CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Friday – March 1^st, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“The Transmission of Foreign Demand Shocks”

Jeppe Druedahl  –  University of Copenhagen (Denmark)

Abstract:

“Introducing heterogeneous households into a New Keynesian model of a small open economy enables the model to fit a set of stylized empirical facts about the transmission of foreign demand shocks. In the absence of a strong labor income effect on consumption, the model counterfactually implies that domestic consumption decreases as the central bank raises the interest rate to curb domestic inflation. With plausible marginal propensities to consume, the model instead produces the observed increase in domestic consumption of both tradeable and non-tradeable goods. This implies that foreign demand shocks are more important for international business-cycle comovement than predicted by existing models. Our findings also have implications for stabilization policies: While monetary policy is well-suited to counteract foreign demand shocks, traditional fiscal policies are inadequate, as they do not provide sufficient stimulus to the tradeable sector. This poses a particular challenge for countries with a fixed exchange rate or in a monetary union.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – February 20^th, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Closing the Gender Gap in Multilateral Negotiations Through Institutional Design“

Diogo Geraldes  –  University College Dublin (Ireland)

Abstract:

“Experimental evidence from different subject pools shows that men earn more than women in majoritarian negotiations. Three stylized modes of behavior emerge as potential reasons for the gap: men sort into making opening offers more often, prefer to partner with other men, and when partnering with each other, their coalitions are more stable compared to mixed-gender ones. We design three experimental interventions to investigate the explanatory role each channel plays in the emergence of the gap and, consequently, provide potential solutions. We find that enabling everyone to simultaneously make an initial proposal does not close the earnings gap, if anything, it weakly grows in magnitude. Hiding gender eliminates bias in coalition partner choice, alters bargaining dynamics, and equalizes mean earnings. Finally, allowing for instantly-binding agreements in bargaining closes the gap, not only because mixed-gender coalitions become more stable, but also because women become preferred partners. Our results highlight how the attributes of the negotiation environment interact with gender, and suggest that the design of bargaining institutions can be leveraged to promote gender equity.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Friday – February 2^nd, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Good Rents versus Bad Rents: R&D Misallocation and Growth“

Antonin Bergeaud  –  HEC Paris (France)

Abstract:

“Firm price-cost markups may reflect (a) bigger step sizes from quality innovations that confer significant knowledge spillovers onto other firms, and/or (b) higher process efficiency than competing firms. We write down an endogenous growth model in which, compared with the laissez-faire equilibrium, the social planner would generally like to reallocate research resources towards high markup firms in case (a) so as to capitalize on knowledge spillovers but not in case (b). We then exploit unit price variation across firms in French manufacturing to assess the relative strength of these two forces. Viewed through the lens of our model, the French data are consistent with significant variation in innovation step sizes, and hence gains from mitigating R&D misallocation. The policy implication is that, to reach the social optimum, French research subsidies should favor only those high markup firms with “good” rents.”

CEF.UP – MaR – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Friday – January 26^th, 2024, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Necessary condition analysis (NCA) with archival data: backgrounds and illustration”

Jan Dul – Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (Netherlands)

Abstract:

“Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA; Dul 2016, 2020, 2021) is an emerging method that is now used in many business and management research fields and beyond. NCA understands cause-effect relations as “necessary but not sufficient” and not as probabilistic causality. “Necessary” means that an outcome will not occur without the right level of the condition, independently of the rest of the causal structure (thus the condition can be a “bottleneck”, “critical factor”, or “constraint”). In practice, the right level must be put and kept in place to avoid guaranteed failure and to allow the outcome to exist. NCA can be used as a stand-alone tool or in combination with regression-based approaches (e.g., multiple regression analysis, structural equation modeling) or Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). By adding a different logic and data analysis approach, for instance through the reuse of data with a necessity causal perspective, NCA adds both rigor and relevance to theory and data analysis and provides new possibilities for impactful publications.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – December 19^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Leveraging Expertise to Build Authority: Experimental Evidence”

Miguel Fonseca  –  University of Exeter

Abstract:

“Decision-makers often seek guidance from experts, whose authority is key for achieving efficiency gains. However, building authority from expertise is challenging, and there is very limited evidence on whether individuals strategically enable it and how. We conduct a laboratory experiment in which an expert recommends a course of action to a decision-maker, and players subsequently bargain over the split of payoffs. In our main treatment, players can bargain pre-play, and we ask whether they use this opportunity to establish authority. We find that pre-play bargaining triples the frequency of authority relationships, resulting in higher efficiency. Authority is strongly associated with agreements that align interests, but only when reached swiftly, indicating that participants exploit bargaining dynamics to signal their intentions. Finally, committing to pre-play bargaining outcomes does not enhance authority compared to non-binding promises due to more challenging bargaining dynamics under commitment. This finding helps explain why informal promises remain prevalent in social interactions.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – December 5^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Optimal income redistribution”

Pavel Brendler  –  Bonn University

Abstract:

“What is the optimal income tax and Social Security policy?  We set up a rich quantitative model in which a Ramsey planner jointly chooses both programs by maximizing the welfare of currently alive and future generations. We find that the extent to which the government is willing to provide insurance through the income tax-and-transfer program vis-a-vis the pension system crucially depends on the weight the planner assigns to future generations as well as the persistence of wealth transmission across generations. Depending on the intergenerational weight, some of the joint reforms deliver Pareto improvements across generations (but not within generations).”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Friday – November 17^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“The cost-vs.-quality tradeoff in make-or-buy decisions”

Frederik Andersson  –  Lund University

Abstract:

“The make-or-buy decision is analyzed in a simple two-task principal-agent model. There is a cost-saving-vs.-quality trade-off in effort provision, both effort and outcome having these two dimensions. The principal faces a dichotomous choice between make/in-house, coming with weak cost-saving incentives for the agent, and buy/outsourcing, coming with strong incentives; the dichotomy is due to an incomplete-contracting limitation necessitating that one party be residual claimant of cost-savings. Choosing buy rather than make leads to higher cost-saving effort and in a plausible main case to lower effort directed towards quality and lower equilibrium quality, this in spite of stronger direct quality-provision incentives. The attractiveness of make-vs.-buy is explored and shown to be aligned with its impact on quality.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – October 24^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Communication through biased intermediators”

Francisco Silva  –  Department of Economics, Deakin University

Abstract:

“We study biased intermediated communication between a sender and a receiver. We prove that the information that can be transmitted from the sender to the receiver is exactly the same as with direct (non-mediated) communication, provided there are (at least) two intermediators who do not communicate with each other. In that sense, the sender is not harmed by not being able to communicate with the receiver directly. This is the case even if the sender does not know the agents’ biases and regardless of the rules of communication (cheap talk, bayesian persuasion, etc.). We discuss the implications of our results to a related information design problem, where a decision maker designs the statistical experiment to be performed by a possibly biased agent. We show that, if the decision maker is able to manipulate the data without causing any statistical loss, she can implement her preferred statistical experiment despite the agent being biased. If, however, manipulating the data has a statistical cost, then strategies that reduce the overall informativeness of the experiment (like reducing the sample) might actually be (second-best) optimal for the decision maker, because they may require less costly manipulation in order to dissuade biased agents from misreporting. We discuss these ideas in the context of medical research.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – May 30^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Marriage, Divorce and Child Development”

Mónica Costa Dias  –  Cef.up, School of Economics, Bristol University and Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract:

“My research interests are in the fields of labour, family and public economics, and applied econometrics. I study how inequalities build over the course of life and are transmitted across generations, how policy interacts with the formation of inequalities and how it can be designed to ameliorate poverty and its long lasting impacts. In my work, I use applied economic theory and applied econometrics, which I often combine in structural models of economic behaviour, to gain a better understanding of individual choices, how they interact in markets and how they respond to economic incentives.

My research has been funded by, among others, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the European Commission, and has been published in leading academic journals such as Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, Quantitative Economics, Journal of Labor Economics or the Journal of Human Resources.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Monday – May 15^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“What We Do in the Shadows: How Urban Density Facilitates Information Diffusion”

Evan Kresch– Oberlin College (joint work with Qing Zhang)

Abstract:

“Does urban density facilitate the diffusion of information? This paper exploits plausibly exogenous variation generated by a unique national policy in China that requires all residential buildings to receive sufficient hours of sunshine. The policy creates higher degrees of restriction on density at higher latitudes, where longer shadows require buildings to be further apart. Data on individual housing projects across China reveal that the cross-latitude variation in regulatory residential Floor Area Ratio can be described quite well by a formula linking structure density to latitude through the solar elevation angle. These differences in building density further induce differences in population density and land prices across latitudes. Using differential topic dynamics on a national petition platform to measure information diffusion, this paper shows that people respond to shifts in government attention with varying speeds across latitudes. Increases in local government reply rate to a topic raises the volume of subsequent posts on the same topic, exhibiting an S-shaped time trajectory consistent with local information diffusion about shifting government priorities. These responses are systematically faster in southern cities, where density is higher. Survey evidence further indicates that otherwise similar individuals are more likely to gossip about public issues in a southern city.”

CEF.UP – ECO Seminar/Webinar

Tuesday – April 11^th, 2023, at 1:00 p.m. | Room 305| Online

“Can the keyboard beat the good old pen? The effect of computer-based testing on students’ performance”

João Pereira dos Santos – ISEG (joint work with Ana Ruis and Luís Catela)

Abstract:

“Computer-based testing is being increasingly adopted by several education institutions worldwide. Whether this transition from paper-based testing yields different impacts on students’ performance is still an open question. This paper aims to assess the impact of computer-based testing exploiting a large-scale pilot-program deployed in 2022 low-stake exams in Portugal. We rely on rich crosssectional student-level data to implement pooled OLS and difference in differences approaches. Results indicate statistically significant differences in students’ score between computer-based and paper-based testing with differences ranging from -5pp to -24pp. Finally, we discuss important heterogeneity effects and implications of implementing this policy at scale.”