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:

• "Can economics predict election results?" with Professor Robert Gordon
  • Date: Friday, May 16, 2025
  • Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton lost the electoral vote but won the popular vote.  Can that be explained? Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972 both won landslides (525 and 520 electoral votes, respectively) – which landslide is better explained by economic indicators? How does the increasing polarization of the electorate show up in the econometric relationships? In approval ratings? We will addresses both recent and long-past historical issues, for instance: is the sharp drop in consumer sentiment recently announced for the first two months of 2025 unprecedented? How much of Harris’ loss is explained by economic indicators? How much did the economy contribute to Biden’s low approval ratings and what remains to be explained? Were Biden’s approval ratings relative to economic indicators better or worse than Trump’s first term?

• "Discourse on Social Planning under Uncertainty" with Professor Charles Manski
  • Date: Wednesday, February 19, 2025
  • Economists have long studied policy choice by social planners aiming to maximize population welfare. Whether performing theoretical studies or applied analyses, researchers have generally assumed that the planner knows enough about the choice environment to be able to determine an optimal action. However, the consequences of decisions are often highly uncertain. Discourse on Social Planning under Uncertainty addresses the failure of research to come to grips with this uncertainty. Combining research across three fields – welfare economics, decision theory, and econometrics – this impressive study offers a comprehensive treatment that fleshes out a 'worldview' and juxtaposes it with other viewpoints. Building on multiple case studies, ranging from medical treatment to climate policy, the book explains analytical methods and how to apply them, providing a foundation on which future interdisciplinary work can build.

• "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.