Title: Belief-Driven Fluctuations, Global Imbalances And Equilibrium Dynamics

Fields: Macro, Theory

Supervisors: Roger Farmer, Herakles Polemarchakis, Pablo Beker

Title: The Revolution Suffocates Its Children - The Short- and Long-Term Effects of Air Pollution in Socialist East Germany

Abstract: Measuring the detrimental effects of air pollution on individuals is difficult. In this paper, we overcome this challenge by leveraging a natural experiment occurring in socialist East Germany in the 1980s. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the Soviet Union reduced and capped East Germany’s access to imported fossil fuels, leading the socialist party dictatorship to rapidly substitute Soviet oil with domestic brown coal at the cost of increased ambient air pollution. Comparing regions within East Germany with and without natural brown coal deposits, we find that the switch to brown coal led to an immediate and permanent increase in mortality (?), infant mortality and a reduction in birth weights. We use administrative social security data after German reunification to show that, in the next 40 years, individuals that lived in areas within the GDR exposed to the shift to brown coal spent less time in employment, earned lower wages and retired earlier. The authoritarian nature of the East German government makes this natural experiment particularly insightful by ruling out spatial sorting behaviour, competitive housing markets, and labour market adjustments as channels through which the estimated effects of air pollution could have been confounded.

Title: Can An Ai Agent Hit A Moving Target

Fields: Macro, Theory

Supervisors: Roger Farmer, Herakles Polemarchakis

Taxation and migration by the super-richLink opens in a new window

A. Advani, D. Burgherr, and A. Summers (2022)

Using administrative data on the globally connected super-rich in the UK, we study the effect of a large tax reform on migration behaviour. Prior to 2017, offshore investment returns for ‘non-doms’ – individuals tax resident in the UK but with connections to other countries – were untaxed. Average offshore investment returns for these individuals exceeded £420,000; even without considering other types of income, this puts them in the top 0.2% of the population. A reform in 2017 brought long-stayers and UK-born non-doms into the standard tax system, reducing their effective net of average tax rate by between 8.8% and 13.0%. We find that migration responses were limited: our central estimate of the migration elasticity is 0.02, and across a range of specifications we can rule out elasticities larger than 0.5. Using reforms for the UK-born super-rich who were living abroad, we find that migration elasticities are limited even for recent arrivals, for whom our central estimate is 0.18. Assuming similar elasticities for all non-doms, abolition of the preferential regime would increase tax revenue collected from non-doms by £3.2bn (84%).

Title: Heterogeneous Local Projections: An Application To Firm Investment

Fields: Macro, Econometrics

Supervisors: Giovanni Ricco, Ana Galvao (Wbs)

Title: Predicting Long-term Unemployment Risk - Andreas Mueller (UT Austin) & Johannes Spinnewijn (LSE)

Abstract: This paper uses rich administrative and survey data from Sweden to study the predictability and determinants of long-term unemployment (LTU) over the period 1992-2016. We use standard machine learning techniques to predict job seekers' LTU risk and find substantial predictable heterogeneity. Compared to a model using standard socio-demographic variables, a comprehensive model that uses data on income, employment and benefit histories more than doubles the predictive power. The estimated heterogeneity in LTU risk implies that at least two thirds of the observed duration dependence in job finding is driven by dynamic selection. We apply our prediction algorithm over the business cycle and find significant heterogeneity underlying the cyclicality in average LTU risk, while the role of composition effects is limited. We evaluate the implied value of targeting unemployment policies and how this changes over the business cycle.

Title: The Fertility Impact Of Mass Return Migration

Fields: Economic History, Labour

Supervisors: James Fenske, Manuel Bagues

Title: How informed do you want your principal to be? (joint with Rahul Deb and Mallesh Pay)

Title: Avoiding Dissonant Information

Fields: Behavioural Economics, Experimental Economics

Supervisors:

Title: Price Changes And Welfare Analysis: Measurement Under Individual Heterogeniety

Fields: Theory, Public, Labour

Supervisors: Herakles Polemarchakis, Robert Akerlof, Costas Cavounidis

Title: Eigenvalue tests for the number of latent factorsin short panels

Alain-Philippe Fortin, Patrick Gagliardini, Olivier Scaillet
This paper studies new tests for the number of latent factors in a large cross-sectionalfactor model with small time dimension. These tests are based on the eigenvalues ofvariance-covariance matrices. We establish the asymptotic distributional results usingexpansion theorems based on perturbation theory for symmetric matrices. Our frame-work accommodates semi-strong factors in the systematic components. We propose anovel statistical test for weak factors against strong or semi-strong factors. We providean empirical application to US equity data. Evidence for a dierent number of latentfactors according to market downturns and market upturns, is statistically ambiguous.In particular, our results contradicts the common wisdom of a single factor model inbear markets

Title: Firming up price inflation

Title to be advised.

This workshop is hybrid, here is a Teams link . https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OWE3ZDAyNWYtYTgzMS00NTUxLWI2ZDktMWYxZjFkYjQyZTUy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2209bacfbd-47ef-4465-9265-3546f2eaf6bc%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22d235acba-bb89-4eff-a07c-515e0b711c79%22%7d

Title: The Education-Innovation Gap.

Title: Using an Online Interactive Textbook for Content Delivery in a large on-campus Mathematics for Economists course.

The Covid pandemic forced lecturers to rethink the way content is delivered to students. Live online lectures and pre-recorded video recordings became standard tools of synchronous and asynchronous content delivery respectively. Reading materials (textbooks or lecture provided notes) also often supplement the content delivery, but are not usually used as the sole source of new content.

We present summary findings regarding the use of an online, interactive textbook-type resource. This resource combined text-based content delivery with interspersed pre-recorded online videos and questions (with instantaneous feedback to students) to check students’ understanding. This resource was produced for a large Mathematics for Economists unit with 900+ students in the pandemic affected academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. In the second of these years this resource was used despite on-campus lectures being available again as a tool.

While the online textbook was used to deliver the content asynchronously, there were twice-weekly Review and Q&A sessions in which students could bring up any questions and problems and in which the lecturer would review some of the key concepts introduced in the online lessons.

We present findings on the usage pattern of the resource as well as student feedback. The student feedback presented, leads to the conclusion that, even as on-campus lecture delivery is becoming available again, a future blend of learning activities can include substantial asynchronous content delivery. This flipped classroom setup is attractive as it can create the space in synchronous meetings to focus on active student learning which has proved to contribute positively to learning outcomes (Freeman et al . (2014).

The online textbook allows us to observe patterns of study we cannot normally observe. The amount of time spend on the learning resource and its timing as well as the engagement with the feedback questions allows us to identify some of the study patterns of successful and less successful students.

Organiser: Subhasish Dey

Title: Classicism and Modern Growth: The Shadow of the Sages

Abstract: This paper examines how intellectual culture has affected economic modernization in China, where the learned class embraced classical wisdom for millennia but encountered the shock of Western industrial influence in the mid-19th century. I use the number of sage temples to measure the strength of classical worship in 269 prefectures, and instrument for the distribution of sage temples using the distribution of sages’ birthplaces. I find that classical worship discouraged intellectuals from appreciating modern learning and thus inhibited the growth of industrial firms between 1858 and 1927. By contrast, industrialization grew faster in regions less constrained by classicism.

Panel:
Juliette de Wit (University of Groningen)
Melanie Fox (Purdue University)
Miguel Flores (National College of Ireland)

Chair: Cloda Jenkins (Imperial)

Co-organiser: Stefania Paredes Fuentes

to attend on Zoom, register here before Monday 24th October.
The session will be live-streamed on the CTaLE YouTube Channel.

Title: Bounds on Average Effects in Discrete Choice Panel Data (joint with Cavit Pakel).

Abstract: Average effects in discrete choice panel data models with individual-specific fixed effects are generally only partially identified in short panels. While consistent estimation of the identified set is possible, it generally requires very large sample sizes, especially when the number of support points of the observed covariates is large, such as when the covariates are continuous. In this paper, we propose estimating outer bounds on the identified set of average effects. Our bounds are easy to construct, converge at the parametric rate, and are computationally simple to obtain even in moderately large samples, independent of whether the covariates are discrete or continuous. We also provide asymptotically valid confidence intervals on the identified set. Simulation studies confirm that our approach works well and is informative in finite samples. We also consider an application to labor force participation.

Title: CBDCs, Financial Inclusion, and Optimal Monetary PolicyLink opens in a new window

Title: Age Set vs. Kin: Culture and Financial Ties in East Africa.

Abstract: We study how social organization shapes patterns of economic interaction and the effects of national policy, focusing on the distinction between age-based and kin-based groups in sub-Saharan Africa. Motivated by ethnographic accounts suggesting that this distinction affects redistribution, we ana- lyze a cash transfer program in Kenya and find that in age-based societies there are consumption spillovers within the age cohort, but not the extended family, while in kin-based societies we find the opposite. Next, we document that social structure shapes the impact of policy by showing that Uganda’s pension program had positive effects on child nutrition only in kin-based societies.

Title: What Do Minimum Wages Do? Evidence from Tanzania

Abstract: To what extent do firms in developing countries comply with minimum wage laws, and how do they affect the location decision of workers? Tanzania enacted its first minimum wage law in 2010, which stipulated different levels for each industry. Using novel data from Tanzania's annual census of firms, I find evidence of partial firm compliance, with no disemployment effects. To assess whether minimum wages are important to workers, I use a spatial equilibrium model which exploits variation in average minimum wages across space to determine their location choice. I find an elasticity of migration with respect to expected earnings of one half. This result is driven by changes in the minimum wage for which the direct effect on migration is 3.4 percent. This suggests that variable minimum wage laws can be used to reallocate labor into more productive sectors, even under partial compliance

Title. Weighted representative democracy

Abstract. I will discuss a new system of democratic representation. In this system, any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss some joint work with Arnold Soh, in which we show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature will agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss my more recent work on endogenous candidacy in this model (this is work in progress).

Title: Simulated Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Large Games using Scenarios". This is joint work with Andrin Pelican.

Abstract: This paper introduces a new simulation algorithm for evaluating the

log-likelihood and score functions associated with a class of supermodular
complete information discrete games. The algorithm allows for payoff
function estimation in games with large numbers of players and/or
many binary actions per player (e.g., games with tens of thousands
of strategic binary actions). In such cases the likelihood of the
observed pure strategy combination may be (i) very small and (ii)
a high dimensional integral with a complex integration region. Direct
numerical integration, as well as accept-reject Monte Carlo integration,
are computationally impractical in such settings. In contrast, our
method allows for accurate likelihood simulation with modest numbers
of simulation draws. Use cases include simulated maximum likelihood
(SML) parameter estimation in models of technology adoption, peer
effects, and strategic network formation.

Title: Substitutability Across Modes of Transport: Implications for International Trade

This workshop is hybrid, here is a Teams link . https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OWE3ZDAyNWYtYTgzMS00NTUxLWI2ZDktMWYxZjFkYjQyZTUy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2209bacfbd-47ef-4465-9265-3546f2eaf6bc%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22d235acba-bb89-4eff-a07c-515e0b711c79%22%7d

Title of paper: The Long-Run Development Impacts of Agricultural Productivity Gains: Evidence from Irrigation Canals in India

Abstract: How do investments in agricultural productivity translate into development and structural transformation? We estimate the long-run impacts of India's irrigation canals, which span 300,000+ km and deliver water to 130,000+ villages. Drawing on high-resolution data on every household, firm, village, and town in India, we use three empirical strategies to characterize the direct and spillover effects of large increases in agricultural productivity. Our findings are consistent with a spatial equilibrium model in which labor is mobile, and urban areas have non-farm productivity advantages. In the long run, areas directly treated by canal irrigation have sharply higher agricultural productivity and population density, but similar non-farm employment shares to non-canal areas. Persistent consumption gains accrue only to landowners and structural transformation occurs almost, exclusively through the concentrated growth of regional towns. In the long run, the substantial productivity effects of canals were equilibrated through the movement of labor across space rather than within locations across sectors.