Our Seminars & Workshops

Title: Recovering latent time-varying network in panel models

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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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Daniel Jaar is visiting the department for one week.

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

Title: Revisiting Shapley-Shubik (1971) via Nash (1953) . This work is joint with Mihai Manea.

 Abstract: The set of stable payoffs in assignment games is often large.

We seek to refine this set in the spirit of the Nash (1953) program, where an idealized (or “cooperative”)

solution is also supported by a non-cooperative mechanism whose Nash equilibria (possibly refined as in Nash (1953))

yield outcomes that exactly mirror the idealized solution. These dual perspectives jointly reinforce and validate

one another.

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Details TBC

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Fairness views about the International Distribution of Climate Change Costs (With Johanna Kober)

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Networks in prison: An experiment with inmates

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