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
November 4, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Koichiro Ito (University of Chicago): Global Policy Spillovers: Evidence from the Multinational Automobile Industry Abstract: In the globalized economy, a country's domestic policy can produce global spillover effects through products manufactured by multinational firms. We investigate this phenomenon in the context of environmental policies for automobiles. First, we empirically show that Japan’s fuel economy subsidy led to improvements in fuel economy for cars sold in the U.S. market. Second, using a structural model of differentiated product markets, we demonstrate that cross-market links in revenues and costs could highlight the potential mechanism behind the global spillovers. Finally, we use the estimated model to conduct counterfactual policy simulations, quantifying the welfare effects of the global policy spillovers.
November 4, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Francesco Furlanetto (Norges Bank): Macroeconomic effects of the gender revolution Abstract: Postwar U.S. labor market data exhibit a major, secular decline in the employment and wage gaps between males and females. In this paper, we identify the structural forces behind this gender convergence, and quantify the spillover to the broader macroeconomy. A novel time series model maps empirical trends in data into underlying (aggregate and gender-specific) structural trends. Identification is achieved with restrictions derived from a neoclassical model with gender-specific labor. Empirically, we find a secular increase in female-specific labor productivity as the main driver of the gender convergence, accounting for approximately one-third of economic growth in the postwar U.S. economy
November 1, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Anthony Bald (Harvard) Title: "The Birth of an Occupation: Professional Nursing in the Era of Public Health" Abstract: This paper studies the origins of nursing as a professional occupation. In the early 20th century, hospitals founded training schools for nurses to meet the growing demand for medical care. Training schools increased overall nurse supply and soon became the primary pathway for young women to receive a professional nursing credential. I estimate how the availability of nurse training affected labor market outcomes. Using linked census records and training school openings as a source of variation, I show that white women who were geographically close to an opening in adolescence were more likely to become trained nurses. Effects are largest for women from well-off families, consistent with the admission criteria of schools. Availability of nurse training caused women to substitute away from other occupations and had little effect on labor force participation or occupation-based measures of income. Furthermore, by their thirties, women who were geographically close to an opening were less likely to become physicians. These results paint a mixed picture: Nurse training provided a new opportunity for women in the workforce, reinforcing existing gender segregation in medicine. Over the course of the 20th century, nursing would grow to become the largest majority-female occupation in the United States.
October 31, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Nathalie Basto  Title:  "Real effects of firms credit information" Abstract:  This paper examines the "Clean Slate" policy's impact on firms in Colombia, which aimed to reduce credit information retention times for previously delinquent firms, thus enhancing credit access and addressing the "no-credit history trap" often facing SMEs. Using a regression discontinuity design around the policy's revenue cutoff, this study reveals mixed effects: while delinquent firms gain short-term credit access, potentially easing liquidity constraints, non-delinquent firms face adverse credit conditions due to pooled risk. Findings indicate that limiting negative credit histories can facilitate credit access but risks creating equilibrium effects that inadvertently tighten credit conditions for traditionally reliable firms. These insights contribute to understanding policy trade-offs in financial inclusion and credit market dynamics.
October 31, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Guilherme Neri
October 30, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Nico Voigtlander (UCLA): "Organizing a Kingdom" With Charles Angelucci and Simone Meraglia Abstract: We develop a framework that examines the organizational challenges faced by central rulers when delegating administrative authority over rural areas and towns to local elites. We highlight two key mechanisms that describe how shifts in the economy can lead to institutional change: First, as towns’ economic potential grows (e.g., due to the Commercial Revolution), their inefficient administration by outsiders (i.e., landed elites) leads to higher losses for the ruler. Thus, the ruler grants self-governance to towns, allowing urban elites to better adapt to local shocks (trade opportunities). Second, in order for self-governing towns to coordinate their choices with the ruler’s interests, they need to receive reliable information about shocks to the kingdom (e.g., war threats). To ensure effective communication, the ruler informs towns directly in central assemblies. Overall, this process increases the weight given to urban elites’ preferences in decisions made by all stakeholders. Our framework can explain the emergence of municipal autonomy and towns’ representation in parliaments throughout Western Europe in the early modern period. We also discuss how the model applies to other historical dynamics, and to alternative organizational settings. Please note the change in usual room.
October 30, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Murphy
October 29, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Dmitry Arkhangelsky (Center for Monetary and Financial Studies): Sequential Synthetic Difference in Differences Abstract: We study the estimation of treatment effects of a binary policy in environments with a staggered treatment rollout. We propose a new estimator -- Sequential Synthetic Difference in Difference (Sequential SDiD) -- and establish its theoretical properties in a linear model with interactive fixed effects. Our estimator is based on sequentially applying the original SDiD estimator proposed in Arkhangelsky et al. (2021) to appropriately aggregated data. To establish the theoretical properties of our method, we compare it to an infeasible OLS estimator based on the knowledge of the subspaces spanned by the interactive fixed effects. We show that this OLS estimator has a sequential representation and use this result to show that it is asymptotically equivalent to the Sequential SDiD estimator. This result implies the asymptotic normality of our estimator along with corresponding efficiency guarantees. The method developed in this paper presents a natural alternative to the conventional DiD strategies in staggered adoption designs.
October 29, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Joint Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP") and Industrial Organization	Hyein Cho (Northwestern): Provider-Insurer Integration and Healthcare Delivery Abstract:  I examine how integration between healthcare providers and insurers affects care delivery. Unlike stand-alone providers, integrated providers bear financial responsibility as insurers, which may incentivize them to limit resource-intensive services or better coordinate care. In the Massachusetts Individual Exchange, I find that integration reduces utilization, mainly by reducing patients' visits to specialists. Integration lowers both the likelihood of patients visiting a specialist by 10 percentage points and, for those who do, the likelihood of seeking second opinions by 2.5 percentage points. This shift is accompanied by patients changing to new primary care practitioners (PCPs) who are more likely to be integrated with the insurer. To assess whether the reduction in specialist visits stems from integrated PCPs' stricter gatekeeping or improved PCP-specialist coordination, I develop and estimate a physician referral model. Model estimates show that integrated PCPs are stricter in referral, but see a more accurate information related to referral. Counterfactual analyses reveal that 90% of the reduction in specialist visits is explained by gatekeeping.   Please note the change in the location. This seminar will take place in KGH 1130.
October 28, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Industrial Organization and Development Economics	Claudia Allende (Stanford University): Search and Biased Beliefs in Education Markets Abstract: This paper asks how search costs, limited awareness of schools, misperceptions of schools’ attributes, and inaccurate beliefs over unknown schools affect families’ search and application decisions in Chile’s nation wide school choice process. We combine novel data on search activity with a panel of household surveys, administrative application data, randomized information experiments, and a model of demand and sequential search with subjective beliefs. Descriptively, households hold inaccurate beliefs and misperceptions along multiple dimensions which distort the perceived returns to search. Most importantly, they do not know all schools, and misperceive quality ratings of the schools they know and like. Improving the search technology would raise households’ search effort and welfare. Correcting misperceptions about known schools’ observables would cause students to match to schools with higher quality, equal to what can be achieved under a full-information benchmark. Models with out misperceptions would incorrectly predict quality reductions.
October 28, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Florian Scheuer (Univeristy of Zurich): Putting the "Finance" into "Public finance": A theory of capital gains taxation Abstract: Standard optimal capital tax theory abstracts from modeling asset prices, making it unsuitable for thinking about capital gains and wealth taxation. We study optimal redistributive taxation in an environment with asset price changes, adopting the modern finance view that asset prices fluctuate not only because of changing cash flows, but also due to other factors (“discount rates”). We show that the optimal tax base (i) generally differs from the case with constant asset prices, and (ii) depends on the sources of asset-price changes. Whenever asset prices fluctuate, and are not exclusively driven by cash flow changes, taxes must target realized trades and generally involve a combination of realization-based capital gains and dividend taxes. This result stands in contrast to the classic Haig-Simons comprehensive income tax concept, as well as recent proposals for wealth or accrual-based capital gains taxes.
October 25, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kota Ogasawara Title: "Technology, Institution, and Regional Growth: Evidence from Mineral Mining Industry in Industrializing Japan." Abstract: Coal extraction was an influential economic activity in interwar Japan. Initially, coal mines employed both males and females as the workforce in the pits. However, the innovation of labor-saving technologies and the renewal of traditional extraction methodology induced institutional change. This was manifested by the revision of labor regulations affecting female miners in the early 1930s. This dramatically changed the mining workplace, making skilled males the principal miners engaged in underground work. This paper investigates the impact of coal mining on regional growth and assesses how the institutional changes induced by the amended labor regulations affected its processes. By linking the mines' location information with both registration and census-based statistics, it was found that coal mines led to remarkable population growth. The labor regulations accelerated local population growth by forcing female miners to exit the labor market and form families. The regulations prohibited female miners from risky underground work. This reduction in occupational hazard also improved early-life mortality via the mortality selection mechanism in utero.
October 24, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ludovica Mosillo  Title:  "The Effects of Load Shedding in South Africa" Abstract: Rationing is a common approach to managing resource crises such as water or electricity shortages in developing countries. This strategy often involves rotating the availability of resources across geographical regions, typically without differentiating based on local needs or demand. This project studies the case of South Africa, where the national power utility introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“load shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply to mitigate the risk of countrywide blackouts. Starting in 2019 power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. I exploit high frequency night light satellite data to show that, even though load shedding was equally implemented across neighborhoods, the rotating power outages disproportionately affect the poorer strata of the population.
October 24, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Eleni Packis
October 23, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Rowena Gray (UC Merced): "Tasks and Black-white Inequality over the Long Twentieth Century" Abstract: We present new evidence on the long-run trend of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitiveintensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred from 1960 onwards. Longitudinal data suggests that transitions to new task content were racially biased: Black men moved to jobs with lower rewarded task content than white men, conditional on initial task content, though gaps decreased after World War II. Routine-intensive Black workers were less likely to move up into non-routine analytic work compared to white workers in both historical and modern periods. The results suggest that task-displacement shocks, such as automating routine-manual work, widen Black-white inequality. Please note the change in usual room. This seminar will be in KGH 2410A&B.
October 23, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jose Alvarado
October 23, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Bitencourt (Northwestern University): "Intermediation and Non-Monotonicities in Network Formation"
October 22, 20244:00 PM - 6:00 PM	Culture and Markets: The Potent Mix that Fueled Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Present	[Hosted by the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago] What explains the explosion in the wealth and productivity of modern societies over the past 250 years? This subject is much debated. Speakers will start with 30-minute summaries of their perspectives. Following these presentations will be a roundtable moderated by James Heckman that will enable speakers to interact and comment on the contents of each lecture. This will be followed by an open forum for audience participation. Deirdre McCloskey will emphasize the role of the liberalization of ideas favoring a culture of free speech and an economy of enterprise and exchange: a culture of equality in which all are liberated to speak, to vote, and to buy and sell freely. The liberal society fosters a culture that makes people bold to venture into all of the unknowns in society, including geography and ideas. A paper on this point of view is posted here. Joel Mokyr emphasizes the link between the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, interpreted as a movement that advocated and promoted institutions that promoted the accumulation of useful knowledge. Useful knowledge was promoted by a network of scholarly societies, publications, and informal networks that created the conditions for rapid economic growth. See his paper here. James Robinson brings a new non-Western element into the discussion. He asks how we should interpret conventional models of the sources of economic growth in light of the recent Chinese experience. He argues that social science does not have a convincing explanation for how China has so successfully combined elements of a market economy with what appears to be totalitarianism for the past 50 years. There is an obvious cultural explanation for this, based on Confucianism, but it is one which appears to be outside of the scope of our theories. He uses this challenge to our understanding and frameworks to pose some questions about what it takes to have growth, whether there are non-western models of growth (surely China cannot be the only possibility) and whether we have anything to learn from such models. See paper here. If you have any questions, please reach out to bfi-events@uchicago.edu.
October 22, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	MOVED TO KGH L070 Carlos Lamarche (University of Kentucky): Wild Bootstrap Inference for Panel Data Quantile Regression with Dependent Data with Antonio F. Galvao (Michigan State University) and Thomas Parker (University of Waterloo) Abstract: Practical inference procedures for panel data quantile regression have been a pervasive concern in empirical work, and can be especially challenging when the panel is observed over many time periods and dependence needs to be taken into account. Quantile regression estimators have complex limiting distributions that are difficult to approximate. In this paper, we propose a new resampling method to conduct statistical inference for conditional quantiles in panels with observations that exhibit time series dependence. We demonstrate that the procedure is asymptotically valid for approximating the distribution of the panel quantile regression estimator. This wild bootstrap procedure offers a viable alternative to existing bootstrap methods for time series data that can be adapted to panel quantile regression. Simulation studies show that the novel approach has accurate small sample behavior, and an empirical application illustrates its use. Title: TBA
October 22, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Christian Dustmann (University College London): Knowledge Spillovers, Competition, and Individual Careers Abstract: Exposure to better peers at work can improve career prospects because of knowledge spillovers. However, it can also harm career prospects if workers compete for career opportunities. We disentangle these two effects by focusing on unskilled labor market entrants and dividing their colleagues in the same occupation into those they are likely and unlikely to compete with. We find strong evidence for persistent knowledge spillover effects but detect counteracting competition effects of similar magnitude. Both knowledge spillover and competition effects are larger for men than women. Please note the change in the location. This seminar will take place in KGH 2110
October 21, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Jin Yang (Northwestern): Price Discrimination and Regulation over a Network: the Case of US Rail Freight Industry Abstract: Price discrimination is prevalent in the deregulated rail freight industry. Besides differential pricing based on detailed shipment characteristics, railroads discriminate against small price-taking shippers in spot markets, favoring large shippers in contract negotiation markets. Growing concerns regarding captive small shippers have prompted regulatory attention. Using a structural model incorporating both types of markets, I evaluate different designs of uniform pricing implemented through the recently proposed price benchmark policy. I find that the simple all-inclusive design decreases shipment quantities from more elastic shippers and harms the overall efficiency of railroad operations under economies of scale. Due to cost interdependence across the railroad network, price reductions for inelastic shippers are also compromised. In contrast, more tailored uniform pricing within selective groups can both preserve the positive output expansion effect and mitigate the negative misallocation effect of price discrimination. In particular, regulation proves most effective when spot prices are benchmarked against contract prices, allowing small shippers to leverage the bargaining power of larger shippers. These results suggest the potential of more refined designs to improve welfare, even in cases where standard uniform pricing falls short.
October 21, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Kunal Sangani (Princeton University): Pass-Through in Levels and the Unequal Incidence of Commodity Shocks Abstract: Empirical studies find that the pass-through of commodity price movements to downstream prices is incomplete: a 10 percent increase in upstream costs causes downstream prices to rise less than 10 percent, even at long horizons. Using microdata from gasoline and food products, we find that in complete pass-through in percentages often disguises complete pass-through in levels: a $1/unit increase in commodity costs leads to $1/unit higher downstream prices. Pass-through appears incomplete in percentages due to a gap between prices and costs. This pass-through behavior, as well as other evidence on firm gross margins, operating margins, and entry rates, contrasts with workhorse models that feature fixed, multiplicative markups. An implication of complete pass-through in levels is that rising commodity costs lead to higher inflation rates for low-margin products in a category, though absolute price changes are similar across products. This generates cyclical inflation inequality. From 2020-2023, we estimate that this pass-through behavior is responsible for two-thirds of the gap in food-at-home inflation rates experienced by low-and high-income households.
October 21, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sorenie Gudissa (Northwestern University): "Borders by Blood: The Politics of Diversity and Conflict"
October 18, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Julien Manili (Northwestern University): "Unraveling of Clean Technology: The Information Economics of Green Transitions"
October 18, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pietro Buri (Princeton University) Title: "The Urban Mortality Transition and the Transformation of the American City (1900-1930)".   Abstract: Between 1900 and 1930, the mortality rates in US cities fell dramatically. Part of this decline was caused by investments in public health infrastructures, such as the opening of a water filtration plant, which reduced overall mortality by 5%.  In this paper, I study the economic consequences of improvements in urban health. I combine data on mortality rates with data on wages and employment from the Census of Manufacturing. I instrument for the mortality in a city using the mortality in cities lying upstream of the same river. First, I find that mortality reduces the population’s growth rate. Second, I find that high-skill workers are more responsive than low-skill workers to urban mortality rates; high-skill wages are positively affected by high mortality rates, while I cannot reject a zero effect of mortality on low-skill wages. Cities with high mortality rates have a smaller ratio of high- to low-skill workers and a higher ratio of high- to low-skill wages. I complement the reduced-form evidence with a Rosen-Roback model which allows me to compute the amenity value by skill group for each city across time. I find that mortality has a negative impact on the amenity value of a city only for high-skill workers.
October 17, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University) Title: "Equity-Efficiency Tradeoffs in the Design of Agricultural Input Subsidies: Experimental Evidence from Mozambique" (with Paul Christian, Steven Glover, Florence Kondylis, John Loeser, and Astrid Zwager) Abstract: Low use of modern inputs limits agricultural productivity in Africa, motivating widespread input subsidy programs. Yet, these subsidies often prove regressive and inefficiently distort the choices of already optimizing farmers. We show, theoretically and empirically, that nonlinear input subsidies trade off equity and efficiency but can improve both. We experimentally evaluate a progressive agricultural input subsidy in Mozambique with a declining marginal subsidy rate, by cross-randomizing additional subsidies for small and large quantities of inputs. Increasing subsidies for small quantities improves equity by acting as a transfer to inframarginal poorer households, as poor households are more likely to redeem smaller quantities of inputs. Increasing subsidies for large quantities of inputs improves efficiency by increasing fertilizer use among farmers using intermediate quantities of inputs, as they are the most marginally productive.
October 17, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giacomo  Title: "Tax Administration Quality and Firm Outcomes: Evidence from Tax Litigation (with Mario Cannella)"
October 16, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Jesse McDevitt Irwin (Northwestern): Health Disparities in the US, 1870-1950: New Evidence from Childhood Sex Ratios Abstract: Basic facts about infant mortality and population health in US history remain to be established due to the lack of birth and death records. I introduce a novel indicator of infant mortality and population health, available from census data: childhood sex ratios. Assembling vital statistics data from contemporary Europe and the 20th-century US, I verify the empirical relationship between sex ratios and infant mortality. I analyze sex ratios by race, nativity, and residence for the period from 1870 to 1950, using IPUMS full count data. I find that population health deteriorated across the second half of the 19th century, with large health disparities based on race, nativity, and residence. Population health improved after 1900, largely driven by declines in urban mortality. Because immigrants were concentrated in cities and the Black population in the rural South, this 20th-century improvement reduced inequality between native-born and foreign-born whites but increased racial health disparities.
October 16, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli
October 16, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Ramya Raghavan (Northwestern University): "Extreme Weather and Commodity Supply Disruptions"
October 15, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Filip Obradovic (Northwestern University): Long-Term Treatment Effect Identification via Data Combination Abstract: "Identification of long-term average treatment effects (LTE) is an important research goal, which is often infeasible via experimentation. Recent literature proposes combining short-term experimental and long-term observational data to provide credible alternatives to observational studies. The paper makes two distinct contributions in this context. I first show that experimental data have an auxiliary role. They bring no identifying power without additional assumptions in the observational data. When such assumptions are imposed, experimental data serve to amplify their power. If the assumptions fail, adding experimental data may only lead to results that are farther but never closer to the truth. Motivated by this, I introduce two assumptions on treatment response that may be defensible based on economic theory or intuition. To utilize them, I develop a novel two-step identification approach that centers on bounding temporal link functions -- the relationship between short-term and mean long-term potential outcomes. This approach allows for imperfect experimental compliance and provides sharp bounds on the LTE for a general class of assumptions -- extending existing results under compliance issues. I illustrate the findings by studying the long-term effects of Head Start participation. To do so, I create a new combined dataset using the Head Start Impact Study and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth."
October 15, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Francisco Gallego (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile): "Come Out and Play: Public Space Recovery, Social Capital, and Citizen Security" (Matias Braun, Francisco Gallego, Rodrigo Soares) Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of renovating deteriorated public squares on economic and social outcomes through a randomized experiment conducted in fragile neighborhoods in Santiago, Chile. Our results show that the renovation led to increased use and maintenance of public spaces, enhanced neighborhood engagement, and a stronger sense of ownership among residents, alongside a reduction in leisure activities outside the neighborhood. Additionally, treated neighborhoods saw improvements in public security perceptions, both within the renovated square and the broader neighborhood. We also find positive effects on trust, particularly among familiar individuals, and greater participation in community organizations. Furthermore, administrative data reveals an increase in property prices and a decrease in crime in the short and medium term. Applying machine learning techniques to assess heterogeneous treatment effects, we do not find support for theories positing a joint determination of security levels and social capital. Instead, our findings suggest that the intervention's effects are better explained by increased neighborhood use, particularly in densely populated areas and those with a higher proportion of social housing.
October 15, 202412:15 PM - 1:30 PM	Joint Seminar in Finance and Development Economics	Matheus Sampaio (Northwestern): Payment Technology Complementarities and their Consequences in the Banking Sector: evidence from Brazil's Pix  Abstract: In this paper, we employ an instrument and individual-level banking data in Brazil to examine the effects of a novel payment technology, Pix, on the utilization of other payment technologies and its impact on the banking sector. We find evidence that Pix increases the usage of the four most common payment technologies in Brazil among individuals and firms. Furthermore, our empirical evidence suggests that Pix contributes to an increase in the number of bank accounts, their usage, and access to credit, benefiting different types of banks. The findings indicate that the implementation of new payment technologies yields advantages not only for firms and individuals but also for the broader banking and payment industry.
October 14, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Hans Zhu (Northwestern): Limiting For-Profit Provision in Nursing Home Markets Abstract: We examine whether policies that affect the extent of for-profit versus not-for-profit provision in regulated markets such as health and education can be effective at addressing quality shortfalls. We consider the US nursing homes industry, where quality provision has been a concern for many decades. Our motivating evidence suggests that not-for-profit providers choose higher-quality inputs but are more prevalent in higher socioeconomic markets and serve less needy residents. Thus, for-profit providers play an important role in providing access. To explain these facts and explore counterfactual policies we estimate a structural model of nursing home demand and supply which allow firms to have non-pecuniary motives and costs that differ across provider types. Costs play a large role in explaining the observed quality and access patterns. Not-for-profit providers choose higher quality as they have a cost advantage at serving higher quality. For-profit providers have a significant cost advantage at serving less profitable patients and are therefore better suited to lower socioeconomic markets. Banning for-profit providers, even when allowing for takeovers by not-for-providers, is unlikely to improve consumer surplus as not-for-profits are overall more costly than for-profit providers.
October 14, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Adrien Bilal (Stanford University): The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature  Abstract: This paper estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought. Exploiting natural global temperature variability, we find that 1°C warming reduces world GDP by 12%. Global temperature correlates strongly with extreme climatic events unlike country-level temperature used in previous work, explaining our larger estimate. We use this evidence to estimate dam- age functions in a neoclassical growth model. Business-as-usual warming implies a 29% present welfare loss and a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,065 per ton. These impacts suggest that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.
October 14, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Vasu Chaudhary (Northwestern University): "Trust and Social Capital in the Village Economy"
October 11, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Eleftheria Kelekidou (Northwestern University): "Inference for High Dimensional Parameters in the Presence of Endogeneity using Alternative Penalization Functions"
October 11, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Caterina Alfonzo (University of Bologna) Title: "The Making of Italians: Institutional Response to Disasters and Nation-Building" Abstract: The emergence of nation-states posed the problem of aligning the borders of modern states to those of national communities, with the political legitimacy of new institutions being essential but not easily achieved. This paper examines how institutional responsiveness to local citizens' needs contributed to building political legitimacy and fostering national consciousness in the early years of the Italian state. Using the first earthquake after Italy’s unification as a quasi-natural experiment, results show that, only in places where the government provided some form of earthquake relief, the population significantly decreases the rate of evasion to the mandatory military conscription -- the proxy I use for local nationalistic sentiments. The comparison between government and monarchy interventions reveals a weak form of imperfect substitutability between the two, with the government emerging as the dominant institution in shaping the long-term process of nation-building.
October 10, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Devis Decet (Northwestern): Organizing Fiscal Capacity Abstract: This paper investigates how the organization of a tax authority's presence across the national territory impacts fiscal capacity. I examine a reform of the Brazilian tax authority, which led to a more centralized structure with fewer, larger local offices. Tax revenues decrease by 3.4% in municipalities previously served by a closed office. The effect is stronger in areas where local information is more valuable and in areas farther away from the new office. Tax revenues increase by 4.4% in municipalities already served by an office that expanded after the reform. The results suggest that a more centralized structure improves the tax authority’s efficiency but makes it more difficult to monitor the local economy across the entire territory.
October 10, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Wilfried Adohinzin (University of Illinois)    Title: The Impacts of Job Security and Tenure Reforms on Teacher and Student Outcomes   Abstract: Many education interventions focus on improving teacher quality, but little is known about the impact of job security on teachers and students. This paper analyzes a policy reform in Peru that required teachers seeking permanent public-school positions to pass a national exam, using unique administrative data. A regression discontinuity design shows that exit rates decrease by 25 percent for teachers who barely pass the exam compared to those who fail. These retention effects are larger for higher-quality teachers, as indicated by teacher value-added measures. Exposure to a permanent teacher improves student learning by 0.14-0.15 standard deviations, with smaller gains in rural schools and among disadvantaged students. A difference-in-differences design further shows that value-added for schools exposed to the policy increases by 7.5 percent relative to unexposed schools.
October 10, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Max Pienkny  Title: "From the Dial to the Aisle: The Effects of Talk Radio" Abstract: I study the political and health impacts of the widespread and sudden deregulation of radio content in the United States. In 1987, the Federal Communication Commission repealed its Fairness doctrine, which required radio broadcasters to devote equal time and/or opportunity to opposing viewpoints whenever discussing political issues. The sudden repeal of the doctrine led to immediate and widespread growth of the talk radio format, which became dominated by conservative voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, each of whom reached more than 10 million unique weekly listeners throughout the 2000s. I find that exposure to the rise of conservative talk radio in the aftermath of deregulation created large and persistent increases in Republican vote share in presidential, senate, and house elections, which began in the early 1990s following repeal and continue through to today. Additionally, I find areas most exposed to this new radio content experienced relative decreases in life expectancy, which emerged in the early 1990s and are driven in part by changes in risky health behavior.
October 9, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Abhay Aneja (UC Berkeley Law): Beyond the Great War: The Intergenerational Effects of Female Public Service Abstract: This paper combines personnel records of the U.S. federal government with census data to study how exposure to greater female representation at work can persistently reduce gender gaps in labor market outcomes. Exploiting city-by-department variation in the sudden expansion of female clerical employment during World War I, we find that daughters of civil servants exposed to female co-workers are more likely to work later in life. This intergenerational effect extends beyond public sector employment and clerical work, reducing the gender earnings gap by 10%. Consistent with a broader shift in attitudes toward working women, exposure to female co–workers also made male civil servants more likely to marry working women. Finally, we show that cities exposed to larger increases in female federal workers saw persistently higher female labor force participation in the public sector, as well as modest increases in the private sector. Collectively, the results highlight how increasing gender representation within the public sector can have broader labor market implications.
October 9, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kwok-Yan Chiu Title: “Heterogeneous Beliefs and Wealth Inequality”.
October 9, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jacob Gosselin (Northwestern University): "Finding Production Functions in Production Networks"
October 8, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Amilcar Velez (Northwestern University): Non-Standard Asymptotic Approximations for Debiased Machine Learning Estimators Abstract: Beyond prediction tasks, machine learning methods have become popular tools for estimating parameters of interest in economics through debiased machine learning (DML). This approach is suited for economic models where the parameter of interest depends on unknown nuisance components that require estimation. However, existing asymptotic theory does not distinguish between the alternatives practitioners face, such as the two available estimators, DML1 and DML2, introduced by Chernozhukov et al. (2018). This paper addresses these limitations by proposing non-standard asymptotic approximations. It shows that DML2 outperforms DML1 in terms of bias and mean-square error, formalizing a previous conjecture supported by simulation evidence. Additional results of this paper provide practical guidance for enhancing the implementation of DML
October 8, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Joe Altonji (Yale University): "Decomposing Trends in the Gender Gap for Highly Educated Workers" with John Eric Humphries, Yagmur Yuksel, and Ling Zhong Abstract: This paper studies the gender gap among full time college educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using rich data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources on college graduates and their labor market outcomes, we decompose trends in the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into trends due to differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate degree field combinations, trends in gender differences in undergraduate field, graduate degree attainment, and graduate field, and trends in a cohort and gender specific “residual component” that shifts the gender gap in earnings by the same amount for all college graduates. We have three main sets of findings. First, we find that much of the large gap in earnings between the 1931 and 1950 cohorts is due to the “residual component”. Most of the decline is within occupation, especially for the early cohorts. The residual gap varies little from 1951 to the late 70s, after which it resumes its decline. Second, we find that gender differences in the relative return to undergraduate and graduate degree combinations matter for the gender gap, but contribute very little to the decline in the gender gap over the full time period. Third, we study and further decompose the “education gap” --the contribution of college major choice, graduate degree attainment and graduate field to the gap. When evaluated at fixed relative returns to each degree type, the education gap declines substantially and is an important part of the narrowing of the gender gap. But this decline is largely offset by cohort trends in the relative returns to specific fields that worked in favor of men against women. Overall, the education gap varies in a narrow range around 0.2 and accounts for very little of the decline.
October 7, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Jennifer La'O (Columbia University): Optimal Monetary Policy with Redistribution Abstract: We study optimal monetary policy in a general equilibrium economy with heterogeneous agents and nominal rigidities. Households differ in type-specific, state-contingent labor productivity and initial firm ownership, yet markets are complete. The fiscal authority has access to a linear tax schedule with non-state-contingent tax rates and uniform, lump-sum taxes (or transfers). We derive sufficient conditions under which implementing flexible-price allocations is optimal. We then show that when there are fluctuations in relative labor productivity across households, it is optimal for monetary policy to abandon the flexible-price benchmark and target a state-contingent markup. The optimal markup covaries positively with a sufficient statistic for labor income inequality. In a calibrated version of the model, countercyclical earnings inequality implies countercyclical optimal markups.
October 7, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aastha Rajan (Northwestern University): "Nexus of US Social Safety-Net: Exploring the Interaction between Tax Credits and Cash Assistance"
October 4, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Christopher Sims (Northwestern) Title: "The Origins of the Nitrogen Revolution" Abstract: Natural soil endowments have historically constrained agricultural productivity and population growth. The 19th century witnessed technological breakthroughs, such as nitrogenous fertilizers, which alleviated these constraints and paved the way to more intensive farming. In this paper, we examine the introduction and rapid diffusion of guano in 19th century England. We first establish that nitrogen deficiency shaped cropping patterns prior to guano’s arrival. Drawing on newly digitized agricultural census data and leveraging the discovery of Peruvian guano as a natural experiment, we show that nitrogen-poor areas reallocated their production toward nitrogen-demanding, more profitable crops. These same areas also experienced increases in livestock counts, consistent with a shift to “high farming” practices. The effects are driven by (i) areas with heavy soils, where fertilizers complemented a contemporary innovation in drainage, and (ii) regions with initially lower agricultural productivity. For future work, we plan to conclude mapping the locations where guano was used and experimented with, based on novel textual sources, incorporate occupation data from the population census, and estimate effects on innovation outcomes.
October 3, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Ryunosuke Matsuura (Northwestern): Political Implications of Trade Liberalization: Evidence from India Abstract: Individual identity is strongly correlated with their economic outcomes. In societies where ethnicity and economic class largely overlap, marginalized groups face economic disadvantages. While trade theory and empirical evidence suggest that marginalized groups are more likely to support trade reforms, trade liberalization does not necessarily lead to an improvement in economic prosperity of marginalized groups in developing countries. This paper investigates how changes in the economic environment induced by trade liberalization affect voting behaviors and political representation of marginalized groups in India. Using exogenous variation in tariff reductions during India’s trade liberalization in the 1990s and constructing a novel match between politicians and social communities in India, we show that the trade reform significantly shaped both the economic structures and political power dynamics. In particular, we first find that trade liberalization did not lead to an increase in total earnings nor decline in unemployment rate among workers from marginalized groups. We then document that increased exposure to import competition had positive impacts on the vote share and political representation of marginalized groups. We show the suggestive evidence that trade liberalization induced the rise of identity politics.
October 3, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: Payment Technology Complementarities and their Consequences in the Banking Sector: evidence from Brazil's Pix Abstract: In this paper, we employ an instrument and individual-level banking data in Brazil to examine the effects of a novel payment technology, Pix, on the utilization of other payment technologies and its impact on the banking sector. We find evidence that Pix increases the usage of the four most common payment technologies in Brazil among individuals and firms. Furthermore, our empirical evidence suggests that Pix contributes to an increase in the number of bank accounts, their usage, and access to credit, benefiting different types of banks. The findings indicate that the implementation of new payment technologies yields advantages not only for firms and individuals but also for the broader banking and payment industry.
October 3, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xizhao Wang Title: "Patenting and Information Disclosure" Abstract: Invention disclosure facilitates knowledge spillovers, supporting future progress but potentially limiting appropriability for the inventor. This paper examines invention disclosure behavior by analyzing the readability of patent texts, using both traditional and novel AI-based readability scores. Using two difference-in-difference analyses, the study finds that following the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and the establishment of Technology Transfer Offices, university-affiliated inventors reduced the readability of patent detailed descriptions. This decrease in readability does not extend to patent summary texts, suggesting that university inventors strategically limit information on how to make and use the invention. The findings reveal strategic disclosure behavior not just in the decision of whether to patent or keep inventions as trade secrets, but also in the degree of patent language clarity. Institutional changes lead inventors to selectively adjust the information disclosed in their patents. The mechanisms behind this influence and its impact on follow-on innovation are further explored.
October 2, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Ethan Lewis (Dartmouth): Electricity and Directed Technological Change: Evidence from US Rural Electrification. Abstract: This paper examines the impact of rural electrification on the direction of agricultural innovations between 1910 and 1950. We combine variation across counties in proximity to power plants and variation across agricultural products in pre-electrification energy intensity. We find that local access to electric power induced an increase in electricity-related patents differentially in energy-intensive products.  These patents were widely cited in following decades, were in activities in which electricity was anticipated to be useful, and were mostly the work of new inventors. The impacts were also larger in counties where agriculture labor was scarcer.  Our findings support theories of endogenous technological change in which invention responds to local incentives.
October 2, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Miguel Santana
October 2, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Netanel Ben-Porath (Northwestern University): "Democratizing Knowledge? The Ripple Effects of Suffrage on Human Capital in Victorian Britain"
October 1, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale University): Non-robustness of diffusion estimates on networks with measurement error Abstract: Network diffusion models are used to study disease transmission, information spread, technology adoption, and other socio-economic processes. We show that estimates of these diffusions are highly non-robust to mismeasurement. First, even when the network is measured perfectly, small and local mismeasurement in the initial seed generates a large shift in the locations of the expected diffusion. Second, if instead the initial seed is known, small and arbitrarily structured measurement error in links, with the share of missed links close to zero, causes diffusion forecasts to be significant under-estimates. Such failures exist even when the basic reproductive number is consistently estimable. We explore difficulties implementing possible solutions, such as estimating the measurement error or implementing widespread detection efforts. Finally, we conduct simulations on synthetic and real networks from three settings: travel data from the COVID-19 pandemic, a mobile phone marketing campaign in rural India, and an insurance experiment in China.
October 1, 20241:00 PM - 1:45 PM	test	test
September 30, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP") and Industrial Organization	Ana Evdokimova (Northwestern University): Over-the-Counter Drugs Market: Information Distortion In Label Design Abstract: This paper integrates survey data, a randomized controlled trial (RCT), and structural analysis to investigate how misconceptions about drug efficacy influence consumer decisions in the over-the-counter market and how clearer information can improve consumer welfare. A key challenge lies in the unobservability of efficacy beliefs, complicating the assessment of consumers' initial perceptions and responses to new information. To address this, I gathered pairwise product comparisons from a control group and three treatment arms to develop product-level measures of efficacy beliefs. The first two treatments modify product labels to indicate whether drugs share the same active components or offer equivalent efficacy, while the third provides consumers with a brochure outlining both aspects before making purchase decisions. Using a structural demand model, I isolate the impact of these beliefs on consumer choice and incorporate revised valuations to recalculate equilibrium outcomes. The results show that all treatments reduce information distortions and enhance welfare by increasing substitution between biologically equivalent and differently composed drugs. The most effective treatment—emphasizing equivalent efficacy—increases substitution elasticity by 22%, saves the average consumer $1.08 (equivalent to $6.5 million annually across the 50 largest markets), and generates a welfare gain of $1.05 per consumer. However, this approach also leads to second-degree price discrimination, highlighting the need for careful policy implementation.
September 30, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Zvi Eckstein (Reichman University and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania): What Explains the Growing Gender Education Gap? The Effects of Parental Background, the Labor Market and the Marriage Market on College Attainment Abstract: In the 1960 cohort, American men and women graduated from college at the same rate, and this was true for Whites, Blacks and Hispanics. But in more recent cohorts, women graduate at much higher rates than men. To understand the emerging gender education gap, we formulate and estimate a model of individual and family decision-making where education, labor supply, marriage and fertility are all endogenous. Assuming preferences that are common across ethnic groups and fixed over cohorts, our model explains differences in all endogenous variables by gender/ethnicity for the ‘60-‘80 cohorts based on three exogenous factors: family background, labor market and marriage market constraints. Changes in parental background are a key factor driving the growing gender education gap: Women with college educated mothers get greater utility from college, and are much more likely to graduate themselves. The marriage market also contributes: Women’s chance of getting marriage offers at older ages has increased, enabling them to defer marriage. The labor market is the largest factor: Improvement in women’s labor market return to college in recent cohorts accounts for 50% of the increase in their graduation rate. But the labor market returns to college are still greater for men. Women go to college more because their overall return is greater, after factoring in marriage market returns and their greater utility from college attendance. We predict the recent large increases in women’s graduation rates will cause their children’s graduation rates to increase further. But growth in the aggregate graduation rate will slow substantially, due to significant increases in the share of Hispanics – a group with a low graduation rate – in recent birth cohorts.
September 30, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Aldighieri(Northwestern University): "Screening and Self-Selection in Moving Pictures"
September 27, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Franco Malpassi (Northwestern University): "General Purpose Technologies and the Evolution of Science: Evidence from the Rise of Computers"
September 26, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Devis Decet Title: Organizing Fiscal Capacity Abstract: This paper investigates how the organization of a tax authority’s presence across the territory affects fiscal capacity. I examine a reform of the Brazilian tax authority, which closed one-fourth of local offices and reallocated agents to some of the remaining ones. I show that tax revenues decrease by 3.9% in municipalities previously served by a closed office. The effects are stronger in areas with less third-party reporting, where local information is more valuable. Increased distance from tax offices leads to lower tax revenues and fewer visits by tax agents. This suggests that distance makes collecting local information harder. There is no evidence of an increase in tax revenues in areas already served by offices where tax agents were reallocated after the reform.
September 26, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Kellogg MEDS Theory Brown Bag Seminar	Alex Smolin (Toulouse School of Economics): "Buyer-Optimal Algorithmic Consumption" Abstract: An algorithm recommends a product to a buyer based on the product's value to the buyer and its price. We characterize an algorithm that maximizes the buyer's expected payoff and show that it strategically biases recommendations to incentivize lower prices. Under optimal algorithmic consumption, informing a seller about the buyer’s value does not affect the buyer's expected payoff but leads to a more equitable distribution of payoffs across different values. These results extend to Pareto-optimal algorithms and multiseller markets.
September 26, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Kellogg MEDS Theory Brown Bag Seminar	Alex Smolin (Toulouse School of Economics): "Buyer-Optimal Algorithmic Consumption" Abstract: An algorithm recommends a product to a buyer based on the product's value to the buyer and its price. We characterize an algorithm that maximizes the buyer's expected payoff and show that it strategically biases recommendations to incentivize lower prices. Under optimal algorithmic consumption, informing a seller about the buyer’s value does not affect the buyer's expected payoff but leads to a more equitable distribution of payoffs across different values. These results extend to Pareto-optimal algorithms and multiseller markets.
September 26, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: David Almog  Title: "Texting to Save Lives: Evidence from Cardiovascular Treatment Reform in Mexico" (with Ari Bronsoler) Abstract: Can widely available technologies be leveraged to reduce healthcare fragmentation in a cost-effective way? We evaluate a program that improves within-hospital capabilities through investment and increases across-hospital transfer coordination through a set of group chats on a common app. We show that the program has large effects on survival and transfer rates, especially for hospitals that can send patients to relatively better hospitals.
September 25, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Laura Weiwu (Stanford): Unequal Access: Racial Segregation and the Distributional Impacts of Interstate Highways in Cities Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the largest infrastructure project in American history— the Interstate highway system—on racial inequality and the role of institutional segregation in its disparate incidence. To evaluate the distributional impacts, I develop a general equilibrium spatial framework that incorporates empirical estimates using novel disaggregated commute flows from Census microdata in 1960 and 1970 for 25 cities. I show that highways generated substantial costs from local harms on adjacent areas as well as benefits from reductions in commute times. In the urban core, costs outweigh benefits as proximity to highways is greater and commute time reductions are lower since connectivity improves predominantly in remote suburbs. I find the initial concentration of the Black population in central areas and their low mobility away are key contributors to their welfare losses from the Interstate highway system. Exclusionary institutions, delineated using redlining maps, account for much of their concentration in addition to sorting on housing prices and preferences for racial composition. These institutional barriers further inhibit their spatial mobility outwards. When barriers are eliminated and Black households are granted access beyond central neighborhoods, the racial gap in impacts is reduced as the Black population benefits more from interstate development. These results highlight how segregation shapes inequality in the incidence of place-based shocks.
September 25, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Michael Cai
September 25, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Rosario Cisternas (Northwestern University): "Occupational Licensing in Medicine: Assuring Quality or Limiting Access in Brazil?"
September 24, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Max Farrell (University of California, Santa Barbara): Nonlinear Binscatter Methods Abstract: Binned scatter plots are a powerful statistical tool for empirical work in the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Available methods rely on a quantile-based partitioning estimator of the conditional mean regression function to primarily construct flexible yet interpretable visualization methods, but they can also be used to estimate treatment effects, assess uncertainty, and test substantive domain-specific hypotheses. This paper introduces novel binscatter methods based on nonlinear, possibly nonsmooth M-estimation methods, covering generalized linear, robust, and quantile regression models. We provide a host of theoretical results and practical tools for local constant estimation along with piecewise polynomial and spline approximations, including (i) optimal tuning parameter (number of bins) selection, (ii) confidence bands, and (iii) formal statistical tests regarding functional form or shape restrictions. Our main results rely on novel strong approximations for general partitioning-based estimators covering random, data-driven partitions, which may be of independent interest. We demonstrate our methods with an empirical application studying the relation between the percentage of individuals without health insurance and per capita income at the zip-code level. We provide general-purpose software packages implementing our methods in Python, R, and Stata.
September 23, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Mike Walker (Competition and Markets Authority): Using economics to make good competition policy decisions: recent UK experience Please note that the room number and time for this talk are different from the usual IO Seminar room and schedule. This seminar will be in 3301 from 12:00 - 1:30 PM.
June 7, 202412:00 PM - 2:00 PM	Department of Economics Senior Lunch & Awards Ceremony	Every year the department holds a senior awards celebration to honor the students who were granted honors for their senior theses, students who received the Coen, Deibler, or Eisner Awards, and students who completed the BA/MA degree. We are excited to welcome the class of 2024 and their guests to this year's Senior Lunch & Awards Ceremony: Date: Friday, June 7, 2024 Time: 12:00pm-2:00pm Location: Kellogg Global Hub, White Auditorium This event is only open to undergraduate Economics majors and their families.
June 7, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Walker Hanlon  Title: "Imagined Communities? Print Media and Identity in the Age of Nation-State Formation"  Abstract: Nationalism has had a profound effect on human history, yet nation-states emerged only recently, during the nineteenth century. What caused the emergence of national identity during that period? One leading theory is that exposure to print media led to the emergence of a national consciousness: an "imagined community" (Anderson, 1983). We provide the first rigorous quantitative evaluation of this theory using data from England and Wales from 1846-1866. Using naming patterns to measure cultural shifts, we show that exposure to newspapers led to convergence toward a more homogenous national culture. For identification, we exploit a sharp increase in the number of newspapers between 1853 and 1855 due to a reduction in the "taxes on knowledge." We also tie the shifts we observe directly to media content, using the appearance of names in digitized newspaper articles. Overall, our results provide strong support for the idea that exposure to print media contributed to emergence of a more homogenous national culture in Europe during the nineteenth century, setting the stage for the enormous consequences that nationalism would have in the twentieth.
June 6, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Pisauro  Title: The Determinants of Telehealth
June 5, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jose Alvarado
June 3, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Valerie Ramey (Stanford Hoover): How Much Will Global Warming Cool Global Growth? Abstract: Does a rise in temperature decrease the level of GDP in affected countries or the permanent growth rate of their GDP? Differing answers to this question lead prominent estimates of climate damages to diverge by an order of magnitude. 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. We start by presenting a range of evidence that technology flows tether country growth rates together, preventing temperature change from causing them to diverge permanently. We then use data from a panel of countries to show that temperature shocks have large and persistent effects on GDP, driven in part by persistence in temperature itself. These estimates imply projected future impacts that are three to five times larger than level effect estimates and two to four times smaller than permanent growth effect estimates, with larger discrepancies for initially hot and cold countries.
May 31, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Evan Majic (Northwestern University): "Forecasting with HANK"
May 31, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Carola Frydman (Northwestern): "Unfinished Business: The Long Ascent of Women into Corporate Leadership"
May 30, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Constantine Msisiri Manda (UCI): Gods, Kings, and Missionaries: Legacies of Ancient States and Christian Missionaries on Religion in Africa   Abstract: Abstract: African Christians who hold indigenous religious beliefs are more tolerant of other religions. I argue that syncretic Africans are more likely to descend from ethnicities that were more politically centralized, relative to acephalous ethnicities, in the ancient period. Exposure to Christian missionaries interacted with ancient political institutions to produce relatively greater syncretism among the former. Ruling elites helped translate the new and foreign Christian ideas and helped map them onto existing and indigenous religious ideas. They had incentives to convert to Christianity to secure their ability to retain power and protect and expand their territories. Christianity replaced indigenous deities that previously legitimized elites’ political authority. Missionaries exploited greater economies of scale among centralized than acephalous groups to more easily convert the former than the latter. Using OLS regressions on data from various sources, I show that centralization and missionary exposure positively associates with syncretism. Later, centralized Africans created African Initiated Churches (AICs) which continued to indigenize Christianity, allowing syncretic legacies of ancient political and religious institutions to persist. This paper shows that ancient indigenous institutions in Africa have important legacies on religion.
May 30, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Devis Decet Title: Tax administration organization and fiscal capacity Abstract: This paper studies how the centralization of tax administration impacts fiscal capacity. Following a sizable reduction in personnel due to retirements and externally imposed budget cuts, the Brazilian federal tax authority closed three local tax offices in 2017 and twenty-four in 2020. Affected municipalities experienced a reduction in tax collection after the closings. The absence of evidence for differential trends in tax collection or economic activity suggests that the observed tax revenue decline is due to a reduction in tax enforcement. I investigate the role of a specific mechanism: the distance between tax offices and municipalities. Results suggest that, despite the pervasive role of technology in tax collection and auditing, physical distance remains a relevant friction and limits tax officials' ability to monitor local economic activity. If you plan to join and have lunch at the presentation, please take the time to confirm your attendance and food preference in this Google spreadsheet by Monday 5/27 at 5:00pm. We hope to see you there.
May 30, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Elena Stella: Organized Crime and Firms Abstract: This paper examines the impact of organized crime's ability to infiltrate firms on local  economic activity. Focusing on Italy, I develop a novel index to measure the presence of infiltrated firms in the public procurement market. I then investigate the effects of the 2013 Antimafia Certification Law, a nationwide policy that creates a negative incentive for infiltrated firms to participate in public tenders. By leveraging the pre-policy level of local market infiltration and exploiting this policy shock, I analyse firm dynamics and the provision of public goods at the local level. Preliminary results suggest that the policy was successful in shifting infiltrated firms incentives, as the probability of these firms winning procurement contracts drops dramatically after 2013. Moderately infiltrated municipalities experience larger entry, higher winning discounts on procurement contracts and firm dynamism after the shock. These effects are attenuated or even reversed in their sign for municipalities with extremely high rate of infiltration.
May 29, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Victor Gay (TSE): "Weapons of Mass Production. World War I and the Modernization of the French Economy.” (joint work with Anne Alonzo and Ronan Tallec).   Abstract: During World War I, annual government spending in France reached unprecedented levels, accounting for 50 percent of pre-war GDP. A significant portion of this spending was allocated to support war industries at a time when the country's industrial cradle in the North-East was unavailable for production. Using original archival data on war procurement contracts, we examine whether these substantial but temporary wartime industrial investments fostered the modernization of the French economy during the interwar period. We find that regions that benefited from relatively more wartime industrial investment experienced a sustained postwar expansion of their manufacturing sector. This expansion was driven by a reallocation of the labor force toward manufacturing within rather than across regions, as well as increased industrial concentration. In contrast, we find little evidence that the war induced capital deepening and technological change.
May 29, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jose Alvarado
May 29, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Mansa Saxena (Northwestern University): "Land Inheritance and Credit: Evidence from India"
May 28, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Xinwei Ma (UC San Diego): Mediation Analysis with Mendelian Randomization.  Abstract: Mediation analysis is a powerful tool for studying causal pathways between exposure, mediator, and outcome variables of interest. While classical mediation analysis using observational data often requires strong and sometimes unrealistic assumptions, such as unconfoundedness, Mendelian Randomization (MR) avoids unmeasured confounding bias by employing genetic variants as instrumental variables. We develop a novel MR framework for mediation analysis with genome-wide associate study (GWAS) summary data, and provide solid statistical guarantees. Our framework efficiently integrates information stored in three independent GWAS summary data and mitigates the commonly encountered winner’s curse and measurement error bias (a.k.a. instrument selection and weak instrument bias) in MR. As a result, our framework provides valid statistical inference for both direct and mediation effects with enhanced statistical efficiency. As part of this endeavor, we also demonstrate that the concept of winner’s curse bias in mediation analysis with MR and summary data is more complex than previously documented in the classical two-sample MR literature, requiring special treatments to address such a bias issue. Through our theoretical investigations, we show that the proposed method delivers consistent and asymptotically normally distributed causal effect estimates. We illustrate the finite-sample performance of our approach through simulation experiments and a case study.
May 24, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Zhen Xie (Northwestern University): "Nonparametric Approaches to Empirical Bayes Confidence Intervals"
May 24, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Sergio & Chris   Sergio's talk:  Title: Crossed by the Border: Economic Assimilation of the First Mexican-Americans Abstract: In 1848 the United States acquired from Mexico the territory of today's states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Texas. Around 80,000 Mexicans lived in these states at the time and were allowed to stay and offered American citizenship. Most of them --more than 95%, according to historians-- chose to stay in the US. How did this group of individuals assimilate economically to their new homeland? I compare occupational and wealth outcomes of these Mexicans and their descendants to those of native, white born Americans. For both generations, I find a big gap that fails to close as decades pass. Chris's talk:  Title: The Origins of the Nitrogen Revolution Abstract: Starting from the mid-19th century, the first commercial nitrogenous fertilizers were made available in the United Kingdom, a key pillar of subsequent agricultural practice. We present early-stage findings based on a major digitization effort to create the first panel of British agricultural data for the 19th century as well as our proposed empirical strategy and future steps.
May 23, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Shoumitro Chatterjee (JHU): No Country for Dying Firms: Evidence from India. Abstract:  This paper examines the impact of exit barriers on firm growth and development in India. Despite being one of the largest and fastest-growing economies, India’s manufacturing sector, particularly low-skill manufacturing, remains underdeveloped. We argue that Indian institutions create frictions that hinder factor adjustment and firm exit, trapping resources in unproductive firms and contributing to this underperformance. Our findings show that firms in India face significant adjustment costs and exit frictions, especially in states with higher misallocation and labor-intensive sectors. We develop and estimate a dynamic heterogeneous firm model incorporating entry, exit, and input adjustment costs. Our estimates suggest that reducing exit frictions to achieve firm exit rates at 70% of those in the US could increase aggregate value added and productivity by about 13% and 3%, respectively. The impact on employment, however, depends on the availability of capital and can potentially be negative if capital is fixed
May 23, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speakers: Vageesha Bainwala and Sebastian Sardon If you plan to join and have lunch at the presentation, please take the time to confirm your attendance and food preference in this Google spreadsheet by Monday 5/20 at 5:00pm. We hope to see you there. Vageesha's presentation: Title: Women's Land Rights and Credit Access (joint work with Mansa Saxena) Abstract: Throughout much of the developing world, women face significant barriers to accessing, controlling, and owning land, with their rights often less secure than those of men. Further, land as collateral has a pivotal role in credit disbursement. This project aims to examine this age-old theoretical idea of how better land access and rights can improve financial access, specifically in the context of females. Using women’s exposure to Hindu Succession Act in India as a source of exogenous variation in improved land rights, we suggest evidence in favour of improved credit. Analyzing data from the All India Debt and Investment Survey (2002-03), our preliminary findings reveal that extending land rights to women increases the chance of households taking loan by 9 percentage points. Loans from both institutional and non-institutional sources see a substantial increase. Sebastian's presentation: Title: Foreign Trade Barriers and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Mexico (joint work with Christopher Sims) Abstract: The agricultural sector features a large productivity gap between rich and developing countries, as well as substantial trade barriers inhibiting South-North flows in agricultural goods. This project tests whether removing such barriers can boost agricultural productivity in the developing world. We address this issue by studying Mexico, where exporting avocados to the US had been banned since 1914 by American plant health regulations. The ban was gradually lifted over 1997-2007, but only for one Mexican state (Michoacan). Following the ban lift, we find large increases in crop yields in areas of Michoacan that are highly suitable for avocado cultivation. Event study estimates suggest effects as large as $800 USD per hectare in treated municipalities (over 60% of the country’s mean output per hectare). These effects seem to be concentrated in places where communal land holdings are low, suggesting that productivity gains are only realized where land markets are not too frictional. In ongoing work, we test for land consolidation, mechanization, and technology adoption as possible mechanisms, and we measure the environmental consequences of this trade shock.
May 23, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: "Family Dynamics and Educational Outcomes: The Impact of Financial Aid on Siblings" Abstract: Families play a crucial role in shaping human capital trajectories, with siblings forming significant social interactions through shared upbringing, exposure to similar experiences, and access to common resources. We study sibling spillover effects of Colombia's Ser Pilo Program, which offers financial aid to high-achieving children from low-income households. Program eligibility is based on two continuous measures: the family's poverty index and the high school exit exam performance. Using a multivariate regression discontinuity design and considering two eligibility criteria of the program, we estimate sibling spillover effects across both dimensions separately. For low SES families, the policy has positive effects on college enrollment in public institutions. For high SES families, we also observe a negative motivational effect on school dropout, as this population is ineligible for the program.
May 22, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Jingyi Huang (Brandeis): Fence Laws: Liability Rules and Agricultural Development Abstract: This paper uses the evolution of fence laws in the American West to show that liability assignment can influence resource allocation and productivity. Local fence laws assign animal trespassing liability to either farmers or livestock owners. I compiled a dataset documenting all county-level fence law changes from the earliest legislative session to 1930 for eight states on the Great Plains. I compare adjacent counties with different fence laws to identify the causal effect of liability assignment on agricultural development. Results show that liability assignments had persistent effects on land use, value of output, and settlement patterns. Shifting the liability from farmers to livestock owners increased acreage in farmland, investment in machinery, and grain production. These effects were driven by an increase in total land used for agricultural production, with no detectable impact on average productivity. On the other hand, increasing farmers’ liability shifted the composition of new settlement by reducing the share of land acquired through cash purchase, while it had no effect on homestead.
May 22, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli
May 22, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Therese Bonomo (Northwestern University): "Paid Maternity Leave and Children’s Outcomes in the Long-Run"
May 21, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Jörg Stoye (Cornell): Robust Treatment Choice: A View From Partial Identification
May 21, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Paolo Pinotti (Bocconi): Small Children, Big Problems: Childbirth and Crime Abstract: We investigate the effect of having a child on parents’ criminal behavior using rich administrative data from Brazil. Fathers’ criminal activity sharply increases by up to 10% during the pregnancy period, and by up to 30% two years after birth, while mothers experience only a transitory decline in criminal activity around childbirth. The effect on fathers lasts for at least six years and can explain at least 5% of the overall male crime rate. Domestic violence within the family also increases after childbirth, reflecting both increases in actual violence and women’s propensity to report. The generalized increase in fathers’ crime stands in sharp contrast with previous evidence from developed countries, where childbirth is associated with significant and enduring declines in criminal behavior by both parents. Our findings can be explained by the costs of parenthood and the pervasiveness of poverty among newly formed Brazilian families. Consistent with this explanation, we provide novel evidence that access to maternity benefits largely offsets the increase in crime by fathers after childbirth.
May 20, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Ben Klopack (Texas A&M University): "Selling Subscriptions" (joint with Liran Einav and Neale Mahoney) Abstract: Retailers are increasingly selling goods and services via subscriptions instead of spot markets. In this paper, we study one benefit to the retailer of selling subscriptions: the possibility that -- presumably because of inattention or inertia -- consumers continue to pay for subscriptions after the flow benefit falls below its price. We use comprehensive data from a large payment card network and focus on credit and debit cards that get replaced (e.g., due to expiration). Replaced cards require an active subscription renewal decision, and we document that months during which cards are replaced are associated with much higher rates of cancellation for the ten subscriptions we study. We write down and estimate a stylized model of subscription renewals that allows us to recover the baseline degree of inattention. We find that estimated inattention is higher for consumers that took cash advances, a proxy for low financial sophistication. Relative to a counterfactual in which consumers are fully attentive, inattention raises seller revenues by between 14% and more than 200%. We use the estimated model to explore the quantitative impact of possible regulatory remedies.
May 20, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Chen Lian (UC Berkeley): "Beliefs about the Economy are Excessively Sensitive to Household-level Shocks:Evidence from the Danish Registry" with Luigi Butera, Matteo Saccarola, and Dmitry Taubinsky Abstract: By linking the Danish registry to a survey of consumer expectations, we examine how people's beliefs about the economy covary with household-level events. We develop formal tests of limited-information rational-expectations (LIRE) and find stark deviations from this Bayesian benchmark. People's inflation forecasts covary too strongly (and negatively) with both recently realized household income changes and measures of expected future household income changes. Similar results hold for recollections of past inflation (“backcasts”). A series of additional tests suggests that selective recall cued by household-level events is a key mediator for people's forecast biases.
May 20, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Thu Tran (Northwestern University): "Rainfall Shocks and Female Reproductive Surgery in India"
May 17, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Avner Kreps (Northwestern University): "Information Sharing versus Collusion in Poultry Processing"
May 17, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Yifan Zhang & Zincy Wei (Northwestern): Zincy Wei (Prizes and Patents) and Yifan Zhang (The Persistence of Son Preference).  Title: Prizes and Patents: Evidence from National Industry Expositions  Abstract: How do ex-post innovation prizes encourage innovation when patenting is available as an alternative? Specifically, does the cost of patenting affect the decision to enter award competitions? And how does winning a prize affect inventors’ future performance? To study these questions, we construct a unique individual-by-product panel dataset from French national industry expositions in Paris. The lunch presentation will focus on the semi-automated linking algorithm with which we carefully link individuals across expositions. We will also present two complementary individual-level research designs with which we plan to answer the posed research questions.   Title: The Persistence of Son Preference: Cultural Transmission of Chinese Migrants in Taiwan Abstract: This study explores the persistence and transmission of son preference. Son preference is measured by exploiting a cultural feature, ancestor worship, which emphasizes the importance of having a son in China. To isolate the effect of son preference culture from institutions, a historical experiment, Kuomingtang's (KMT) Retreat to Taiwan, is employed to explore the cultural transmission of son preference. Between 1945 and 1954, KMT resettled approximately one million Chinese in Taiwan, without regard for their cultural background, to meet the party's needs. This bold move resulted in local Taiwanese and Chinese migrants being exposed to groups with vastly different son preference beliefs and behaviors. By combining KMT Retreat and the introduction of sex-selective abortion in 1985, I identify the effect of migrants' ancestor worship on sex selection by using a difference-in-differences framework. The effect is stronger for culturally closer groups and when adopting migrant cultures is less costly. Additionally, I dissect the cultural transmission of son preference in three categories: transmission from migrants to locals, through family, and within migrant communities. I also find migrants' ancestor worship permanently altered individuals' beliefs about ancestors, family, and sons.
May 16, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Matteo Ruzzante: Price Regulation of Agricultural Technology (joint with Felipe Berrutti) Abstract: Regulating the price of productivity-enhancing inputs can allow governments to facilitate the diffusion of existing technologies but deter private firms from investing in innovation and introducing superior technologies. This project studies the demand and supply-side consequences of price controls on genetically engineered (GE) cotton seeds in India. Leveraging the differential timing and intensity of this policy across states, we show that the government-mandated price reduction increased farmers’ adoption of GE seeds by 20pp and decreased the costs of cultivating cotton by 20%. Although cotton seed firms did not incur significant losses in the short term, the number of new hybrid varieties introduced by these firms fell abruptly in the aftermath of the policy, leading farmers to use older seeds. Using newly assembled data from experimental field trials across India, we show that: (i) cotton varieties lose 6% of their yield yearly; (ii) agronomic yields of new varieties worsen by 30% in price-controlled states. We develop and estimate a structural model of demand and supply of cotton seeds. We use this model to study the welfare impact of the policy through comparisons with estimated counterfactual outcomes under no price controls.
May 16, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Radhika Ramakrishnan "Welfare in the Market for Specialized Healthcare", "Quality Differentials Across For Profit and Non Profit Hospitals" (with Sanjana Gosh), and "Immigrant Location Decisions and Healthcare Markets"
May 15, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Aradhya Sood (Toronto): The Long Shadow of Housing Discrimination: Evidence from Racial Covenants  Abstract: Racial covenants, which were used throughout the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century, were clauses in property deeds that prohibited the sale or rental of property to racial and ethnic minorities. This paper studies the long-run causal and persistent effects of racially restrictive covenants on racial sorting, racial homeown- ership differentials, and house prices. Using novel data on racial covenants and a quasi-experimental design that exploits time to build delays in housing and the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made racial covenants unenforceable, we compare newly built, covenanted (and hence all-white) neighborhoods built before 1948 with covenanted neighborhoods constructed after the verdict, as the post-1948 neigh- borhoods lost a primary legal way to coordinate segregation. We find that about 5-17% of the observed neighborhood racial residential sorting and 6-17% of racial homeownership sorting, measured from 1980 to 2020, can be causally linked to racial covenants of the past. In addition, while the treated and control neighborhoods exhibit some differences in public amenities, particularly in the distance to highways and the restrictiveness of zoning regulations, these differences do not drive the ob- served persistent effects. Instead, homophily bias or unobserved housing quality are the likely drivers behind the persistent effects.
May 15, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Luxi Han
May 14, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Matias Cattaneo (Princeton): Adaptive Decision Tree Methods
May 14, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	SEMINAR WILL BE IN L130 Melanie Wasserman (UCLA): The Effects of Gender Integration on Men: Evidence from the U.S. Military Abstract: How do men respond when women first enter an occupation? In 2016, the U.S. military removed one of the final explicit occupational barriers to women in the U.S. by opening all positions to women, including historically male-only combat occupations. This policy change provides a rare opportunity to study the initial gender integration of an occupation. The effects of introducing women into a previously all-male group or occupation are theoretically ambiguous. Increasing gender diversity could leverage complementary skills and ideas, boosting individual and team performance. Alternatively, integrating women could create communication obstacles, lead to interpersonal conflict, or incite retaliatory behavior, potentially diminishing both group performance and the performance of men themselves. In this paper, we exploit the staggered integration of women into combat units to estimate the causal effects of the introduction of female colleagues on men’s job performance and satisfaction, using monthly administrative personnel records and rich survey responses measuring workplace climate. We find little evidence that integrating women into previously all-male units negatively impacts men’s performance and behavior. Many of our results are precise enough to rule out small, detrimental effects. However, the integration of women causes a negative shift in male soldiers’—especially officers’—perceptions of workplace quality, including job satisfaction, organizational effectiveness, and the organization’s ability to address potential incidents of sexual harassment/assault. Additionally, the negative effects of integration on men’s perceptions of workplace quality are confined to units that integrate with at least one female officer. We discuss how these findings shed light on the role of gender identity concerns in explaining occupational segregation by gender.
May 13, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Audrey Tiew (Harvard): E.U. Trade Restrictions and Heterogeneity among Malaysian Oil Palm Farmers Abstract: Focusing on the 2017 European Union resolution to phase out palm oil in all biofuels, I consider how heterogeneity among upstream oil palm farmers interacts with a coarse environmental policy that does not distinguish among upstream producers. Upstream oil palm producers include both small farms for which oil palm has played a historically important role in poverty reduction and large estates owned by publicly traded corporations. Differences in land-clearing technologies across farm types imply that the resolution may: (i) have distributional consequences and (ii) be mistargeted in terms of minimizing deforestation. Leveraging Malaysian government data on aggregate regional land use by farm type from 2006 to 2019 and a dynamic model of oil palm cultivation decisions, I find that smallholders may have experienced a disproportionately large fraction of the resulting long-run losses, relative to their portion of reduced land area expansion. I further find that a targeted per-unit tax on large estates could potentially have both increased smallholder payoffs and preserved more primary forest.
May 13, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Luminita Stevens (Maryland): Price Rigidities in U.S. Business Cycles  Abstract: We provide a structurally estimated time series for the degree of nominal price rigidities in the United States between 1978 and 2023. To model the price rigidity, we allow for stochastic state dependence in both the timing of price changes and the choice of what price to charge. We give a cost-based micro-foundation to this stochasticity, modeling firms that face information costs and menu costs when making decisions regarding their prices. Estimating the model on time series of moments from the distribution of price changes over time-–in addition to time series of real economic activity and inflation-–we find considerable monetary non-neutrality with medium-cycle volatility. Underlying our estimated series are results that shed new light on the sources and dynamics of price rigidity. In particular, the model attributes most of the rigidities in price setting not to infrequent, but rather to inaccurate price adjustment. The timing of adjustments has been accurate, especially for price decreases. Menu costs have been small, while information frictions are large and volatile. This volatility has implications for the trade-offs involved in monetary stabilization policy.
May 13, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jana Obradovic (Northwestern University): "Marriage and Inequality"
May 10, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Eric Monnet (Paris School of Economics):"Central banks and the absorption of international shocks" Abstract: We examine how central bank balance sheets react to international financial shocks and assess whether they can protect domestic financial markets from these shocks. Our study is based on newly collected monthly data from 22 central banks since 1890. Four results stand out. First, contrary to conventional wisdom, central banks do not only rely on foreign exchange intervention to tame international shocks, but actually buy more domestic assets to stabilize the money market rate. Second, the use of the central bank balance sheet to relax the constraints of fixed exchange rates has been the norm throughout history (with the exception of the European Monetary System). Third, until the 1970s, the textbook macroeconomic trilemma prevailed, so that central bank balance sheets did not need to respond to international shocks in the context of floating exchange rates or closed capital accounts. Fourth, the second financial globalization since the 1990s has created an unprecedented situation where central bank balance sheets are now called upon to absorb international shocks even in a floating exchange rate regime. The deepening of international financial markets has thus increased the reliance on the absorbing role of central bank balance sheets.
May 9, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Siwan Anderson (UBC): "Harm and Harmony" Abstract: Intimate partner violence (IPV) affects a third of women worldwide. It is important to understand the key drivers of IPV. We focus on the relationship between female autonomy and IPV. We first demonstrate a robust U-shaped relationship between a wife's relative decision making power and IPV in a very large representative sample from 45 developing countries. We argue that current household bargaining models of IPV cannot reconcile this stylized fact. We posit an alternative theoretical framework which incorporates notions from behavioural economics into the household bargaining framework. We model IPV as the unintended consequence of male violence from conflictual family interactions. The model is consistent with the patterns we observe in the data. Moreover, it makes several new policy predictions.
May 9, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Jose Luis Flor Toro: "Natural disasters and internal migration: Evidence from Peru" Abstract: It is undeniable that recent years have seen some of the worst disasters in history, and migration (the permanent displacement of people from certain places) has not been immune to this situation. In this paper, we perform a regression analysis showing how the disaster may cause internal migration in Peru, using a database with natural disasters in Peru (Desinventar.net) and the many Census in Peru (1981, 1993, 2007, 2014). We show that migration is not immune to natural disasters, and that in fact internal migration in Peru responds to geological and marine-related natural disasters as well. We also try to economically explain why we observe an effect on labor and capital to these disasters.
May 9, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Giacomo Marcolin: "The Effects of Pregnancy-Discrimination Laws: The Case of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978" Abstract: Pregnancy discrimination is a common form of discrimination faced by women in the labor force. Nonetheless, before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978, it was not forbidden by existing federal anti-discrimination laws: firms who provided job-protected sick-leave to male workers, often fired their female counterparts upon pregnancy. However, the effects of the employment protection component of the PDA have not yet been studied. In this paper, we first calibrate a matching model to find that (1) the effect of the legislation on employment is unambiguously negative unless it significantly raises the firing costs for discriminating employers, (2) conditional on being strongly implemented, the law could increase women's employment, but only if the degree of discrimination is not too high. We then examine the actual effects of the PDA empirically exploiting quasi-experimental variation, granted by US states' staggered enactment of similar policies. Difference-in-differences types of analyses, based on individual-level survey data, show that the PDA had negative effects on employment of fertile-age women. Evidence of null effects on proxies of job dismissals suggests that the PDA was not effective in sufficiently raising costs of firing discrimination. We finally document a muted response of women's wages, likely due to prior equal pay legislation. This may have exacerbated the negative effect on employment, limiting one margin of adjustment.
May 8, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Petra Moser (NYU Stern): The Ms. Allocation of Talent: Can Improvements in the Allocation of Talent Close the Innovation Gender Gap? Abstract: This paper investigates whether changes in the allocation of talent can help to close the innovation gender gap. To examine this question, we link the biographies of more than 70,000 scientists with their patents. OLS decompositions indicate that gender differences in research focus are a main driver of the innovation gender gap: Women are less likely to invent because they are less likely to work in patent-intensive research fields. To identify the causal effects of gender differences in the allocation of talent across fields, we exploit an exogenous shock during WWII, when the scarcity of male scientists pulled female scientists into patent-intensive research fields in STEM. Difference-in-differences estimates indicate that the number of female scientists increased by 41 percent in fields with an additional 10-percent increase in the share of enlisted male scientists. Using variation in enlistments across fields as an instrument for female entry, we find that one additional woman becomes an inventor for every five women entering a field in the physical sciences. Had women worked in STEM fields at the same rate as men, 64% more American women born 1940-80 would have become inventors and the innovation gender gap would close roughly 80 years sooner.
May 8, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Michael Cai
May 8, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tim Seida (Northwestern University): "Adverse Selection in Repeated Contracting: The Case of U.S. Mortgage Markets"
May 7, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Alfred Galichon (NYU): Existence of a Competitive Equilibrium with Substitutes, with Applications to Matching and Discrete Choice Models Abstract: We propose new results for the existence and uniqueness of a general nonparametric and nonseparable competitive equilibrium with substitutes. These results ensure the invertibility of a general competitive system. The existing literature has focused on the uniqueness of a competitive equilibrium assuming that existence holds. We introduce three properties that our supply system must satisfy: weak substitutes, pivotal substitutes, and responsiveness. These properties are sufficient to ensure the existence of an equilibrium, thus providing the existence counterpart to Berry, Gandhi, and Haile (2013)'s uniqueness results. For two important classes of models, bipartite matching models with full assignment and discrete choice models, we show that both models can be reformulated as a competitive system such that our existence and uniqueness results can be readily applied. We also provide an algorithm to compute the unique competitive equilibrium. Furthermore, we argue that our results are particularly useful for studying imperfectly transferable utility matching models with full assignment and non-additive random utility models.
May 7, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Joint Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP") and Industrial Organization	Kate Ho (Princeton): A Framework for Modeling Social Program Participation, with an Application to SNAP
May 6, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Karel Mertens (Dallas Fed): The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence From U.S. Appropriations Shocks    Abstract: Based on a narrative classification of all significant postwar changes in R&D appropriations for five major federal agencies, we find that an increase in nondefense R&D appropriations leads to increases in various measures of innovative activity and higher business-sector productivity in the long run. We structurally estimate the production function elasticity of nondefense government R&D capital using the SP-IV methodology of Lewis and Mertens (2023) and obtain implied returns of 150 to 300 percent over the postwar period. The estimates indicate that government-funded R&D accounts for one quarter of business-sector TFP growth since WWII, and imply substantial underfunding of nondefense R&D.
May 6, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Miguel Jorquera (Northwestern University): "The Impact of Transmission Expansion: Evidence from Energy Contracts and Downstream Markets in Chile"
May 3, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Andrea Di Giovan Paolo (Northwestern University): "Screening Sellers through Buyer Persuasion"
May 3, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Joao Tampellini (Vanderbilt):“Safer at Home? Migration Response to Violence at the Destination.” Roma Poberegski (Kellogg): “The effect of TMI on the electric grid.”  Title: Safer at Home? Migration Responses to Violence at the Destination Abstract: Over 50 Italian immigrants were killed by lynching mobs in the United States during the Age of Mass Migration. This paper studies the effects of lynchings against Italians on migration flows, selection, and destination choice. I find that affected provinces sent 37% fewer migrants to the United States, despite not reducing their overall migration rate. I find suggestive evidence that such effects are concentrated in provinces with strong migrant networks as well as access to international newspapers. In the U.S., I find that Italian immigrants substitute away from ports other than New York and become less likely to live in lynching locations. Title: The effect of TMI on the electric grid Or: how we did not learn to stop worrying and love nuclear power Abstract: With the goal of 1000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, the US was on the path to energy independence. However, the 1979 Three Mile Island accident turned public opinion against nuclear energy and spelled decades of stagnation for the industry. We show that the accident both halted the growth of the US reactor fleet, and stifled innovation in nuclear physics. We propose a mechanism by which accumulated scientific knowledge determines the capacity of nuclear reactors, and find that some 55 billion tons of CO2 emissions, 2.3 million premature deaths, and 14 trillion USD in health costs could have been avoided, had we displaced fossil fuels with nuclear power.
May 2, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Enahoro Innocent Ojiri Title: TBD
May 2, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Genia Rachkovski:  "The Substitutability of Religiosity and Quality: School Attribute Information and Parental Choice of School Religiosity" Abstract: In many countries, households choose between religious and secular schools, impacting preferences, beliefs and labor market outcomes. Given the importance of this choice, it is paramount to explore the preference structure underlying it and to identify circumstances that can lead households to choose schools that do not align most strongly with their religious preferences. In this paper, we investigate how attributes such as average test scores, school violence levels, and student satisfaction affect school selection. We exploit a natural experiment of an information disclosure combined with a unique setting in which both religious and secular public schooling options were available to households, to estimate school choice trade-offs using a Diff-in-Diff analysis. We find that households are willing to sacrifice religiosity for better school attributes, especially among religious households, suggesting a lower threshold for trade-offs. Furthermore, we find that while both high and low SES households seem to value test score disparities, only lower SES households are willing to trade off religiosity preferences for improvements related to school violence and student satisfaction ratings. Implementing an IV approach, we find evidence that the choice of an alternative schooling religiosity, induced by quality differences, may lead to long run changes in religious preferences and shifts in academic pursuits towards fields with higher labor market returns. Finally, estimating parameters of households' utility function using a discrete choice model further supports our results.
May 1, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	David de la Croix (Louvain): "Seeds of Knowledge: Premodern Scholarship, Academic Fields, and European Growth" with Matthew Curtis
May 1, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Murphy
May 1, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): "The Causes and Consequences of Gendered Occupations"
April 30, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Abhishek Ananth (Emory): Optimal Treatment Assignment Rules on Networked Populations Abstract: I address the challenge of optimally distributing treatments among units in a population while considering interference across units, which is governed by a network of interactions. Within my framework, a planner aims to allocate a limited number of treatments among units in a target population to maximize a welfare measure. To derive an empirical welfare maximizing treatment assignment rule (EWM rule), the planner utilizes data from a (quasi) experiment conducted on a separate and independent pilot population. In this paper, I extend empirical welfare maximization to incorporate interference, resulting in a rule that translates observed data from the pilot population into treatment assignments at the population level in the target population. I demonstrate that previously explored individual-level treatment assignments are effectively constrained population-level treatment assignments. I offer finite sample bounds for the regret associated with the EWM rule, imposing restrictions on both the shape of the network and the nature of interference. This regret measures the disparity between the maximum feasible welfare and the welfare achieved by the EWM rule. The main conclusion is that the regret linked with the EWM rule, extended to account for interference, converges at the parametric rate (with a logarithmic factor) as the size of the pilot population increases. Furthermore, I demonstrate that no statistical treatment rule achieves a faster rate of convergence for the uniform regret, suggesting that the EWM rule is rate-optimal.
April 30, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Alex Albright (Minneapolis Fed): “The Hidden Effects of Algorithmic Recommendations”  Abstract: "Algorithms are intended to improve human decisions with data-driven predictions. However, algorithms provide more than just predictions to decision-makers — they often provide explicit recommendations. In this paper, I demonstrate these algorithmic recommendations have significant independent effects on human decisions. I leverage a natural experiment in which algorithmic recommendations were given to bail judges in some cases but not others. Lenient recommendations increased lenient bail decisions by 50% for marginal cases. The results are consistent with algorithmic recommendations making visible mistakes, such as violent rearrest, less costly to judges by providing them reputational cover. Algorithms can change human decisions by shifting incentives, in addition to directly providing new prediction information. Finally, I show there is variation across decision-makers in adherence to recommendations, which generated unintended effects across racial groups. Lenient recommendations increased Black-white gaps in lenient bail for defendants with identical algorithmic risk scores."
April 29, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Allan Hsiao (Princeton): Sea Level Rise and Urban Adaptation in Jakarta
April 29, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Robert Barro (Harvard): Fiscal Influences on Inflation in OECD Countries, 2020-2022* Tests of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level   Abstract: The fiscal theory of the price level (FTPL) has been active for 30 years, and the interest in this theory grew with the recent global surges in inflation and government spending. This study applies the FTPL to 37 OECD countries for 2020-2022. The theory’s centerpiece is the government’s intertemporal budget constraint, which relates a country’s inflation rate in 2020-2022 (relative to a baseline rate) to a composite government-spending variable. This variable equals the cumulative increase in the ratio of government expenditure to GDP from 2020 to 2022, divided by the ratio of public debt to GDP in 2019 and the duration of the debt in 2019. This specification has substantial explanatory power for recent inflation rates across 20 non-Euro-zone countries and an aggregate of 17 Euro-zone countries. The estimated coefficients of the composite spending variable are significantly positive, implying that 40-50% of effective government financing came from the inverse effect of unexpected inflation on the real value of public debt, whereas 50-60% reflected conventional public finance (increases in current or future taxes or cuts in future spending). Within the Euro area, inflation reacts mostly to the area-wide government-spending variable, not to individual values.
April 29, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Dalton Zhang (Northwestern University): "Labor Market Power and Business Cycle"
April 26, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Max Pienkny (Northwestern University): "Chasing Ambulances: The Economics of Pre-Hospital Care"
April 26, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Henry Downes (University of Notre Dame): Title TBA
April 25, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	The Susan Bies Lecture on Economics and Public Policy with Gita Gopinath (IMF)	"Gita Gopinath: a Conversation with Lawrence Christiano" The Susan Bies Lecture on Economics and Public Policy was launched in 2008 in honor of Northwestern alumna Susan Schmidt Bies. Bies, who earned her doctorate in economics from Northwestern University in 1972, served in various capacities during a long career, including on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2001 until 2007. The lecture alternates between microeconomic and macroeconomic topics. Gita Gopinath is the First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund
April 25, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Sibling Spillovers: The Unintended Impact of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students
April 25, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Hyein Cho Title: "Vertical Integration between Healthcare Providers and Insurers: Care Coordination vs. Patient Steering" Abstract: Fragmented care—care delivered by many providers—is often criticized as an important source of inefficiency in the U.S. healthcare system. This paper provides empirical evidence that vertical integration between healthcare providers and insurers reduces care fragmentation. Using a mover's design in the Massachusetts individual market, where three out of nine insurers are vertically integrated, I find that vertical integration reduces care fragmentation by one standard deviation, which is mainly driven by enrollees seeing fewer specialists. On the other hand, vertically integrated plans have narrower networks disproportionately representing their integrated providers, suggesting patient steering through network design. To analyze whether the reduction in care fragmentation comes from better-coordinated care among integrated physicians or patient steering, I build a physician referral model. My estimates suggest that primary care practitioners observe a more accurate signal about the match value between the patient and the specialist for specialists that they are integrated with. Widening the network size of vertically integrated plans would increase out-of-provider group referrals and reduce patients' travel time.
April 24, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Devesh Rustagi (University of Warwick): “Market Exposure, Civic Values, and Rules” Abstract: Does markets exposure foster or erode civic values and rules necessary to con- strain opportunistic behavior? What mechanisms drive this effect? Using a natural experiment on market emergence and location from Ethiopia, I find that market exposure fosters civic values and rule formation. This result arises because locals trade primarily in livestock, which is prone to cooperation problem from asymmetric information and weak state capacity. I find that societies develop different types of exchange structures to mitigate this problem. In societies far from markets, individuals engage in eponymous exchange within their social network, resulting in limited civic values. In societies near markets, individuals engage in impersonal ex- change, which creates a demand for trust and community sanctioning, resulting in generalized civic values. Exposure to markets without asymmetric information has no effect on civic values and rules, allowing me to rule out prosperity and contact hypothesis as alternative channels.
April 24, 20241:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Strategy Seminar Series	Enrique Seira Bejarano (MSU): Title TBA
April 24, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kwok Yan Chiu Title: "Investment When Managers and Investors Disagree"
April 24, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aaron Wolf (Northwestern University): "Strategic Information Disclosure and Talent Sorting in Competitive Labor Markets"
April 23, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Michael Jansson (UC Berkeley): Cluster Robust Inference in Linear Regression Models with Many Covariates (with Matias D. Cattaneo, Aibo Gong, and Whitney K. Newey)  Abstract: The linear regression model is widely used in empirical work in economics, statistics, and many other disciplines. We give inference methods that allow for many covariates and clustering. Our results are obtained using high-dimensional approximations, where the number of included covariates is allowed to grow as fast as the sample size. We study various cluster robust variance estimators and give conditions under which they are consistent. Examples of models covered by our results include the partially linear regression model and linear panel data models with fixed effects.
April 23, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Marcella Alsan (Harvard): "Interest Groups, Ideology, and Indirect Lobbying: The Rise of Private Health Insurance in the United States" with Yousra Neberai Abstract: This study examines the rise of private health insurance (PHI) in the United States in the post-World War II era (1946-1954). We examine the role of the American Medical Association (AMA) who financed a campaign against national health insurance (NHI) directed by the country's first political public relations firm, Whitaker and Baxter (WB). The AMA-WB Campaign had two key components: (1) physicians who would endorse private health insurance (PHI) to patients; and (2) newspaper advertising that described PHI as “freedom” and “the American way." We bring together archival data from several novel sources to assess whether the Campaign was effective. We find that areas more exposed to the Campaign experienced sharp declines in support for NHI and increased enrollment in PHI. A one standard deviation in AMA-WB Campaign exposure is also associated with a 2.3 percentage point increase in PHI enrollment on average, per year, or 20% of the increase in the post-Campaign period. We also find effects on physician financial contributions to the Republican presidential candidate in 1952 as well on policy debates from the Congressional Record. These findings suggest the rise of PHI in the U.S. was not solely due to collective bargaining, favorable tax treatment, or price controls. Rather, it was enabled by an interest group financed Campaign that used ideology to indirectly lobby policymakers via persuading ordinary citizens.
April 22, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Pierre Bodéré (NYU): " Dynamic Spatial Competition in Early Education: an Equilibrium Analysis of the Preschool Market in Pennsylvania”   Abstract: High-quality preschool is one of the most cost-effective educational interventions, yet the United States invests little in early childhood education. Recent policy discussions call for increasing preschool enrollment and raising the quality provided, especially for disadvantaged children, but equilibrium responses of private providers which make up most of the market generate trade-offs between these objectives. Supply expansion may lower incentives to invest in quality, and price responses to demand subsidies can increase the costs faced by non-subsidized parents. This paper develops a dynamic model of the preschool market to evaluate the effectiveness of policies at achieving these objectives. The model nests a static equilibrium model of spatial competition and preschool choice within a dynamic model of providers’ entry, exit and quality investments. I estimate this model using data on the universe of child-care centers in Pennsylvania. I use the model to simulate the aggregate and distributional consequences of proposed approaches to early education expansion. I find that policies focused on expanding supply raise access but decrease the quality children are enrolled in due to parents’ value for proximity. Demand subsidies generate market expansion, but on their own do not create sufficient incentives for providers to invest in quality. Among the simulated policies, the most cost-effective at expanding high-quality enrollment combine demand subsidies targeted to low-income families with financial support to high-quality providers serving disadvantaged children. These policies increase access by reducing exit of providers, and expand high-quality enrollment for low-income children through subsidies. In addition, these targeted policies generate spillovers to the educational quality of non-targeted families by creating incentives for centers to invest in quality.
April 22, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq.: M. Reguant (Economics/IPR) - Smart Rationing: Designing Electricity Blackout Policies for Extreme Events	"Smart Rationing: Designing Electricity Blackout Policies for Extreme Events" by Mar Reguant, Professor of Economics and IPR Associate This event is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Spring 2024 Colloquium Series, where our researchers from around the University share their latest policy-relevant research. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
April 22, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Pascal Noel (UChicago Booth): Wealth, Race, and Consumption Smoothing of Typical Labor Income Shocks Abstract: We study the consumption response to typical labor income shocks and investigate how these vary by wealth and race. First, we develop an instrument based on firm-wide changes in labor income. Household income volatility stems mostly from fluctuations in labor income and this research design therefore studies the sort of income fluctuations that households typically experience from month to month. Using administrative banking data, we find an average elasticity of 0.21, with a much higher elasticity for low-liquidity households and close to zero elasticity for high-liquidity households. In a stylized model calibrated to our estimates, this degree of sensitivity implies that temporary income volatility has a large welfare cost for the average household, and especially large costs for low-liquidity households. Second, we use this instrument to study how wealth shapes racial inequality. Although an extensive body of work documents the long-term persistence of the racial wealth gap, less is known about its consequences on households’ lives from month to month. We find that Black and Hispanic households are twice as sensitive to typical income shocks as White households. Nearly all of this difference is explained in a statistical sense by racial wealth inequality. Because of racial disparities in consumption smoothing, the welfare cost of temporary income volatility is twice as high for Black and Hispanic households than for White households.
April 22, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Yutong Zhang (Northwestern University): "Cherry-picking"
April 19, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Flavio Malnati (CERGE-EI): Title TBA
April 18, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ryu Matsura Title:  Political Implications of Trade Liberalization: Evidence from India (with Sebastian Jävervall and Roza Khoban) Abstract: International trade substantially affects firms' business environments and economic development. However, little is known about the political and democratic consequences of these trade-induced changes. This project investigates how changes in the economic environment induced by trade liberalization affect political power concentration and political representation in India. Using exogenous variation in tariff reductions during India's trade liberalization in the 1990s and constructing a novel mapping between politicians and social communities in India, we show that the trade reform significantly shaped both the market structures and political power dynamics. In particular, we find that increased access to foreign inputs enhanced political representation in India by reducing political power concentration and fostering greater inclusion in political participation of historically marginalized groups.
April 18, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Anastasiia Evdokimova Over-the-Counter Drugs Market: Information Distortion In Label Design Abstract: Labels play a vital role in the over-the-counter (OTC) drug market as they help customers choose products that alleviate their symptoms. However, current label design allows drug companies to charge markups by making customers believe that some products are more effective than others, even when they are chemically identical. According to survey data, this practice results in information distortion, making it difficult for customers to identify equally effective drugs. Therefore, providing low-cost information can improve welfare. This project aims to measure the loss of consumer surplus due to misconceptions about efficacy and develop a welfare-enhancing label design for OTC drugs. To separately identify unobserved efficacy beliefs from the preferences in the demand model, I collect consumers ' perceptions of drugs ' effectiveness through an experiment and convert them into a quantifiable measure of relative effectiveness through triplet embedding. Preliminary results suggest that the label design that directly indicates which products have the same effectiveness is the best candidate for enhancing welfare.
April 17, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Stefano Gagliarducci (Tor Vergata): "Church, State and Education: School Funding and Catholic Assimilation in the U.S." with Squicciarini M. and Tabellini M. Abstract: We study how the allocation of public funds affects the diffusion of confessional schools and the assimilation of immigrants. We focus on the Age of Mass Migration, when about 15 million European Catholics migrated to the US, where public schools were de facto Protestant. To this purpose, we combine newly digitized data on Catholic parochial schools for the period 1872-1925 with the full count US Censuses, where Catholic immigrants are identified through their nationality. We leverage on the staggered adoption of amendments across states between 1870-1920 aimed at defunding confessional education (the so-called Blaine Amendments), and further exploit county-level variation in the size of Catholic communities to achieve identification. We find that a cut in public funding for confessional education reduced the presence and the attendance to Catholic schools. However, the effect of Blaine amendments on immigrants' assimilation was more nuanced: while we observe a positive effect on human capital accumulation, especially through schools, there was instead a negative impact on inter-group assimilation between Catholics and natives.
April 17, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Andrea Ferrara
April 17, 202411:30 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.
April 17, 202411:00 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.
April 16, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Aureo de Paula (UCL): Estimating Production Functions with Expectations Data Abstract: Standard methods for estimating production functions in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition require assumptions on input choices. We introduce a new method that exploits expectations data, which is increasingly available, and allows us to relax these input demand assumptions to obtain consistent production function parameter estimates. In contrast to dynamic panel data methods, our proposed estimator can be implemented on very short panels (including a single cross-section), and Monte Carlo simulations show it outperforms alternative estimators when firms' material and/or investment choices are subject to optimization error. We also implement our estimation strategy on UK data.
April 16, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Amy Finkelstein (MIT): Targeting Overuse of Home Health Care: Evidence from Multiple Policy Instruments (with Liran Einav, Yunan Ji, and Neale Mahoney)
April 15, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Michael Rubens (UCLA): TBA
April 15, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Amy Finkelstein (MIT): "Lives Vs. Livelihoods: The Impact of the Great Recession on Mortality and Welfare" with Matthew J. Notowidigdo, Frank Schilbach, and Jonathan Zhang Abstract: We leverage spatial variation in the severity of the Great Recession across the United States to examine its impact on mortality and to explore implications for the welfare consequences of recessions. We estimate that an increase in the unemployment rate of the magnitude of the Great Recession reduces the average, annual age-adjusted mortality rate by 2.3 percent, with effects persisting for at least 10 years. Mortality reductions appear across causes of death and are concentrated in the half of the population with a high school degree or less. We estimate similar percentage reductions in mortality at all ages, with declines in elderly mortality thus responsible for about three-quarters of the total mortality reduction. Recession-induced mortality declines are driven primarily by external effects of reduced aggregate economic activity on mortality, and recession-induced reductions in air pollution appear to be a quantitatively important mechanism. Incorporating our estimates of pro-cyclical mortality into a standard macroeconomics framework substantially reduces the welfare costs of recessions, particularly for people with less education, and at older ages where they may even be welfare-improving.
April 15, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Giacomo Marcolin (Northwestern University): "Tax Administration Quality and Firm Outcomes: Evidence from Tax Litigation"
April 12, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Guohui Jiang (University of Zurich): War as Cooperation: The Equality Motive of War Participation in World War II This paper examines how equality motives determined war participation in the United States during WWII. First, exposure to higher draft inequality -- draft share differences between individuals' poorer and richer neighbors -- diminished the willingness to enlist. The identification variations were created by draft lottery. Collectivists' enlistment decisions were more sensitive to local draft inequality. Second, induction of leaders, such as relatives of draft board members, enhanced the enlistment of ordinary men. The higher the draft inequality, the more pronounced the leadership effect. Finally, perceptions of draft fairness mediated these results. Higher draft inequality impaired fairness perceptions, whereas visible and heroic behaviors of leaders enhanced them. Administrative records and survey evidence substantiate the fairness mechanism. These findings highlight the importance of equality and fairness in sustaining large-scale cooperation.
April 11, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Melanie Morten (Stanford): TBA
April 11, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Hellen Namawejje (CEGA Fellow) Title: Impact of Financial Literacy Training on cash savings and credit behaviors in Uganda Abstract: Limited savings is still a big burden in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is due to low incomes, limited access to formal financial services, economic instability among others.  A big proportion of individuals in Sub-Saharan Africa are still relying on informal saving mechanisms which limits them from gaining benefits of access to formal services. This study intends to train women on financial literacy skills and also measure the impact of training on cash savings and credit behaviors.
April 10, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Eyal Frank (University of Chicago): "Campaigning for Extinction: Eradication of Sparrows and the Great Famine in China" Abstract: How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? In 1958, China embarked on the "Four Pests Campaign" that aimed to quickly eradicate flies, mosquitoes, rats, and sparrows nationwide, despite warnings from scientists that sparrows play important roles in pest control. Historians have long speculated that eradicating sparrows, by letting other pest populations grow out of control, contributed to the Great Famine in China between 1959 and 1961—the largest in human history. This paper combines newly digitized data on historical agricultural productivity in China with habitat suitability modeling methods in ecology to quantitatively test this hypothesis. We document that regions with higher "sparrow suitability" experienced significant drops in agricultural output after the Four Pests Campaign, as compared to their low-suitability counterparts. A one standard deviation difference in sparrow suitability explains a 5.3% or 8.7% decline in rice or wheat agricultural output. We further document that the food procurement and redistribution system exacerbated the negative agricultural shock in high-sparrow suitability counties. Consequently, we find that counties with a one standard deviation in sparrow suitability experienced an elevated death rate of 3.3 deaths per 1,000 people during the Great Famine, even though there were no systematic differences between the two before 1958. These effects are driven by yield reductions for above-ground crops, which are more vulnerable to pest outbreaks, and farmers tried to mitigate pest risks by switching to below-ground crops. When China removed sparrows from the "four pests" list in 1960 and started to reboot the sparrow population, agricultural productivity gradually recovered, while the change in crop choices persisted. POSTPONED (New date TBD) Omer Ali (University of Pittsburgh): “The Impact of Federal Housing Policies on Racial Inequality: the case of the Federal Housing Administration”
April 10, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Gabriel Jardanovski
April 10, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pablo Sanchez (Northwestern University): "Liquid Wealth and Age Distribution"
April 9, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Andrew Chesher (UCL): Robust analysis of short panels   Abstract: Many structural econometric models include latent variables on whose probability distributions one may wish to place minimal restrictions. Leading examples in panel data models are individual-specific variables sometimes treated as “fixed effects” and, in dynamic models, initial conditions. This paper presents a generally applicable method for characterizing sharp identified sets when models place no restrictions on the probability distribution of certain latent variables and no restrictions on their covariation with other variables. In our analysis latent variables on which restrictions are undesirable are removed, leading to econometric analysis robust to misspecification of restrictions on their distributions which are commonplace in the applied panel data literature. Endogenous explanatory variables are easily accommodated. Examples of application to some static and dynamic binary, ordered and multiple discrete choice and censored panel data models are presented.
April 9, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Brian Knight (Brown): The Rise of the Religious Right: Evidence from the Moral Majority and the Jimmy Carter Presidency
April 8, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Nikhil Agarwal (MIT): "Combining Human Expertise with Artificial Intelligence: Experimental Evidence from Radiology" with Alex Moehring, Pranav Rajpurkar, and Tobias Salz Abstract: Full automation using Artifical Intelligence (AI) predictions may not be optimal if humans can access contextual information. We study human-AI collaboration using an information experiment with professional radiologists. Results show that providing (i) AI predictions does not always improve performance, whereas (ii) contextual information does. Radiologists do not realize the gains from AI assistance because of errors in belief updating – they underweight AI predictions and treat their own information and AI predictions as statistically independent. Unless these mistakes can be corrected, the optimal human-AI collaboration design delegates cases either to humans or to AI, but rarely to AI assisted humans.
April 8, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Ben Johannsen (FRB): "Speed of Learning and Policy Analysis" with Lawrence J. Christiano and Martin Eichenbaum Abstract: Little is known about how much time it takes for a learning equilibrium to converge to a rational expectations equilibrium (REE). This paper investigates what features of an economy determine whether convergence is fast or slow. In all of the models that we consider, people's beliefs about model outcomes are central determinants of those outcomes. We argue that under certain circumstances, convergence of a learning equilibrium to the REE can be so slow that policy analysis based on rational expectations is very misleading. We also develop new analytic results regarding rates of convergence in learning models.
April 8, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Rui Sousa (Northwestern University): "The Heterogeneous Transmission of Oil Shocks: The Role of The Gasoline Burden"
April 5, 20248:00 AM - 5:15 PM	CSIO Anniversary - Michael Whinston Fest Workshop	The Northwestern Center for the Study of Industrial Organization is hosting a workshop on Friday, April 5th to celebrate its 25th anniversary and Mike Whinston’s 65th birthday. Speaker List: Allan Collard-Wexler (Duke): "Regulating New Product Testing” Kei Kawai (Tokyo): “A Field Experiment on Antitrust Compliance” Volker Nocke (Mannheim): “Multiproduct-Firm Pricing Games and Transformed Potentials” Igal Hendel (Northwestern): “Approaches to Encouraging Health Insurance Takeup” Aviv Nevo (Pennsylvania): TBA Victoria Marone (Texas at Austin):  “Market Design in Single Payer Healthcare: Evidence from a GP Allocation System” Soheil Ghili (Yale): “An Empirical Analysis of Sequential Screening” Alvaro Parra (UBC): “Health Insurance Markets with Endogenous Risks" Ben Handel (UC Berkeley): “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media" Jakub Kastl (Princeton):  “Platform Pricing”
April 4, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Jonas Hjort (UCL): Input Sourcing in Lopsided Low-income Economies
April 4, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Bruno Fava Title: Algorithmic Bias in Microcredit: The Unseen Costs of Data-Driven Lending Practices Abstract: New machine learning methods may allow lenders to increase profits by targeting their loans to the most lucrative borrowers. But how will this affect which borrowers can access credit and the impacts of the loans on borrower outcomes? Using data from four RCTs on microcredit we find that profit targeting is possible and can increase returns for lenders. But profit targeting leads lenders to sideline poorer and less educated clients. Targeting loans to the borrowers who would see a large increase in income is unsuccessful given existing data and algorithms. This suggests caution is necessary when lenders begin optimizing for profits especially for "social'' lenders who claim to care about a double bottom line.
April 4, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Myera Rashid Title: Engine of Intergenerational Mobility: Typewriter Adoption and Women's Economic Outcomes Abstract: Women’s economic outcomes changed dramatically over the last century, but there is scarce evidence on the role of workplace technological advances in fueling these changes. This paper studies the effects of the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces on women's economic outcomes in the 20th century. Exploiting variation in the demand for typists across industries coupled with the geographic distribution of industries, I document that the adoption of the typewriter caused an increase in women's labor force participation and a decrease in their likelihood of being married and having children. I show that the mechanisms driving these developments operated through two main channels: there was a direct effect driving White women to leave the household and enter offices, and an indirect crowding-in effect that increased the participation of Black women, who substituted for White women by entering domestic service work. The typewriter also resulted in upward mobility for women through the channel of marriage. Using linked data following women over time, I show that typists were more likely to marry men of higher socioeconomic status compared to women working in alternative white-collar occupations. This result holds in a within-household analysis comparing sisters. This finding is consistent with a hypothesis that typing and secretarial occupations offered women a unique opportunity to work in offices alongside higher earning men.
April 3, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Tanja Linta
April 3, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Charles Williamson (Northwestern University): "Panel LPs vs Panel VARs"
April 2, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Qinyou Hu (Rice): Breaking Down Bullying: Empathy, Social Networks, and Adolescents    Abstract: This paper examines the formation of a specific non-cognitive skill – empathy – and its role in determining bullying behavior with a focus on social networks. The analysis centers on a parent-directed empathy-fostering intervention, which successfully increased empathy levels and reduced bullying among students. To disentangle the mechanisms underlying these findings, I develop and estimate a structural model of empathy development, network formation, and bullying decisions. The analysis reveals that 32% of the observed reduction in bullying is attributed to empathy-induced alterations in social networks. Policy counterfactuals show that social network information is valuable. Notably, targeting students based on popularity can lead to up to a 7.5% further reduction in bullying compared to targeting students randomly. Moreover, targeting bullies’ friends is more effective than targeting bullies directly. This insight holds promise for refining the efficacy of anti-bullying initiatives, which often focus more on bullies, and highlights the potential of reshaping social networks to mitigate violent behavior among adolescents.
April 2, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Jérôme Adda (Bocconi): "Health Beliefs and the Long Run Effects of Medical Information"
April 1, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Ying Fan (University of Michigan): "Spillover Effects in Complementary Markets: A Study of the Indian Cellphone and Wireless Service Markets" with Chirantan Chatterjee and Debi Prasad Mohapatra Abstract: This paper studies network effects between two complementary markets and quantifies how the presence of technologically more advanced international firms in one market helps the development of the other market (a cross-market spillover effect), which, in turn, benefits domestic firms in the first market (a within-market spillover effect), and more importantly, how consumers benefit from both spillover effects. Our context is the Indian mobile industry during the 4G rollout. The industry consists of two complementary markets: the handset market, where international firms play a big role, and the wireless service market. Using data on sales, prices, and product availability in these two markets, we estimate a structural model of consumer demand, carriers' 4G network expansions, and handset firms' product choices. Our estimates yield four findings that support the spillover effects. Using counterfactual simulations, we quantify how the presence of international handset firms speeds up the 4G network rollout, increases the 4G phone variety, and benefits consumers.
April 1, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Christian Wolf (MIT): "Evaluating Policy Counterfactuals: A 'VAR-Plus' Approach" with Tomas E. Caravello and Alisdair McKay Abstract: In a general family of linearized structural macroeconomic models, the counterfactual evolution of the economy under alternative policy rules is fully pinned down by: (i) reduced-form projections with respect to a large information set; and (ii) the causal effects of policy on macroeconomic aggregates. This identification result motivates a three-step approach. First, the researcher constructs (i) directly from time-series data. Second, she partially estimates (ii) using semi-structural methods for policy shock analysis. Third, if needed, she uses structural models of policy transmission to extrapolate beyond those observed policy experiments, giving the missing parts of (ii). We document attractive robustness properties of this procedure, and use it to study U.S. business-cycle fluctuations under alternative assumptions on the conduct of monetary policy.
April 1, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Johanna Rayl (Northwestern University): "Disaster Recovery and Social Insurance: Welfare Effects of FEMA’s Individual Assistance Program"
March 28, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Devis Decet (Northwestern): Child Labour, Human Capital and Beliefs (with Kaman Lyu) Abstract:  Child labour is pervasive and rising in African countries. Our paper tests a novel hypothesis to explain child labour on family farms. Parents are allocating work instead of school because they view child labour as another dimension of human capital formation. Parents are not undervaluing education. They believe that working on farms is an investment in agricultural skills which can yield higher returns than investments in schooling if the child will be a farmer in the future. We design and implement a survey for 5,000 households in Ghana to elicit parental beliefs on the returns to child labour. Exploiting vignettes, we find that parents believe that a child who works on family farms alongside schooling will be more productive as a farmer than if they attained two more years of schooling with no farming experience. We then test whether parents act accordingly to these beliefs. We find that parents with strong beliefs on the returns to child labour on the farm are more likely to put their child to work on family farms if the child is designated to become a farmer. On the contrary, parents with strong beliefs on the returns to secondary education are more likely to have their child in school if the child is designated to become a white-collar worker.
March 26, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Vishal Kamat (TSE): "Identification in Multiple Treatment Models under Discrete Variation" with Samuel Norris and Matthew Pecenco Abstract: We develop a method to learn about treatment effects in multiple treatment models with discrete-valued instruments. We allow selection into treatment to be governed by a general class of threshold crossing models that permits multidimensional unobserved heterogeneity. Under a semi-parametric restriction on the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity, we show how a sequence of linear programs can be used to compute sharp bounds for a number of treatment effect parameters when the marginal treatment response functions underlying them remain nonparametric or are additionally parameterized.
March 26, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Juliana Londono-Velez (UCLA): “Elite Colleges as Engines of Upward Mobility: Evidence from Colombia's Ser Pilo Paga” with Fabio Sanchez, Catherine Rodriguez, and Luis Esteban Alvarez Abstract: We study the role of elite colleges as engines of upward mobility. A groundbreaking financial aid reform in Colombia overhauled access to elite universities by rendering them financially accessible for academically successful low-SES students. We leverage stringent program eligibility criteria and nationwide administrative microdata on long-term educational and labor market outcomes to estimate effects on economic mobility, equity, and efficiency. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that enhancing college quality substantially improved individuals' long-term educational attainment and earnings and successfully narrowed socioeconomic gaps. Using difference-in-differences, we find that it did not disadvantage nonrecipients, promoting both equity and efficiency.
March 26, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Takaaki Sagawa (Northwestern University): "Climate Models with Non-homothetic Utility"
March 25, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Mar Reguant (Northwestern): "Smart Rationing: Designing Electricity Blackout Policies for Extreme Events" Abstract: Systemic blackouts have increased due to extreme weather events and supply shortages, leading to a prominent example of demand rationing. Exploiting features of smart meters, we propose a partial rationing policy for residential households to avoid blackouts. We have two main findings. First, partial rationing policies can be equivalent to large rolling blackouts, even when the partial rationing is generous. Second, due to selection, partial rationing policies reduce the number of households effectively impacted by the rationing event, even without losing power. We conclude with a discussion of open questions about the design of optimal rationing policies.
March 14, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title:  "Impacts of Expanded Health Insurance for Immigrants" Abstract: "State policies regarding immigrant eligibility for public health insurance have varied greatly since the 1990s.  I aim to examine the impacts of insurance receipt on health, labor, and educational outcomes for recent entrants into the US. "
March 13, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker:  Miguel Santana
March 12, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Chuck Manski (Northwestern): "Comprehensive OOS Evaluation of Predictive Algorithms with Statistical Decision Theory" with Jeff Dominitz
March 8, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Netanel Ben-Porath (Northwestern):  Democratization Spurs Public Investment, But Only When a Media Market is Present: Evidence From Early American History Abstract: This study explores the economic impact of extending voting rights to less affluent white males in early American history, leveraging the staggered nature of franchise expansion across states through a contiguous counties framework. It demonstrates that broadening voter eligibility led to a significant increase in investments in the post office, which was the primary public good provided by the government and had a critical economic role. Notably, the study finds that the observed investment increase was evident primarily in areas with newspapers, the predominant medium for political information. This suggests that democratization may alter governmental investment priorities, but only in contexts where the newly enfranchised population can access sufficient political information. The paper presents a simple model to articulate this hypothesis. It further supports the main findings by investigating additional suffrage reforms and by comparing patterns of petitioning before and after democratization.
March 7, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA Title: TBA
March 7, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ana Evdokimova Title: Over-the-Counter Drugs Market: Information Distortion In Label Design Abstract: "In the OTC pharmaceutical market, labels are a crucial source of information that guides consumers' choices. Current label design allows pharmaceutical companies to convey differentiated effectiveness values to consumers; products with the biological formula are represented as different. Scanner data shows how information distortion leads to markup extraction because consumers cannot identify the drugs with the same effectiveness. In addition, survey data supports the fact that information distortion comes from the inability of the consumers to identify the drugs that carry the same effectiveness. This project aims to quantify the loss in the consumer surplus that comes from this misconception and construct a welfare-enhancing label design for OTC drugs. Preliminary results from the experiment suggest that the variation in information processing costs can explain the initial variation in information distortion levels. Label modification that achieves the lowest level of information distortion directly signals to consumers which products have the same efficacy rather than informing them about the content of the active component."
March 6, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Alina Wang (Northwestern): “Foreign-educated Elite, Ideology, and the Fall of Imperial China”
March 6, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pablo Sanchez
March 5, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")	Erzo F. P. Luttmer (Dartmouth): "Living large or long: preference estimates from completed-life stories"
March 1, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Walker Hanlon (Northwestern): Regulating Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain Abstract: The market for sex is heavily regulated or banned in most jurisdictions, but our understanding of the consequences of regulation remains limited. We study a set of laws passed in Britain in the 1860s known as the Contagious Disease Acts (CDAs) that were aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). These regulations mandated sex workers undergo routine medical examinations for STIs and gave police the authority to detain women that tested positive for up to nine months. The first part of our analysis shows that the CDAs led to substantial public health improvements. However, these regulations were repealed in 1886. The second part examines the causes of this repeal. Our results show that the success of public health regulations depend not only on the policy’s effectiveness, but also on the perceived fairness of the distribution of its costs. These results provide a new perspective on the impact of regulating the sex trade while also improving our understanding of a policy that played a key role in the women’s rights movement in the U.K.
February 29, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA Title: TBA
February 29, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ludovica Mosillo Title: CEO Appointments and Firm Performance in the US Abstract: "Despite constituting a minority in positions of economic and political power, women are anecdotally overrepresented in leadership roles during periods of uncertainty and crisis, a phenomenon known as the "glass cliff" (Ryan and Haslam, 2005). This study analyzes CEO turnovers within the S&P 1500 index from 1994 to 2019 and explores various measures of firm performance to examine the existence of the glass cliff phenomenon in US firms and  the drivers behind the appointment of women to top managerial positions."
February 28, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Laura Murphy
February 23, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Chiara Zanardello and Shuyi Yu Shuyi Yu (Northwestern) Title: The Curse of the Mandate of Heaven: A Model of Power Centralization Abstract: Europe and China followed divergent paths of development during the premodern period. Europe nurtured representative institutions and secure property rights that facilitated the rise of modern capitalism, whereas the growth of commercial interests in China was persistently stifled. The divergence can be attributed, at least in part, to the more centralized power structure of the Chinese state at the dawn of the premodern era. To account for this distinction, I propose that China’s early adoption of the Mandate of Heaven, a merit-based political philosophy aimed at legitimizing imperial rule in a secular society, inadvertently contributed to the cyclical overturning of dynasties and a steady trend of power centralization towards the emperor. In substantiating this argument, I develop a game-theoretical model of authoritarian power sharing, demonstrating that the threat of peasant revolution can alter the initial power distribution between the ruler and the elite, tilting the equilibrium more in favor of the ruler and leading to a less balanced power structure. I also present historical narratives to corroborate and contextualize this finding. Chiara Zanardello Title: Early Modern Academies, Universities and Economic Growth Abstract: Using a novel micro-level database spanning Early Modern scholars and educational institutions, I explore the impact of innovative knowledge on Europe's economic growth from 1500 to 1800. Employing advanced DID estimators, I observe that the establishment of scientific academies leads to a 15% increase in population growth rates after 150 years in the cities hosting them. However, literary academies show no discernible positive effect on long-term growth. I also do not find any detectable effect in the entire sample of academies, suggesting the importance of micro level data on scholars' field of study. Moreover, I test the historical evidence about academies fostering universities' reforms and innovations by showing that scientific academies rapidly enhance the quality of universities in the same urban area. Overall, the paper provides the first evidence on the pivotal role of scientific academies in the economic growth of Europe and in the modernization of universities.
February 22, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Illegal Economies and Economic Growth
February 22, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Pisauro Title: "The Determinants and Consequences of Telehealth"
February 21, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker:  Michael Cai
February 16, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Holly Swenson Title: Cultural Commerce: British Media Exports and British Sentiment in Australia Abstract: My research investigates how the business of exporting British media products such as books, musicals, and television shaped popular perceptions in Australia from 1860 to the 1980s that British media was superior to alternatives. Drawing on archival business records in Britain and Australia, I find that British and Australian entrepreneurs worked together to make British media the standard for excellence in Australia. They did this by exploiting dynamics of Australian political economy such as copyright laws and limited regulation against monopoly and by encouraging consumers to see British goods as superior to alternatives. This project thus argues that British media production and distribution strategies directly influenced consumer tastes in Australia. My research, utilizing cultural and business history methods, reveals the role of private media business in buttressing the cultural trappings of empire. This presentation focuses on my fifth case study: British comedy television from the 1960s to 1980s. I argue that Australian television stations, public and private, imported British comedy television because it was cheaper than alternatives and because it claimed to be (defensibly so) high quality. Claims of high quality made by stations came to influence consumer tastes, as seen in the pages of the Australian TV Week. Ultimately, Australian television stations found themselves in a bind; even when they wanted to make domestic programmes, they realized that it was too expensive to overcome decades of underinvestment.
February 15, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA Title: TBA
February 15, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Nathalie Basto Title: Evaluating Educational Incentives: The Direct and Peer Effects of Financial Aid" (joint work with Elizabeth Jaramillo) Abstract: "This study assesses the Ser Pilo Paga (SPP) scholarship's effect on educational outcomes in Colombia, leveraging a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design to evaluate direct motivational impacts on scholarship-eligible students and employing a Diff-in-Diff methodology to estimate peer effects on ineligible students. It finds a significant direct motivational effect, particularly in the cohort immediately following the first scholarship recipients, with an increase of 2 to 3 points in exam scores for students below the poverty threshold. Preliminary analyses suggest an increase in middle and high school completion rates among subsequent cohorts. The DiD estimates reveal significant peer effects on math scores. While the study offers a detailed methodological framework for examining the scholarship's repercussions, it presents initial results focusing on selected outcomes, excluding factors such as performance in earlier grades, parental contributions, and involvement in criminal activities. The research contributes to the literature on the role of financial incentives in education, offering insights into how such initiatives can shape educational pursuits and socioeconomic mobility."
February 14, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: TBA
February 9, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Teppo Lindfors (Lund Univesity)  Title: "Public Opposition and Mass Mobilization" Abstract: "What outcomes ensue from the erosion of autocratic media censorship? This paper investigates the political effects in Finland arising from the dissolution of imperial censorship after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Using the universe of Finnish newspaper articles, I document a sharp jump in pro-opposition rhetoric in the press following the dissolution. Combining difference-in-differences approach and spatial regression discontinuity design, I further show that the change of rhetoric enticed the Finnish populace to mobilize in an armed rebellion against the government ten months post the uplifting of censorship. I provide evidence for two contingent explanations for the rise in public opposition: accumulation of suppressed dissent and inspiration provided by the Bolshevik Revolution. The findings highlight that pro-government sentiment is susceptible to a rapid decline in the face of competing ideas."
February 8, 20244:00 PM - 5:00 PM	Transportation Center Seminar	Milena Almagro (University of Chicago): "Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago"
February 8, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker:  Devis Decet Title: Bureaucracy and Taxation Abstract: This paper studies how the organization of a national tax authority impacts fiscal capacity. I build a novel dataset on federal tax collection, tax office locations, tax jurisdictions, and tax officials in Brazil for the period 2012-2022. I investigate the consequences of a large wave of tax office closings in 2020, triggered by a decline in the number of tax officials. Preliminary results show that closings negatively impact tax collection in affected municipalities.
February 8, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elena Stella Title: Organised Crime and Firms: the Value of Signalling Good Behaviour Abstract: This paper studies how asymmetric information about firms affiliation to organised crime impacts their performance, ability to raise capital and participation in public procurement. I exploit an Italian reform that introduces local police investigations into all firms wanting to participate in public procurement. I hand collect firm level information from 12 provincial police offices and match them with public tender and balance sheet data. Preliminary results suggest that firms undergoing the investigation improve their performance, increase their leverage and win more public contracts.
February 7, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli
February 5, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Lindsey Raymond (MIT): “The Market Effects of Algorithms” Abstract: While there is excitement about the potential of algorithms to optimize individual decision-making, changing individual behavior will, almost inevitably, impact markets. Yet little is known about these effects. In this paper, I study how the availability of algorithmic prediction changes entry, allocation, and prices in the U.S. residential real estate market, a key driver of household wealth. I identify a market-level natural experiment that generates variation in the cost of using algorithms to value houses: digitization, the transition from physical to digital housing records. I show that digitization leads to entry by investors using algorithms, but does not displace investors using human judgment. Instead, human investors shift towards houses that are difficult to predict algorithmically. Algorithm-using investors predominantly purchase minority-owned homes, an area where humans may be biased. Digitization increases the average sale price of minority-owned homes by 5% or $5,000 and nearly eliminates racial disparities in home prices. Algorithmic investors, via competition, affect the prices paid by humans, which drives most of the reduction in racial disparities.  This decrease in racial inequality underscores the potential of algorithms to mitigate human biases at the market level.
February 5, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq.: C. Manski (IPR/Economics) - Using Measures of Race to Make Clinical Predictions: Decision Making, Patient Health, and Fairness	"Using Measures of Race to Make Clinical Predictions: Decision Making, Patient Health, and Fairness" by Charles F. Manski, Board of Trustees Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow Abstract: The use of race measures in clinical prediction models is contentious. Manski and his colleagues seek to inform the discourse by evaluating the inclusion of race in probabilistic predictions of illness that support clinical decision making. Adopting a static utilitarian framework to formalize social welfare, they show that patients of all races benefit when clinical decisions are jointly guided by patient race and other observable covariates. Similar conclusions emerge when the model is extended to a two-period setting where prevention activities target systemic drivers of disease. The researchers also discuss non-utilitarian concepts that have been proposed to guide allocation of healthcare resources. This event is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Winter 2024 Colloquium Series, where IPR researchers from around the University share their latest policy-relevant research. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
February 1, 20245:00 PM - 6:30 PM	Celebrating Dale Mortensen’s Legacy	Please join us for a lecture and reception celebrating Dale Mortensen’s Legacy. The lecture will be given by Robert Shimer, Department Chair and the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at The University of Chicago. The reception will be held after the lecture at 5:45 PM in the third floor Light Court (KGH 3322).
January 31, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker:  Valerio di Tommaso
January 29, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Christophe Gaillac (TSE): “Predicting Unobserved Individual-level Causal Effects” Abstract: Measuring accurately heterogeneous effects is key for the design of efficient public policies. This paper considers the prediction of unobserved individual-level causal effects in linear random coefficients models, conditional on all the available data. In the application I consider, these ``posterior effects'' are the average effects of teachers' knowledge on their students' performance, conditional on both variables. I derive two strategies for recovering these posterior effects nonparametrically, assuming independence between the effects and the covariates. The first strategy recovers the distribution of the random coefficients by a minimum distance approach, and then obtains the posterior effects from this distribution. The corresponding estimator can be computed using an optimal transport algorithm. The second approach, which is only valid for continuous regressors, expresses the posterior effects directly as a function of the data. The corresponding estimator is rate optimal. I discuss several extensions, in particular the relaxation of the independence condition. Finally, the application reveals large heterogeneity in the effect of teacher knowledge, suggesting that we could substantially improve the cost-effectiveness of their training.
January 25, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Andrew Wooders "The Impacts of Social Activism on Discrimination" Speaker: Seung Hyeong Lee "Guidance-Driven Heterogeneity and Forecast Dispersion"   Abstract for "The Impacts of Social Activism on Discrimination":  “We study the effects of social activism on racial discrimination and social attitudes, and how these effects are manifested in market outcomes. We study three distinct social activism events that occurred in response to police brutality against African Americans in the United States -- the Philando Castile shooting, Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, and the George Floyd protest. Following over 1.2 million transactions across over 10 years in the secondary market for baseball cards, we find differential changes in market prices between cards of black and white players following each of these social justice events. We exploit novel institutional details combined with a difference-in-difference framework to identify and quantify these market trends as changes in racial attitudes. For example, we find that the George Floyd protests in May 2020 resulted in an average 8.3\% increase in prices of black cards, which we attribute to changes in racial attitudes and perceptions in favor of African Americans. Our results both identify and quantify the impact of social activism on racial discrimination in markets, and provide novel insights into the role of social activism in bringing forth important behavioral changes in individuals, markets, and society."   Abstract for "Guidance-Driven Heterogeneity and Forecast Dispersion":  "We analyze how equity analysts systematically utilize firms' earnings guidance and announcements when making forecasts. Approximately 35% and 52% of analysts' (sums of) quarterly EPS forecasts deviate by less than 1 cent and 2 cents, respectively, from their corresponding benchmarks implied by annual guidance and announced quarterly earnings. We identify two channels that affect forecast dispersion: how closely forecasts align with the benchmark and the number of `free forecasts' analysts have to match the annual guidance. We create measures to capture these channels and empirically test their relationship with forecast dispersion. Our long-short portfolio generated from two measures yields a monthly abnormal return of 1.08%. The findings suggest researchers should be cautious when interpreting dispersion across analysts' forecasts as a measure of heterogeneous beliefs or risk."
January 24, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Hugo Reichardt (LSE): “Scale-Biased Technical Change and Inequality" Abstract: Scale bias in technical change is the degree to which technical change increases the productivity of large relative to small firms. I propose that this dimension of technical change is important for inequality. I first develop a tractable framework with heterogeneous households choosing to work for wages or earn profits as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs choose from a set of available production technologies, defined by a fixed and a marginal cost. Large-scale-biased technical change lowers entrepreneurship rates and leads to larger firms on average. With fewer and larger firms, top entrepreneurs are capturing a larger share of the profits which increases top income inequality. Small-scale-biased technical change has the opposite effects. I test the theory by comparing the effects of two technologies that vary in scale bias, but are similar in purpose: steam engines (large-scale-biased) and electric motors (small-scale-biased). Using newly collected data from the United States and the Netherlands, I verify that these two technologies had opposite effects on firm sizes and inequality. Steam engines increased firm sizes, while electric motors decreased them. Steam engines led to increased inequality, electric motors did not. Consistent with scale bias (rather than skill bias), I find that adopting entrepreneurs were the main drivers of inequality increases after steam engine adoption.
January 24, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker:  Andrea Ferrara
January 23, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Cody Cook (Stanford): “Where to Build Affordable Housing? Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location” with Pearl Z. Li and Ariel J. Binder Abstract: How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader social objectives such as racial and economic integration? Using administrative data on households living in units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that tenant characteristics such as income, race, education, and family structure vary widely across neighborhoods, despite common eligibility thresholds. To quantify the welfare implications, we develop and estimate a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter are priced below-market and must be rationed. Moving a new development to a neighborhood with less poverty and better access to good schools and jobs increases aggregate tenant welfare and reduces both racial and economic segregation. However, it is also more costly to provide and disproportionately benefits more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households. This change in the distribution of assistance arises in part because of the rationing process: households that only apply for assistance in opportunity-rich neighborhoods crowd out other households willing to apply anywhere. Relative to the choice of where to build, policy levers available post-construction—such as lowering the eligibility thresholds—have only limited effects on outcomes.
January 22, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Anaïs Fabre (TSE): “The Geography of Higher Education and Spatial Inequalities" Abstract: This paper shows that the within-country spatial distribution of colleges largely contributes to spatial inequalities. Using data on the universe of college applicants and programs in France, I document that higher education options are unevenly distributed across space while students' demand is highly sensitive to geographic proximity. This creates inequalities in access to higher education across space, feeding gaps in educational attainment and spatial skill sorting. To quantify these effects, I build a dynamic model linking equilibrium sorting on the higher education market and location choices of entry-level workers. I show that students' and programs' preferences can be identified and estimated from data on choices and equilibrium outcomes. One-third of regional gaps in educational attainment are explained by the interaction of the uneven distribution of colleges and mobility frictions. Eliminating the latter, however, generates a trade-off, as it benefits students from low-opportunity areas but accelerates their migration to higher education hubs, magnifying regional inequalities. Low-opportunity areas could halt this brain drain and outsource the education of their local labor force by tying mobility scholarships and incentives to return.
January 22, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PM	IPR Colloq.: E. Jácome (IPR/Economics) - Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety	"Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety" by Elisa Jácome, Assistant Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow Abstract: How does immigration enforcement affect public safety? Heightened enforcement could reduce crime by deterring and incapacitating immigrant offenders or alternatively increase crime if it discourages crime reporting by victims. Jácome and her colleagues study the U.S. Secure Communities program, which significantly increased enforcement against unauthorized immigrants. Using nationwide survey data, they find that the program increased victimizations against Hispanics and reduced their crime reporting rate. Total reported crimes are unchanged, masking these opposing effects. In this talk, Jácome will provide evidence that reduced Hispanic reporting is a key driver of the increase in victimization. The findings underscore the importance of directly measuring victim reporting for evaluating criminal justice policies. The Winter 2024 IPR Monday Fay Lomax Cook (FLC) Colloquium Series will be held in person. No virtual attendance options are available.
January 19, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Frank Yang (Stanford): "Nested Bundling" Abstract: A nested bundling strategy creates menus in which more expensive bundles include all the goods of the less expensive ones. We study when nested bundling is optimal and determine which nested menu is optimal, when consumers differ in one dimension. We introduce a partial order on the set of bundles, defined by (i) set inclusion and (ii) sales quantity when sold alone. We show that, under quasiconcavity assumptions, if the undominated bundles with respect to this partial order are nested, then nested bundling is optimal. We provide an iterative procedure to determine the minimal optimal menu that consists of a subset of the undominated bundles. The proof technique involves a new constructive monotone comparative statics theorem. We present partial converses. Additionally, we provide distributionally robust characterizations of nested bundling. We also show that under suitable conditions it is possible to extend our analysis to allow multidimensional heterogeneity.
January 18, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Alice Wu (Harvard): "Reveal or Conceal? Employer Learning in the Labor Market for Computer Scientists" Abstract: The efficient allocation of labor relies on the identification of talent. When employee output is not publicly observable, employers have an incentive to take advantage of private information, potentially leading to the misallocation of labor among firms. This paper provides empirical evidence of employer learning and quantifies the impact of learning on job mobility and innovation outputs in the labor market for computer science (CS) Ph.D.'s. CS conference proceedings provide public information on research effort by existing CS workers. Among papers authored by researchers from industry, about one-quarter can be matched to a contemporaneous patent application - an indicator of a more valuable innovation. Yet the fact of the application remains private information at the incumbent employer for 18 months. Consistent with public learning, researchers with a new paper have higher inter-firm mobility rates than do coworkers without a paper. Initially, authors of papers with a matched patent are less likely to move than authors without a patent application. But once the patent application becomes public, their mobility rates cross over. Authors of papers with a matched patent are also 35% more likely to move to a top tech firm. These patterns confirm the predictions of a model in which incumbent firms have initially private information on more productive researchers. Structural estimates of the model suggest that if papers and patents were disclosed simultaneously, high-ability workers would sort more quickly to high-productivity firms. The implied increase in allocative efficiency would increase innovation outputs by about 5%.
January 17, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Ryungha Oh (Yale): “Spatial Sorting of Workers and Firms”  Abstract: Why do productive workers and firms locate together in dense cities? I develop a new theory of two-sided sorting in which both heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space. Three forces are essential for generating spatial disparities: complementarity between worker and firm productivity, random matching within frictional local labor markets, and congestion costs. I demonstrate that the equilibrium exhibits excessive concentration of workers and firms, and dispersing them away from dense locations can mitigate congestion without reducing output. I then provide direct empirical evidence of two-sided sorting using German administrative microdata. An exogenous increase in the quality of the local workforce results in more productive firms choosing the same location. Finally, to quantify the implications of the model, I calibrate it to U.S. regional data and show that policies such as federal income taxes or local housing regulations, which relocate workers and firms toward less dense areas, can increase welfare.
January 17, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xiaojie Liu
January 16, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Anna Russo (MIT): “Additionality and Asymmetric Information in Environmental Markets: Evidence from Conservation Auctions” with Karl M. Aspelund  Abstract: Market mechanisms aim to deliver environmental services at low cost. However, this objective is undermined by participants whose conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive — or “additional” — as the lowest cost providers of environmental services may not be the highest social value. We investigate this potential market failure in the world’s largest auction mechanism for ecosystem services, the Conservation Reserve Program, with a dataset linking bids in the program’s scoring auction to satellite-derived land use. We use a regression discontinuity design to show that three of four marginal winners of the auction are not additional. Moreover, we find that the heterogeneity in counterfactual land use introduces adverse selection in the market. We then develop and estimate a joint model of multi-dimensional bidding and land use to quantify the implications of this market failure for the performance of environmental procurement mechanisms and competitive offset markets. We design alternative auctions with scoring rules that incorporate the expected impact of the auction on bidders’ land use. These auctions increase efficiency by using bids and observed characteristics to select participants based on both costs and expected additionality.
January 12, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Dev Patel (Harvard): “Learning About a Warming World: Attention and Adaptation in Agriculture Floods”  Abstract: Global warming threatens the livelihoods of 600 million low-income agricultural workers. I study how farmers learn about the environment and the consequences for climate change adaptation. Rice farmers in Bangladesh must form beliefs about local soil salinity, a climate danger exacerbated by rising sea levels that can be mitigated by planting salinity-tolerant seeds. Comparing beliefs about salt levels to agronomic readings, I find that on average farmers hold correct environmental perceptions, but this masks substantial errors across individuals. I explain this pattern using a conceptual framework of belief formation featuring an identification problem: farmers must learn about multiple unobserved environmental threats from ambiguous signals. As a result, farmers endogenously process data in support of their priors, e.g., someone worried about high salinity will interpret low yield as a sign of too much salt. Climate change amplifies this process by systematically altering the environmental risks farmers consider most threatening. I test and confirm the framework's predictions using a pair of natural experiments that capture two changes emblematic of global warming: salient shocks that capture attention (e.g., tidal flooding) and subtle shifts that go unnoticed (e.g., groundwater contamination through rising sea-levels). Despite equal effects on true salt levels, I find asymmetric impacts on beliefs as subtle groundwater intrusion causes no change in perceptions while saltwater floods spur significant overestimation. Analyses of rainfall and flooding perceptions exhibit similar patterns to those of soil salinity. In large-scale field experiments, I document major economic consequences of environmental beliefs: correcting misperceptions significantly alters farmers' demand for salinity-tolerant seeds with substantial impacts on profits. I use this experimental variation to estimate and validate a structural model of seed choice that allows me to simulate counterfactual policies and underscores the influence of environmental beliefs.
January 11, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Alina Mulyukova Title: "Services Liberalization and Product Variety of Manufacturing Firms" Abstract: "This paper investigates the effect of liberalization in the services sector on downstream manufacturing firms' product scope and the distribution of sales across products. I combine firm-level panel data for India with the services reform measure and exploit variation across manufacturing firms in their exposure to service inputs as well as time variation in services reform in a two-way fixed effects framework. My analysis yields that reforms in the services sector significantly increased the number of products of manufacturing firms and decreased the concentration of sales. Looking further at the characteristics of added products, I find that firms add products in the same 3-digit industry as their core product, which leads to a within-firm cannibalization effect. I present a model of multi-product firms in the presence of within firm demand linkages. I document that reforms in the services sector decrease firms' fixed cost of product innovation, whereas having no effect on the variable cost."
January 10, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Kunal Sangani (Harvard): "Markups Across the Income Distribution: Measurement and Implications" Abstract: I examine the relationship between customer income and firm markups using rich data on household transactions and wholesale costs. Over the observed purchases, high-income households pay 15pp higher retail markups than low-income households. Half of the markup gap is due to differences in markups paid at the same store. Conditional on income, markups paid by a household also increase when a household shops in high-income areas, shops at retail chains with locations in other high-income areas, or purchases products with a high-income customer base. A model in which household search intensity depends on opportunity cost of time can account for these facts. Consistent with the model’s predictions, I document that retail markups across cities rise with both per-capita income and inequality. Through the lens of the model, changes in the income distribution since 1950 account for a 10–14pp rise in retail markups, with 30 percent of the increase since 1980 due to growing income dispersion. This rise in markups consists of within-firm markup increases as well as a reallocation of sales to high-markup firms, which occurs without any change to the nature of firm production or competition.
December 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Job Talk	Basit Zafar (UMichigan): "Assessing the Costs of Balancing College and Work Activities: The Gig Economy Meets Online Education"Spectral and post-spectral estimators for grouped panel data models" with Esteban Aucejo and Spencer Perry Abstract: Balancing the demands of work and schooling is a challenging task for an increasing number of students who have to pay their way through college and for workers who intend to upgrade their skills. However, flexible learning and working environments could play an important role in easing many frictions associated with performing both activities simultaneously. Using detailed data from gig workers enrolled in online college education, we analyze how labor supply and study efforts respond to changes in labor market conditions and college activities/tasks. Ourfindings indicate that average weekly college activities reduce weekly time spent on the Uber platform by 1.7 hours, representing a "short run" opportunity cost of only $41 per week. We also show that study time is not particularly sensitive to changes in labor market conditions, where a 10% increase in average weekly pay reduces study hours by only 2%. Consistent with these results, we find that workers take advantage of their flexible schedules by changing their usual working hours when college activities are more demanding. Finally, we do not find adverse effects of work hours on academic performance in this context, or of study hours on workplace performance (as measured by driver ratings or tips). Overall, the evidence suggests that combining flexible working and learning formats could constitute a suitable path for many (low-SES) students who work to afford an increasingly expensive college education and for workers aiming to improve their skill set.
December 7, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Job Talk	Denis Chetverikov (UCLA): "Spectral and Post-Spectral Estimators for Grouped Panel Data Models" with Elena Manresa Abstract: In this paper, we develop spectral and post-spectral estimators for grouped panel data models. Both estimators are consistent in the asymptotics where the number of observations N and the number of time periods T simultaneously grow large. In addition, the post-spectral estimator is √NT-consistent and asymptotically normal with mean zero under the assumption of well-separated groups even if T is growing much slower than N. The post-spectral estimator has, therefore, theoretical properties that are comparable to those of the grouped fixed-effect estimator developed by Bonhomme and Manresa in [11]. In contrast to the grouped fixed-effect estimator, however, our post-spectral estimator is computationally straightforward.
December 6, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Yutong Zhang (Northwestern University): "Snitching on Peers"
December 5, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Alex Torgovitsky (UChicago): "Empirical Analysis of Linear Supply and Demand in Heterogeneous Markets"
December 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Will Rafey (UCLA): Title TBD
December 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Charles Williamson (Northwestern University): "Modeling Migration and Investment Decisions in Response to Climate Change"
December 1, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Mansa Saxena (Northwestern University): "Effects of Female Education on Dowry in India"
December 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Davis Kedrosky  Title: Expropriation, Reallocation, and Political Selection: Evidence from the Rise of the English Gentry Abstract: I study the emergence of Parliamentary government in England during the early modern period. In the century preceding the Civil War (1540-1640), Parliament was gradually transformed from an occasional assembly into a regular institution, developing formal operating procedures and the first stirrings of an independent legislative agenda. Which economic interests in the House of Commons drove this shift? To answer this question, I use biographical data on British MPs to investigate the effects of a shock to the distribution of landholding—the dissolution of the English monasteries—on the composition of Parliament. Sales of monastic land led to the expansion of the gentry and thus an increase in the number of gentlemen competing for seats. This presentation will discuss descriptive statistics and preliminary evidence on the changing social backgrounds and political activities of Parliamentarians. AND Speaker: Guohui Jiang Title: Trickle Down Cooperation: Draft Fairness and Voluntary Enlistment in World War II Abstract: This paper investigates the role of fairness in shaping voluntary enlistment decisions during World War II in the United States. Exploiting draft lotteries, I explore how individuals' draft affected their neighbors' voluntary enlistment.  I find that the drafting of higher-income individuals resulted in increased neighborhood enlistment, while drafting lower-income individuals discouraged their neighbors' enlistment. This divergence can be explained by fairness views. As higher-income individuals had more access to draft deferments, a relatively higher draft rate among them enhanced perceptions of draft fairness, thereby boosting enlistment of their neighbors. Administrative data and survey evidence confirm these. These findings highlight the importance of equity and fairness in sustaining social cooperation.
November 30, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Ludovica Mosillo Title: The impact of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa embarked on an ambitious electrification effort, connecting nearly 90% of its population to the electrical grid. However, the aging coal-powered supply system has struggled to meet the growing demand for electricity, resulting in a persistent threat of countrywide blackouts. To mitigate this risk in 2007, Eskom, the national power utility, introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“Load Shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply. initially infrequent and of shorts duration, starting in 2019 Power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. This project aims to analyze the consequences of this phenomenon on South African households and firms
November 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Giovanni Pisauro Title: "The Determinants and Consequences of Telehealth"
November 29, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Leticia Arroyo Abad (CUNY): “Gambling for America: The First Wave of Migration to the Americas, 1492-1540”.
November 29, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pablo Sanchez "Credit Access and Housing Quality", joint with Kwok Yan Chiu and Diego Cid.
November 29, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Giacomo Marcolin (Northwestern University): "Gig Work as Income Insurance During Unemployment: Evidence from Germany"
November 28, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Carlos Lamarche (University of Kentucky): “Quantile Regression with an Endogenous Misclassified Binary Regressor”
November 28, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Ricardo Perez-Truglia (Berkeley Haas): "What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking" with Zoe B. Cullen and Shengwu Li
November 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Nano Barahona (UC Berkeley): Title TBD
November 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Dalton Zhang (Northwestern University): "De-anchored Inflation? Flattened (and Steepened) Philips Curve"
November 21, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Ashesh Rambacham (MIT): "From Predictive Algorithms to Automatic Generation of Anomalies" with Sendhil Mullainathan Abstract: Economic theories often progress through the discovery of “anomalies.” Canonical examples of anomalies include the Allais Paradox and the Kahneman-Tversky choice experiments, which are constructed menus of lotteries that highlighted particular flaws in expected utility theory and spurred the development of new theories for decisionmaking under risk. In this paper, we develop algorithmic procedures to automatically generate such anomalies. Our algorithmic procedures take as inputs an existing theory and data it seeks to explain, and then generate examples on which we would likely observe violations of our existing theory if we were to collect data. As an illustration, we produce anomalies for expected utility theory using simulated lottery choice data from individuals who behave according to cumulative prospect theory. Our procedures recover known anomalies for expected utility theory in behavioral economics and discover novel anomalies based on the probability weighting function. We conduct incentivized experiments to collect choice data on our algorithmically generated anomalies, finding that participants violate expected utility theory at similar rates to the Allais Paradox and Common Ratio Effect. While this illustration is specific, our anomaly generation procedures are general and can be applied in any domain where there exists a formal theory and rich data that the theory seeks to explain.
November 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Zhen Huo (Yale): "Noisy Global Value Chains" with Ha Bui, Andrei Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar Abstract: We study international propagation of both fundamental and non-fundamental shocks in a global production network model with information frictions. Producers in a sector do not perfectly observe other country-sector fundamentals, and their production decisions depend on their beliefs about worldwide exogenous states as well as other producers’ behavior. In this environment, “noise” shocks – errors in the public signals about fundamentals – propagate internationally and generate aggregate fluctuations. Using a novel panel dataset containing the frequencies of country-industry-specific economic news reports by 11 leading newspapers in the G7 plus Spain, we show that greater news coverage is associated with both smaller GDP forecast errors, and less disagreement among forecasters. We use these empirical regularities to discipline the parameters governing the severity of information frictions. We find that noise shocks are a quantitatively important source of international fluctuations. Noise shocks propagate relatively more powerfully to the more distant parts of the network, while TFP shocks propagate less powerfully to the more distant sectors in the presence of informational frictions.
November 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pablo Sanchez (Northwestern University): "Title TBA"
November 17, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tom Fisher (Northwestern University): "Destructive Reputational Bargaining"
November 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 16, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sebastian Sardon Title: TBD
November 16, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: “Illicit economies and economic growth”
November 15, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Margaret Jones (Emory University): "Institutional Drift, Property Rights, and Economic Development: Evidence from Historical Treaties" with Donn Feir and Rob Gillezeau Abstract: For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated everywhere, including in regions subsequently settled by Europeans. Consequentially, there is substantial regional variation in the legal status of occupied lands, jurisdiction over natural resources, and state commitments to Indigenous nations. We study how these legal institutions have shaped the path of economic development in Indigenous communities. Using restricted-access census data, we show that historical treaties substantially lower income in Indigenous communities today. We argue that this results from the constitutional and legal recognition of Aboriginal rights and title, which have dramatically increased bargaining power and, consequently, income growth in non-treaty Indigenous communities.
November 15, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Michael Cai
November 15, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Takaaki Sagawa (Northwestern University): "Sovereign Liquidity Shocks"
November 14, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Kohei Yata (UW Madison): "Optimal Decision Rules Under Partial Identification" Abstract: I consider a class of statistical decision problems in which the policy maker must decide between two alternative policies to maximize social welfare based on a finite sample. The central assumption is that the underlying, possibly infinite-dimensional parameter, lies in a known convex set, potentially leading to partial identification of the welfare effect. An example of such restrictions is the smoothness of counterfactual outcome functions. As the main theoretical result, I derive a finite-sample, exact minimax regret decision rule within the class of all decision rules under normal errors with known variance. When the error distribution is unknown, I obtain a feasible decision rule that is asymptotically minimax regret. I apply my results to the problem of whether to change a policy eligibility cutoff in a regression discontinuity setup, and illustrate them in an empirical application to a school construction program in Burkina Faso.
November 14, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Gustavo Bobonis (University of Toronto): "A Helping Hand Goes a Long Way: Long-Term Effects of Counselling and Support to Workfare Program Participants" with Aneta Bonikowska, Phillip Oreopoulos, W. Craig Riddell, and Steven P. Ryan
November 13, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Lulu Wang (Northwestern): "Regulating Competing Payment Networks”    Abstract: Payment markets are two-sided. Networks like Visa and Mastercard charge merchant fees to fund consumer rewards. I study how regulation, private entry, and public entry in this market affect prices, distribution, and welfare in equilibrium. I model consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of multiple cards, merchant pricing, and network competition. I estimate the model by matching data on consumers’ card holdings, merchant acceptance, network pricing, and the effects of debit rewards reductions. The estimated model matches external evidence on networks’ costs, merchants’ margins, and the effects of AmEx’s 2016 – 2019 cuts in merchant fees. Using the estimated model, I compare the effects of capping credit card merchant fees, increasing entry of private credit card networks, and introducing a low-fee public option like FedNow. Capping credit card merchant fees is progressive and increases annual welfare by $29 billion by reducing rewards, retail prices paid by cash and debit consumers, and credit card use. In contrast, because I estimate consumers’ reward sensitivity is ten times merchants’ fee-sensitivity, incumbents respond to competition by raising fees to fund rewards. A public option struggles to gain consumer adoption without rewards, limiting welfare gains.
November 13, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PM	Kellogg Labor Seminar: Amanda Pallais	Amanda Pallais (Harvard University)
November 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Pascual Restrepo Mesa (Boston University): "Automation and Rent Dissipation: Implications for Inequality, Productivity, and Welfare" with Daron Acemoglu
November 13, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Johanna Rayl (Northwestern University): "Energy Subsidies and Cash Transfers: Redistributive Policy in Indonesia"
November 10, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Evan Majic (Northwestern University): "Think Big: Solving Large-Scale Heterogenous Agent Models in Sequence Space"
November 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development	Tommaso Porzio (Columbia): "Self-employment within the firm" with Vittoria Bassi, Jung Hyuk Lee, Alessandra Peter, Ritwika Sen, and Esau Tugume Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a general equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it with our data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close, in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmark in which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing a production space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits from alleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most African firms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable.
November 9, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker Matteo Ruzzante Title TBD
November 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Applied Microeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Claire Mackevicius Title: "Plugging Holes or Hoarding More? Toward an Understanding of Fundraising PTA Spending Dynamics at Public Schools"  Abstract: “Decades of policy efforts have aimed to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources across K-12 public schools, weakening the link between community wealth and government resources at schools (Chingos & Blagg, 2017). At the same time, fundraising PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), Organizations (PTOs), and “Friends of” groups) have grown dramatically in number and size (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). These nonprofit organizations provide supplemental funds at some public schools, though school funding research and policy do not systematically take fundraising PTAs into account–they represent an understudied source of discretionary funds at public schools. The limited extant literature rests on an untested presumption that these groups exist and spend money at public schools in response to government budget shortfalls. In this study, I test this presumption and do not find evidence that on average, fundraising PTA spending responds to shifts in government spending at schools. I use regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences event study approaches to estimate the causal effect of school budget referenda elections on fundraising PTAs, analyzing a dataset I constructed that links all fundraising PTAs in California to the public schools they support from 2005-2018. I find suggestive evidence that in racially homogenous districts, PTAs may be responsive to government spending at schools. I also consider whether PTAs may operate in ways more consistent with theorizing that suggests they facilitate community engagement and establish district identities as places that invest in public schools and/or reify economic and racial stratification. I discuss the potential portability of findings across other states and settings, describe implications for school funding research and policy more broadly, and deepen understandings of fundraising PTA organizations.”
November 8, 20237:30 PM - 9:00 PM	Leon N. Moses Distinguished Lecture in Transportation	Patrick Harker (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia): "Perspectives on Economics Trends and Global Supply Chains"
November 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Yishay Yafeh (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): "The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America" with Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Konstantin Kosenko, and JK Suh
November 8, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kilian Rieder  Title: Central Bank Communication by ??? The Economics of Public Policy Leaks
November 7, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Lihua Lei (Stanford GSB): "Model-Agnostic Covariate-Assisted Inference on Partially Identified Causal Effects" with Wenlong Ji and Asher Spector
November 7, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Abigail Adams-Prassl (University of Oxford): "The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships" with Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang Abstract: Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviours beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. This paper provides the first evidence on the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victim’s economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role played by economic suppression and coercive control in such relationships. Using administrative data and a matched control event study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner, which translates into a total household income loss. Second, this decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women’s pre-cohabitation outside options. Third, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to use coercive control to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship. We show that this model is consistent with all three empirical facts. We harness the model’s predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women’s outside options is crucially linked to breakup dynamics.
November 6, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Chris Conlon (NYU Stern): "Estimating Preferences and Substitution Patterns from Second-Choice Data Alone" with Julie Holland Mortimer and Paul Sarkis Abstract: We consider identification and estimation of a model of consumer choice where the main source of variation is in the set of products made available to consumers. Instead of relying on variation in the choice environment (prices, product characteristics) we require first-choice probabilities and a subset of (conditional) second-choice probabilities. We develop a semiparametric low-rank approximation to the matrix of second-choice probabilities that is consistent with mixed logit models of demand but is defined in “product space” and does not require that product characteristics explain substitution patterns. In Monte Carlo experiments we show that our model can replicate a nested logit or random coefficients logit model. We apply our model to a single year of automobile data from Grieco et al. (2021) and show that we can fit substitution patterns with higher accuracy.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Dept. of History presents "China and the West" with Professor Joel Mokyr	We invite you to a moderated discussion between University of Chicago Prof. Pomeranz and Northwestern Prof. Mokyr. On the Early Modern "Great Divergence" between the economies of China and of the West. Lunch starts at 12pm and the talk promptly at 12:30pm.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Manuel Amador (University of Minnesota): Title TBD