October 04^th, 2019   

Personalized Pricing and Brand Distribution

Markus Reisinger – Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

(joint work with Bruno Jullien and Patrick Rey)

1-2p.m. | Room 305

Paper Prof Markus Reisinger (PDF)

October 16^th, 2019

Applied economics as a historical problem

Roger Backhouse – Birmingham University/Erasmus University Rotterdam

For many intellectual historians it is problematic to write the history of an individual discipline in isolation from wider intellectual developments. It follows that writing a history of “applied economics” is even more problematic. Drawing on projects in which I have been involved, this paper explores different ways in which writing the history of applied economics can be justified, arguing not only that understanding the position of applied economics is central to the history of economics but also that focusing on applied economics addresses some of the doubts that intellectual historians have expressed about writing  histories of economic thought.

 1-2p.m. | Room 305

November 8^th, 2019

The Macroeconomic Effects of Structural Reforms in Developing Countries

João Tovar Jalles – Economist at Conselho das Finanças Públicas | Portuguese Public Finance Council (joint work with Gabrielle Ciminelli, Davide Furceri and Giovanni Melina)

ABSTRACT

The paper estimates the dynamic macroeconomic effects of structural reforms on output, employment and productivity in a sample of developing countries, and explores how these vary with prevailing macroeconomic conditions and policies. We apply a local projection method to a new dataset of major country- and country-sector-level reform shocks in various areas of labor market institutions, product market regulation, financial and trade liberalization over the past four decades. In the medium run, structural reforms can help lift income and employment levels. Domestic finance reforms implemented when economic conditions are strong are associated with an increase in output that is twice as large as the that estimated for the baseline—unconditional—reform. Trade reforms are associated with a slow but non-negligible increase in output. Labor market reforms generally have positive macroeconomic effects. Finally, product market reforms have statistically significant, although rather small, effects on output. These materialize at a quicker pace relative to other reforms. These findings suggest that prioritizing and sequencing reforms can prove particularly useful for optimizing their beneficial effects on macroeconomic outcomes.

1-2p.m. | Room 305

November 22^th, 2019

The Local Impact of Containerization

Gisela Rua – Senior Economist – Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

ABSTRACT

“We investigate how containerization impacts local economic activity. Containerization is premised on a simple insight: packaging goods for waterborne trade into a standardized container makes them cheaper to move. We use a novel cost-shifter instrument — port depth pre-containerization — to contend with the non-random adoption of containerization by ports. Container ships sit much deeper in the water than their predecessors, making initially deep ports cheaper to containerize. We find that counties near containerized ports grew about twice as fast as other coastal port counties between 1950 and 2010 because of containerization. Gains are concentrated in areas with initially low land values.”

1-2p.m. | Room 305

November 29^th, 2019

Some recent research using info-metrics

Pedro Macedo – Universidade de Aveiro

ABSTRACT

“Info-metrics is a research area at the intersection of statistics, computer science and decision theory, where the maximum entropy principle established by Edwin Jaynes plays an important role. Maximum entropy provides a tool for solving ill-posed problems that occur in diverse areas of science and it can be seen as an extension of the Bernoulli’s principle of insufficient reason. Some recent research in regularization, variable selection, large-scale data and stochastic frontier analysis will be discussed, along with some applications.”

 1-2p.m. | Room 305