Our Seminars & Workshops

Title: Competition and Management Upgrading: Experimental Evidence on Firms' Mental Models (joint work with Girum Abebe, Pascaline Dupas, Marcel Fafchamps, and Tigabu Telahun).

Title: Food Policy in a Warming World

Title: BIg question economics: A way to introduce undergraduates to modern economics.

Title: Robustly Optimal Income Taxation

Title: The Political Economy of Alternative Realities

We build a model in which a politician can persuade voters of a false alternative reality that serves to discredit the intellectual elite. In the alternative reality, elite members conspire to criticize the competence of a politician whose ideology they dislike. If believed, the alternative reality inverts the effect of the elite's message, so that criticism helps the politician. This force leads to reduced accountability, distrust in experts, and bad policies that invite elite criticism. Alternative realities feature conspiracies which solve a collective action problem, evolve in response to evidence, and create demand for new media that reinforce them.

Title: Subgroup Decomposition of the Gini Coefficient: A New Solution to an Old Problem

Title: Recruitment, Wage Inequality, and Shrinking Task Differences.

Title: Decomposing Trends in the Gender Gap for Highly Educated Workers (with Joseph G. Altonji, John Eric Humphries, Yagmur Yuksel)

The weblink to the latest draft of our paper is: https://www.ling-zhong.com/_files/ugd/44b3ec_33fba2ab19f5445eb85d8cfefd4fe403.pdf

Title: Media Capture by Banks (with A. Fabiani, L. Laeven, JL Peydró)

Abstract: We study whether media slant news in favor of their lenders combining data on news coverage of key financial events in major European newspapers and information on bank-firm loan connections. We find that newspapers cover earning announcements by their lenders more, relative to other banks’, when they report profits than when they report losses. They also cover more favorably bank M&As in which their lenders participate as acquirers. Finally, newspapers connected to banks more exposed to stressed sovereign bonds tend to promote a narrative of the Eurobond crisis more favorable to banks and to oppose sovereign-debt-restructuring measures detrimental to creditors.

BIO: Ruben Durante is Professor of Economics and Provost's Chair at the National University of Singapore and ICREA Researcher at Pompeu Fabra University. He is also Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), the Asian Bureau for Finance and Economic Research (ABFER), CESifo, and IZA, and Research Advisor at Gallup. He has held visiting positions at Yale University,. PSE, and INSEAD. He studies political economy with a focus on the functioning and impact of traditional and new media in democratic societies. His work has been published in top journals in economics, political science, and management, and is regularly featured in the press. His research has been supported by several funding agencies including the European Research Council through a Starting Grant, a Proof of Concept Grant, and, more, recently a Consolidator Grant. He holds a Master in political economy from Sorbonne University, as well as a Master and a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.

Title: Is Equal Opportunity Different from Welfarism?

Abstract: Equal opportunity, widely invoked in popular discourse as a goal for policy, seems at odds with the welfarist approach that is standard in economics. But are they really different? We consider a canonical class of resource allocation problems and ask whether the allocations chosen by an equal-opportunity criterion could also have been chosen under some welfarist criterion. Typically, no such welfarist criterion exists. However, for a rich class of problem specifications, it does exist, and we characterize this class. In the cases where the sought-after welfarist criterion does not exist, the basic reason is that it is overconstrained: it would have to equalize a measure of marginal welfare across too many points in allocation space. On the other hand, when the welfarist criterion does exist, it can use either the sum or the min to aggregate individual welfares; the freedom to use more exotic aggregators is not needed.

Title: The Origins and Consequences of Territorial Control

Territorial control is central to the political economy of state formation during war. Which armed actor controls or contests a given region can have profound consequences for subsequent economic and political development, especially in weakly institutionalized settings. Yet existing measures of control and contestation are often lacking in construct validity, coverage, or availability. This project addresses this gap in three parts. First, I develop a novel measurement strategy that builds on a simple intuition: armed actors routinely deny or disrupt the ability of agents of the state to gather sensitive information. Leveraging a dataset built from enumerator logs tracking millions of survey collection events in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2020, I cross-validate the measurement concept against alternative classified and semi-public measures and existing theories of violence across zones of control. Second, I exploit within-district cross-seasonal variation in potential revenue from the opium trade to study how local economic shocks enhance the capacity of the Taliban to consolidate authority. Third, I study the impact of changes in local control on illicit activities and public service provision by the government. This project clarifies how resource endowment shocks can disrupt or reinforce political authority, helping us to better understand the economic origins of territorial control.

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Title: Who Should Get Money? Estimating Welfare Weights in the U.S. (with Krishna Srinivasan)

Abstract: Evaluating the desirability of a reform typically involves weighing the gains of the winners against the losses of the losers using welfare weights. Welfare weights measure the value that citizens assigns to a $1 gain in consumption to individuals. They can capture various normative ideals like utilitarianism and equality of opportunity. What are the welfare weights that citizens assign to individuals in society? We develop a portable method to elicit welfare weights from general population samples and validate it using two experiments. We find that the general population weights are more progressive than the weights implied by tax and transfer policies in the U.S., indicating that the general population desires additional redistribution. The general population weights are less progressive than those frequently used in the literature. We explore the implications of these weights for optimal income taxes.

Title: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects of Repeated School Admission Reforms

Authors: Chiaki Moriguchi, Yusuke Narita, Mari Tanaka
Abstract: What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent meritocracy-equity tradeoff. Compared to the decentralized system, the centralized system admitted more high-achievers and produced more occupational elites (such as top income earners) decades later in the labor market. This gain came at a distributional cost, however. Meritocratic centralization also increased the number of urban-born elites relative to rural-born ones, undermining equal access to higher education and career advancement.

Title: Transition Probabilities and Moment Restrictions in Dynamic Fixed Effects Logit Models

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Title: Firm Premia in Pay vs. Amenities: Evidence from a Large-Scale Survey of Job Movers

Title: University-to-work transition and the quality of the work placement experience

Title: The Social Learning Barrier

Abstract: We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors’ actions in the previous period before taking an action herself. Our main result shows that the learning rate of the slowest learning agent is bounded independently of the network size and structure and the agents’ strategies. This extends recent findings on equilibrium learning by demonstrating that the limitation stems from an inherent tradeoff between optimal action choices and information revelation, rather than strategic considerations. We complement this result by showing that a social planner can design strategies for which each agent learns faster than an isolated individual, provided the network is sufficiently large and strongly connected.

Link: http://brandlf.com/docs/network-learning.pdf

Title: Bound Together: Racial Peer Effects and Caucus Control in the U.S. Congress

Abstract: This paper argues that MCs’ social groups and the norms of behavior that define them can powerfully constrain legislators’ behaviors. Guided by insights from scholarship on legislative organizations and identity politics, I test my argument using the case of Black MCs and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). My main empirical strategy uses an original data set of committee hearing transcripts from 2007 to 2019 and a design that exploits members’ exposure to fellow Black MCs on their various committee assignments to uncover the impact of group pressures on CBC members. I show that the effect of serving on a committee with more co-ethnic legislators varies by a given MC’s type: Members that are more aligned with the interests of the CBC — those that are left-leaning and represent more-Black Congressional districts — participate more in committee hearings, and members that are less aligned participate less. I then show using a series of empirical tests and qualitative evidence drawing on eliteinterviews that this pattern of results is driven by in-group sanctions for behavior that is inconsistentwith caucus wishes. Together, the theory and findings shed light on the role of groups and their norms in shaping elite behavior and provide evidence for the contextual nature of legislative Black political behavior.

Title: Dissecting Structural Change in an Open Economy.

Here is the linkLink opens in a new window.

Abstract -- This paper studies the role of trade and international borrowing in driving structural change. I decompose the change in manufacturing shares into contributions by sectoral expenditure shares, trade shares, and aggregate trade imbalances, and map these into structural primitives in a quantitative trade model with endogenous borrowing. Using data from twenty economies, I show that trade specialization and international borrowing explain 34% of the average change in the manufacturing share, half of the cross-country heterogeneity in the patterns of industrialization, half the dynamics in high-technology subsectors of manufacturing, and much of the China-driven deindustrialization and ‘miracle’ industrialization in South Korea.

Title: Memory Rehearsal and Belief Biases

Abstract: We rely on memory to form beliefs, but we also frequently revisit memories in conversation and private reflection. I show experimentally that such rehearsal of past experiences generates systematic belief biases. Participants are given a set of experiences and then randomized to have conversations about a subset of them, either ones that reflect well or poorly on them. Such rehearsal has large effects on which of the original experiences participants can recall a week later. Crucially, participants appear naive about rehearsal effects: they take what they remember at face value when later incentivized to form accurate beliefs about the full set of original experiences. Rehearsal therefore distorts not only future recall but also future beliefs. Participants also make rehearsal choices without regard to their later distortionary effects. Intrinsic preferences for thinking about certain experiences instead drive rehearsal choices and therefore belief biases: in particular, a preference to reflect on positive experiences unintentionally generates a positivity bias in future recall and beliefs. This mechanism provides a new non-strategic channel through which seemingly motivated beliefs arise and generates novel predictions in a range of economic domains.

Title: Clash of generations: scramble for space amid rising income gaps

Title: Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks (with Emileigh Harrison)

Abstract: Curricular materials not only impart knowledge but also instill values and shape collective memory. Growth in U.S. school choice programs has increased public funds directed to religious schools, but little is known about what is taught. We examine textbooks from public schools in Texas and California and from religious private and home schools, applying and improving upon artificial intelligence tools to measure topics, values, representation, and portrayal over time. Political polarization suggests a narrative of divergence, but our analysis reveals meaningful parallels between the public school collections overall, while religious textbooks differ notably, featuring less female representation, characters with lighter skin, more famous White individuals, and differential portrayal of topics such as evolution and religion. Important similarities, however, also emerge: for example, each collection portrays females in contexts that are more positive but less active and powerful than males, and depicts the U.S. founding era and slavery in similar contexts.

Title: The Social Construction of Race after Emancipation: US Census Racial Assignment Based on Skin Tone, Wealth, and Literacy (joint with Anjali Adukia and Daniel Keniston)

Shobhit Kulshreshtha (visiting PhD student from Tilburg University) will present  

Title: The Effect of Initial Location Assignment on Healthcare Utilization of Refugees

 Abstract: Characteristics of a place, such as healthcare access and the local environment, influence healthcare utilization. Refugees resettled in developed countries are often assigned locations based on the host country’s assignment policies, yet the impact of initial placement on their healthcare usage remains understudied. I use Dutch administrative data to examine the effect of conditions in the initial municipality on healthcare utilization of refugees, leveraging the random assignment of refugees. I show that 10% of the total variation in hospital visits among refugees can be explained by municipality effects. Additionally, being assigned to a municipality with a higher hospital visit rate among non-refugees increases a refugee’s probability of hospital visits. There is significant heterogeneity in the results for other measures, such as depression medication use and general practitioner costs. This study highlights the role of local healthcare access in shaping healthcare usage among refugees, contributing to policy debates aiming to provide separate and more targeted healthcare services for this vulnerable population at the municipality level.

Title: Comparison of Screening Devices

The abstract and pdf of paper can be found here: https://web.stanford.edu/~shuny/papers/ranking.pdfLink opens in a new window).

Title: Article-Level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media

Abstract: There is widespread concern that the online news ecosystem produces polarized content and that extreme content gets further amplified through social media distribution channels. Methodological limitations in estimating content-based slant at the article level have made evaluating these claims difficult. We use data on the near universe (circa 1 million) of hard news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. news outlets in 2019, together with recent advances in natural language processing, to obtain a content-based measure of slant at the article level. Our main finding is that the degree of polarization in news consumption on social media is arguably high. Specifically, the mean slant difference between articles consumed by conservative and liberal users is 1.5 times the ideological distance between the average New York Times and Foxnews.com article. We also show that: i) the majority 65% of the variance in slant across articles arises within outlets, rather than across outlets, thus highlighting the importance of measuring slant at the article rather than the outlet level. ii) Most news produced is centrist, but the tails of the slant distribution are thick and there is substantial variation in slant across news type and topic. iii) Extreme content is much more likely to be shared widely on Facebook than moderate content. iv) There is substantial pro-attitudinal news consumption on Facebook even within the same outlet. v) Polarization in news exposure can account for the majority of polarization in news consumption on Facebook. vi) Echo chambers play an important role in driving polarized news consumption on Facebook.

Title: A general theory of tax-smoothing

Abstract: This paper extends the dynamic theory of optimal fiscal policy with a representative agent in several environments by using a generalized version of recursive preferences. I allow markets to be complete or incomplete and study optimal policy under commitment or discretion. The resulting theories are interpreted through the excess burden of taxation, a multiplier, whose evolution gives rise to different notions of ``tax-smoothing.'' Variants of a law of motion in terms of the inverse excess burden emerge when we allow for richer asset pricing implications through recursive preferences. I highlight a common unifying principle of taxation and debt issuance in all environments that revolves around interest rate manipulation: issue new debt and tax more in the future if this can lead to lower interest rates today.