Title is: The Topology of Quantum Theory and Social Choice.

Please register to attend here by Monday 22nd of May.
The event will also be live-streamed on the CTaLE YouTube Channel.

Panel:
Silvia dal Bianco (Chair, UCL and CTaLE)
Laura Harvey (University of East Anglia)
Amy Eremionkhale (Georgia State University)

Organiser: Stefania Paredes Fuentes

Title: Attitude towards success and failure

There will be two (x 30mins) presentations for this Macro/international workshop.

Title - 1 - Structural Transformation and Intra-Household Bargaining (Jiaqi Li and Qianxue Zhang) (30 mins)

Abstract: A standard structural change model with intra-household bargaining predicts that moving out of agriculture increases female bargaining position by an increase in female to male wage ratio due to the rising service sector. However, we reject this prediction using data from Sub-Saharan Africa. We build a general equilibrium model with gender stigma. It shows that structural transformation reduces female bargaining power if social stigma exceeds the threshold jointly determined by female comparative advantage and substitutability of labor input between genders.

Title – 2 - Human Capital, Self-Insurance and Marriage Uncertainty (Jiaqi Li) (30 mins)

Abstract: Black women's high female labor supply has been a puzzle in economic and sociology literature, since economic and demographic variables fail to explain the gap. Therefore, literature relies on parameters( childcare cost and preferences) to explain the gap. By building a life cycle model of female labor supply, consumption, and savings with uncertainty in divorce shock, I show that only using the racial difference in marriage and divorce rates is able to generate the same racial gap in child penalties as empirical estimates. The structural model illustrates that Black women stay in the labor market to prevent human capital from depreciation as a means to self-insure against future divorce shocks

Title:  No Taxation Without Representation? Evidence from Colonial India

Title: Utilitarian Meritocrats or Conformist Meritocrats? A Redistribution Experiment in China and France (joint work with Yuchen Huang (Paris School of Economics and EHESS) and Zhexun Mo (Paris School of Economics and World Inequality Lab))

Abstract: Recent experimental evidence suggests that meritocratic ideals are mainly a Western phenomenon. Puzzlingly, the Chinese public do not differentiate between merit and luck-based inequalities, despite having highly meritocratic historical institutions. We run a redistribution experiment with elite university students in China and France, investigating two hypotheses: first, that Chinese respondents value meritocracy as a means rather than an end (“consequentialist” rather than “deontological” meritocrats); second, that they exhibit a greater status quo bias. Preliminary results indicate that although Chinese respondents systematically redistribute less than the French, they behave, like French respondents, as deontological meritocrats, implementing more redistribution when merit differences are small or hard to determine. A large part of the overall difference in redistribution is driven by greater reluctance to change the status quo in the Chinese sample. We further show that the Chinese status quo conformity is driven by children of public servants, workers and farmers, but is nearly non-existent for children of private enterprise owners. Finally, we construct and estimate a structural model of distribution choice under conformism, to disentangle preferred distributions from implemented distributions.

Title: Quota Mechanisms: Limitations and Robustness (with Deniz Kattwinkel).

Abstract: Quota mechanisms are commonly used within organizations to elicit private information when agents face multiple decisions and monetary transfers are infeasible. As the number of decisions grows large, quotas asymptotically implement the same set of social choice rules as do monetary transfers. We analyze the robustness of quota mechanisms to misspecified beliefs. To set the correct quota, the designer must have precise knowledge of the environment. We show that only trivial social choice rules can be implemented by quota mechanisms in a prior-independent way. Next, we bound the error that results when the quota does not match the true type distribution. Finally, we show that in a multi-agent setting, quotas are robust to misspecification of the agents' beliefs about each other. Crucially, the quota makes the distribution of reports common knowledge.

Title: “Countervailing power of firms in international trade”. It is available here: CountervailingPower_2023.pdf (annaignatenko.com) 

Abstract - This paper disentangles the effects of seller’s and buyer’s market power in firm-to-firm trade. I incorporate oligopoly, oligopsony, and bilateral bargaining in a trade model, in which buyers and sellers differ in productivity, bargaining ability, and preferences. These market structures predict differential patterns of price variation across buyers. Testing these predictions, I find, in most markets, price variation is consistent with oligopolistic price discrimination. More productive buyers pay lower mark-ups because of their better outside options, rather than scale economies, oligopsony power, or bargaining abilities. Consequently, more productive buyers have higher gains from trade and cost shocks’ pass-through into prices.

Title: Transforming Rural Economies through Tertiary Education: Evidence from India

Abstract: In this paper, we estimate the impact of a higher share of village population who complete tertiary education on village prosperity in India. To causally identify the effect, we use data from the census of villages in India; we control for a host of geographic, historic and current covariates and use intra state variation. Further, we use historical catholic mission location as an instrumental variable-we show that the mean distance of villages to the nearest Catholic mission location circa 1911, when averaged for a sub-district, predicts the tertiary completion rate of a village and argue, through a myriad of robustness checks, that it doesn't affect village prosperity through any other channel. Further, we find that having tertiary educated people in a rural household raises per acre agricultural revenue from crops, increases crop diversification and makes households more likely to have access to technical advice. Some of the effect also comes from tertiary education impacting occupations-those with university degrees are more likely to be in skilled occupations both in agriculture and in the private job market. Some, though not all, of these jobs are outside the village that are accessed through daily commutes to urban areas. In the stylized version of structural transformation, a rise in education leads to a shift of labour from agriculture to non farm jobs and often involves migration of labour to cities, leading to higher urbanisation. Our analysis shows that a rise in the share of tertiary educated among the rural population can lead to village prosperity through a rise in agricultural productivity as well as non farm jobs within and outside the village.

Title: Bidding for Talent: A Test of Conduct on a High-Wage Labor Market

Abstract: We propose a novel procedure for adjudicating between models of firm wage-setting conduct. Using data on workers' choice sets and decisions over real jobs from a U.S. job search platform, we first estimate workers' rankings over firms' non-wage amenities. We document three key findings: 1) On average, workers are willing to accept 12.3% lower salaries for a 1-S.D. improvement in amenities. 2) Between-worker preference dispersion is equally large, indicating that preferences are not well-described by a single ranking. 3) Augmenting differentials prevail. Following the modern IO literature, we then use those estimates to formulate a test of conduct based on exclusion restrictions. Oligopsonistic models incorporating strategic interactions between firms and tailoring of wage offers to workers' outside options are rejected in favor of simpler monopsonistic models featuring near-uniform markdowns. Misspecification has meaningful consequences: while our preferred model predicts average markdowns of 18%, others predict average markdowns of 26% (about 50% larger).

Title: Equilibrium Selection in Repeated Games with Patient Players

This is taking place in Scarman House

Organiser: Bhaskar Dutta

The preliminary title is “Household inflation expectations and labour market outcomes”.

Anshumaan will be presenting the paper with Gavin Hassall.

Negar will be presenting a proposal for the joint project she works jointly with Elaheh Fatemi Pour on. The title is "An Investigation of Employer Gender Preferences: Evidence from Iran".

Title is "Stock Market Bubbles and Monetary Policy".

This will be an in person presentation.

Title: Branching for caution: Banks in England and Wales during the 1878 Financial Panic

Abstract: Using a bank-level dataset on joint-stock banks in England and Wales in the 1870s and 1880s, I show that exposure to an unexpected financial panic resulting from the failure of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878 led to the geographical expansion of banks affected. My baseline estimation includes bank and year fixed effects. I also construct an instrumental variable based on the number of newspapers in the towns of bank headquarters before the panic. Exposure to external shocks led to expansion of banks after the panic and the effects were larger for banks with limited liability.

Title: Firm Localness and Labour Misallocation.

Title: After Amazing Grace: Britain's Campaign to End the Slave Trade

Title: Politics of Food

Title: When Are Estimates Independent of Measurement Units?

Abstract: Data transformations often facilitate regression analysis, yet many commonly used transformations make hypothesis testing misleading because the results depend on the measurement units of the data. This paper aims to address this issue by characterizing the set of transformations where measurement units do not affect conclusions in linear regressions. The equivalence theorem establishes that desirable properties—scale-equivariant coefficient estimates, scale-invariant t-statistics, and scale-invariant semi-elasticities—arise if and only if the transformation is a logarithmic or a power function. Power transformations thus offer a natural extension of logarithmic transformations that both preserves the essential feature of obtaining unit-independent estimates for unitless quantities of interest and can handle zero or negative values. On the other hand, popular alternatives that approximate the shape of the logarithmic function at large values, such as adding a small positive constant before applying a logarithmic transformation or the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation, result in similar inferences as in an untransformed linear regression when expressing outcomes in large measurement units and imply arbitrarily large effect sizes or arbitrarily large confidence intervals when expressing outcomes in small measurement units. We demonstrate using data from a randomized experiment that such transformations reverse the sign or significance of treatment effect estimates for up to 15 out of 49 outcomes variables when measurement units are changed to natural alternatives (e.g., from US dollars to local currency).

Title: Gender of childhood friends and the gender equality paradox.

Title: Sea Level Rise and Urban Adaptation in Jakarta

Title: Some Advice on Navigating Applied Research

Abstract: Professor Canen will open the season in the CAGE-AMES series with an exciting talk about his academic trajectory, research agenda, advice about doing applied research, and lessons he has learned during his career.

Title: Price Discrimination with Manipulable Observables.

Title: Self-employment within the firm

Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor special-ization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this islikely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a gen-eral equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it withour data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close,in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmarkin which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing aproduction space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits fromalleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most Africanfirms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable

Title. Dependence, examples and tools

Title: Labor Market Power in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Effect of Small Firms, Self-Employment, and Migration

Abstract: How competitive are labor markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, and how does the level of competition differ between rural and urban markets? Unlike developed countries, labor markets in developing countries are characterized by a large number of small firms, high rates of self-employment and costly migration. I develop a general equilibrium spatial monopsony framework that accounts for each of these features. I find that labor market power is concentrated in rural areas where there are fewer firms and workers face higher migration costs. Less competitive wages in rural areas causes a misallocation of workers into self-employment, and leads the rural-urban income gap to overstate differences in productivity. However, self-employment plays an important role in diminishing labor market power, particularly in rural areas. In the counterfactual exercise in which I remove migration frictions, total output increases by 23%. This change is driven almost entirely by reallocation across space and not across sectors. This suggests that, above all, self-employment plays a dual role, mitigating labor market power while simultaneously reallocating labor into less productive work.