DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

Feed Your Mind Lunch Series

The Department of Economics hosts a quarterly "Feed Your Mind" Lunch Series aimed to bring students and professors together outside the classroom. The lunches give students the opportunity to learn about economics research in a small group format. 

Past Events:

• "Identifying Socially Disruptive Policies" with Professor Eric Auerbach
  • Date: Friday, November 17, 2023
  • Social disruption occurs when a policy creates or destroys many network connections between agents. It is a costly side effect of many interventions and so a growing empirical literature recommends measuring and accounting for social disruption when evaluating the welfare impact of a policy. However, there is currently little work characterizing what can actually be learned about social disruption from data in practice. In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying social disruption in a research design that is popular in the literature. We provide two sets of identification results. First, we show that social disruption is not generally point identified, but informative bounds can be constructed using the eigenvalues of the network adjacency matrices observed by the researcher. Second, we show that point identification follows from a theoretically motivated monotonicity condition, and we derive a closed form representation. We apply our methods in two empirical illustrations and find large policy effects that otherwise might be missed by alternatives in the literature.

• "How Better Access to Mental Health Care Can Reduce Crime" with Professor Elisa Jácome
  • Date: Wednesday, May 3, 2023
  • American prisons house a disproportionate number of inmates with mental illnesses, making them some of the country's largest providers of mental health care. Professor Jácome explores the link between young adults aging out of Medicaid eligibility and higher rates of incarceration.

• "The Unequal Consequences of Carbon Pricing" with Professor Diego Känzig
  • Date: Friday, February 10, 2023
  • Carbon pricing is increasingly used as a tool to mitigate climate change, with a growing number of jurisdictions having implemented such policies either in the form of carbon taxes or cap and trade systems. Professor Känzig studies the aggregate and distributional impacts of such policies and discusses how redistributive policies can complement climate policy for a successful transition to a low-carbon economy.

• "Redistribution Through Markets" with Professor Piotr Dworczak
  
  • Date: Friday, November 18, 2022
  • Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. Professor Dworczak examines the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design, and identifies the optimal trade-off between allocative efficiency and redistribution.

• "Algorithmic Design: Fairness and Accuracy" with Professor Annie Liang
  • Date: Monday, November 29, 2021
  • Algorithms guide many high-stakes decisions including who should receive bail, who should receive medical treatment, who should receive loans, and who should receive employment. Professor Annie Liang shared her research on the tradeoffs between fairness and accuracy in algorithm design. 

• "The Lasting Impacts of School Shootings" with Professor Molly Schnell
  • Date: Friday, April 16, 2021
  • "While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on surviving youth. In this talk, I will discuss my recent work on the persistent effects of school shootings on students' well-being and economic trajectories."

• "Does Poverty Change Labor Supply? Evidence from Multiple Income Effects and 115,579 Bags"  with Professor Chris Udry 
  
  • Date: February 19, 2021
  • Professor Udry shared his research on how labor supply and effort in northern Ghana respond to exogenous changes in income and wages using a randomized evaluation of a multi-faceted grant program combined with a bag-making operation. The research found that recipients of the grant program increase, rather than reduce, their supply of labor. 

• "Guns & Roses" with Professor Sara Hernandez-Saborit
  
  • Date: November 13, 2020 
  • What do Guns & Roses have in common? Professor Hernandez-Saborit shared her research on how the development of the fresh-cut flower industry in Colombia affected different forms of violence in the country, and how creating job opportunities for females might prove to be an effective, anti-violence program.

• Professor Lori Beaman in partnership with the Global Poverty Research Lab
  • Date: January 16, 2020 
  • Professor Beaman discussed her research which is currently in the field in India.  The research team is seeking to understand whether soft skills training will improve young women’s ability to transition from school to the labor market. Professor Beaman shared that it was a great experience – and she ended up meeting a student who she subsequently hired for summer research work!

• "Real-Time Pricing in the Spanish Electricity Market" with Professor Mar Reguant
  
  • Date: November 22, 2019 
  • Professor Reguant very much enjoyed sharing her research about electricity demand with students, hoping to spark their interest in the important challenges we are facing in energy markets. A student who attended the lunch will work with Professor Reguant this summer on a research project.