Title: Martingale Embeddings: Theory and Applications.

Who Benefits from Meritocracy? (with Santiago Pérez)

Does screening applicants using exams help or hurt the chances of lower-SES candidates? Because individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fare, on average, worse than those from richer backgrounds in standardized tests, a common concern with this “meritocratic” approach is that it might have a negative impact on the opportunities of lower-SES individuals.
However, an alternative view is that, even if such applicants underperformed on exams, other (potentially more discretionary and less impersonal) selection criteria might put them at an even worse disadvantage. We investigate this question using evidence from the 1883 Pendleton Act, a landmark reform in American history which introduced competitive exams to select
certain federal employees. Using newly assembled data on the socioeconomic backgrounds of government employees and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, although the reform increased the representation of “educated outsiders” (individuals with high education but limited connections), it reduced the share of lower-SES individuals. This decline was driven by
a higher representation of the middle class, with little change in the representation of upper class applicants. The drop in the representation of lower-SES workers was stronger among applicants from states with more unequal access to schooling as well as in offices that relied more heavily on connections prior to the reform. These findings suggest that, although using
exams could help select more qualified candidates, these improvements can come with the cost of increased elitism.

This seminar will be hybrid format via MS Teams.

Click here to join the meeting<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NjExOWVhZTAtNTY4MC00OWUwLWEyYWQtYTcxOGY3NmE1YzAy%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2209bacfbd-47ef-4465-9265-3546f2eaf6bc%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%229f3e7b84-305e-496a-b9de-8c9ca74b3237%22%7d>

Title: to be advised

Christine Braun is hosting this visit.

Title: Omina Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era (with Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong)

Title: Noisy, Non-Smooth, Non-Convex Estimation of Moment Condition Models

Title: Local Monopsony Power and Sorting

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: Taxing Property in Developing Countries: Theory and Evidence from Mexico

Title : Incentives for collective innovation

Abstract: Identical agents exert hidden effort to produce randomly-sized improvements in a technology they share. Their payoff flow grows as the technology develops, but so does the opportunity cost of effort, due to a resource trade-off between using and improving the technology. The game admits a unique strongly symmetric equilibrium, and it is Markov; that is, no form of punishment is sustainable. Moreover, in this equilibrium, small innovations may hurt all agents as they severely reduce effort. Allowing each agent to discard the innovations she produces (after observing their size) increases equilibrium effort and welfare. If agents can instead conceal innovations for a period of time, there exists an equilibrium in which improvements are refined in secret until they are sufficiently large, and progress stops after disclosure. Although concealment is inefficient due to forgone benefits and the risk of redundancy, under natural conditions, this equilibrium induces higher welfare than all equilibria with forced disclosure.

Weblink: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01885

Title: Politics Transformed? Electoral Competition under Ranked Choice Voting

 Abstract: We compare multi-candidate elections under plurality rule versus ranked choice voting (RCV). In our framework candidates choose whether to pursue a narrow campaign that targets their base, or instead pursue a broad campaign that can appeal to the entire electorate. We find that RCV generally intensifies candidates’ incentives to target their base at the expense of a broader appeal. We also unearth circumstances in which RCV increases the probability that a candidate who would lose any pairwise contest nonetheless wins a multi-candidate contest.

Title: Dream Jobs in a Globalized Economy: Wage Dynamics and International Experience.

Title: Child Endowment and the Demand for Children@ Revisiting the Quantity-Quality Model of Fertility (joint with Yeshaya Nussbaum – Hebrew University)

Abstract: China’s one-child policy or Past research has tested the quantity-quality model of fertility by studying a shock to quantity, typically by exploiting the birth of twins or China’s one-child policy. We take an alternative approach and study the effect of a quality shock on the QQ trade-off, which we conceptualize as the birth of a child with an extreme level of intellectual endowment. Theory predicts that a rise in child endowment increases parental demand for children through an increase in family income and a decline in the shadow price of children. The opposite is true for a fall in child endowment. Using two quasi-experiments, we test these predictions and estimate the reduced-form effect of a positive or negative change in endowment on family size. The first experiment estimates the effect of a first-born high-endowment child on further fertility in a sample including families with either a first- or second-born high-endowment child and at least two children. Similarly, we estimate the effect of a second-born high-endowment child on further fertility in a sample including families with either a second or third-born high-endowment child and at least three children. We use Israeli data on families and their children and measure high endowment by giftedness or exceptional scores on early cognitive tests. We find that the birth of a high-endowment child increases the probability of an additional child in both quasi-experiments. In addition, as the information on child endowment becomes noisier, parents' ability to recognize the endowment is a condition for its effect. On the other hand, the birth of a low-endowment child, measured as enrolment in a special-education class, negatively affects family size in both quasi-experiments. However, this effect is smaller and less significant in the first experiment, estimating the effect of a first-born low-endowment child. This last result is consistent with families' preference for a child with a regular endowment, which offsets the negative income and price effects activated by a low-endowment child. Overall, our results point to child endowment as an important factor affecting fertility choice.

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: Firm Adaptation in Production Networks: Evidence from Extreme Weather Events in Pakistan (Joint with Johannes Boehm and Mazhar Waseem)

 Abstract - This paper considers how far private adaptation may reduce future vulnerability to climate

change. Firms’ climate risk exposure depends not only on the location of production, but also

on network effects via the flood risk profile of suppliers and transportation links connecting

trading partners. We use data on monthly firm-to-firm transactions for the near-universe of

formal sector manufacturing firms in Pakistan and more than six billion observations from

commercial trucks traveling on the road network from 2011 to 2018 to study adaptation of

firms in production networks. We find that firms affected by major floods relocate to less flood-prone

areas, diversify their supplier base, and shift the composition of their suppliers towards

those located in less flood-prone regions and reached via less flood-prone roads. Identification

strategies that exploit both firm- and route-level flooding suggest that these responses reflect

forward-looking actions to reduce future vulnerability to flood risk rather than direct effects of

flooding, and are consistent with experience-based Bayesian updating. The results suggest that

the impacts of climate change will be mediated as firms learn from the experience of increasingly

frequent climate disasters.

Title: AI-based formative feedback

Organised by Subhasish Dey

Title: Blackwell correlated equilibrium (joint with Doron Ravid).

Abstract: We develop a method for making robust predictions in games with flexible information acquisition (i.e., rational inattention, Sims 2003). In games with exogenous information, one can describe the set of attainable outcomes using the Bayes correlated equilibrium (BCE) concept (Bergemann and Morris 2016). We introduce a refinement of BCE, Blackwell correlated equilibrium (BKE), and prove that it spans all outcomes attainable under some flexible learning technology whose costs increase in Blackwell's (1951,1953) information order. We show the BKE set is either dense or nowhere dense in the BCE set, with the former being true for generic games. We also characterize the set of outcomes attainable under almost-free learning. We conclude by exploring the implications of BKE on a Bertrand competition game, where we show the best BCE for consumers may not be approximable by BKEs.

Title: Breaking invisible barriers: Does fast internet improve access to input markets? (joint with Beata Javorcik and Piyush Panigrahi)

Abstract: We combine rich data with theory to study how access to fast internet affects firm’s supplier network by facilitating doing business. By augmenting data on the quasi universe of firm-to-firm transactions with the information on the length of fibre optic internet cable in each of 81 province during 2012-2019, a period of large investments in internet infrastructure, we show that buyers increase their purchases from sellers with better internet connectivity. The effects of high-speed internet on buyers’ input purchases are stronger for initially concentrated input markets. Next, we present a tractable model of firm-to-firm connections to recover the key parameter of interest: the elasticity of firm-to-firm trade with respect to internet connectivity. The estimated elasticity is sizable across all sectors. In manufacturing and trade, the elasticity with respect to internet connectivity is of comparable magnitude with the elasticity with respect to travel time.

Organised by Subhasish Dey

Title to be advised

Title to be advised.

Organised by Subhasish Dey

Title - Unconventional Monetary Policy in the Face of External Stress

Title: Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution

Title: Ethnicity, prior schooling and graduate outcomes in the UK.

Organised by Subhasish Dey

Title to be advised.

Title to be advised.

Title: Going for Broke: Underwriter Reputaion and the Performance of Mortgage-Backed Securities (with Abe de Jong and Tim Kooijmans)

Title to be advised