“The Effects of Business School Education on Manager Career Outcomes”

Title: State of the Art: Economic development through the lens of paintings (with Gorin and Heblich)

Title: Climate change and migration: the case of Africa.

Abstract:

This paper estimates the impacts of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) on migration and other economic outcomes. I develop a quantitative spatial model that captures the role of trade networks, migration barriers, and agricultural yields on the geography of the economy. I combine the model with forecasts of future crop yields to find that climate change, by the end of the century, reduces SSA real GDP per capita by 1.8 percent and displaces 4 million individuals. Migration barriers in SSA are very stringent: if absent, climate-induced migration exceeds 100 million individuals. Still, migration and trade are powerful adaptation mechanisms. Reducing migration barriers to the European Union (EU) standards eliminates the aggregate economic losses of climate change in SSA, but at the cost of more climate migration and higher regional inequality. Also reducing trade frictions to the EU levels attenuates this cost and makes SSA better off on aggregate and distributional terms.

What affects the survival of trade relationships? Evidence from road disruptions in Colombia

With climate change, weather patterns like El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) are becoming more persistent and disruptive. It is crucial to understand how to adapt to extreme weather shocks. This paper investigates how extreme weather events can spread through trade channels, and it is the first one that focuses on the extensive margin of relationships. I use the rain season of La Niña in Colombia during 2010-2011, which caused major road closures that disrupted the transportation of goods. I focus in the Colombian flower sector and its main export market, the US. I find treated relationships exit less after the shock, but within treatment, links from larger and more connected exporters exit more relative to links with small and less-connected exporters. The shock also induced larger exporters to increase their matching after the shock relative to non-affected exporters. The empirical results point out that search frictions are a mechanism at play and the effect on firms varies depending on their size. In this sense, replacing buyers might be more costly to small firms, which explains the lower exit rates observed in the data, but other mechanisms are needed to explain the different responses when considering different network sizes.

Title: Historical Self-Governance and Norms of Cooperation

Abstract: Does self-governance, a hallmark of democratic societies, foster or erode norms of generalized cooperation? Does this effect persist, and if so, why? I investigate these questions using a natural experiment in Switzerland. In the middle-ages, the absence of an heir resulted in the extinction of a prominent noble dynasty. As a result, some Swiss municipalities became self-governing, whereas the others remained under feudalism for another 600 years. Evidence from a behavioral experiment, World Values Survey, and Swiss Household Panel consistently shows that individuals from historically self-governing municipalities exhibit stronger norms of cooperation today. Referenda data on voter-turnout, women's suffrage, and minority citizenship, allow me to trace these effects on individually costly and socially beneficial actions for over 150 years. Furthermore, norms of cooperation map into prosocial behaviors like charitable giving and environmental protection. Uniquely, Switzerland tracks every family's place of origin in registration data, which I use to demonstrate persistence from cultural transmission in a context of historically low migration.

Title: Accept this Paper" (with Andrea WilsonLink opens in a new window)

Title: Sectoral Development Multipliers, joint work with Francisco Buera (Washington University at St Louis).

Abstract: We study how technology adoption complementarities propagate through an input-output network of sector production. We devise a procedure to estimate both non-parametrically and structurally the incidence of distortions and the relevance of technology adoption across and within sectors. We then compute the response of aggregate output to sector revenue and adoption subsidies aimed to spur development through sector reallocation of production and technology adoption. Large multipliers occur for sectors that are central in both the production and adoption networks. Accounting for adoption greatly magnifies the relative importance of central sectors.

TItle: Frontier History and Gender Norms in the United StatesLink opens in a new window

The title of the talk is: How Biased are Observational Methods in Practice? Accumulating Evidence Using Randomised Controlled Trials with Imperfect Compliance, joint with David Rhys Bernard, Gharad Bryan, Sylvain Chabé-Ferret, Jon de Quidt and Roland Rathelot.

The abstract: Consider a policy maker choosing between programs of unknown impact. She can inform her decision using observational methods, or by running a randomised controlled trial (RCT). The proponents of RCTs would argue that observational approaches suffer from bias of an unknown size and direction, and so are uninformative. Our study treats this as an empirical claim that can be studied. By doing so we hope to increase the value of observational data and studies, as well as better inform the choice to undertake RCTs. We propose a large-scale, standardised, hands-off approach to assessing the performance of observational methods. First, we collect and categorise data from a large number of RCTs in the past 20 years. Second, we implement new methods to understand the size and direction of expected bias in observational studies, and how bias depends on measurable characteristics of programmes and settings. We find that the difference between observational estimators and the experimental benchmark is on average zero, but the resulting observational bias distribution has high variance.

Title: Workhorses of Opportunity: Regional Universities Increase Local Social Mobility (with Greg Howard).

Abstract: Regional public universities educate approximately 70 percent of college students at
four-year public universities and an even larger share of students from disadvantaged
backgrounds. They aim to provide opportunity for education and social mobility, in
part by locating near potential students. In this paper, we use the historical assignment
of normal schools and insane asylums (normal schools grew into regional universities
while asylums remain small) and data from Opportunity Insights to identify the effects

of regional universities on the social mobility of nearby children. Children in counties given a normal school get more education and have better economic and social

outcomes, especially lower-income children. For several key outcomes, we show this

effect is a causal effect on children, and not only selection on which children live near
universities.

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

Title: State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years (with Nicola Mastrorocco)

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.