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

Title: Asset-based microfinance for microenterprises: Evidence from Pakistan

http://simonrquinn.com/PaperHigherPurchase.pdf 

Abstract: We run a field experiment offering graduated microcredit clients the opportunity to finance a business asset worth four times their usual borrowing limit. We implement this using a hire-purchase contract; our control group is offered a zero-interest loan at the usual borrowing limit. We find large, significant and persistent effects: treated microenterprise owners run larger businesses with higher profits; consequently, household consumption increases, particularly on food and children’s education. A dynamic structural model with non-convex capital adjustment costs rationalises our results and allows counterfactual analysis; this highlights the potential for welfare improvements through large capital injections that are financially sustainable..

Title: Auctions with Frictions (joint with Asher Wolinsky)

Title: Unequal Global Convergence

Title: The Decline of U.S. Manufacturing Productivity Between 1941 and 1948

Title: Identification of Intertemporal Preferences From Choice Set Variation

Abstract: The paper provides conditions to identify the discount factor(s) and utility function in an infinite-horizon dynamic discrete choice model variation in choice sets over time. We show that if current choices or states are informative about the choice set the agent will face in the future, then the discount factor and utility are identified without any strong normalization. These identification results hold in both the exponential discounting model and, if the choice set provides a form of pre-commitment, the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model. Identifying the discount factor and utility allows us to identify the counterfactual policies which often are the objects of interest in dynamic discrete-choice analysis, but which are not generally identified. We conduct a data analyses to validate our approach.

Title - to be advised

Title: The Rise of China and the Global Production of Scientific Knowledge (with Tianrui Mu)

Title: Incentives and Efficiency in Constrained Allocation Mechanisms (joint with Joseph Root (Chicago)).

Title to be advised.

Organised by Subhasish Dey

The Political Economic Determinants of Nuclear Power: Evidence from Chernobyl (by Alexey Makarin, Nancy Qian, Shaoda Wang)

This paper investigates the political-economic determinants of nuclear energy investment using the Chernobyl accident as a natural experiment. We document several facts. First, the accident sharply reduced worldwide growth in the number of operating nuclear reactors. Second, the reduction is driven by increased construction delays in democracies, leading to prolonged use of older and less safe plants. Third, the nuclear growth slowdown in democracies is more pronounced when large fossil fuel reserves are present. Fourth, the opening of a new nuclear power plant reduces air pollution in nearby cities. Finally, micro-level evidence from the UK Parliament and US Congress provides strong indication that political capture by energy groups played a role in reducing nuclear energy investment in democracies, which may have hindered efforts to improve nuclear safety and moderate climate change.

Title to be advised.

Title: Empirical Welfare Maximization with Constraints

The paper link is https://lsun20.github.io/EWM_constraints.pdf

Title to be advised.

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: 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 to be advised.

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

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.