DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Past Events

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

Additionally, view the drop down menu on the left.

Date & Time	Seminar Series	Speaker and Title
February 20, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch	Speaker: Thu Tran Title: Negative Shocks and Hidden Money on the Household Abstract: This project seeks to answer the question: How does income hiding by household members respond to the expectation of negative shocks? I aim to show that when the household bargaining rule allocates less marginal resources to a member during tougher times, they are more likely to hide money in anticipation of negative shocks. This insight connects hiding behaviors to intra-household risk-sharing. Risk-sharing efficiency requires household bargaining to favor more risk-aversed members during economic hardship. Therefore, if a risk-aversed family member hides money in response to negative shocks, there might exist inefficiencies in intra-household risk sharing. In such cases, bargaining does not adequately support household members most worried about risks, so they resort to hiding as a coping strategy.
February 20, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Nathalie Basto Aguirre  Title: Real Effects of Firms’ Credit Information Abstract: Financial frictions hinder firm investment and growth, affecting productivity and development. Credit access is crucial for SMEs, often challenged by information asymmetry. Credit registries improve lender information and repayment incentives, providing SMEs with "reputational collateral" to boost credit access. However, excluding incidental delinquents raises concerns about balancing information sharing and borrower protection. This study examines the effects of limiting credit information for firms through Colombia's Clean Slate policy, a one-time amnesty in 2021 that deleted negative credit reports for previously delinquent SMEs. Using a difference in discontinuities design based on the revenue cutoff for SME classification, we find that restricting information increased credit access for prior delinquents without raising interest rates for this group. Conversely, clean-record firms were negatively affected by the informational externality induced by the policy, experiencing reduced credit access and significantly higher interest rates as banks adjusted their risk assessments. Overall, the policy tightened credit markets, with suggestive evidence of impacts on firm growth and employment, highlighting the trade-offs of such interventions in balancing credit access and market efficiency.
February 19, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Rui Sousa
February 14, 20251:00 PM - 2:30 PM	Economic History Lunch	Speaker: Michael Giordano Title: Park Avenues: Wealth, Neighborhoods, and Mobility in Gilded Age Manhattan. Abstract: The Neighborhoods Hypothesis holds that economic mobility is influenced by the socioeconomic status of residents nearby. Existing research focuses on demand-side interventions-offering families opportunities to move to high-status areas. This paper uses the creation of Central Park (1858-1876) as a natural experiment to examine a supply-side intervention, where, following the American Civil War, a rich neighborhood springs up around existing households. Using topographic variation to separate treated and untreated households, I find that, conditional on already possessing property, treated households see 70% larger wealth gains than comparable untreated households between 1860 and 1870. By 1900, though, the economic status of children from treated and untreated households is statistically indistinguishable across multiple measures. These findings suggest that, in this setting, exogenous increases in neighborhood amenities and household wealth did not have sustained effects on future mobility.
February 13, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch	Speaker: Jiaqi Zhao
February 13, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Pedro Aldighieri  Title: General Purpose Technologies and the Evolution of Science: Evidence from the Early Computers (Co-authored with Franco Malpassi)  Abstract: This paper examines how access to transformative technologies shapes scientific research outcomes. We focus on the introduction of digital computers to U.S. universities during the 1950s and 1960s, leveraging their staggered adoption across institutions to study impacts on research and researcher behavior. Using a novel, comprehensive database of historical computer installations at U.S. universities, combined with publication records, we implement a differences-in-differences design to analyze how early exposure to computers influenced scientific output. Our preliminary findings indicate that research using computers began immediately following institutional installations, with computer-intensive papers concentrated in physical sciences, particularly physics, mathematics, and engineering. While papers using computers show a citation premium of approximately 20%, we find no preliminary evidence that computer installations affected overall researcher productivity.
February 12, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Gabriel
February 6, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Patrick Agte (Princeton): Fighting Silent Killers: How India’s Public Healthcare Staffing Expansion Saves Lives by Improving Access and Market Quality  Abstract: Millions of adults in low- and middle-income countries die from treatable conditions every year. This paper highlights that an understaffed public healthcare system contributes to high premature mortality, both directly by affecting public provision and indirectly by allowing low-quality private providers to remain competitive.  We evaluate a large-scale reform to India's public healthcare system that adds a mid-level healthcare worker to village clinics. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to assignment rules, we find that adding a worker reduces all-age mortality in the catchment area by 10% within two years, making the reform highly cost-effective. Eighty percent of the decline is attributable to a decrease in deaths of adults aged 56+, increasing their life expectancy by at least three months. We conduct audit visits, patient exit interviews, and provider surveys to study mechanisms and find that the program improves performance and service availability in the public sector and also induces private providers to increase their quality. To quantify the importance of each of these channels and evaluate counterfactual policies, we estimate a structural model of patient demand. Ten percent of the decrease in all-age mortality can be attributed to the private sector response, while the remaining 90% is due to simultaneous improvements in public sector quality and access. Only improving public sector quality or access in isolation has limited effects. Model estimates further demonstrate large heterogeneity in predicted treatment gains; we show that an optimal reallocation of the new providers that accounts for local market conditions could achieve a substantially greater reduction in mortality.
February 6, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	CANCELLED: Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	CANCELLED Kristen Shure (University of Pennsylvania)
February 6, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Seung Hyeong Lee  Title: "Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Employment, and Investment Abstract: Homeownership is becoming out of reach for younger generations. Using a life-cycle structural model, we show that when individuals give up homeownership, they increase consumption by depleting savings originally earmarked for home purchases and increasing marginal propensity to consume. They also reduce employment, as the loss of the goal of homeownership diminishes their need to save and lowers their willingness to endure the disutility of work. These findings align with global trends, where younger cohorts who abandon homeownership aspirations redirect savings toward luxury consumption and reduce work effort. Moreover, under conditions of high variance in risky asset returns and/or robust social safety nets that guarantee a minimum quality of life, these individuals exhibit extreme risk-seeking behaviors as a potential path to homeownership. This also aligns with the observed rise in retail investor participation in high-risk assets. Together, these trends highlight the economic implications of the "giving up" phenomenon. Using transaction-level data from U.S. bank and card account usage, we identify a subsample of individuals whose regional housing markets rendered homeownership unaffordable. We provide empirical evidence that aligns with simulation results.
February 5, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Cris
February 4, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Matthew Brown (Stanford)
February 3, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Danny O'Connor (MIT): Revitalize or Relocate: Optimal Place-based Transfers for Local Recessions  Abstract: Many regions in the US experience depressed labor demand and high unemployment, even when the rest of the United States does not. How should the US government respond? In this paper, I characterize optimal place-based transfers in a dynamic economic geography model with nominal wage rigidity and compare them to observed government transfers. I show that transfers not only have a stimulus effect—by boosting local demand—but also a migration effect—by encouraging local residents to stay. Analytically, I provide optimal transfer formulas that capture this trade-off and show, perhaps surprisingly, that the optimal transfer to a distressed region may be a tax due to the migration effect. All else equal, transfers should be larger in the short-run and when distressed places are geographically concentrated. Quantitatively, I find that observed transfers are both too small in the short-run and too large in the medium-run, achieving less than half of the gains from the fully optimal response to idiosyncratic local shocks. I conclude by exploring how the US government could have responded to the China trade shock in the 2000s.
January 30, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Katie Leinenbach (Emory)
January 30, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Sibling Spillovers: The Unintended Impact of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students 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 the 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 criteria: the family's poverty index and the target child's performance on the high school exit exam. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that for low SES families, the policy has positive effects on college enrollment and test score performance. Additionally, we observe a positive motivational effect on school performance and higher education enrollment among siblings of nearly eligible test-takers.
January 29, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Tishara Garg (MIT): Can Industrial Policy overcome Coordination Failures? Theory and Evidence  Abstract: This paper introduces a method to study the impact of policy events on equilibrium selection in settings where strong complementarities may lead to multiple equilibria and coordination failures. Many industrial policies are rooted in the idea of coordination failures and big-push' theories, yet empirical evidence on their effectiveness remains limited, since distinguishing equilibrium shifts from direct changes in fundamentals is challenging. Leveraging tools from industrial organization and algebraic geometry, I develop an approach to study coordination effects without imposing strong assumptions on the distribution or responsiveness of economic fundamentals. The method identifies the `types' of factual and counterfactual equilibria through a three-step procedure: model estimation and inversion, equilibrium enumeration, and type assignment. Types of factual equilibria may be used to examine how events, like urban infrastructure, subsidy drives, or trade liberalization, affect equilibrium selection. Types of counterfactual equilibria further allow decomposition of observed effects into fundamentals- versus coordination-driven. I apply this method to study industrial zones in India. Using a newly assembled dataset, I find that municipalities receiving an industrial zone see a 60% increase in non-farm employment over 15 years, with significant spillovers to non-targeted sectors and municipalities. Combining the methodology with event study designs, I find that industrial zones increase the probability of escaping a low-industrialization equilibrium by 38%, with coordination effects explaining roughly one-third of the observed change in outcomes.
January 29, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Chase
January 28, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Oscar Volpe (UChicago): Job Preferences, Labor Market Power, and Inequality  Abstract: I analyze how a firm’s labor market power shapes, and is shaped by, its workforce, and I evaluate the implications for welfare and inequality. Using matched worker-firm panel data from Norway (1995-2018), I develop, identify, and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market where firms compete with one another for workers who are heterogeneous in both their skills and preferences over wages versus non-wage job amenities. I allow the wage-amenity trade-offs to be correlated with skills, while also varying among equally skilled workers. When a firm adjusts its wages, the composition of its workforce shifts, and these compositional changes, in turn, affect the labor supply curve to the firm. As a result, the firm’s wage-setting power varies based on which types of workers it employs. I find that this variation leads to large allocative inefficiency, with welfare losses from imperfect competition estimated at 9.5% relative to the competitive benchmark.
January 28, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Chiara Sotis (LSE)
January 27, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Deivy Houeix (MIT): Asymmetric Information and Digital Technology Adoption: Evidence from Senegal  Abstract: Digital technologies have the potential to increase firm productivity. However, they often come bundled with data observability, which can be a double-edged sword. Observability reduces information frictions and can increase efficiency, but some agents may lose their informational rent and thus resist adoption. I explore this trade-off between observability and adoption through two field experiments conducted over nearly two years. These experiments, guided by contract theory, introduce digital payments to the Senegalese taxi industry in partnership with the country's largest payment company. In the first experiment, I randomize access to digital payments for drivers (employees) and transaction observability to taxi owners (employers). I find that digital payments reduce drivers' cash-related costs by about half but also serve as effective monitoring tools for taxi owners. Transaction observability substantially increases driver effort, contract efficiency, and the duration of owner-driver relationships. However, 50% of drivers—primarily the worst-performing and poorest—decline to adopt digital payments when transactions are observable. The second experiment shows that the adoption rate doubles when drivers are assured that owners will not be able to observe their transactions. I develop a theoretical framework and use the experimental variations to estimate the welfare impacts of policy counterfactuals. I show that removing transaction observability would maintain moral hazard problems but broaden adoption and thus increase overall welfare—an approach ultimately implemented by the payment company. These findings highlight the crucial role of information embedded in digital technologies, as it magnifies gains for adopting firms but can deter initial adoption.
January 24, 20251:30 PM - 2:30 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Frank Limbrock (Northwestern)
January 23, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Sebastian Poblete Coddou  Title: Union Bargaining Schemes in the Presence of Labor Market Power Abstract: There is increasing concern for the exercise of monopsony power in different industries and countries. In this project, I study the role of unions in potentially counteracting wage markdowns. Using data on firms, union, and collective agreements on the entire Chilean manufacturing sector, I propose a bargaining model that allows for two related issues to be studied. First, to separately quantify the components of wages explained by marginal productivity, monopsony power of the form, and bargaining power of the union. Second, to study the role of different bargaining schemes, in particular comparing single firm and union bargaining with unions representing a number of workers across firms. In this presentation, I'll present characteristics and descriptives of the newly acquired data, and discuss the proposal of the bargaining model and estimation strategies.
January 22, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Dalton
January 21, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Lea Nagel (Stanford): As-If Dominant Strategy Mechanisms Abstract: We show that achieving dominant strategy incentive compatibility often requires to choose a mechanism which severely limits what agents can observe about others' previous moves. However, experiments and theoretical arguments suggest increasing the transparency of a mechanism's extensive form can improve reliability of its predictions---even if it breaks the dominant strategy property. To help resolve this dilemma, we define as-if dominant strategy mechanisms: (i) Each agent has at least one strategy that becomes dominant if the others were restricted to behave as if the mechanism was static, and (ii) all combinations of such strategies are ex-post equilibria. These mechanisms look like a dominant strategy one to cognitively limited agents who neglect others may condition their behavior in sophisticated ways, and can help them avoid dominated behaviors. Moreover, they ensure sophisticated agents never have an incentive to deviate. Our framework rationalizes the auction format chosen by prominent online platforms, such as eBay. It also provides a unified explanation for experimental evidence in various settings. Further, we provide sufficient conditions for as-if dominant strategy mechanisms to also be weak dominance solvable.
January 21, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	MOVED TO 1410 Heather Bone (University of Toronto)
January 16, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Canishk Naik (LSE): Mental Health and the Targeting of Social Assistance  Abstract: People living with mental disorders are at a higher risk of needing income-support programs but face greater difficulty overcoming barriers to access. This paper investigates whether social assistance effectively reaches people with poor mental health. I measure mental health and social assistance take-up using Dutch administrative data and develop a theoretical framework to show how take-up responses can identify the marginal value of benefits (need) and the cost of barriers. These are key components for evaluating targeting effectiveness. I find that a policy increasing barriers disproportionately screens-out those with poor mental health, indicating a 64% higher cost of these barriers. Despite their higher cost, people with poor mental health have the same average take-up levels as those with good mental health, conditional on eligibility, which suggests greater need. To assess this, I show that individuals with poor mental health are more responsive to plausibly exogenous variation in benefits than those with good mental health, demonstrating that their need is twice as high. These estimates imply that people with poor mental health are inefficiently excluded from low-income welfare assistance by barriers. Consequently, reducing barriers to take-up would be twice as effective as increasing benefits.
January 16, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Ellen Anderson (UC Davis)
January 16, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Xizhao Wang Title: Human Capital and Firm’s Innovation Direction Abstract: This paper examines how the loss of personnel impacts the direction of innovation within firms. I introduce three distinct measures to quantify shifts in firms’ innovation trajectories. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then analyze changes in the innovation direction of U.S. public firms following personnel deaths. The results reveal that the death of upper-tail inventors significantly alters a firm’s innovation trajectory, while deaths among lower-tail inventors and management personnel do not. Further analysis suggests that a firm’s innovation direction is shaped by the aggregation of individual inventors’ expertise and the collaborative dynamics within teams. The findings—characterized by reduced invention in the technology fields of upper-tail inventors, a lack of new inventors in affected firms, and declines in firm performance—highlight the hard-to-replace nature of inventive human capital and underscore its role in firms’ dynamic capabilities. Moreover, by employing the inventor’s death as an instrumental variable, this paper provides evidence linking higher invention output to stronger sales and greater profitability within firms.
January 15, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Morgan Foy (UC - Berkeley): Selection and Performance in Teachers’ Unions  Abstract: This paper examines whether teachers’ unions affect student achievement in Wisconsin. First, I establish several facts about which teachers are voluntary union members. In particular, I find that union members appear negatively selected by teacher value added. Second, using the staggered decertification of district unions over time, I find increases in both student test scores and attendance rates. These effects are not driven by compositional changes within the teaching workforce; rather, I find evidence suggesting that teachers’ productivity improved in decertified districts. Together, the results imply that union efforts to insulate workers may adversely affect the quality of public services.
January 15, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD
January 14, 20253:45 PM - 5:15 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	*Please note the seminar start and end time has changed to 3:45 - 5:15* Allison Green (Princeton): Networks and Geographic Mobility: Evidence from World War II Navy Ships  Abstract: This paper uses quasi-random assignment to World War II Navy ships during World War II to study how personal networks shape migration patterns. Using newly constructed data on 1.4 million sailors, I measure exposure to geographically diverse shipmates and estimate its impact on post-war migration. A one-standard-deviation increase in a sailor's exposure to shipmates from different states raises the probability of out-migration from his own state by 4-5% by 1950. Effects on directed migration are larger but heterogeneous by destination, increasing moves to fast-growing Census divisions by over 15%. I then estimate a discrete choice migration model with embedded networks, revealing Navy ties encouraged long-distance moves, in part substituting short-distance moves that would have otherwise occurred.Using variation from Navy networks to construct instruments for the probability of migrating, I estimate large returns to network-facilitated migration, suggesting Navy ties enabled moves to higher-opportunity areas.
January 14, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Rebecca Rose (LSE)
January 10, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	George Nikolakoudis (Princeton): Incomplete Information in Production Networks  Abstract: I develop a model of production networks in which firms choose inputs under incomplete information about sectoral productivity and aggregate demand disturbances. As in the rational expectations framework of Lucas (1972), firms use input prices as endogenous signals to infer broader economic conditions. Theoretically, I show that the effect of sectoral productivity shocks on aggregate output depends on the interaction between the economy's input-output structure and firm-level uncertainty. Specifically, shocks to upstream sectors have a larger impact on aggregate output during periods of high productivity uncertainty, while shocks to downstream sectors have a larger effect on output during periods of high demand uncertainty. When calibrated to historical U.S. data, the model generates a state-dependent measure of sectoral importance that diverges significantly from traditional metrics, particularly in economic downturns. On aggregate, the interaction between uncertainty and the U.S. economy's network structure dampened the impact of productivity shocks on aggregate output by 50% during Covid (a period of high measured demand uncertainty) relative to the Dot-Com bubble (a period of high measured productivity uncertainty) or non-crisis periods.
January 9, 20255:00 PM - 6:00 PM	A Conversation with Kirabo Jackson: Insights from His Time on President Biden's Council of Economic Advisers	In Conversation with Andrew V. Papachristos Kirabo Jackson is the Abraham Harris Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and a Professor of Economics at Northwestern University.  Andrew Papachristos is a Professor of Sociology and Faculty Fellow at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research This event is organized by the Department of Economics and co-sponsored with the School of Education and Social Policy, Institute for Policy Research, and Kellogg School of Management. RSVP Required
January 9, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Junior Recruitment Seminar	Rebekah Dix (MIT): Combining Complements: Theory and Evidence from Cancer Treatment Innovation Abstract: Innovations often combine several components to achieve outcomes greater than the “sum of the parts.” We argue that such combination innovations can introduce an understudied inefficiency – a positive market expansion externality that benefits the owners of the components. We demonstrate the existence of this externality in the market for pharmaceutical cancer treatments, where drug combination therapies have proven highly effective. Using data on clinical trial investments, we document several facts consistent with inefficiently low private innovation: firms are less likely than publicly funded researchers to trial combinations, firms are less likely to trial combinations including other firms’ drugs than those including their own drugs, and firms often wait to trial combinations including other firms’ drugs until those drugs experience generic entry. Using microdata on drug prices and utilization, we quantify the externalities that arise from new combinations and find that the market expansion externality often dominates the standard negative business stealing externality, suggesting too little innovation in combination therapies. As a result, firms may have incentives to free ride off others’ innovation, which we analyze with a dynamic structural model of innovation decisions. Finally, we use the estimated model to design cost-effective policies that advance combination innovation. Redirecting publicly funded innovation toward combinations with high predicted market expansion or consumer surplus spillovers minimizes crowd out of private investments, increasing the rate of combination innovation and total welfare while remaining budget neutral.
January 9, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Teaching Track Recruitment Sample Lecture	Ben Chabot (Northwestern)
January 9, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	*CANCELLED* HELP Workshop Lunch	Cancelled Jan. 9
December 13, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Joel Mokyr Title: "The Great Reversal and the Industrial Revolution"
December 11, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBD
December 11, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker TBD
December 6, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tomer Novikov (Northwestern University): "Violence in Coups: Ideological Polarization, Bayesian updates and 1936 Spain"
December 6, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Franco Malpassi Title: "General Purpose Technologies and the Evolution of Science: Evidence from the Early Computers" Abstract: This work-in-progress examines how access to transformative technologies shapes scientific careers and research trajectories. We use the introduction of digital computers to U.S. universities during the 1950s and 1960s and study its impact on outcomes of faculty and PhD students. We collect and digitize novel data on historical computer installations at U.S. universities, combining it with scientific publication records and, in the future, with the Survey of Earned Doctorates. Exploiting the staggered adoption of computers by universities, we implement a differences-in-differences design to analyze how early exposure to computers influenced research outcomes, such as changes to researcher career trajectories, researcher productivity, diversity of fields, as well as overall direction of science.
December 5, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Augustin Tapsoba (Toulouse School of Economics): Polygyny and the Economic Determinants of Family Formation in Sub-Saharan Africa  Abstract: Young bachelors and older married men compete for brides in many areas of Sub- Saharan Africa, where polygyny is still practiced. This paper studies how local economic conditions affect the demand for first/unique wives compared to junior wives (second or higher order) and its impact on family formation. I find that the demand for junior wives is more sensitive to aggregate income shocks (rainfall and crop price shocks) in areas where the shadow price of marrying a junior wife is low. As a result, girls and young women exposed to negative shocks during their prime marriageable years are more likely to marry as first/unique wives of young men. Additionally, the higher elasticity in the demand for junior wives substantially mitigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on the age at which girls and young women marry and have their first child.
December 5, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speakers: Sebastian Sardon and Christopher Sims Title: Trade, Land Consolidation, and Agricultural Productivity  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, in particular by reallocating land towards more productive farmers. We address this question by studying Mexico, where a ban on exporting avocados to the US was lifted in 1997. Following the ban lift, we find large increases in crop yields in treated areas that are highly suitable for avocado cultivation. Event study estimates suggest effects as large as $800 USD per hectare in treated villages (over 60% of the country’s mean output per hectare). We use newly linked confidential census data to show that export opportunities trigger land consolidation in treated areas, consistent with trade theory (e.g., Melitz, 2003). In such areas, more productive farms grow faster than unproductive ones, whereas farm growth is essentially independent of productivity elsewhere. Yield growth and land consolidation seem concentrated in places where communal land holdings are low, suggesting that gains from trade are only realized where land markets are not too frictional.
December 5, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Myera Rashid  Title: The Black-White Mobility Gap: The Role of Religious Institutions in the US Abstract: The economic mobility of Black Americans has lagged far behind that of their White counterparts and continues to do so today. In this work-in-progress, I study the role of the Black Church as a determinant of this observed economic mobility gap. Black churches may improve intergenerational outcomes for members by providing informal economic insurance or migration networks to places with better opportunities. Simultaneously, strong ties to their churches can also prevent Black individuals from migrating to take advantage of faraway economic opportunities, thus reducing both geographic and economic mobility. Exploiting a historical natural experiment that led to out-migration of Black individuals, I assess how presence of Black churches mediates this effect. Preliminary results suggest that Black churches might have facilitated out-migration of Black individuals in the presence of a shock.
December 4, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Economic History and Industrial Organization	Chad Syverson (Chicago Booth): Spatial Competition, Strategic Entry Responses, and the North Dakota Railroad War of 1905 Abstract: The North Dakota Railroad War of 1905, which pitted a potential entrant (the Soo Line) against an established monopolist incumbent (the Great Northern Railway), offers a lucid empirical example of strategic behavior, and in particular the potential for entry deterrence through product proliferation. I use detailed geographic data and historical records to examine the profitability of both the incumbent’s and entrant’s potential and chosen strategies. I find that the incumbent could have likely profitably deterred entry. It did not, however, waiting instead to respond only once the entrant began building. This simultaneous entry arguably led to over expansion in the market. I investigate whether the chosen strategies may have ultimately ended up being both unprofitable for the firms involved as well as, potentially, socially wasteful.
December 4, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Luxi Han
December 4, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	James Atkins (Northwestern University): "The Cost of Connectivity: Sender Pays in South Korea"
December 3, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Jonathan Skinner (Dartmouth College): Productivity Variation and Input Misallocation: Evidence from Hospitals Abstract: There are widespread differences in total factor productivity across producers in the U.S. and around the world. To help explain these variations, we devise a general test for misallocation in input choices and apply it to inpatient hospital care, where the underuse of effective inputs and overuse of ineffective ones has been well-documented and represents input misallocation. Applying our test to a sample of 1.6 million Medicare beneficiaries with heart attacks, we reject the hypothesis of efficient production; hospitals with lower levels of misallocation have higher one-year survival of 3.1 percentage points. Misallocation contributes to around 25 percent of overall variation in hospitals’ total hospital factor productivity.
December 2, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	CANCELLED: Seminar in Macroeconomics	CANCELLED Matteo Maggiori (Stanford University): A Theory of Economic Coercion and Fragmentation Abstract: Hegemonic powers, like the United States and China, exert influence on other countries by threatening the suspension or alteration of financial and trade relationships. Mechanisms that generate gains from integration, such as external economies of scale and specialization, also increase these countries’ power to exert economic influence because in equilibrium they make other relationships poor substitutes for those with a global hegemon. Other countries can implement economic security policies to shape their economies in ways that insulate them from undue foreign pressure. These policies faces a tradeoff between gains from trade and economic security. While an individual country can make itself better off, uncoordinated attempts by multiple countries to limit their dependency on the hegemon lead to inefficient fragmentation of the global f inancial and trade system. We study financial services as a leading application both as tools of coercion and an industry with strong strategic complementarities. We estimate that US geoeconomic power relies on financial services, while Chinese power relies on manufacturing. Since power is non-linear and increases disproportionally as the hegemon approaches controlling the entire supply of a sectoral input, we estimate that much economic security could be achieved with little overall fragmentation by diversifying the input sources of key sectors currently controlled by the hegemons.
December 2, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Harrison Ridland (Northwestern University): "The Interview: Two stage Contests with Flexible Weights"
November 27, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sofia Semik
November 26, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Dongwoo Kim (Simon Fraser University): Semi-nonparametric multidimensional matching: an optimal transport approach Abstract: This paper proposes empirically tractable multidimensional matching models, focusing on worker-job matching. We generalize the parametric model proposed by Lindenlaub (2017), which relies on the assumption of joint normality of observed characteristics of workers and jobs. In our paper, we allow unrestricted distributions of characteristics and show identification of the production technology, and equilibrium wage and matching functions using tools from optimal transport theory. Given identification, we propose efficient, consistent, asymptotically normal sieve estimators. We revisit Lindenlaub’s empirical application and show that, between 1990 and 2010, the U.S. economy experienced much larger technological progress favouring cognitive abilities than the original findings suggest. Furthermore, our flexible model specifications provide a significantly better fit for patterns in the evolution of wage inequality.
November 25, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Garima Sharma (Northwestern University): Collusion Among Employers in India Abstract: This paper evidences collusion among employers in the textile and clothing manufacturing industry in India. First, I develop a simple comparative static test to distinguish standard forms of imperfect competition from collusion. I show that, for very general labor supply and production structures, the spillover effects of firm-specific demand shocks predict opposite employment effects at unshocked competitors who operate independently ( ↓ employment) versus who previously colluded but whose collusion dismantles due to the shock ( ↑ employment). Next, I argue that large employers in the garment industry organize into industry associations to pay workers exactly the state- and industry-specific minimum wage, using it as a focal point for coordination. Members of industry associations are substantially more likely to bunch from above at the local minimum wage than non-members, and track its policy-induced rise without reducing employment. I show that small export demand shocks evoke the standard imperfectly competitive response among non-members (higher wages and employment), but no response from members (they forego export opportunities to stick to the minimum wage). By contrast, when a large demand shock leads affected members to deviate from the minimum wage, unaffected non-members respond as in oligopsony ( ↑ wage, ↓ employment), but unaffected members respond as if their collusion dismantles ( ↑ wage, ↑ employment). Imposing specific models of labor supply and production, the “full-IO” approach rejects the oligopsony model in favor of the breakdown of collusion. I conclude that collusion spurs substantial losses even compared to a world where each firm exercises its own, but not their collective, market power, reducing the average worker’s wage by 9.6% and employment by 17%.
November 25, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Jaeeun Seo (Northwestern University): Sectoral Shocks and Labor Market Dynamics: A Sufficient Statistics Approach (joint with Ryungha Oh)
November 25, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Nicole Saito (Northwestern University): "The Human Capital Hypothesis: Rebuilding after the Japanese Internment"
November 22, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aaron Amburgey (Northwestern University): "The Macroeconomic Effects of Election Shocks"
November 22, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speakers: Vitaliia Eliseeva (Paris School of Economics) Title: "Failing to forge the New Soviet Woman: Long-term effect of WW2-induced sex ratios on family formation" Abstract: Does male scarcity empower women, or, conversely, push them to become more dependent and conform to traditional gender roles? Drawing on the episode of extreme male scarcity caused by 27 million Soviet casualties during WWII, I find that male scarcity decreases women's bargaining power in the marriage market, leading to a long-term rise in conservative gender attitudes and willingness to create a family. Based on exogenous local within-region variation in the military deaths, I identify a causal effect of a 10 percentage-point increase in female share leading to a 3.3 percentage-point increase in the share of married females today. Using survey data, I document that in historically more male-scarce localities modern-day respondents are 11 percentage points more likely to find marriage important and 20 to 40 percentage points more likely to believe in conservative gender roles in the family. To reconcile these results with the literature, I show that the effect of sex ratio skewness is more pronounced in districts where females were already a part of the labor force before the war. Overall, I show how male scarcity, when female labor force participation is high to start with, leads to more conservative and family-oriented societal norms.
November 21, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Erin Kelley (University of Chicago): The Household at Work: A Field Experiment in the Rohingya Refugee Camps Abstract: We use a randomized control trial to examine how employment impacts the household. Our study includes 2,513 households in the world’s largest refugee camp, where we 1) randomly assign either the husband or wife to an employment intervention, 2) interview both partners, and 3) assess outcomes beyond the financial, including psychosocial, power and violence. Our findings reveal that employment affects spouses in ways the employed partner may not directly perceive, with spillover effects varying based on which spouse receives the job. When men are employed, both they and their wives report improved psychosocial wellbeing, and women experience reduced IPV. When women are employed we observe positive, though not decisive, shifts in social norms. These results emphasize the importance of understanding employment as a social, not just individual, phenomenon. They also highlight the need for complementary interventions to balance immediate well-being with long-term changes in norms.
November 21, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Mansa Saxena Title: Self-Efficacy and Human Capital Accumulation at Work  Abstract: In developing countries, where formal educational attainment is often limited, many workers acquire skills primarily through on-the-job experience. However, low levels of self-efficacy—a non-cognitive skill reflecting an individual’s belief in their ability to succeed - may hinder workers from pursuing skill enhancement opportunities, potentially restricting their long-term earnings potential. In this project, I will implement a randomized experiment in a firm in North India to study whether a firm-provided psychosocial program can increase the self-efficacy of workers and whether such improvements translate into greater human capital accumulation at work.
November 21, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Zincy Wei Title: The Political-Economic Determinants of Choosing Traditional Medicine in India Abstract: Traditional medicine is widely used in low- and middle-income developing countries, despite limited medical evidence supporting its effectiveness compared to modern medicine. This project investigates the political and economic determinants of choosing traditional medicine in India. I design a field survey to document and measure people's beliefs and behaviors in healthcare choices. Preliminary pilot results suggest that patients who exclusively use traditional medicine hold low trust in the Indian healthcare system despite supporting the in-power party. Low take-up modern medicine rate is not driven by price sensitivity, but persistent and strongly motivated beliefs on the effectiveness of traditional treatment. These results hold regardless of the patient's socioeconomic background and diseases they treat. Next, I plan to conduct a field experiment to test whether intense competition of medical practices is crowding out patients' trust in medicines, and resulting in sorting of choosing medicine. The experimental design will focus on proposing cost-effective policies to overcome this market failure.   Title: Quality Provision with Decision Frictions: Evidence from the Indian Pharmaceutical Sector Abstract: How do demand-side constraints - characterized by consumers' decision frictions - influence supply-side incentives for quality provision in a limited disclosure environment? In this paper, I propose a novel hypothesis: demand frictions limit firms’ ability to build reputation locally, incentivizing firms to shift toward improving quality provision in the global market instead, resulting in quality provision sorting across products and markets. I investigate this in the Indian pharmaceutical sector. I first design a consumer survey to systematically document decision frictions - consumers' strong branded preference across products (at the molecule level) and markets (at the disease level). I then utilize aggregated drug sales data linked to the U.S. FDA to measure market structure and quality provision outcomes. Leveraging experimental variations, I plan to estimate a structural model that quantifies the role of demand-side frictions in shaping supply side quality provision behaviors.
November 20, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Cristoforo Pizzimenti
November 20, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Daniela Arriaga Borja (Northwestern University): "Formalization under Incomplete Information: Can Knowledge of Legal Rights Shift Domestic Work Contracts?"
November 19, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Benny Goldman (Cornell University) Title: Who Marries Whom? The Role of Segregation by Race and Class Abstract: Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure—or social interactions with members of other groups—may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent-income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (white and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage market model predicts that residential segregation---one of many forms of exposure---accounts for more than one third of marital sorting by class but less than 10% by race.
November 18, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Steven Berry (Yale University): "What Drives Voting: Estimates from a Multilevel Data," joint with Christian Cox (U of Arizona) and Phil Haile (Yale)
November 18, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Patrick Kehoe (Stanford University): "Taxing the Rich? A Theory of Income and Wealth Inequality" with VV Chari, University of Minnesota, Pierlauro Lopez, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Elena Pastorino, Stanford University, and the Hoover Institution Abstract: R Recently, it has been argued that a progressive wealth tax may have a large beneficial impact on the distribution of welfare in society and effectively no adverse effects on real economic activity. This paper evaluates the merits of this view within a dynamic general equilibrium framework that microfounds  empirically plausible income and wealth distributions as arising from a fundamental agency problem between managers and entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and capital markets, on the other hand. In this framework, wealth taxes distort the effort that managers and entrepreneurs expend to create firm value, which capital markets reward them for, by tilting their choice of projects towards less productive ventures. If wealth taxes are too broad based to affect individuals at the top of the wealth distribution who most contribute to firms' productivity, then wealth taxes end up depressing capital accumulation and output in the economy. Our preliminary simulations show that even a simple version of the model accounts well for the degree of income and wealth inequality in the United States, including the distinct degrees of concentration of the distribution of income and wealth. The model implies a substantial aggregate output loss from wealth taxes of the magnitude currently being debated, which leads to a reduction in inequality that would be achieved at a much lower cost by  modestly increasing the degree of progressivity of income taxes rather than by introducing wealth taxes.
November 18, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Seung Hyeong Lee (Northwestern University): "Disagreement, Subjective Uncertainty, and the Stock Market"
November 15, 20242:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jialu Sun (Northwestern University): "Dealer Market Power and Balance Sheet Cost in CIP Deviations"
November 15, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speakers: Myera Rashid and Davis Kedrosky   Myera's talk: "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.   Davis's talk: "The Success of the Informal State in Britain" Abstract: We study the performance of the informal state in early modern Britain. Traditional accounts by economic historians suggest that the development of a Weberian bureaucracy—composed of hierarchically organized, paid, and professionally motivated civil servants—during the eighteenth century was a precondition for the British Industrial Revolution. We document three stylized facts that challenge this conventional wisdom. First, even during the early nineteenth century, there were over seven times as many informal local officers as professional civilian bureaucrats. Second, unsalaried parish, county, and borough officers provided most public goods, including justice, policing, and infrastructure. Third, the centralizing reforms that created an integrated Weberian bureaucracy did not occur until the late nineteenth century. Using a new dataset on over 12,500 municipal officers in 257 British towns in 1832, we show that informal officers were more effective at providing public goods than their ‘Weberian’ peers. We argue that, when a full Weberian bureaucracy is outside the choice set, informal public service based on prosocial motivation (prestige, respectability, or political office) may be a second-best method of organizing the state—and that this method was consistent with the origins of modern economic growth.
November 14, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Abi Adams (University of Oxford): Revealed Beliefs and the Marriage Market Returns to Education Abstract:  We develop a new methodology to estimate subjective beliefs from hypothetical choice data. Our identification approach is based on the novel insight that by varying the amount of information on future realizations of stochastic variables, discrete choice experiments can identify not only preferences, but also subjective beliefs. We formally prove this result in a general setting and apply it to design a strategic survey instrument to measure Rajasthani parents' subjective beliefs over the joint distribution of girls' age of marriage, education, and marriage match quality. Our approach allows us to quantify the importance of perceived marriage market returns to education and youth and perform various counterfactual simulation exercises. Structural preference and belief parameters estimated using responses to our strategic survey instrument accurately predict realized marriage and schooling trajectories in follow-up data we collect from the same sample five years after our experimental data collection.
November 14, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	CANCELLED: Development Economics Lunch Seminar	CANCELLED
November 14, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan  Title: Profit Motives in Healthcare: Evidence from Hospitals Abstract: Differences between nonprofit and for-profit hospitals have been of longstanding debate within the health economics literature.  Past work on this subject has been largely descriptive, with few papers providing causal evidence.  In this project, I will apply an econometric approach that has (in other works) successfully examined differences between hospitals across other characteristics to offer updated identification for this question.
November 13, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Leander Heldring (Northwestern): The Cost Of State-building: Evidence From Germany Abstract: This paper studies the impact of a well-functioning bureaucracy on the effectiveness of repression, in the context of Germany’s Nazi regime. I compare former Prussian to non-Prussian municipalities within unified Germany in a regression discontinuity framework. When the Nazis persecuted the German Jews, Prussian areas implemented deportations of Jews more efficiently. During the Weimar republic, when Jews were legally protected, violence against Jews is lower in former Prussian areas. In both periods, Prussian local governments had greater ‘capacity’: They were more effective at raising taxes and providing public goods. Capacity derived from greater specialization and better information processing rather than from effort. Democratic oversight and less committed principals reduce, but not reverse, the effect of state capacity on repression.
November 13, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speakers: Andrea Ferrara and Gabriel Jardanovski
November 13, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Brian Livingston (Northwestern University): "An Extension of the Credit Channel: Bank Lending to Shadow Banks"
November 12, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Michal Kolesar (Princeton University): The Fragility of Sparsity Abstract: We show, using three empirical applications, that linear regression estimates which rely on the assumption of sparsity are fragile in two ways. First, we document that different choices of the regressor matrix that do not impact ordinary least squares (OLS) estimates, such as the choice of baseline category with categorical controls, can move sparsity-based estimates two standard errors or more. Second, we develop two tests of the sparsity assumption based on comparing sparsity-based estimators with OLS. The tests tend to reject the sparsity assumption in all three applications. Unless the number of regressors is comparable to or exceeds the sample size, OLS yields more robust results at little efficiency cost.
November 12, 20242:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Joshua Gottlieb (University of Chicago): Market Size and Trade in Medical Services Abstract: We uncover substantial interregional trade in medical services and investigate whether regional increasing returns explain it. In Medicare data, one-fifth of production involves a doctor treating a patient from another region. Larger regions produce greater quantity, quality, and variety of medical services, which they “export” to patients from elsewhere, especially smaller regions. We show that these patterns reflect scale economies: greater demand enables larger regions to improve quality, so they attract patients from elsewhere. Despite concerns about rural access, larger regions have higher marginal returns to spending. We study counterfactual policies that would lower travel costs rather than relocating production.
November 11, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Daniel Yi Xu (Duke University): Firm Selection and Growth in Carbon Offset Markets: Evidence from the Clean Development Mechanism in China Abstract: Carbon offsets could reduce the global costs of carbon abatement, but there is little evidence on whether they truly reduce emissions. We study carbon offsets sold by manufacturing firms in China under the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). We find that offset-selling firms increase carbon emissions by 49% in the four years after starting an offset project, relative to a matched sample of non-applicants. We explain this increase in emissions by jointly modeling the firm decision to propose an offset project and the UN’s decision of whether to approve. In estimates of our model, CDM firms increase emissions due to both the selection of higher-growth firms into project investment (40 pp of the total) and the causal effect of higher efficiency, post investment, on firm scale and therefore emissions (9 pp).
November 11, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Gianluca Violante (Princeton University): Job Amenity Shocks and Labor Reallocation (joint with Sadhika Bagga, Lukas Mann, and Aysegul Sahin) Abstract: We introduce aggregate shocks to workers’ value of job amenities in a frictional equilibrium model of the labor market with on-the-job search where workers' quits trigger vacancies. We examine how key labor market indicators respond to this shock: when the valuation of the amenity is heterogeneous in the population, labor reallocation ensues. A calibrated version of the model can quantitatively account for many peculiar traits of the post-pandemic labor market recovery through three aggregate shocks: a temporary fall in productivity to account for the short, but sharp, downturn; a decline in the willingness to work; and, crucially, a persistent increase in the value that workers put on job amenities. Cross-sectoral patterns of vacancies, quit rates, job-filling rates, and wages —where sectors are ranked by the share of teleworkable jobs— offer support to the view that the key amenity in question is the ability to work remotely.
November 11, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jose Lara (Northwestern University): "Cost-side Effects of Monetary Policy Transmission in a Production Network"
November 8, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jennifer Mayo (University of Missouri) Title: "Rags to Rags: The Multi-Generational Effects of Ending Cash Transfers in Victorian Britain." Abstract: We study the intergenerational impacts of ending cash transfers using the 1834 ("New") Poor Law, which drastically cut the income support that was provided to 15 percent of the population in England and Wales at a cost of 2 percent of GDP. We show that in 1861, cohorts more exposed to income-support declines in childhood held lower-skilled jobs as adults and had fewer of their children in school. Linking these sons to the 1891 census, we find similar results for them as adults and also for their children, highlighting the importance of accounting for multi-generational effects in cost-benefit analyses of social programs.
November 7, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Lauren Bergquist (Yale University): “Quality Incentives and Upgrading in Uganda’s Coffee Supply Chain” (with Jie Bai, Ameet Morjaria, Russell Morton, and Yulu Tang) Abstract: Quality upgrading to attain export premia is a key development strategy in many low and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, in supply chains in LMICs, producers often do not sell directly to the world market; instead, they sell through multiple layers of domestic intermediation. We study how these chains of intermediation affect incentives for quality production in the context of the Uganda coffee supply chain. We first map out the supply chain linking farm gate and export gate, documenting that coffee changes hands, on average, two times before reaching export markets. Next, leveraging high-frequency transaction-level data throughout the supply chain, including prices and lab quality assessments, we show that quality premium diminishes upstream. We build a model highlighting two key economic mechanisms that may drive these diminished quality premia upstream. First, barriers to entry to high-quality intermediation enable greater buyer power in the high-quality segment; resulting differential markdowns squeeze the quality premium upstream. Second, both producers and intermediaries engage in quality investments, with the degree of substitutability of these investments mediating the downstream’s demand for high quality from the upstream. Both mechanisms have distributional implications for farmer surplus, but only the former dampens aggregate quality production.  To separately quantify the two, we conduct an experiment that offers randomized coffee production contracts to induce quality-specific demand shocks throughout the supply chain to identify the key cost parameters of our model. We use the estimated model to examine the efficiency implications and distributional consequences of market power and productive substitutability, as well as how they interact to affect quality production and surplus distribution along the chain. Finally, we apply the model to investigate policy counterfactuals.
November 7, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch Seminar	Speakera: Aaron Wolf & Alison Zhao   Title: Potential Over Pay: Career Incentives in India’s Youth Labor Market Abstract: Understanding what appeals to job seekers is the first step to attracting and retaining the right talent for organizations. In this project we study the preferences of young job seekers in India, focusing on how they trade off immediate compensation with potential future opportunities. We report estimates from a pilot discrete choice experiment of the reservation wages for positions offering upward mobility compared to fixed-term roles. Our pilot results show that candidates are willing to accept entry-level wages 1,511 Rs lower per month for roles promising promotion potential—a discount that rises to 3,964 Rs when such advancement is highly likely. Additionally, job seekers trade off lower current wages for future raises at a ratio of 1.1:1, increasing to 3.1:1 when the likelihood of a raise is high. Notably, women show heightened responsiveness to clear promotion and raise opportunities. These results suggest that transparent career incentives play a significant role in shaping workers’ preferred contracts and job choices.
November 7, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Tessa Bonomo
November 6, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Mark Koyama (George Mason): "Rents and Reformation" with Desiree Desierto and Marcus Shera Abstract: We test the hypothesis that the sale of Catholic monastic lands following the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1540) cemented Protestantism post- Reformation England. Drawing on a newly compiled dataset of 16th and 17th century members of Parliament (MPs), we first establish that borough constituencies with a higher proportion of monastic lands had MPs who were more likely to support Protestantism during the reign of Mary I (r. 1553-1558). Furthermore, individuals MPs with connections to monastic lands were more likely to support Protestantism and opposed Mary I. We go on to show that these attitudes persisted into he late 17th century. MPs representing boroughs with monastic lands were more likely to support the exclusion of the Catholic future James II from the throne in 1679-1681.
November 6, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xiaojie Liu
November 5, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Kaspar Wuthrich (University of California, San Diego): Estimating Causal Effects of Discrete and Continuous Treatments with Binary Instruments Abstract: We propose an instrumental variable framework for identifying and estimating average and quantile effects of discrete and continuous treatments with binary instruments. The basis of our approach is a local copula representation of the joint distribution of the potential outcomes and unobservables determining treatment assignment. This representation allows us to introduce an identifying assumption, so-called copula invariance, that restricts the local dependence of the copula with respect to the treatment propensity. We show that copula invariance identifies treatment effects for the entire population and other subpopulations such as the treated. The identification results are constructive and lead to straightforward semiparametric estimation procedures based on distribution regression. An application to the effect of sleep on well-being uncovers interesting patterns of heterogeneity.
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"