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

Abstract: In this work I study the effect of substitutability of modes of transport in international trade. Firstly, I document European composition of imports and exports flows by mode of transport. I identify two main patterns: (i) on average more than one mode is used on the same route and (ii) the share of value transported by each mode reacts to change in costs. To do so, I use Ukrainian-Russian airspace's closure as a proxy for the increase in transportation costs. I build a Ricardian model of trade with multiple modes of transport that can reproduce these patterns. The model generates a gravity equation in which modes-specific shocks are partially absorbed by changes in the share of value traded with each mode. Finally, I show how this model could be used to study the impact for international trade of a carbon tax on specific transportation sectors.

Title: The Unequal Economic Consequences of Carbon Pricing

Abstract: This paper studies how carbon pricing affects emissions, economic aggregates and inequality. Exploiting institutional features of the European carbon market and high-frequency data, I identify a carbon policy shock. I find that a tighter carbon pricing regime leads to a significant increase in energy prices, a persistent fall in emissions and an uptick in green innovation. This comes at the cost of a temporary fall in economic activity, which is not borne equally across society: poorer households lower their consumption significantly while richer households are less affected. Not only are the poor more exposed because of their higher energy share, they also experience a larger fall in their income. These indirect, general-equilibrium effects turn out to be quantitatively important. My results suggest that targeted fiscal policy can reduce the economic costs of carbon pricing without compromising emission reductions.

Title: Medical Technology and Life Expectancy: Evidence from the Antitoxin Treatment of Diphtheria

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the impact of the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease---diphtheria antitoxin---on the historical health transition. In 1895, the Massachusetts State Board of Health began providing free supplies of the antitoxin for medical use throughout the state. This policy has later been recognized as a significant event in the public-health history of Massachusetts. We use cross-municipality variation in pre-antitoxin diphtheria mortality rates and the availability of free antitoxin since 1895 to create an instrumental variable for local adoption rates, as measured by the number of antitoxin bottles per capita. By analyzing approximately 1.6 million death certificates from 1880 to 1914, we find that a hypothetical 10-year delay in the development of antitoxin would have reduced life expectancy at birth by one year, primarily due to reductions in child mortality. Our results suggest that medicine played a significant role in the increase of life expectancy in the early 20th century. Finally, we provide evidence suggesting that antitoxin treatment during the first 9 years increased school attendance but did not affect adult labor-market outcomes.

Title: The Fragility of Sparsity" (with Ulrich Müller and Sebastian Roelsgaard) There is no paper yet, but the abstract is:

We argue, using three empirical applications, that linear regression estimators which rely on the assumption of sparsity are fragile in two ways. First, we document that different choices of the regressor matrix that don't impact long regression estimates, such as the choice of baseline category with categorical controls, move the post-double-selection estimates by one standard error or more. Second, we develop two tests of the sparsity assumption based on comparing sparsity-based estimators with long regression. Both tests tend to reject the sparsity assumption in all three applications. Unless the number of regressors is comparable to or exceeds the sample size, long regression yields more robust results at little efficiency cost.

Title to be advised.

Title: Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States.

Title: The Confederate Diaspora (with Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson, and Patrick A. Testa)

Abstract: This paper shows how white migration out of the early postbellum South helped to diffuse and entrench Confederate culture across the United States at a critical juncture of westward expansion, national reconciliation, and nation building. These migrants laid the groundwork for Confederate memorialization and racial norms to become pervasive nationally in the early 20th century. Former Confederates, and especially those from slaveholding backgrounds, sorted into positions of power, exacerbated racial violence, and built exclusionary institutions. Migrants transmitted Confederate nostalgia to their children and to non-Southern white populations in their new communities. The legacy of the Confederate diaspora persists over the long run with implications for racial inequity in labor and housing markets as well as policing. Together, our findings shed new light on the role of migration in shaping the cultural and institutional foundations of racial animus across America.

The title is Moonshot: Public R&D and Growth

Title: Robust Estimation and Inference in Panels with Interactive Fixed Effects (with Timothy B. Armstrong and Martin Weidner)

Abstract We consider estimation and inference for a regression coefficient in a panel setting with time and individual specific effects which follow a factor structure. Previous approaches to this model require a "strong factor" assumption, which allows the factors to be consistently estimated, thereby removing omitted variable bias due to the unobserved factors. We propose confidence intervals (CIs) that are robust to failure of this assumption, along with estimators that achieve better rates of convergence than previous methods when factors may be weak. Our approach applies the theory of minimax linear estimation to form a debiased estimate using a nuclear norm bound on the error of an initial estimate of the individual effects. In Monte Carlo experiments, we find a substantial improvement over conventional approaches when factors are weak, with little cost to estimation error when factors are strong.

Title: Assessment of Learning

Irene asks the question 'How do you know that students are actually learning what you said they would learn and at what level are they learning it?'

Title: The Puzzle of Educated Unemployment in West Africa (with Romuald Meango).

Title: Understanding the Effects of Labor Market Entry Conditions: The Role of Skill Match

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Title to be advised.

A preliminary title is "Self-Insurance in Turbulent Labor Markets" (joint with Ana Figueiredo, Cristiano Mantovani, and Alireza Sepahsalari).

Title: CPI releases and inflation expectations: Evidence from the Decision Maker Panel

Title: Educated Leaders through Legislation but at What Cost?

Abstract: Many societies have tried to design incentives and restrictions to improve the quality of their political leaders. In this paper, we use a legislation introduced in 2014 that mandated minimum education requirements– a correlate of quality, in the context of local village council elections in Rajasthan to look at the impact of such restrictions on the selection of elected leaders. We show that there was a higher probability of under-representation of disadvantaged groups where such legislation hit the hardest in terms of the incumbent not meeting the education criteria. These results are robust to accounting for differential trends by education and population characteristics. Furthermore, we find that this legislation did not lead to demonstrable improvement in performance of public program (NREGS), economic development as measured by night time luminosity or investment in education as measured by new school openings.

TITLE Optimal Public Transportation Networks: Evidence from the World's Largest Bus Rapid Transit System in Jakarta
joint with Arya Gaduh, Rema Hanna, Tilman Graff, Benjamin O. Olken

ABSTRACT Designing public transport networks involves tradeoffs between extensive geographic coverage, frequent service on each route, and relying on interconnections as opposed to direct service. These choices, in turn, depend on individual preferences for waiting for busses, travel time on the bus, and transfers. We study these tradeoffs by examining the world's largest bus rapid transit system, in Jakarta, Indonesia, leveraging a large-scale bus network expansion between 2016-2020. Using detailed ridership data and aggregate travel flows from smartphone data, we analyze how new direct connections, changes in bus travel time, and wait time reductions increase ridership and overall trips. We set up and estimate a transit network demand model with multi-dimensional travel costs, idiosyncratic heterogeneity induced by random wait times, and inattention, matching moments from the route launches. Commuters in Jakarta are 2-4 times more sensitive to wait time compared to time on the bus, and inattentive to long bus route options, To study the implications for network design, we introduce a new framework to describe optimal networks in terms of their characteristics and how these depend on preference parameters. Our results suggest that a less concentrated TransJakarta network would increase ridership and commuter welfare.

Iacopo Monterosa (University of Turin) is a visiting research student until July 2023.

Iacopo graduated from our department with an MSc in Economics in 2021. Please find the title and abstract of his presentation below.

Title: Environmental Degradation and Social Unrest: an Analysis of Open-Air Waste Burning in Italy

Although environmental activism has been increasing worldwide in recent years, less is known about what drives variation among and within countries in such activism. In this project, I examine the role of exposure to local episodes of pollution as a potential driver. I ask if exposure to environmental degradation fosters pro-environmental protests as well as the intensity of social unrest in general. Using granular data on open-air fires of industrial waste and protests in Italy, I document an increase in environmental protests and violence (i.e. riots) following a fire. To account for the endogeneity of fire location, I rely on the fact that some industrial waste containing copper is burned by copper thieves when trying to get hold of this valuable metal. I thus exploit exogenous variation in the world price of copper to confirm that open-air fires are consequential for both environmental protests and violent events. 

Title: Embracing Artificial Intelligence in Assessment: designing in or designing out?

Title to be advised

Title: Cost Based Nonlinear Pricing with Tibor Heumann, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, tibor.heumann@uc.cl.

Stephen Morris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, semorris@mit.edu

Abstract: How should a monopolist offer quantity or quality differentiated products if they have no information about the distribution of demand and must price based on cost conditions alone? Specifically, we consider a monopolist who cares about the "profit guarantee" of a pricing rule, that is, the minimum ratio value of expected profits to expected surplus for any distribution of demand.

We show that the profit guarantee is maximized by setting the price markup over marginal cost equal to (describe) function of elasticity. We provide profit guarantees (and associated mechanisms) that the seller can achieve across all possible distributions of willingness to pay of the buyers. With a constant elasticity cost function, constant markup pricing provides the optimal revenue guarantee across all possible distributions of willingness to pay and the lower bound is attained under a Pareto distribution. We characterize how profits and consumer surplus vary with the distribution of values and show that Pareto distributions are extremal. We also provide a revenue guarantee for general cost functions. We establish equivalent results for optimal procurement policies that support maximal surplus guarantees for the buyer given all possible cost distributions of the sellers.

Title to be advised.

Title: Targeting Social Assistance with Machine Learning

Abstract: Targeting is a central challenge in the design of anti-poverty programs: given available data, how does one identify the individuals and households with the greatest need? Here we show that machine learning, applied to non-traditional data from satellites and mobile phones, can improve the targeting of anti-poverty programs. Our analysis is based on data from three field-based projects -- in Togo, Afghanistan, and Kenya -- that illustrate the promise, as well as some of the potential challenges, of this new approach to targeting. Collectively, the results highlight the potential for new data sources to improve humanitarian response efforts, particularly in crisis settings when traditional data are missing or out of date.

There will be two 30 min presentations. Details below: 

Priyama Majumdar is presenting "Women Political Leadership and Dowry: Evidence from India."

Albert Dudou, title TBD.

Title: Who Controls the Agenda Controls the Polity.

Title: Electoral Turnovers (with Benjamin Marx, Vincent Rollet)

Abstract: In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and parliamentary elections held since 1945. We document the prevalence of turnovers over time and estimate their effects on economic performance, trade, human development, conflict, and democracy. Using a close-elections regression dis-continuity design (RDD) across countries, we show that turnovers improve country performance. These effects are not driven by differences in the characteristics of challengers, or by the fact that challengers systematically increase the level of government intervention in the economy. Electing new leaders leads to more policy change, it improves governance, and it reduces perceived corruption, consistent with the expectation that recently elected leaders exert more effort due to stronger reputation concerns.