Our Seminars & Workshops

Title: Inheritance Customs and the European Marriage Pattern 

Abstract: Centuries before the demographic transition, the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) limited fertility in Western Europe through high celibacy, late marriage, and nuclear households. Whether the EMP reflected female empowerment or instead financial hardship remains debated. This paper shows that local inheritance institutions determined where economic opportunity strengthened the EMP and where it did not. We construct a new atlas of 2,441 rural and urban inheritance customs in France and Belgium and combine it with genealogical data on 75,000 women born between 1500 and 1750. We show that the EMP emerged alongside economic opportunities where inheritance included women and younger siblings, but that the EMP reflected economic distress where inheritance was inegalitarian; that effects differed between urban and rural areas; and that they persisted over centuries. We develop and estimate a structural model in which inheritance rules affect marriage decisions through female empowerment and financial constraints. The estimates imply that 70 percent of celibacy reflected choice rather than constraint, suggesting that the EMP was primarily a positive force for Europe's development.

Title: Robust Trust (with Piotr Dworczak)

Abstract: An agent chooses an action based on her private information and a recommendation from an informed but potentially misaligned adviser. With a known probability, the adviser truthfully reports his signal; with the remaining probability, he can send any message. We characterize optimal robust decision rules that maximize the agent's worst-case expected payoff. Every optimal rule is equivalent to a trust-region policy i belief space: the adviser's reported beliefs are taken at face value if they fall within the trust region but are otherwise clipped to the trust region's boundary. We derive alignment thresholds above which advice is strictly valuable and fully characterize the solution in both binary-state and binary-action environments.

Title: Reduced Forms: Feasibility, Extremality, Optimality

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Title: The Impact of Technology-Enhanced Learning on Students with Learning Differences in Higher Education: challenging the norm

Professor Fabio Aricò, Centre for Higher Education Research Practice Policy and Scholarship (CHERPPS), University of East Anglia

This talk presents findings from qualitative research exploring how technology-enhanced learning (TEL) is experienced by undergraduate students with specific learning differences (SpLDs) and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), alongside the perspectives of their lecturers. Drawing on interview data, the study challenges assumptions that TEL is inherently inclusive, showing that its benefits are uneven and shaped by pedagogy, institutional practices, and context. The session highlights implications for inclusive pedagogy, staff development, and TEL policy in higher education, while also reflecting on the pedagogical research design and methodological choices underpinning the study

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Do people predict others’ decisions by repeated sampling of simulated outcomes?

Title: Scope of Trust: Origins and Consequences

Title: Synthetic Control and Synthetic Difference-in-Differences: An Asymptotic Optimality Perspective

Title: Health Insurance for Seasonal Savings: Evidence from Rural Côte d'Ivoire

Authors: Günther Fink, B. Kelsey Jack, Renate Strobl, Dao Daouda

Abstract: Households in low-income agricultural economies face large seasonal fluctuations in income and limited access to financial tools for smoothing consumption. In such settings, health insurance can serve not only as risk protection, but also as a state-contingent savings technology, transferring resources from high-income harvest periods to low-income lean periods. We study the rollout of Côte d'Ivoire's national health insurance scheme in a context with high morbidity, substantial out-of-pocket expenditures, and pronounced income seasonality---conditions under which the potential welfare gains from insurance are particularly large. Using a randomized subsidy design among 2,468 cocoa-farming households, we show that insurance demand is highly responsive to both price and cash-on-hand liquidity. Despite strong demand and actuarially favorable pricing, we find limited effects on health spending or consumption. We show that this disconnect arises from frictions in accessing benefits, including weak verification and reimbursement environments that limit providers' willingness to honor coverage without immediate proof. Our results highlight the importance of implementation, trust, and contract enforceability in determining the welfare impacts of social insurance.

Title: Follow the Leader? Coordination Motives in Sequential Information Acquisition (joint with Mark Whitmeyer)

Title: Decoupling Taste-Based versus Statistical Discrimination in ElectionsLink opens in a new window (with Amanda de Albuquerque, Fred Finan, Anubhav Jha, and Laura Karpuska)

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Title: Bank Branches and the Allocation of Capital across Cities (with Gustavo Gonzalez, Marcos Sora).

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Title: Is the Electricity Sector a Weak Link in Development? (joint with Martin Shu and Jonathan Colmer)

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