Title: The Distribution of the Gender Wage Gap: An Equilibrium Model

Authors: Sonia R. Bhalotra, Manuel Fernández, and Fan Wang

Abstract: We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to investigate the joint evolution of gender gaps in labor force participation and wages. We do this overall and by task-based occupation and skill, which allows us to study distributional effects. We structurally estimate the model using data from Mexico over a period during which women's participation increased by fifty percent. We provide new evidence that male and female labor are closer substitutes in high-paying analytical task-intensive occupations than in lower-paying manual and routine task-intensive occupations. We find that demand trends favored women, especially college-educated women. Consistent with these results, we see a widening of the gender wage gap at the lower end of the distribution, alongside a narrowing at the top. On the supply side, we find that increased appliance availability was the key driver of increases in the participation of unskilled women, and fertility decline a key driver for skilled women. The growth of appliances acted to widen the gender wage gap and the decline of fertility to narrow it. We also trace equilibrium impacts of growth in college attainment, which was more rapid among women, and of emigration, which was dominated by unskilled men. Our counterfactual estimates demonstrate that ignoring the countervailing effects of equilibrium wage adjustments on labor supplies, as is commonly done in the literature, can be misleading.

Here is a link to a just updated version of the paper: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/2022/twerp_1404_-_bhalotra.pdf

This workshop is online only via MS Teams 

Title: Diversity and Legitimacy – Evidence from Clinical Trials

With Harsh Gupta Maya Durvasula and Heidi Williams (Stanford)

Title to be advised.

Leonardo Melosi (a macroeconomist from Chicago Fed, https://sites.google.com/site/lemelosi/) .

CAGE-Crafts Lecture 2022

Title: Career and Family: Then and Now

This seminar is joint with Bristol University and will be hosting today's event.

Title to be advised.

Title: What are the likely macroeconomic effects of the EU Recovery Plan?

The title of talk is "Treatment effect estimation with noisy conditioning variables" and the abstract can be found below.

 In this paper, I develop a new identification strategy for treatment effects when proxy variables for unobserved confounding factors are available. I use proxy variables to construct a random variable conditional on which treatment variables become exogenous. The key idea is that, under appropriate conditions, there exists a one-to-one mapping between the distribution of unobserved confounding factors and the distribution of proxies. To ensure sufficient variation in the constructed control variable, I use an additional variable, termed excluded variable, which satisfies certain exclusion restrictions and relevance conditions. I establish asymptotic distributional results for flexible parametric and nonparametric estimators of the average structural function. I illustrate empirical relevance and usefulness of my results by extending the identification strategy of Dale and Krueger (2002, QJE).

This is an opportunity for our PhD students to practice job talks.

Raghav will present paper: Price Changes And Welfare Analysis: Measurement Under Individual Heterogeneity

Fields: Microeconomic Theory, Labor Theory, Public Finance Theory

Supervisors: Herakles Polemarchakis, Costas Cavounidis, Robert Akerlof

Title: The Intertemporal Effects of Seeing Prices: Evidence from Garbled Offers in Malawi (with Maite Deambrosi and Jiajing Feng)

ABSTRACT: Preventive health care products are often sold at heavily discounted prices in developing countries. Does that hurt future demand for these products, by inducing subjects to anchor on low prices? Previous research on discounts for anti-malaria bed nets (Dupas, Ecma 2014) documents that experience and learning effects brought about by discounts dominate anchoring effects (if any). Bed nets are, however, an experience good sold at low frequency. Many essential preventive health care products – such as chlorine – are credence goods and have to be purchased at much higher frequency. Moreover, if discounts were perceived as a bargain by study participants, higher future demand might not generalize outside of the experiment. In a field experiment in Malawi, we investigate whether discounts generate anchoring and transaction utility effects across different types of preventive health care products. We do so by cross-randomizing actual discounts and implicit deals. Concretely, we decompose transaction prices into a sticker price and a randomly assigned delivery fee – revealed regardless of the purchasing decision. We find that demand decreases with discounts but increases with the size of the implicit deal. Such intertemporal effects of seeing prices are consistent with anchoring and transaction utility effects. Anchoring decays with time, but lasts up to 2 months after seeing prices. Using impulse-response functions, we simulate counterfactual demand under different pricing policies, showing that universal discounts are dominated by targeted (garbled) offers to those most responsive to each instrument.

Manuela Puente Beccar (Bocconi) will be presenting: Health preferences and sorting in the city

Zoom Link: https://monash.zoom.us/j/81415393123?pwd=dlVCOHpON3ZrSnRCR1VEUHZmeGR2UT09Link opens in a new window

Title to be advised

Marta Santamaria will be hosting this visit.

Title: GMM is Inadmissible Under Weak Identification

If you would like to meet with Isaiah, please sign up here 

This seminar is joint with Bristol University and will be hosting today's event.

Shaoting will present his work in an informal seminar in room 2.77. The title of the paper is “Voting and Trading: The Shareholder’s Dilemma,” joint with Adam Meirowitz (University of Utah and Yale University). Shaoting will be visiting us until Friday. If you wish to talk to him, please feel free to email him.

Title: Dynamic Value Shading, joint with Maryam Saeedi

Title: The Legal Origins of Financial Development: Evidence from the Shanghai Concessions

This seminar is joint with Bristol University and Warwick will be hosting today's event.

This AYEW Workshop on Firms will be a 1.5 hour event, with three 30-minute presentations.

Here are the details:

1. Daniel Morrison (Princeton): “Disentangling the motivations for campaign contributions: Corruption or policy alignment”
2. Xiangyu Shi (Yale): “Hometown favoritism and intercity investment networks in China”
3. Jian Xie (Warwick): “The cultural origins of family firms” (joint with Song Yuan)

Title: A Cooperative Theory of Market Segmentation by Consumers

Abstract: We consider a market that may be segmented and is served by a single seller. The surplus of each consumer in a segment depends on the price that the seller optimally charges, and this optimal price depends on the set of consumers in that segment. This gives rise to a novel cooperative game between consumers that determines market segmentation. We study several solution concepts. The most demanding solution concept, the core, requires that there is no objection to the segmentation by a coalition of consumers who benefit by forming a new segment. We show that the core is empty except for trivial cases. We then introduce a new solution concept, stability. A segmentation is stable if for each possible objection by a coalition, there is a counter-objection by a coalition in the original segmentation. We characterize stable segmentations as ones that are efficient and ``saturated,'' which means that the segments are maximal in some sense. We use this characterization to constructively show that stable segmentations exist. Even though stable segmentations are efficient, they need not maximize average consumer surplus, and segmentations that maximize average consumer surplus need not be stable. Our weakest solution concept, fragmentation-proofness, rules out objections by coalitions that include consumers from more than one segment. We show that a segmentation is fragmentation-proof if and only if it is efficient.

This is joint work with Ron Siegel.

Title of Nathan’s talk is Political Parties as Drivers of U.S. Polarization: 1927-2018 (with Chad Kendall and Francesco Trebbi) .

This visit is hosted by Andreas Stegmann.

This is an opportunity for our PhD student to practice job talk seminar.

Gianni will be presenting paper: When Nation Building Goes South: Draft Evasion, Government Repression, And The Origins Of The Sicilian Mafia

Fields: Economic History, Political Economy

Supervisors: James Fenske, Sharun Mukand

Title: Tax Audits Under Weak Fiscal Capacity: Experimental Evidence from Senegal, joint work with Pierre Bachas, Alipio Ferreira, and Bassirou Sarr.

Abstract: Developing economies are characterized by limited compliance with government regulations, such as taxation. Resources for enforcement are scarce and audit cases are often selected in a discretionary manner. We study whether the increasing availability of digitized data helps improve audit targeting. In a field experiment at scale in Senegal, we compare tax audits selected by inspectors to audits selected by a risk-scoring algorithm. We find that inspector-selected audits are more likely to be conducted and uncover similar amounts of evasion as algorithm-selected audits. However, algorithm-selected audits require less manpower, are faster and may generate less corruption. In ongoing work, we attempt to unpack the algorithm’s (dis)functioning and its interaction with human capital.

Seminar organisers: Manuel Bagues & Ludovica Gazze

This is an opportunity for our PhD student to practice job talk seminar.

Cora will present paper: Unemployment, Migration, And Right-Wing Voting: Evidence From Germany

Fields: Economic History, Political Economy, Gender Economics

Supervisors: James Fenske, Manuel Bagues