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
June 13, 20251:00 PM - 2:00 PM	Department of Economics Senior Celebration & 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 2025 and their guests to this year's Senior Celebration & Awards Ceremony: Date: Friday, June 13, 2025 Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm Location: Kellogg Global Hub, White Auditorium This event is only open to undergraduate Economics majors and their guests. Light refreshments will be served.
June 11, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Valerio Di Tommaso
June 6, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Phillipp Ager Liberation Technology? The impact of the sewing machine on women Abstract: This paper examines the transformative impact of the sewing machine on women's lives in 19th-century Massachusetts, considering its dual role as both a manufacturing tool and household appliance. Leveraging variation in town-level exposure to sewing machines in factories and the presence of local retailers, we isolate the technology's influence on female labor force participation, marriage, and fertility. At the town level, we find that sewing machine adoption---in both workplaces and homes---significantly increased female labor force participation. However, exposure to sewing machines in manufacturing led to declines in fertility and marriage rates, a pattern not observed with household adoption. Our individual-level analysis reveals notable heterogeneity: poorer women responded to both industrial and household exposure by increasing their labor supply, remaining single, and reducing fertility. In contrast, wealthier women were more likely to be married and increased fertility following the adoption of sewing machines in the household, and they appeared to use some of their freed time for social activities. These findings underscore how technological change can shape women's economic and social roles in markedly different ways across the wealth distribution.
June 5, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sebastian Sardon 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. We assess whether removing such barriers can boost productivity in the developing world, and if so through which channels. Guided by a model of agricultural production with heterogeneous farms, we study a 1997 USDA ban lift on avocado exports from Mexico to the US. Using a triple-difference strategy and newly linked confidential census microdata (1991–2022), we find that output per hectare increases by more than 30% in treated areas suitable for avocado cultivation. Consistent with the model, the share of land operated by private farms over 100 hectares roughly doubles in such places. In our framework, this process of land consolidation occurs because large farms are the only ones who can incur the fixed costs required to participate in export markets. One such cost is irrigation infrastructure, essential for avocado cultivation, which must be privately financed in the study area. In ongoing work, we use remote sensing to build a georeferenced dataset of irrigation investment. Preliminary results indicate that investment is concentrated in areas experiencing both productivity growth and land consolidation. Finally, we find that these gains only occur in localities where land markets are not too frictional. In treated areas dominated by collective land tenure, productivity growth, reallocation, and investment all fail to materialize.
June 5, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Aastha Rajan Title: Hospital Ownership and Quality of Care Abstract: We examine the impacts of for-profit ownership on hospital quality of care, primarily measured by readmission, costs, and mortality.  Using an instrumental variables strategy to mitigate patient selection into hospital type, we find that for-profit hospitals have slightly worse outcomes.
June 4, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics and Economic History	Ilyana Kuziemko (Princeton): The Cold War and U.S. Labor Markets
June 4, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Xiaojie Liu
June 3, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Soonwoo Kwon (Brown): "Extrapolation in Regression Discontinuity Design Using Rank Invariance" (with Ben Deaner)
June 2, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Christina Patterson (Chicago Booth): Earnings Instability
May 30, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Bitencourt (Northwestern University): "Missing Lines: Jurisdictional Frictions in Electricity Transmission”
May 30, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Amir Abahel Title: Pricing Methods in 18th-Century England Abstract: Pricing, i.e. determining how much something costs, is a fundamental aspect of economic activity, but surprisingly little historical research was done on pricing as a practical problem. This paper tries to unearth pricing processes in 18th century England – the methods used by sellers to determine the price of their goods and services, focusing specifically on retailers and pawnbrokers. The evidence from this research suggests that different professions made such decisions in different ways: retailers would hide their selling prices from their customers, leaving them room to make adjustments to individual buyers; pawnbrokers, on the other hand, operated under much greater degrees of social supervision and made pricing decisions without considering the identity of the customer.
May 29, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Juliana Londoño-Vélez (UCLA): Reparations as Development? Evidence from Victims of the Colombian Armed Conflict
May 29, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Family Dynamics and Educational Outcomes: the Impact of Financial Aid on Siblings Abstract: This paper studies sibling spillovers from a large-scale higher education financial aid program. In 2014, the Colombian government launched Ser Pilo Paga (“Hard Work Pays Off”), a merit- and need-based scholarship targeting high-achieving students from low-income households. Eligibility was determined by household poverty and performance on the national standardized high school exit exam. Leveraging quasi-random variation around the eligibility cutoff in a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the impact of program eligibility on younger siblings' outcomes. We find that younger siblings of eligible students experience sizable gains in standardized test scores (0.13 SD or 56%) and a 12.4% increase in college enrollment, particularly in high-quality institutions. We also observe a 9.5% increase in their likelihood of formal employment. In addition, we find evidence that younger siblings of students just below the eligibility threshold also improved their academic performance, suggesting that access to opportunity can increase motivation and effort. Because the program primarily targeted low-income households, who are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, we also examine effects on crime. Linking administrative data with web-scraped criminal records, we find that younger siblings of eligible students are significantly less likely to be convicted of a crime, with effects concentrated among the poorest households. Our findings highlight the presence of sibling spillovers and suggest that policies targeting one child in a family can generate broader benefits, across education, labor market outcomes, and even criminal justice involvement, for other household members.
May 29, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Aastha Rajan Title: Incentivizing Success: Assessing the Texas Incentive Allotment Program's Impact on Teacher Labor Markets and Student Achievement (Joint with Lauren Harris and Cecilia Moreira) Abstract: This research project aims to study how policies that introduce compensation differentials while reducing information asymmetries impact teacher sorting in the education labor market. To do so, we study the effects of the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) - a new  pay-for-performance program instituted in Texas in 2019 - on the labor market for teachers and student outcomes.  Using linked student-teacher K-12 administrative data, we analyze how the program impacts teacher mobility, teacher retention, and students' outcomes. Preliminary results show that TIA changes sorting patterns in the teacher labor market and is effective at increasing retention of teachers in participating school districts.
May 28, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Rui Esteves (Geneva Graduate Institute): “Dormant securities: Imperial guarantees for colonial loans, 1842-1934"
May 28, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Evan Majic
May 28, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Harrison Ridland (Northwestern University): "Two Stage All-Pay Auctions with Flexible Weights”
May 22, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Sara Lowes (UCSD): Age Sets, Accountability, and the Balance of Power: Evidence from Villages in Rural Congo
May 22, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Ludovica Mosillo Title: The Unequal Impact of Equitable Rationing: the Case of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Rationing is a common approach to managing resource crises such as water or electricity shortages in fast growing developing economies. This strategy often involves rotating the availability of resources across geographical regions, typically without differentiating based on local needs or demand. The aim of this project is to assess whether rationing can exacerbate existing economic inequalities. I study 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.
May 22, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Zincy Wei Title: The Economics of Choosing Traditional Medicine: Evidence from a Field Experiment 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. What are the economic determinants and market failures of choosing traditional medicine? I study these questions in the context of India, with large social welfare impact and well-established modern pharmaceutical and traditional medicine industries. First, I design a field survey and document three key facts: 1) patients who using traditional medicine for chronic conditions elicit low willingness to switch to modern medicine (less than 7%); 2) which is driven by persistent beliefs in efficacy rather than information limitation or price sensitivity; and 3) these patterns hold across social-economic strata. Motivated by these facts, I then conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) targeting individuals at high risk for hypertension and with a history of using traditional medicine for non-chronic conditions. The experiment tests two interventions: 1) providing medical literacy information, and 2) providing cost coverage for initial modern medicine take-up.  Preliminary results show that information interventions are more effective than financial incentives. This suggests that the timing of acquiring new information - before patients fully committed to either treatment - is critical for healthcare demand and medical decision-making. Overall, this paper provides insights into designing early stage, cost-effective healthcare policies to overcome market failures of over-utilization of traditional medicine, which can be applied in, but not limited to developing countries.
May 21, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Cris Pizzimenti
May 21, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aaron Amburgey (Northwestern University): "Household Composition and the Transmission of Monetary Policy Shocks”
May 20, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Mark Watson (Princeton): Testing Coefficient Variability in Spatial Regression
May 20, 20252:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Adriana Lleras-Muney (UCLA): The Impact of Medicare’s Introduction on Life Expectancy (joint with Andrew Goodman-Bacon, Joseph Price and Dahai Yue)
May 19, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Cailin Slattery (UC Berkeley): Consolidation and Political Influence in the Auto Retail Industry
May 19, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Oren Levintal (Reichman University): Aggregate demand in financial crises
May 19, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jacob Gosselin (Northwestern University): "Negative Earnings in the Era of Market Power”
May 16, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Eleftheria Kelekidou (Northwestern University): "A genetic Algorithm for the Best Subset Problem”
May 16, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Netanel Ben-Porath Title: Democracy's Spoils: Populism and Misallocation of Public Goods in Jacksonian USA Abstract: Populist leaders often argue that executive power should be centralized in their hands. Because politicians are directly accountable to the people, they, rather than unelected bureaucrats, should allocate goods. Yet this political authority can be abused for narrow electoral gain, sacrificing service quality for partisan advantage. This work studies how the election of Andrew Jackson, often referred to as the `First Populist', shaped the allocation of post offices. Contrary to Jackson’s promise of broader representation, the quality of office allocation plummeted, decreasing the average citizen's welfare. The over-supplying competitive counties and spoiling Jacksonian congressmen caused distorted provision. Furthermore, states with broader franchises saw the steepest quality declines, likely because they tended to be more competitive. These results highlight a fundamental trade-off in public‐goods provision: centralizing authority in elected hands may enhance responsiveness, but it also invites partisan distortions that can erode overall service quality.
May 15, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Nathalie Basto Title: Real Effects of Firms' Credit Information Abstract: This study examines the effects of limiting credit information for firms through Colombia's Clean Slate policy, a one-time amnesty 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. In contrast, 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. The policy tightened credit markets, with suggestive evidence of impacts on firm balances, highlighting the trade-offs of such interventions in balancing credit access and market efficiency.
May 15, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Giacomo Marcolin Title: The Role of Pregnancy in Gender Discrimination: Evidence from the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 Abstract: Gender discrimination remains a persistent issue in labor markets and identifying its underlying drivers is crucial to guide policy solutions. Fertility-related concerns are a clear candidate, but isolating their role is hindered by the fact that pregnancy discrimination is typically addressed by broader gender-discrimination policies. However, this was not the case before the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) of 1978: employers could not discriminate on the basis of gender due to existing federal laws, but could legally dismiss workers if pregnant. In this paper, we first calibrate a matching model to find that (i) the effect of the legislation on employment is unambiguously negative unless it significantly raises the firing costs for discriminating employers, (ii) 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 and hiring 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. These findings suggest that fertility is a key driver of discrimination. We finally document that pre-existing equal pay legislation shaped the effects of the PDA by limiting the response of women's wages. This may have exacerbated the negative effect on employment, limiting one margin of adjustment.
May 14, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Luigi Pascali (UPF): "The Dawn of Civilization: Metal Trade and the Rise of Hierarchy" with M. Flueckiger,  M. Larch and M. Ludwig
May 14, 20251:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Strategy and Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Johannes Spinnewijn (LSE): Private Health Insurance under Universal Coverage: Balancing Efficiency and Equity, Joint with Marten Palme (Stockholm University), David Seim (Stockholm University) and Jens Wikstrom (Gothenburg University)
May 14, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Luxi Han
May 14, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Nicole Saito (Northwestern University): "The Effects of Forced Displacement: West Coast Agriculture after WWII Internment”
May 13, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Richard Crump (NY FRB): A Jackknife Variance Estimator for Panel Regressions
May 12, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Recruitment Seminar	David McKenzie (World Bank): Long-term and lasting impacts of personal initiative training on entrepreneurial success
May 12, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Ryungha Oh (Northwestern): What Causes Agglomeration of Services? Theory and Evidence from Seoul
May 12, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Sorenie Gudissa (Northwestern University): "Internet Shutdowns as State Strategy: Are They Effective?”
May 10, 20258:30 AM - 1:30 PM	Celebrating Joel Horowitz’s Contributions to Econometrics	Conference by invitation only.  Sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and NBER
May 9, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Vasu Chaudhary (Northwestern University): "Endogenous Diffusion of Rival Information”
May 9, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Davis Kedrosky Title: Expropriation, Reallocation, and Political Selection: Evidence from the Rise of the English Gentry Abstract: We study the political effects of a large-scale land redistribution—the Dissolution of the English Monasteries—to test the ‘Tawney thesis’ on the evolution of parliamentary government in England. Before the nineteenth century, property ownership, specifically in land, was a near-requirement for political participation. Most constituencies had explicit property thresholds for voting, while standing for and holding office demanded time and resources. In this context, shocks to the distribution of landed assets could directly translate into shifts in the distribution of political power. Using newly-collected biographical data on English MPs from 1509-1640, we show that residents of parishes containing expropriated Church properties were more likely to enter Parliament after the Dissolution. New MPs were increasingly members of the gentry: relatively educated and politically engaged country landowners from outside the traditional elite. We also present descriptive evidence suggestive of important downstream political consequences, including simultaneous increases in the size and activity of Parliament during the late sixteenth century. Our results are consistent with one famous explanation of the emergence of English ‘inclusive institutions’: that the rise of a gentry class independent of the Crown strengthened Parliament, contributing to its victory in the English Civil War and the creation of a constitutional monarchy.
May 9, 20258:15 AM - 5:00 PM	Celebrating Joel Horowitz’s Contributions to Econometrics	Conference by invitation only.  Sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and NBER
May 8, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Senior Recruitment Seminar	Michael Best (Columbia): "Greener on the Other Side: Inequity and Tax Compliance"
May 8, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Vageesha Bainwala
May 8, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speakers: Seung Hyeong Lee and Sungjin Kim Presenter 1: Seung Hyeong Lee  Title: Expanding Financial Frontiers: Welfare Impacts of Alternative Data and Machine Learning Abstract: This paper examines how alternative data and machine learning models can broaden credit access for individuals in developing countries who lack traditional credit scores. Using traditional financial data alongside alternative data, primarily from smartphone SMS messages, we develop an alternative credit scoring system. We demonstrate that incorporating these alternative data sources and machine learning techniques in credit risk assessment allows the system to outperform conventional methods in predictive accuracy. This technological innovation enhances the welfare of both the firm and its users while addressing issues of accessibility and bias. Furthermore, we investigate the effects and welfare implications of short-term loans. The paper's findings are expected to have significant policy implications by contributing to current debates on the efficacy and fairness of algorithmic decision-making, as well as the privacy and usage of alternative data sources.   Presenter 2: Sungjin Kim  Title: Access to Public Healthcare in Rural India: Complementarities between Physician Incentives and Patient-side Trust Abstract: Although much work has been done in improving healthcare systems in many developing countries, the fundamental problem of access, finding a doctor who is actually present, is difficult. A case in point is the public healthcare system in rural India, where qualified doctors sit idle or absent in public primary clinics while communities rely heavily on informal and untrained providers. Past supply-side pay interventions have produced only modest and impersistent gains. In this study, we hypothesize that the solution requires complementary solutions on both sides of the market: incentives raise physician's effort if patients visit, and patients visit only if they expect providers to be present. To test this, we propose a 2 x 2 RCT of (i) replacing the doctors’ flat salary with service-based performance bonus and (ii) organizing information campaigns providing doctors' attendance rates and relative quality of public clinics. With this approach, we aim to show how aligning provider pay with patient knowledge can restore trust, raise utilization, and put qualified care within reach of the communities who need it most.
May 7, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	James Feigenbaum (Boston): Fine-Tunable Historical Record Linkage with Transformers: LLMs for Census Linking
May 7, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Gabriel Jardanovski
May 7, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Franco Malpassi (Northwestern University): "Regulating the Levers of Invention? The Effects of Antitrust Action on Firm Innovation”
May 6, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Jiaying Gu (Toronton): Empirical Bayes for Compound Adaptive Experiments
May 6, 20252:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Note seminar room will be KGH 4302.  Nathan Hendren (MIT): “A Welfare Analysis of Policies Impacting Climate Change” Zoom: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98154392122
May 5, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Volker Nocke (Mannheim): Oligopoly, Complementarities, and Transformed Potentials
May 5, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Christian Bayer (University of Bonn): Unequal Lives — Heterogeneity in income risk and household portfolios
May 5, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Daniela Borja Arriaga (Northwestern University): "Title TBA”
May 2, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Brian Livingston (Northwestern University): "Changes in the Fiscal Response to Deficits”
May 2, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Alex Weinberg Title: Urban Scars: The Persistent Effects of 1960s Civil Unrest Abstract: Why are once-thriving central city neighborhoods today home to few businesses? I study the dynamics of neighborhood decline in the wake of 1964–1969 urban unrest. Using newly digitized telephone directories, I document that census tracts directly impacted by riots experienced a persistent decline in business activity relative to comparable areas. To study mechanisms and understand consequences for efficiency and policy, I develop a dynamic quantitative spatial model of firm location choice.
May 1, 20255:15 PM - 6:15 PM	Environmental Economics Lecture	Join us for an engaging lecture on environmental economics, featuring short presentations by leading scholars in the field. Professor Diego Känzig will explore the intersection of macroeconomics, climate change, and inequality, shedding light on how energy dynamics and economic disparities shape business cycles and policy responses. Professor Mar Reguant will discuss the economics of energy, with a focus on how renewable power is reshaping the economics of electricity markets in various parts of the globe. The event will conclude with a discussion and Q&A session led by Professor Mark Witte, Director of Undergraduate Studies, offering an opportunity to further explore these pressing issues and their broader economic implications.
May 1, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Russell Morton (Yale): Value Creation and Value Capture in Indian Garment Manufacturing
May 1, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Matteo Ruzzante
May 1, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speakers: Lydia Cao Title: Step Therapy: Balancing Physician Expertise and Cost Saving Abstract: In this project, I examine the trade-offs involved in insurer interventions in physicians’ prescribing decisions, focusing on a widely used cost-containment protocol known as step therapy (ST), or “fail-first.” ST is typically applied to expensive brand-name drugs, requiring prescribers to first try a generic or lower-cost alternative. Within a principal-agent framework, insurers use ST to (1) align physician behavior with their own preferences and (2) reduce inefficient drug trials, particularly when physicians lack a strong informational advantage. Using data on antidiabetic drugs in Medicare Part D, I show that ST reduces the use of restricted drugs and delays their initiation. These effects are concentrated in early prescribing decisions, highlighting the role of constrained physician experimentation. To quantify the mechanisms of incentive alignment and limited experimentation, I plan to estimate a structural model of physician drug choice and insurer ST policy setting. By recovering the joint distribution of physician ability and preferences, along with insurer incentives, I will assess the welfare implications of alternative ST designs and related policies that govern physician autonomy and insurer behavior.
April 30, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Karen Clay (Carnegie Mellon): The social lifecycle impacts of power plant siting in the historical United States
April 30, 202512:30 PM - 1:00 PM	Town Hall Meeting for Second Year Economics Graduate Students	DGS Federico Bugni and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
April 30, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Andrea Ferrara
April 30, 202512:00 PM - 12:30 PM	Town Hall Meeting for Third Year Economics Graduate Students	DGS Federico Bugni and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
April 30, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	James Atkins  (Northwestern University): "App Store Competition”
April 29, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Mikkel Soelvsten (AU): TBA
April 29, 20252:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Jon Gruber (MIT): Investing in Mothers?  The Long-Run Impact of a Universal Childcare Program on Maternal Work and Income
April 28, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Jean-François Houde (UW Madison): TBD
April 28, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Raghuram Rajan (Chicago Booth): Debt and Assets
April 28, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Aastha Rajan (Northwestern University): "Mail and Mobility: The Economic Impact of Postal Service Employment on Black Families”
April 25, 20258:30 AM - 5:00 PM	Conference in Honor of Bob Gordon	Sponsored by: Center for International Macroeconomics Center for Economic History Please email mariya.acherkan@northwestern.edu to RSVP
April 24, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Jonathan Zinman (Dartmouth): Working it out: Randomized restructuring and entrepreneurial effort in a collateralized debt market
April 24, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Johanna Rayl Title: Redistribution with Limited Information: Fuel Subsidies and Cash Transfers in Indonesia Abstract: We study optimal design of cash and in-kind redistribution in a setting with limited information: cash transfers and fuel subsidies in Indonesia. In 2005, the government shifted spending away from a costly and regressive consumer fossil fuel subsidy and towards a targeted cash transfer program, which was hindered by the government’s limited ability to identify low-income households. In our model, a planner with distributional preferences may prefer in-kind over cash mechanisms if the targeting benefits of self-selection over the in-kind good outweigh the inefficiencies associated with subsidization. An optimal in-kind (subsidy) transfer can improve welfare depending on the joint distribution of covariates used for targeting cash transfers with parameters governing consumption of the in-kind good. We take this model to the data in the Indonesian setting, estimating household preferences for fuel by exploiting large exogenous shocks to fuel prices, and solving for the optimal policy given a limited government information set.
April 24, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Johanna Rayl
April 23, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Alex Whalley (Calgary): Researchers, Ideas, and Economic Growth: Evidence from Vietnam War Draft Avoidance
April 23, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Kwok Yan Chiu
April 23, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Rosario Cisternas (Northwestern University): "Discrimination Despite Bans: The Role of Limited Awareness and Sales Agents in the Chilean Health Insurance Market”
April 22, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Eric Auerbach (Northwestern): Discrepancy-based inference for observational studies.
April 21, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Lorenzo Magnolfi (UW Madison): “Market Counterfactuals with Nonparametric Supply: An ML/AI Approach,” joint with Harold Chiang, Jack Collison, and Chris Sullivan Abstract: This paper develops a flexible approach to perform market counterfactuals using machine learning methods and nonparametric structure from economics. While stan- dard structural methods rely on restrictive assumptions about firm conduct and cost, we propose a data-driven framework that relaxes these constraints when rich market data are available. Building on the identification results of Berry and Haile (2014), we develop a nonparametric model of supply that nests traditional conduct specifications while allowing for more complex competitive interactions. We adapt the Variational Method of Moments (VMM) (Bennett and Kallus, 2023) to estimate this flexible model, addressing the endogeneity of market shares and the high dimensionality of the prob- lem. Our approach enables a wide range of counterfactual exercises including tax policy analysis, product regulation, and merger simulation. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms standard approaches; applied to the American Airlines-US Airways merger, our method produces more accurate post-merger price predictions.
April 21, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Joe Kaboski (Notre Dame): Information Spreads (with Jasmin Xiao and Antonio Falato) Abstract: We propose a financially-driven business cycle propagation mechanism in which firm credit spreads arise from default concerns under incomplete information. Investors learn from public information and adjust expectations about firm creditworthiness downward in response to a deterioration in the profit outlook or increase in uncertainty. Empirically, we show that spreads and real outcomes -- both at the aggregate and firm-level -- respond predictably to the new information summarized in professional forecast revisions. Quantitatively, the model explains the high level and variation of credit spreads and the patterns in responding to public information, and establishes a novel amplification mechanism whereby credit spreads transmit changes in public information and its uncertainty to investment and the real economy.
April 21, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jialu Sun (Northwestern University): "Regulation, Deregulation, and Leverage: A Historical Look at Intermediary Asset Pricing”
April 18, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Christopher Sims Title: The Origins of the Nitrogen Revolution (joint with Matteo Ruzzante) 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. Our results are corroborated with analysis using detailed price and sales data covering a panel of English towns over the same period. We conclude by discussing preliminary work on the welfare implications of this shock.
April 17, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Johanna Rayl Title: Redistribution with Limited Information: Fuel Subsidies and Cash Transfers in Indonesia (with Gabriel Jardanovski and Budy Resosudarmo) Abstract: We study optimal design of cash and in-kind redistribution in a setting with limited information: cash transfers and fuel subsidies in Indonesia. In 2005, the government shifted spending away from a costly and regressive consumer fossil fuel subsidy and towards a targeted cash transfer program, which was hindered by the government’s limited ability to identify low-income households. It is well-known that a planner with distributional preferences may prefer in-kind over cash mechanisms if self-selection over the in-kind good aids in overcoming information frictions. We exploit recent tools from mechanism design to ask whether the optimal in-kind (subsidy) transfer could improve welfare in the Indonesian setting, and how this depends on the government information set. We estimate household preferences for fuel, exploiting large exogenous shocks to fuel prices, and apply a mechanism design approach to solve for the optimal policy given a limited government information set.
April 16, 20251:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Economic History and Strategy	Eric Chyn (UT Austin): TBA
April 16, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pablo Sanchez
April 16, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Ramya Raghavan (Northwestern University): "The Macroeconomic Effects of Supply Chain Shocks: Evidence from Global Shipping Disruptions”
April 15, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Toru Kitagawa (Brown): Dynamic Targeting: Experimental Evidence from Energy Rebate Programs
April 15, 20252:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Jesse Bruhn (Brown): Path Dependence in the Labor Market: The Long-run Effects of Early Career Occupational Experience
April 14, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Eric Richert (UChicago): Efficient Grid Search to Solve Static Games with Private Information
April 14, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	John Grigsby (Princeton): “Are Inflationary Shocks Regressive? A Feasible Set Approach,” joint with Felipe del Canto, Eric Qian and Conor Walsh.
April 14, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Seung Hyeong Lee (Northwestern University): "Giving Up": The Impact of Decreasing Housing Affordability on Consumption, Employment, and Investment   ”
April 11, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Netanel Ben- Porath (Northwestern University): "From Community to Society: The Factory System’s Disruption of Social Structure”
April 11, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Leander Heldring Title: The Success of the Informal State in England Abstract: We estimate the effectiveness of the informal state in Britain. Until the late 19th century, the size of the salaried bureaucracy was about 10 percent of the size of the unsalaried, community based, bureaucracy which supplied public goods, maintained order, and staffed the legal sector. In a new dataset of formal and informal local bureaucrats operating in cities we show that informally incentivized bureaucrats do better on a range of public tasks. Higher level bureaucrats, such as mayors, were motivated by a combination of status and threats of punishment. They were selected from the gentry class, which was culturally focused on public service. Boroughs, which typically did not have direct tax revenue, attracted such individuals that could not be hired at market wages. Only after the Industrial Revolution, when the central state acquired sufficient revenue to pay everyone was the British government formalized.
April 10, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Mansa Saxena Title: Gender Gaps in Job Application Signals and Assessment: Experimental Evidence from Hiring in Malawi (with Gabriella Fleischman) Abstract: Our study examines gender gaps in hiring for formal employment in Malawi. We partner with a firm in Malawi to conduct two sequential experiments to study supply-side constraints (lack of qualified female applicants) and demand-side constraints (biases in hiring decisions). The first experiment focuses on increasing the pool of female applications during a recruitment drive through female-directed advertising. Despite no differences in the objective quality of the female applicants across treated and control areas, the treatment has the perverse effect of leading to a reduction in female hiring. This surprising result informs our second experiment—a resume audit study—where we use real applications from stage one and manipulate application features, while holding qualifications constant, to study evaluator behavior. We find differences in evaluation of applications by gender, which may have further been exacerbated under the treatment.
April 10, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speakers: Hellary Zhang and Netanel Ben-Porath   Presenter 1: Netanel Ben-Porath Title: Production Outside Markets: The Coercion-Children Tradeoff in the Antebellum South Abstract: Throughout much of history, production occurred primarily outside free labor markets, organized either through family networks or via the exploitation of coerced labor. Yet, the interaction between coercive institutions and the kin structures of coercers has received little attention in economic research. This paper demonstrates that, in American Southern agriculture, coerced labor substituted for child labor. Employing multiple identification strategies, I provide robust evidence that the use of enslaved labor was associated with smaller household sizes and higher schooling rates among white farm owners. Moreover, I complement these findings with correlational evidence suggesting that slavery fostered more compact kin structures in Africa. Overall, this work not only sheds light on an understudied legacy of slavery in the United States but also offers insights into labor dynamics that might still prevail in developing contexts.   Presenter 2: Hellary Zhang Title: From Bedlam to Bedless: Causes and Consequences of Shrinking Inpatient Psychiatric Care in the US Abstract: Severe mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder) afflict approximately six percent of U.S. adults each year, imposing substantial costs on both individuals and society through disability and premature death. Health outcomes for this population appear to have worsened over time, with suicide mortality rates increasing by 33% between 1999 and 2017. In earlier decades, the number of inpatient psychiatric beds declined by 60% from 1970 to 2002. One contributing factor to this decline is the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) Exclusion, which prohibits federal Medicaid reimbursement for psychiatric treatment provided in facilities with more than sixteen beds to beneficiaries aged 21 to 64. In this project, I hope to examine whether the IMD exclusion contributed to the reduction in inpatient psychiatric bed capacity and, in turn, led to increases in emergency department boarding and other downstream outcomes (e.g., mortality, homelessness). To do so, I will leverage cross-state variation in exposure to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which capped the share of federal disproportionate-share hospital (DSH) payments allocated to IMDs.
April 9, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Jacob Moscona (MIT): Directed Innovation Meets Economic Development: Embrapa and Brazil’s Agricultural Revolution
April 9, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Carolyn Moehling (Rutgers): Do Female-Owned Employment Agencies Mitigate Discrimination and Expand Opportunity for Women?
April 9, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Cancelled 4/9
April 8, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Seminar in Econometrics	Michael Pollmann (Duke): "Causal Inference from Hypothetical Evaluations" (with B. Douglas Bernheim, Daniel Björkegren, and Jeffrey Naecker)
April 8, 20252:30 PM - 4:00 PM	Seminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Ugo antonio Troiano (UC Riverside): The Political Economy of Violent Crime and the Erosion of Social Capital
April 7, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Natalia Fabra (Carlos III): The Costs of Counterparty Risk in Long-Term Contracts
April 7, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Fernando Luco (Texas A&M): Quantifying Foreclosure: The Ticketmaster-Live Nation Merger
April 7, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Seminar in Macroeconomics	Paul Beaudry (UBC): Monetary policy along the yield curve: Why can central banks affect long-term real rates? Abstract:  This paper presents theory and evidence to advance the notion that very persistent policy-induced interest rate changes may have only weak effects on activity. This arises when consumption-savings decisions are not primarily driven by intertemporal substitution, but also by life-cycle forces associated with retirement. We show that, within this framework, the impact of highly persistent monetary policy shocks is determined by two forces: an asset valuation effect and the response of the long-run average marginal propensity to consume out of financial wealth. We argue, based on theory and empirics, that these forces likely cancel each other out, allowing monetary policy to (unconsciously) drive trends in long-run real rates. Our findings also suggest that very precise knowledge of r* might not be essential to the successful conduct of monetary policy.
April 7, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Tomer Novikov (Northwestern University): "The Effects of the Removal of SNAP Cliffs”
April 4, 20252:00 PM - 3:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Jose Lara (Northwestern University): "Identifying Subjective GE Models”
April 4, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Sergio Lopez Araiza Title: Crossed by the Border: Economic Assimilation of Mexican Involuntary Migrants Abstract: Immigrant selection and assimilation at destination are at the core of immigration economics. However, the literature so far has not been able to show if they are correlated. To shed light on the interaction between immigrant selection and assimilation, I used an unexplored historical experiment: the US annexation of more than half of Mexico's territory in 1848. These territories had a population of around 100,000 individuals that were allowed to stay and become American citizens; most of them did. I call this group Mexican involuntary migrants (MIMs). This paper compares labor outcomes of these MIMs to those of native-born white individuals (NWBs), as well as to Mexican Voluntary Migrants (MVMs) that came to the US during the same time period. I find widening occupational score gaps for both MIMs and MVMs with respect to the native white population. However, MIMs seem to improve their occupational status at higher rates than MVMs, which suggests that self selection into migration (or the lack of it) might not be relevant for immigrant assimilation in the destination country.
April 3, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Guilherme Neri Title: Safety Nets, Persistence and Household Labor Dynamics Abstract: Safety nets are widely debated for potentially fostering dependency among beneficiaries. This paper examines how safety net generosity affects time on welfare and labor market behavior across and within families, and estimates its fiscal consequences. Using a randomized experiment where participants were exposed to means-tested transfers of different magnitudes for up to 8 years, we first document that larger transfers caused recipients to remain on welfare longer. Next, we estimate that this additional persistence raised the cost of the higher-transfer regime by 18% relative to the lower-transfer one. While the more generous safety net shifts participation toward households of higher-earning potential, we find asymmetric labor market responses within families: those directly responsible to receive the benefit reduce formal earnings by 6.4%, while cohabitating adults increase earnings by 7.3%. Finally, we show that the opposing within-household effects are partially driven by household structure, with non-single direct recipients showing stronger negative responses.
April 2, 20251:45 PM - 3:00 PM	Joint Seminar in Strategy and Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics	Sandy Black (Columbia): Intergenerational Transmission of Lifespan in the US
April 2, 202512:00 PM - 1:00 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker TBA
April 2, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Pedro Aldighieri (Northwestern University): "General Purpose Technologies and the Evolution of Science: Evidence from the Early Computers”
April 1, 20254:00 PM - 5:30 PM	Joint Seminar in Econometrics and Industrial Organization	Kirill Borusyak (Berkeley): Estimating Structural Models of Demand with Recentered Instruments (with Peter Hull and Mauricio Caceres Bravo)
April 1, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	Economics 501: Graduate Student Seminar	Julien Manili (Northwestern University): "Self-Control Contests as a Disciplining Device”
March 19, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Robert Gordon (Northwestern) Title: How do electoral votes, presidential approval, and consumer sentiment respond to economic indicators?
March 14, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch	Speaker: Caterina Alfonzo Title: The Legacy of Feudalism and Sicilian Low Social Capital. Abstract: This paper investigates the role of feudal institutions in hampering the short- and long-term accumulation of social capital. Focusing on Sicily, we construct a novel municipality-level dataset and show that the experience and type of feudal institutions predicts local social capital shortly after the formal abolition of feudalism. We suggest that the production structure put into place by feudal landlords favored the prevalence of socially-isolated nuclear families, incapable to develop inter-family solidarity and mutual trust. Finally, we find that the legacy of feudalism, not the rise of the Mafia, is negatively associated with today’s social capital and economic progress – thus providing a novel explanation for Sicily’s social and economic backwardness.
March 13, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch	Speaker: Ludovica Mosillo  Title: The Unequal Effects of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Rationing is a common approach to managing resource crises such as water or electricity shortages in fast growing developing economies. This strategy often involves rotating the availability of resources across geographical regions, typically without differentiating based on local needs or demand. The aim of this project is to assess whether rationing can exacerbate existing economic inequalities. I study 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.
March 13, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title: Impacts of Hospital Ownership on Quality of Care Abstract: We examine the impacts of for-profit ownership on hospital quality of care, primarily measured by mortality.  Using an instrumental variables strategy to mitigate patient selection into hospital type, we find little difference in quality of care between for-profit and nonprofit hospitals.
March 12, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Desmond Ang (Harvard University): World War I and the Rise of the Ku Klux Klan (with Sahil Chinoy) The post-World War I era witnessed a dramatic resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, with membership swelling to millions across the United States during the 1920s. Drawing on newly digitized military records and KKK membership rolls, we examine the relationship between military service and subsequent Klan participation among white veterans. Reconstructing the WWI draft lottery, we find that white men who were inducted into the Army were significantly more likely to join the KKK than comparable non-drafted men from the same communities. This effect was particularly pronounced among those conscripted from regions with stronger expressions of patriotic sentiment. Our analysis reveals that increased KKK membership was significantly mediated by contact with Black and Jewish soldiers, with the strongest effects observed among white veterans with the most exposure to those groups. These findings contribute to our understanding of how wartime experiences shaped racial attitudes and mobilized white supremacist activity in interwar America.
March 12, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Pablo Sanchez
March 10, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Industrial Organization	Pietro Tebaldi (Columbia): "Managed Competition vs. Public Procurement in Individual Health Insurance" joint with Jose Ignacio Cuesta
March 7, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch	Speaker: Shuyi Yu  Title: Bureaucratization as a Bumpy Journey: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Chinese State. Abstract: Historians have long documented the rise and fall of the Imperial Chinese state. This paper introduces bureaucratization as a potential mechanism underlying these dynamics. It develops a game-theoretical model to analyze the inherent principal-agent problem in state administration, identifying two types of agents available to the ruler: elites and bureaucrats. The process of bureaucratization, driven by exogenous forces such as technological advancements and power centralization, enabled the state to routinize an increasing portion of administrative tasks and delegate them to bureaucrats rather than elites. A relational contract with bureaucrats offers higher returns than one with elites, as bureaucrats can be more effectively monitored. Interestingly, as bureaucrats gradually took on administrative duties, state capacity followed an N-shaped trajectory. The mid-phase decline in state capacity is attributed to the weakening credibility of the ruler’s contract with elites, leading to their reduced efforts. This decline aligns with the significant downturn of the Chinese state during the late Imperial period, followed by a resurgence in modern times as bureaucratization eventually reaches its full form. Furthermore, this model may have broader applicability to other historical civilizations.
March 6, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch	Speaker: Elizabeth Jamarillo Title: Family Dynamics and Educational Outcomes: the Impact of Financial Aid on Siblings Abstract: Siblings are typically the closest peers to an individual, changes in one child’s circumstances can therefore spill over to their siblings. In 2014, the Government of Colombia launched the Ser Pilo Paga Program, which translates to ''Hard Work Pays Off" in English. The program was designed to provide college financial aid to high-achieving high school seniors from low-income households. Children were eligible to receive a grant according to two criteria: the poverty index of the household and their score on the high school exit exam. We leverage quasi-random variation in grant receipt by comparing the change over time in educational outcomes for siblings of students above and below the eligibility threshold in a difference-in-differences framework. Relative to younger siblings of non-eligible students, those above the cutoff experience increases in test scores and the probability of going to college of about 0.13 standard deviations (56%), and 12.4% respectively, following the implementation of the financial aid program. The effects are driven by large and statistically significant effects of enrollment in high-quality higher education institutions. The results highlight the presence of sibling spillovers, suggesting that policies or shocks that affect one child in a family may have multiplier effects on other members of the family.
March 6, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Max Pienkny  Title: Churches and Local Economies Abstract: How important are churches to local economic outcomes? Exploiting two plausibly exogenous shocks to church access and attendance, we study the causal effect of churches on a variety of economic and social outcomes. Using data from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), we study: (1) unexpected pastor deaths, which precipitate church closures, and (2) SBC pastor convictions for sex crimes, which also alter local congregations and attendance. Across multiple data sources, we find that churches exert large positive effects on economic activity and wellbeing, and that these effects are partly due to the church's role in facilitating social connectedness.
March 5, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Lukas Althoff (Stanford): Who Benefited from the GI Bill? The Limits of Race- and Gender-Blind Policy
March 5, 202512:30 PM - 1:30 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Jana Obradovic
February 28, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch	Speaker: Yifan Mao Title: Reshaping Social Relations without Changing Social Norms Abstract: Social norms often undermine state efforts to empower women: practices like child marriage and genital cutting persist despite being outlawed. These norms remain deeply entrenched and resistant to intervention. This research asks: Can the state reshape social relations and promote women’s rights without first dismantling these norms? A crucial yet overlooked factor is the structure of the state itself: How does the degree of centralization influence the interaction between the state and women, as well as the implementation of policies aimed at their empowerment? Drawing on divorce legislation in 1950s China, this research finds that a more centralized state—distanced from local biases—was more effective in challenging traditional norms and bringing social reforms.  Paradoxically, decentralization, which brought the state apparatus closer to women, did not improve their welfare.
February 27, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Development Economics	Eduardo Montero (UChicago): "The Price of Faith: Economic Costs and Religious Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa" (joint with Dean Yang and Triana Yentzen)
February 27, 202512:15 PM - 1:15 PM	Development Economics Lunch	Faculty Panel Discussion: Project Development in Development Economics Panelists: Lori Beaman, Dean Karlan, Garima Sharma, and Chris Udry
February 27, 202511:00 AM - 12:00 PM	HELP Workshop Lunch	Speaker: Therese Bonomo Zoom Link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/98059847355 Title: Impacts of Guaranteed Income on Health and Economic Well-Being: Experimental Evidence from Evanston (with Sheridan Fuller) Abstract: Over 150 guaranteed income pilots have been initiated in the U.S. since 2019, offering a unique opportunity to understand how low-income households respond to unconditional cash transfers. We evaluate the effects of the Evanston Guaranteed Income Pilot Program, a randomized experiment offering $500/month for one year to low-income residents, on beneficiary’s health, economic security, and labor supply. After ten months of GI, we find that recipients have significantly improved mental health, increased food security, and decreased likelihood of forgoing medical care due to costs. These effects are largest among young adults. We also find no significant changes in labor supply, either in aggregate or among heterogeneous subsamples.
February 26, 20253:30 PM - 5:00 PM	Seminar in Economic History	Reka Juhasz (UBC): Codification, Technology Absorption, and the Globalization of the Industrial Revolution
February 26, 202512:45 PM - 1:45 PM	Macroeconomics Lunch Seminar	Speaker: Valerio Di Tommaso
February 21, 202512:00 PM - 1:30 PM	Economic History Lunch	Speaker: Scott Sowerby Title: The Seventeenth-Century Demographic Crisis and Religious Toleration in Europe. Abstract: This paper argues that European jurisdictions that lost more population in the seventeenth century were more likely to enact religious toleration. It suggests two possible reasons why rulers facing a demographic crisis might be inclined to support toleration. One was an economic growth pathway: from the point of view of the ruler, having more people helped the economy, allowing them to invest in prestige goods (such as palaces) that they could show off to other rulers, which served to legitimize their status. The second was a security pathway: having more people helped to fend off external invasions.
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.