimal monetary policy closes the output gap, while optimal FX interventions eliminate UIP deviations. When the first-best real exchange rate is stable, both goals can be achieved by a fixed exchange rate policy — an open-economy divine coincidence. Generally, this is not the case, and the optimal policy requires a managed peg by means of a combination of monetary policy and FX interventions, without requiring the use of capital controls. We explore various constrained optimal policies, when either monetary policy or FX interventions are restricted, and characterize the possibility of central bank’s income gains and losses from FX interventions.
October 24, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Cristoforo Pizzimenti (Northwestern University): "Banks’ Loans and Safe Assets: Does Regulation Matter for Ssset Allocation?"
October 21, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Kyohei Okumura (Northwestern University): "Designing Dynamic Contests with Incremental Progress"
October 21, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Blair Long (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee): Extralegal Determinants of Criminal Sentencing: The Case of British Columbia, 1864-1913   Abstract: What factors determine criminal sentences? While legal factors such as crime and criminal history should affect punishment, judges may also incorporate extralegal factors when handing down sentences. In this paper, we study the role that extralegal determinants played in the sentencing of criminals in British Columbia (BC) between 1864 and 1913. Using prison admissions data, we document the sentencing behaviour of judges and find more leniency towards women, Indigenous, and Chinese individuals. We find harsher sentences for the lowest and highest social classes. Over time, we find that these biases shifted, concurrent with significant historical events. A sentiment analysis of historical BC newspapers shows that public sentiment mirrored this pattern. We conduct tests to distinguish between taste-based and statistical bias. First, we estimate prisoners' predicted future recidivism and incorporate this into our main specification. We find that statistical bias is present but small in comparison to the extralegal bias we initially observe. We next augment Becker's (1968) model of punishment to incorporate both channels of bias. We use the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in BC as an exogenous decrease in the incentives for crime to test for the presence of statistical bias. In this case, we detect substantial statistical bias favouring domestic and European workers. Chinese workers, however, see no change in their sentences during the building of the CPR, which we attribute to judicial tastes.
October 20, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Hossein Alidaee (Northwestern): "How Uncertainty About Heterogeneity Impacts Technology Adoption"
October 20, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development (joint with Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Hossein Alidaee (Northwestern): "How Uncertainty About Heterogeneity Impacts Technology Adoption"
October 20, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Ismaël Yacoubou Djima (Paris School of Economics) - Migration, Occupations Transmission, and Development: Evidence from Castes in Mali   Abstract: In this work, I document that, in Mali, social identity based on castes--historical, hierarchical social groups whose role is thought to have subsided- still relates to the current socio-economic outcomes of part of the population. Using individuals' last names, a marker of caste identity, I start by showing that it is possible to proxy for the castes of individuals in 8 rounds of living standards household surveys collected between 2014 and 2019. Then, focusing on internal migration, I provide evidence that individuals from castes of artisans and griots (bards) are less likely to migrate from rural to urban areas than the rest of the population. This lower migration rate appears to be related to the amenities provided by their castes' identities in rural areas. These amenities are linked to the current occupations for the artisan caste that is over-represented in professions of the artisanal type and whose members are more likely to pass on their occupations to their descendants. On the other hand, the griots' amenities come from the traditional role they play in social contexts (ceremonies, conflict resolution, etc.), allowing them to derive a higher share of their consumption from gifts than other groups.
October 20, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Emre Yavuz (Northwestern University): Title TBA
October 20, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Anastasiia Evdokimova (Northwestern University): Obfuscation on the OTC market: suboptimal choices and costly information acquisition   Abstract: The goal of the FDA on the self-medication market is to guide consumers to the appropriate treatment choice: to provide clear, simple, and readable over-the-counter drug labels. While these policies manage to reach symptom/drug matching, according to our analysis, we cannot rule out the existence of consumer obfuscation. We observe a price dispersion for identical drugs, which differ only in the direction of usage. We also document that under this price dispersion, consumers make suboptimal decisions, choosing the more expensive version of the identical drug. One possible explanation for why consumers make suboptimal decisions under the full information case is that while information from labels is publicly available, some parts are costly to acquire. While the front label of the drug contains all the information that can lead to the first best decision, part of this information, such as active components, is health-related, specific, knowledge that is hard to obtain and use during decision-making. Therefore, we construct a model that helps to disentangle costly information acquisition decisions from preferences and inertia and draw a distribution of the information acquisition costs. Based on the parameters of this model, we will be able to construct policy counterfactuals that address changes in welfare as a result of a change in the price of information acquisition.
October 19, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Nancy Qian (Northwestern University): “The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932-33”, with Natalya Naumenko and Andrei Markevich. Abstract: This paper constructs a large new dataset and document several new facts about the Great Soviet Famine (1932-33), during which mortality was disproportionally higher for Ukrainians. First, enough food was produced in Ukraine to avoid famine. Since food distribution was centrally planned, it follows that over-procurement from Ukraine is a necessary condition for famine. Second, famine mortality and realized food procurement (retention) were increasing (decreasing) with the share of ethnic Ukrainians across regions, holding per capita food production, weather and other variables constant. This and other results support the hypothesis that Ukrainian famine mortality was due to systematic policy bias against Ukrainians. Ukrainian bias explains approximately 92% of famine deaths in Ukraine and 77% in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
October 19, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Valerio Di Tommaso (Northwestern University): "Market Expectations and the Macroeconomy: an Application to the Oil Industry"
October 18, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Panos Toulis (UChicago Booth School) - "Invariant Inference via Residual Randomization"
October 17, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Chenyu Yang (University of Maryland): "Estimating Discrete Games with Many Firms and Many Decisions: An Application to Merger and Product Variety" (with Ying Fan) Abstract: This paper presents a new method for estimating discrete games based on bounds of conditional choice probabilities. The method does not require solving the game and is scalable to models with many firms and many discrete decisions. We apply the method to study merger effects on firm entry and product variety in the retail craft beer market in California. We simulate an acquisition of multiple craft breweries by a large brewery and find that the acquisition would induce firm entry and product entry by non-merging firms. However, these changes are insufficient to offset the negative welfare effects resulting from the higher prices and decreased product offerings by the merging firms.
October 17, 202212:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Institute for Policy Research Colloquium with Charles Manski (IPR/Economics) - Partial Identification of Personalized Treatment Response	Charles Manski (Northwestern University) - Partial Identification of Personalized Treatment Response with Trial-Reported Analyses of Binary Subgroups*   Working paper can be found here.  *This presentation will cover work in progress.
October 17, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Chad Jones (Stanford): "Recipes and Economic Growth: A Combinatorial March Down an Exponential Tail" Abstract: New ideas are often combinations of existing ideas, a point emphasized by Romer (1993) and Weitzman (1998). But this insight is largely absent from state-of-the-art models. Separately, Kortum (1997) created a new framework for modeling growth, one where ideas are draws from a probability distribution, and argued that the Pareto distribution plays an essential role. What happened to the Romer-Weitzman observation that combinations matter, and do we really need to make such a strong distributional assumption to get growth? This paper shows that combinatorial increases in the number of draws from standard thin-tailed distributions leads to exponential economic growth. More broadly, the paper provides a theorem linking the behavior of the max extreme value to the number of draws and the shape of the upper tail for probability distributions.
October 17, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Ludovica Mosillo (Northwestern University): "Is migration good for everyone? Parental migration and children left behind"
October 14, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Nina Fluegel (Northwestern University): "Convincing Agents to Collaborate"
October 14, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Lukas Rosenberger (Northwestern University): Access to Knowledge and Economic Growth
October 13, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Federico Puglisi (Northwestern University): Title TBA
October 13, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Aleksandra Paluszynska (Northwestern University): Hazy decisions: The effect of dementia on medical decision-making Abstract: I estimate the causal effect of having dementia on the course of treatment for an unrelated disease by leveraging differences in relative time of onset of dementia and the other condition in a difference-in-differences event-study framework. To demonstrate this approach I look at heart attacks and show that after accounting for individual and calendar time fixed effects the "dementia first"  and "heart attack first" groups exhibit parallel trends in health care utilization before the heart attack. I find that health care cost is persistently lower following a heart attack for those who had dementia already and that the effect is driven by decreases in frequency of care. Dementia patients who experience a heart attack reduce the number of interactions with the health care system, while those who do not yet have dementia markedly increase their frequency of care in response to the health shock. I establish that this finding holds universally for a variety of other acute and chronic conditions and is not driven by higher mortality among dementia patients. Long-term reductions in medical care received are driven by care over which patients have the most discretion such as pathology and lab, which points to reduced follow-up care and treatment adherence as possible mechanisms behind my estimates.
October 12, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Vageesha Bainwala (Northwestern University): "Transparent “Piggy-Banks” & Domestic Violence: Evidence from Demonetization"
October 11, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Davide Viviano (Stanford GSB): "Policy design in experiments with unknown interference"  Abstract: This paper studies experimental designs for estimation and inference on welfare-maximizing policies in the presence of spillover effects. I consider a setting where units are organized into a finite number of large clusters and interact in unknown ways within each cluster. As a first contribution, I introduce a single-wave experiment which, by carefully varying the randomization across pairs of clusters, estimates the marginal effect of a change in treatment probabilities, taking spillover effects into account. Using the marginal effect, I propose a practical test for policy optimality. The idea is that researchers should report the marginal effect and test for policy optimality: the marginal effect indicates the direction for a welfare improvement, and the test provides evidence on whether it is worth conducting additional experiments to estimate a welfare-improving treatment allocation. As a second contribution, I design a multiple-wave experiment to estimate treatment assignment rules and maximize welfare. I derive strong small-sample guarantees on the difference between the maximum attainable welfare and the welfare evaluated at the estimated policy, which converges linearly in the number of clusters and iterations. Simulations calibrated to existing experiments on information diffusion and cash-transfer programs show welfare improvements up to fifty percentage points.
October 10, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization (joint with Development & Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Eilidh Geddes (Northwestern): "The Effects of Price Regulation in Markets with Strategic Entry: Evidence from Health Insurance Markets"
October 10, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization (joint with Development & Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Eilidh Geddes (Northwestern): "The Effects of Price Regulation in Markets with Strategic Entry: Evidence from Health Insurance Markets"
October 10, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization (joint with Development & Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Eilidh Geddes (Northwestern): "The Effects of Price Regulation in Markets with Strategic Entry: Evidence from Health Insurance Markets"
October 10, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Rohan Kekre (UChicago Booth): "The Flight to Safety and International Risk Sharing”
October 10, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sebastian Sardon (Northwestern University): "Land Redistribution and Productivity: Evidence from a Peruvian Reform"
October 7, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Julius Koschnik (London School of Economics): Breaking Tradition: Teacher-Student Effects at English Universities during the Scientific Revolution     Abstract: While teacher-student effects in conveying a fixed curriculum have been widely studied, the effect of teachers on the direction of research at the knowledge frontier has received less attention. This paper studies the teacher effect on students’ future research at the time of the English Scientific Revolution. It introduces a novel dataset on the universe of all 111,242 students at English universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and matches them to their publications. Through topic modeling, the paper is able to quantify personal interest in different research topics. To derive causal estimates, the paper exploits a natural experiment based on the expulsion of fellows following the English Civil War. The paper finds that teachers strongly influenced the direction of research of their students, both for traditional topics and topics associated with the Scientific Revolution. Thus, it identifies an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of the ideas of the Scientific Revolution.
October 6, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Eduardo Campillo Betancourt (Northwestern): “Caste heterogeneity in the effects of political affirmative action on India”
October 6, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development (joint with Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Eduardo Campillo Betancourt (Northwestern): “Caste heterogeneity in the effects of political affirmative action on India”
October 6, 202212:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Marie-Louise Decamps (Northwestern University) - 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 consider two sources of exposure to the shock. The direct exposure refers to the local increase in soy productivity. I find that it leads to changes in the local composition of agricultural land use, driven by the reduction in cattle ranching, but not to changes in forest area. Second, I consider the indirect exposure from proximity to areas with larger local increases in soy productivity. I find that cattle ranching activity reallocates to indirectly exposed areas, and leads to a reduction in forest area. This shows that changes in the composition of agricultural activity across space should be considered when examining the total environmental cost of local agricultural productivity shocks.
October 6, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Joao Guerreiro (Northwestern University): Title TBA
October 6, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Jose Luis Flor Toro (Northwestern University): Higher Education in Peru: An Economics Overview Abstract: While the rapid expansion of enrollment in higher education in Latin America has been seen positively, it has also been coupled with lowering quality indicators and other issues. In an extreme reaction, the Peruvian government issued a moratorium on new universities and new branches of existing ones in 2012. This is a great setting to understand the effects of entry on welfare in the higher education industry, as it features asymmetric information and endogenous quality decisions of the providers. Moreover, the overall allocation is centralized through a system called SERUMS, and we exploit this too. Recent reduced-form evidence motivates more cautious inspection of the results, and of the overall allocation results.
October 5, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Eric Chaney (Oxford University): "Modern Library Holdings and Historic City Growth"
October 5, 20221:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Workshop	Stefano DellaVigna (University of California, Berkeley) - Bottlenecks for Evidence Adoption
October 5, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Elizabeth Jaramillo Rojas (Northwestern University): "Maternity Leave Policies and Informality"
October 4, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Wayne Gao (UPenn) - "Two Stage Maximum Score Estimator"
October 3, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Paul Kim (Northwestern): "Risk-Corridors in Medicare Part D: Risk-Sharing or Profit-Limiting Mechanism?"
October 3, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics (Cancelled)	Hassan Afrouzi (Columbia): "Inflation and GDP Dynamics in Production Networks: A Sufficient Statistics Approach" (with Saroj Bhattarai)
October 3, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tom Fisher (Northwestern University): "Dynamic co-ordination games with information externalities - On Revolutionary Waves"
September 30, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Danil Fedchenko (Northwestern University): "Unobservable Outcomes: Unified and Economics‑Friendly Approach to Surrogates"
September 30, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Emily Nix (University of Southern California): Black-White Income Inequality During Jim Crow: Evidence from "Passing" for White (with Ricardo Dahis and Nancy Qian)
September 29, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Sean Higgins (Northwestern University) -  The Impact of Price Comparison Tools in Consumer Credit Markets (with Erik Berwart, Sheisha Kulkarni, and Santiago Truffa)   Abstract: Consumer credit markets feature large amounts of price dispersion in loan costs, even conditional on loan and borrower characteristics. If consumers are unaware of the extent of this price dispersion, they may shop less and take out loans at higher interest rates than they would otherwise. We conduct a randomized controlled trial in Chile where we provide just-in-time, personalized information about the distribution of interest rates or the benefits of search to people searching for loans on Google. The first treatment arm is a price comparison tool that shows prospective borrowers a conditional distribution of interest rates based on administrative data on originated loans for borrowers and loans with similar observable characteristics. The second treatment is a simplified message that shows prospective borrowers an estimate of the monthly and total amount they could save by shopping at more banks. We find that consumers indeed underestimate price dispersion, and that the price comparison tool causes them to double their estimate of how much dispersion there is in interest rates. Consumers also underestimate the interest rate they will obtain, and the price comparison tool causes them to increase their prior about the interest rate they will obtain by 17 percentage points over a control mean of 23%. The simplified message treatment does not appear to affect priors about dispersion or the rate people expect to obtain. Our trial is still ongoing; after finishing our data collection, we will analyze results on loan characteristics using administrative data from Chile’s financial regulator. We will also conduct a follow-up phone survey that will be used to measure effects on search behavior and better understand how people form and update priors in consumer credit markets.
September 29, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Carl Hallman (Northwestern University): Title TBA
September 29, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Genia Rachkovski (Northwestern University): Heads Up: Does Air Pollution Cause Workplace Accidents The presentation will be on zoom.
September 28, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Martin Fiszbein (Boston University): "The Other Great Migration: Southern Whites and the New Right" (with Samuel Bazzi, Andy Ferrara, Thomas Pearson, and Patrick Testa)
September 28, 20221:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Workshop	James Sallee (University of California, Berkeley) - Title TBA Strategy Department Seminar Series Virtual Option
September 28, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrea Ferrara (Northwestern University): "Monetary Shock, Firms’ Debt Maturity and the Investment Channel"
September 27, 20224:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Andrei Zeleneev (University College London) - "Robust Estimation and Inference in Panels with Interactive Fixed Effects"
September 27, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics (joint with Development)	Nicole Holz (Northwestern): "Information Disclosure and Patient Demand"
September 27, 20222:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics (joint with Development)	Nicole Holz (Northwestern): "Information Disclosure and Patient Demand"
September 26, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Diego Jimenez-Hernandez (Chicago Federal Reserve): Title TBA
September 26, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Per Krusell (Stockholm University): "Suboptimal Climate Policy, II" Joint with John Hassler (IIES) and Conny Olovsson (Sveriges Riksbank and ECB)
September 26, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sebastian Poblete Coddou (Northwestern University): "Efficiency of Slot Auctions at Congested Airports"
September 23, 20222:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jose Higueras Corona (Northwestern University): "Optimal Trade Design by a Platform"
September 23, 202212:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Introductory lunch
September 22, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development (joint with Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Kensuke Maeba (Northwestern): "Extrapolation of Treatment Effect Estimates Across Contexts and Policies: An Application to Cash Transfer Experiments"
September 22, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development (joint with Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics)	Kensuke Maeba (Northwestern): "Extrapolation of Treatment Effect Estimates Across Contexts and Policies: An Application to Cash Transfer Experiments"
September 22, 202212:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Dalton Zhang (Northwestern University) and Xiaojie Liu (Northwestern University): TItle TBA
September 22, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA Title: TBA
September 21, 20221:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Workshop	Alessandro Pavan (Northwestern University) - "Knowing Your Lemon before You Dump It"
September 21, 202211:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Bruno Nunes Fava (Northwestern University): "On Strong Sparsity Assumptions and Their Implications for Post Double Selection in RCTs "
September 19, 20223:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Chiara Fumagalli (Bocconi): "Shelving or developing? Optimal policy for mergers with potential competitors"