CEF.UP – ECO Webinar

Thursday – December  16^th, 2021 2:00 p.m. | Online

“Why Does Risk Matter More in Recessions than in Expansions?“

Efrem Castelnuovo – University of Padova, CESifo, and Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (joint work with Martin M. Andreaseny, Giovanni Caggianoz and Giovanni Pellegrino )

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/ Webinar

Tuesday – December 7^th, 2021 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Commitment and the Dynamics of Household Labor Supply “

Alexandros Theloudis – Tilburg University (joint work with PA Chiappori, JI Giménez-Nadal, JA Molina, J Velilla)

Abstract

“We study household labor supply, within the context of a dynamic collective model, and three prominent intra-household commitment regimes: full commitment, no commitment, and limited commitment. We propose a test that distinguishes among all three alternatives based on how contemporary and historical changes to the economic environment affect household behavior. We implement the test on recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the US. Although couples and singles behave similarly in many aspects, couples’ labor supply exhibits distinctive features that are consistent with limited commitment. We then use our results to highlight several issues and caveats that arise when testing for commitment in broad risk-sharing settings.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/ Webinar

Tuesday – November 9^th, 2021 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Better Peers but Worse Rank Position: The Opportunity Cost of Joining a Selective Group”

Pilar Beneito – Universitat de València and ERI-CES

Abstract

“The sharp downgrading of the relative position in the distribution of ability experienced by those just qualifying to enter a selective group may run counter to the intended positive effects of joining better peers. I exploit variation in admission cutoffs across different cohorts and types of business majors programs within a same university to study the causal impact that joining a selective group has on the academic performance of marginal students. I first compare students just above and just below the admission cutoff using a regression discontinuity design, and then I analyse the impact of the ability rank on the academic performance of students at the threshold. I find that female students who are just above the cutoff (thus, low-ranked students in a high-ability group) underperform female students who just fail to gain entry to the selective group (thus, high-ranked students in a mixed-ability group). Conversely, I find much smaller or no significant effects among male students. I show that gender differences in the response of students to their ability rank position explain a large part of the differences found at the threshold.”

CEF.UP – WiP Seminar/Webinar

Friday – October 22^nd, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Specialists or All-Rounders: How best to select university students?”.

Pedro Luís Silva – CIPES and FEP

Abstract:

This paper studies whether universities should select their students only using specialised subject-specific tests or based on a broader set of skills and knowledge. I show that even if broader skills are not improving graduates’ outcomes in the labour market, the university chooses to use them as a criterion for selection alongside the mastery of more subject-specific tools. Empirically, I exploit the variation between subject-specific and non-specific entrance exam sets on Portuguese students’ large administrative dataset. My central finding is that, on average, universities with less specialised admission policies admit a pool of students who obtain a higher final GPA.

CEF.UP – WiP Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – September 21^st, 2021 at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305 | Online

“Do in-group biases lead to overconfidence in performance? Experimental evidence”.

Lia Flores – FEP (joint work with Miguel Fonseca)

Abstract:

“Psychologists have long identified the tendency of humans to overestimate their skill relative to their peers (overplacement). We investigate whether this phenomenon is exacerbated by group affiliation: social identity theory predicts people evaluate in-group members more positively than out-group members, and we hypothesized that this differential treatment may result in greater overplacement when interacting with an out-group member. We tested this hypothesis with 301 US voters affiliated with either the Republican or Democratic party in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential election, a time when political identities were salient and highly polarized. We found there is a higher tendency for overplacement when faced with an out-group opponent than with an in-group opponent. Decomposition analysis suggests this difference is due to underestimating the opponent, as opposed to overestimating one’s own performance to a higher degree. Moreover, any tendency to incur in overplacement is mitigated when faced with an opponent with the same political-identity relative to one with a neutral one. While group affiliation biases initial priors, such effect is unchanged when participants are asked to update their beliefs.”

CEF.UP – ECO Webinar

Friday – July 9^th, 2021 2:00 p.m.

“The trend-cycle connection”

Hernan Bernadaz –  Universidad Carlos III, Madrid (joint work with Florencia Airaudo)

Abstract

“Long-run growth in Latin America over the last 50 years has been low and volatile in the presence of frequent Sudden Stops. We develop a theory that links long-run growth, financial frictions, and Sudden Stops in Emerging countries. Our theory exploits the fact that reversals in trade balance during Sudden Stops occur through sharp declines in imports, particularly of imported investment, rather than increases in exports. Imported investment, in turn, has a permanent impact on economic growth. We find that trend growth deteriorates during Sudden Stops and, even though trend shocks play a crucial role, financial frictions and shocks have a significant impact on its dynamics. We apply our model to the Sudden Stops in Argentina since the 1950s and find that financial crises have a strong permanent effect on the trend, that is, to a large extent, the trend is the cycle.”

CEF.UP – MaR Webinar

Tuesday – June  15^th, 2021 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

“Does Subsidiary Auditor Misalignment Explain Audit Fee Low-Balling?”

Peter Pope – Bocconi University (Italy) and London School of Economics (UK) – joint work with Angela Pettinicchio and Alessandra Scimeca

Area: Accounting and Management Control

CEF.UP – FIN Webinar

Wednesday – June  2^nd, 2021, at 1:00 p.m.

Glass Half Full or Half Empty?  Activists, Short Sellers, and Disagreement

Pedro Saffi – Cambridge Judge Business School (joint work with Tao Li and Daheng Yang)

Abstract: We study events in which activist hedge funds and short sellers target the same stock, using European data on activism and mandatory disclosures of large short positions. The likelihood of activist targeting and the probability of a successful campaign are higher in the presence of large short sellers, with an even larger effect when investor disagreement is high. Hedge fund activism is associated with a reduction in short interest, but it does not affect the likelihood of a large short position. Finally, we show that hedge fund activism generates higher abnormal returns when large short sellers are present, especially when activists achieve their stated goals.

CEF.UP – FIN Webinar

Wednesday – May 19^th, 2021 at 3:00 p. m.

“Specialized Investments and Firms’ Boundaries: Evidence from Textual Analysis of Patents”

Michael Weisbach – Fisher College of Business (Ohio State University) – joint work with Jan Bena, Isil Erel and Daisy Wang

Abstract

Inducing firms to make specialized investments through bilateral contracts can be challenging because of potential hold-up problems. Such contracting difficulties have long been argued to be an important reason for acquisitions. To evaluate the extent to which this motivation leads to mergers, we perform a textual analysis of the patents filed by the same lead inventors of the target firms before and after the mergers. We find that patents of inventors from target firms become 15% to 20% more similar to those of acquirers’ inventors following completed mergers, benchmarked against patents filed by targets and a group of counterfactual acquirers. This pattern is stronger for vertical mergers that are likely to require specialized investments. There is no change in the similarity of patents for mergers that are announced but not consummated. Overall, we provide evidence suggesting that contracting issues in motivating specialized investment can be a motive for acquisitions.

CEF.UP – MaR Webinar

Tuesday – May  11^th, 2021 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

It is time to Rethink and Reinvent Future Research Directions?

Jay Kandampully – Ohio State University (USA)

Area: Marketing and Strategy

The goal of this seminar is to enable young researchers to successfully develop and publish their work. In particular, this seminar aims to assist young researchers in developing research ideas and to share strategies used by good researchers to make work appealing to the journals’ editor, reviewers and readers, and hence get it published.

CEF.UP – ECO Webinar

Tuesday – May 11^th, 2021 3:00 p.m.

“Necessary and Sufficient conditions for Determinacy of Asymptotically Stationary Equilibria in OLG Models”

Anna Rubinchik –  Western Galilee College, Israel (joint work with Alexander Gorokhovsky)

Abstract:

We propose a criterion for verifying whether a local policy analysis can be made in an overlapping generations model,  i.e., whether a given equilibrium is determinate. The criterion is applicable for a generic set of parameters of the model, and in case of indeterminacy, it indicates the nature of the problem: multiplicity of equilibria or their absence for near-by parameters.

The criterion can be applied to models with infinite past and future as well as those with a truncated past.

The equilibrium is not necessarily a steady state; for example, demographic- and type-composition of the population and endowments can change over time.

However, asymptotically, the equilibrium should be stationary. The two limiting stationary paths at either end of the timeline do not have to be the same. If they are, conditions for local uniqueness are far more stringent for an economy with a truncated past as compared to its counterpart with an infinite past.

In addition, we illustrate our main result using a text-book model with a single physical good, a two-period life-cycle and a single type of consumer. In this model we show how to calculate a response to a policy change using the implicit function theorem.

CEF.UP – WiP Webinar

Tuesday – May 4^th, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.

“Automation, Education and Demographic Dynamics: Growth Effects in an OLG Model of Endogenous Fertility”.

Catarina Peralta – FEP

Abstract:

” We address two main structural changes occurring in developed countries: the rise of automation and population ageing. We use an R\&D-based growth model in an OLG framework with endogenous education and fertility, and automation in the production process. Our model is able to combine the growth of real wages over time and either a fall or an increase in birth rates, consistent with recent data regarding the birth rate by skill group. Moreover, our model allows for the study of the interplay between the effects of population ageing and those of automation. The results show a dynamics consistent with the US trends for the period covering 1970 to 2019.”

CEF.UP – WiP Webinar

Tuesday – April 13^th, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.

“Building a Composite Index using the Multi-objective Approach: An application to the case of human development”.

Elif Öztürk – FEP

Abstract:

“Composite indicator (CI) is a powerful tool to observe the performance of various alternatives when several dimensions are in question. Normalisation, weighting and aggregation are known as the three obligatory steps to build a CI. The current paper proposes a new and unconventional method, which does not require any of these steps, to construct a CI. In this method, we suggest using the Pareto frontier concept, a term in the multi-objective optimisation, to set the solutions  (e.g. countries, firms, or alternatives) in an order. Pareto frontiers help to collect similar solutions together according to their performance on several dimensions, sequentially. Each Pareto frontier represents a different achievement level. However,  it is not possible to evaluate the solutions located in the same Pareto frontier using multi-objective optimisation. To identify the performance of each solution within the Pareto frontiers, we implement the ordered probit regression model and predict the latent variable that represents the specific problem by using the estimated results. We use this proposed methodology to re-measure human development. A comparison took place between the Human Development Index (HDI) and our proposed method. According to the results, the country ranks in the proposed method show a significant difference compared to the HDI, although there is a high Spearman’s rank correlation. This method is strong and reliable because it does not require any vague selection of obligatory steps to build a CI. Moreover, it provides fully non-compensatory results and an influential ranking of the solutions.”

CEF.UP – MaR Webinar

Tuesday – April  6^th, 2021 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

“Identifying Market Structure: A Deep Network Representation Learning of Social Engagement“

P.K. Kannan – University of Maryland (USA)

Area: Marketing and Strategy

CEF.UP – MaR Webinar

Tuesday – March 23^rd, 2021 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

“Economic lot sizing problem with remanufacturing option“

Ashwin Arulselvan – University of Strathclyde (UK)

Area: Operations and Logistics

Abstract:

“In a single item dynamic lot-sizing problem, we are given a time horizon and demand for a single item in every time period. The problem seeks a solution that determines how much to produce and carry at each time period, so that we will incur the least amount of production and inventory cost. When the remanufacturing option is included, the input comprises of returned products at each time period that can be potentially remanufactured to satisfy the demands, where remanufacturing and inventory costs are applicable. For this problem, we first show that it cannot have a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). We then provide a pseudo-polynomial algorithm to solve the problem and show how this algorithm can be adapted to solve it in polynomial time, when we make certain realistic assumptions on the cost structure. A lot of questions remain open for generic cost structure.

In the second half of the talk, we are interested in the robust version of the problem. We assume that the demands and returns are uncertain and we employ the approach used by Bertsimas and Thiele to model the uncertainty set. We then provide a computational approach to solve the problem assuming the demands and returns belong to this uncertainty set. The approach can be viewed as a variant of Benders’ decomposition. The complexity of the subproblem even in the simplest case remains open.”

CEF.UP – WiP Webinar

Tuesday – March 23^rd, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.

“How does inequality affect growth on the US and France? A SVAR approach with structural breaks focused on the whole distribution of income and wealth”

Pedro Lima – FEP

Abstract:

“We analyze transmission channels between inequality and growth on the US and France using an approach that innovates twofold: (i) analyzing measures that characterize different parts of the income and wealth distributions; (ii) conducting a time series analysis using a SVAR approach with long-run restrictions that considers the presence of structural breaks in the data. We find that each transmission channel is affected by changes in particular parts of the income and wealth distribution, which are not always consistent with an inequality increase, and there are stark differences in the way each transmission channel operates between different distributions and countries. Our results are robust to alternative long-run specifications and provide an additional explanation for the myriad of results found in the literature that reinforces the complexity of the inequality-growth relationship.”

CEF.UP – MaR Webinar

Tuesday – March 2^nd, 2021 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

“Job Insecurity and Work Engagement when Working Remotely: Evidence from Academics in the UK during the COVID-19 Lockdown”

Rita Fontinha –  University of Reading (UK)

Area: Organization and Human Resources

CEF.UP – WiP Webinar

Friday – February 26^th, 2021 at 2:00 p.m.

“The Agglomerative Force of Education”

Jorge Saraiva – CEF.UP

Abstract:

“We find that, when skilled workers are allowed to choose their location, an economy with a higher human capital favours the agglomeration of economic activities and reduces the likelihood of a symmetric dispersion scenario. We explore the possibility that both skilled and unskilled populations remain unchanged while allowing skilled workers to increase their productivity. The choice of the productivity level turns out to be independent of spatial distribution and transportation costs. Education is higher, the higher the expenditure share in the industrial good is. Increases in education levels lead to positive externalities that affect the whole society.”

CEF.UP – ECO Webinar

Friday – January 8^th, 2021  3:00 p.m.

Comparative European Institutions and the Little Divergence, 1385-1800

Nuno Palma –   Manchester University (joint work with António Castro Henriques)

Abstract:

Why did the countries which first benefited from access to the New World –Castile and Portugal –decline relative to their followers, especially England and the Netherlands? The dominant narrative is that worse initial institutions at the time of the opening of Atlantic trade explain Iberian divergence. In this paper, we build new quantitative measures which allow for a comparison of institutional quality over time. We consider the frequency and nature of parliamentary meetings, the frequency and intensity of extraordinary taxation and coin debasement, and real interest spreads for public debt. We find no evidence that the political institutions of Iberia were worse at least until the English Civil War.