Past Events

View past seminars and other events sponsored by the department of Economics. Events can be viewed by date or filtered by seminar series. 

Additionally, view the drop down menu on the left.

Date & TimeSeminar SeriesSpeaker and Title
March 14, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title:  "Impacts of Expanded Health Insurance for Immigrants" Abstract: "State policies regarding immigrant eligibility for public health insurance have varied greatly since the 1990s.  I aim to examine the impacts of insurance receipt on health, labor, and educational outcomes for recent entrants into the US. "  
March 13, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker:  Miguel Santana
March 12, 20244:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsChuck Manski (Northwestern): "Comprehensive OOS Evaluation of Predictive Algorithms with Statistical Decision Theory" with Jeff Dominitz
March 8, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarNetanel Ben-Porath (Northwestern):  Democratization Spurs Public Investment, But Only When a Media Market is Present: Evidence From Early American History Abstract: This study explores the economic impact of extending voting rights to less affluent white males in early American history, leveraging the staggered nature of franchise expansion across states through a contiguous counties framework. It demonstrates that broadening voter eligibility led to a significant increase in investments in the post office, which was the primary public good provided by the government and had a critical economic role. Notably, the study finds that the observed investment increase was evident primarily in areas with newspapers, the predominant medium for political information. This suggests that democratization may alter governmental investment priorities, but only in contexts where the newly enfranchised population can access sufficient political information. The paper presents a simple model to articulate this hypothesis. It further supports the main findings by investigating additional suffrage reforms and by comparing patterns of petitioning before and after democratization.  
March 7, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: TBA Title: TBA
March 7, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ana Evdokimova Title: Over-the-Counter Drugs Market: Information Distortion In Label Design Abstract: "In the OTC pharmaceutical market, labels are a crucial source of information that guides consumers' choices. Current label design allows pharmaceutical companies to convey differentiated effectiveness values to consumers; products with the biological formula are represented as different. Scanner data shows how information distortion leads to markup extraction because consumers cannot identify the drugs with the same effectiveness. In addition, survey data supports the fact that information distortion comes from the inability of the consumers to identify the drugs that carry the same effectiveness. This project aims to quantify the loss in the consumer surplus that comes from this misconception and construct a welfare-enhancing label design for OTC drugs. Preliminary results from the experiment suggest that the variation in information processing costs can explain the initial variation in information distortion levels. Label modification that achieves the lowest level of information distortion directly signals to consumers which products have the same efficacy rather than informing them about the content of the active component."    
March 6, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryAlina Wang (Northwestern): “Foreign-educated Elite, Ideology, and the Fall of Imperial China”
March 6, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Pablo Sanchez
March 5, 20242:30 PM - 3:45 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public Economics ("HELP")Erzo F. P. Luttmer (Dartmouth): "Living large or long: preference estimates from completed-life stories"
March 1, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarWalker Hanlon (Northwestern): Regulating Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Britain Abstract: The market for sex is heavily regulated or banned in most jurisdictions, but our understanding of the consequences of regulation remains limited. We study a set of laws passed in Britain in the 1860s known as the Contagious Disease Acts (CDAs) that were aimed at reducing the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs). These regulations mandated sex workers undergo routine medical examinations for STIs and gave police the authority to detain women that tested positive for up to nine months. The first part of our analysis shows that the CDAs led to substantial public health improvements. However, these regulations were repealed in 1886. The second part examines the causes of this repeal. Our results show that the success of public health regulations depend not only on the policy’s effectiveness, but also on the perceived fairness of the distribution of its costs. These results provide a new perspective on the impact of regulating the sex trade while also improving our understanding of a policy that played a key role in the women’s rights movement in the U.K.
February 29, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: TBA Title: TBA
February 29, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ludovica Mosillo Title: CEO Appointments and Firm Performance in the US Abstract: "Despite constituting a minority in positions of economic and political power, women are anecdotally overrepresented in leadership roles during periods of uncertainty and crisis, a phenomenon known as the "glass cliff" (Ryan and Haslam, 2005). This study analyzes CEO turnovers within the S&P 1500 index from 1994 to 2019 and explores various measures of firm performance to examine the existence of the glass cliff phenomenon in US firms and  the drivers behind the appointment of women to top managerial positions."  
February 28, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Laura Murphy
February 23, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarChiara Zanardello and Shuyi Yu Shuyi Yu (Northwestern) Title: The Curse of the Mandate of Heaven: A Model of Power Centralization Abstract: Europe and China followed divergent paths of development during the premodern period. Europe nurtured representative institutions and secure property rights that facilitated the rise of modern capitalism, whereas the growth of commercial interests in China was persistently stifled. The divergence can be attributed, at least in part, to the more centralized power structure of the Chinese state at the dawn of the premodern era. To account for this distinction, I propose that China’s early adoption of the Mandate of Heaven, a merit-based political philosophy aimed at legitimizing imperial rule in a secular society, inadvertently contributed to the cyclical overturning of dynasties and a steady trend of power centralization towards the emperor. In substantiating this argument, I develop a game-theoretical model of authoritarian power sharing, demonstrating that the threat of peasant revolution can alter the initial power distribution between the ruler and the elite, tilting the equilibrium more in favor of the ruler and leading to a less balanced power structure. I also present historical narratives to corroborate and contextualize this finding. Chiara Zanardello Title: Early Modern Academies, Universities and Economic Growth Abstract: Using a novel micro-level database spanning Early Modern scholars and educational institutions, I explore the impact of innovative knowledge on Europe's economic growth from 1500 to 1800. Employing advanced DID estimators, I observe that the establishment of scientific academies leads to a 15% increase in population growth rates after 150 years in the cities hosting them. However, literary academies show no discernible positive effect on long-term growth. I also do not find any detectable effect in the entire sample of academies, suggesting the importance of micro level data on scholars' field of study. Moreover, I test the historical evidence about academies fostering universities' reforms and innovations by showing that scientific academies rapidly enhance the quality of universities in the same urban area. Overall, the paper provides the first evidence on the pivotal role of scientific academies in the economic growth of Europe and in the modernization of universities.  
February 22, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Illegal Economies and Economic Growth 
February 22, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Giovanni Pisauro Title: "The Determinants and Consequences of Telehealth"
February 21, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker:  Michael Cai
February 16, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Holly Swenson Title: Cultural Commerce: British Media Exports and British Sentiment in Australia Abstract: My research investigates how the business of exporting British media products such as books, musicals, and television shaped popular perceptions in Australia from 1860 to the 1980s that British media was superior to alternatives. Drawing on archival business records in Britain and Australia, I find that British and Australian entrepreneurs worked together to make British media the standard for excellence in Australia. They did this by exploiting dynamics of Australian political economy such as copyright laws and limited regulation against monopoly and by encouraging consumers to see British goods as superior to alternatives. This project thus argues that British media production and distribution strategies directly influenced consumer tastes in Australia. My research, utilizing cultural and business history methods, reveals the role of private media business in buttressing the cultural trappings of empire. This presentation focuses on my fifth case study: British comedy television from the 1960s to 1980s. I argue that Australian television stations, public and private, imported British comedy television because it was cheaper than alternatives and because it claimed to be (defensibly so) high quality. Claims of high quality made by stations came to influence consumer tastes, as seen in the pages of the Australian TV Week. Ultimately, Australian television stations found themselves in a bind; even when they wanted to make domestic programmes, they realized that it was too expensive to overcome decades of underinvestment. 
February 15, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: TBA Title: TBA
February 15, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Nathalie Basto Title: Evaluating Educational Incentives: The Direct and Peer Effects of Financial Aid" (joint work with Elizabeth Jaramillo) Abstract: "This study assesses the Ser Pilo Paga (SPP) scholarship's effect on educational outcomes in Colombia, leveraging a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design to evaluate direct motivational impacts on scholarship-eligible students and employing a Diff-in-Diff methodology to estimate peer effects on ineligible students. It finds a significant direct motivational effect, particularly in the cohort immediately following the first scholarship recipients, with an increase of 2 to 3 points in exam scores for students below the poverty threshold. Preliminary analyses suggest an increase in middle and high school completion rates among subsequent cohorts. The DiD estimates reveal significant peer effects on math scores. While the study offers a detailed methodological framework for examining the scholarship's repercussions, it presents initial results focusing on selected outcomes, excluding factors such as performance in earlier grades, parental contributions, and involvement in criminal activities. The research contributes to the literature on the role of financial incentives in education, offering insights into how such initiatives can shape educational pursuits and socioeconomic mobility."  
February 14, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: TBA
February 9, 202412:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarTeppo Lindfors (Lund Univesity)  Title: "Public Opposition and Mass Mobilization" Abstract: "What outcomes ensue from the erosion of autocratic media censorship? This paper investigates the political effects in Finland arising from the dissolution of imperial censorship after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Using the universe of Finnish newspaper articles, I document a sharp jump in pro-opposition rhetoric in the press following the dissolution. Combining difference-in-differences approach and spatial regression discontinuity design, I further show that the change of rhetoric enticed the Finnish populace to mobilize in an armed rebellion against the government ten months post the uplifting of censorship. I provide evidence for two contingent explanations for the rise in public opposition: accumulation of suppressed dissent and inspiration provided by the Bolshevik Revolution. The findings highlight that pro-government sentiment is susceptible to a rapid decline in the face of competing ideas."  
February 8, 20244:00 PM - 5:00 PMTransportation Center SeminarMilena Almagro (University of Chicago): "Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago"
February 8, 202412:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker:  Devis Decet Title: Bureaucracy and Taxation Abstract: This paper studies how the organization of a national tax authority impacts fiscal capacity. I build a novel dataset on federal tax collection, tax office locations, tax jurisdictions, and tax officials in Brazil for the period 2012-2022. I investigate the consequences of a large wave of tax office closings in 2020, triggered by a decline in the number of tax officials. Preliminary results show that closings negatively impact tax collection in affected municipalities.
February 8, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Elena Stella Title: Organised Crime and Firms: the Value of Signalling Good Behaviour Abstract: This paper studies how asymmetric information about firms affiliation to organised crime impacts their performance, ability to raise capital and participation in public procurement. I exploit an Italian reform that introduces local police investigations into all firms wanting to participate in public procurement. I hand collect firm level information from 12 provincial police offices and match them with public tender and balance sheet data. Preliminary results suggest that firms undergoing the investigation improve their performance, increase their leverage and win more public contracts.
February 7, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli
February 5, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarLindsey Raymond (MIT): “The Market Effects of Algorithms” Abstract: While there is excitement about the potential of algorithms to optimize individual decision-making, changing individual behavior will, almost inevitably, impact markets. Yet little is known about these effects. In this paper, I study how the availability of algorithmic prediction changes entry, allocation, and prices in the U.S. residential real estate market, a key driver of household wealth. I identify a market-level natural experiment that generates variation in the cost of using algorithms to value houses: digitization, the transition from physical to digital housing records. I show that digitization leads to entry by investors using algorithms, but does not displace investors using human judgment. Instead, human investors shift towards houses that are difficult to predict algorithmically. Algorithm-using investors predominantly purchase minority-owned homes, an area where humans may be biased. Digitization increases the average sale price of minority-owned homes by 5% or $5,000 and nearly eliminates racial disparities in home prices. Algorithmic investors, via competition, affect the prices paid by humans, which drives most of the reduction in racial disparities.  This decrease in racial inequality underscores the potential of algorithms to mitigate human biases at the market level.
February 5, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq.: C. Manski (IPR/Economics) - Using Measures of Race to Make Clinical Predictions: Decision Making, Patient Health, and Fairness"Using Measures of Race to Make Clinical Predictions: Decision Making, Patient Health, and Fairness" by Charles F. Manski, Board of Trustees Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow Abstract: The use of race measures in clinical prediction models is contentious. Manski and his colleagues seek to inform the discourse by evaluating the inclusion of race in probabilistic predictions of illness that support clinical decision making. Adopting a static utilitarian framework to formalize social welfare, they show that patients of all races benefit when clinical decisions are jointly guided by patient race and other observable covariates. Similar conclusions emerge when the model is extended to a two-period setting where prevention activities target systemic drivers of disease. The researchers also discuss non-utilitarian concepts that have been proposed to guide allocation of healthcare resources. This event is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Winter 2024 Colloquium Series, where IPR researchers from around the University share their latest policy-relevant research. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
February 1, 20245:00 PM - 6:30 PMCelebrating Dale Mortensen’s LegacyPlease join us for a lecture and reception celebrating Dale Mortensen’s Legacy. The lecture will be given by Robert Shimer, Department Chair and the George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at The University of Chicago. The reception will be held after the lecture at 5:45 PM in the third floor Light Court (KGH 3322).
January 31, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker:  Valerio di Tommaso
January 29, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarChristophe Gaillac (TSE): “Predicting Unobserved Individual-level Causal Effects” Abstract: Measuring accurately heterogeneous effects is key for the design of efficient public policies. This paper considers the prediction of unobserved individual-level causal effects in linear random coefficients models, conditional on all the available data. In the application I consider, these ``posterior effects'' are the average effects of teachers' knowledge on their students' performance, conditional on both variables. I derive two strategies for recovering these posterior effects nonparametrically, assuming independence between the effects and the covariates. The first strategy recovers the distribution of the random coefficients by a minimum distance approach, and then obtains the posterior effects from this distribution. The corresponding estimator can be computed using an optimal transport algorithm. The second approach, which is only valid for continuous regressors, expresses the posterior effects directly as a function of the data. The corresponding estimator is rate optimal. I discuss several extensions, in particular the relaxation of the independence condition. Finally, the application reveals large heterogeneity in the effect of teacher knowledge, suggesting that we could substantially improve the cost-effectiveness of their training.
January 25, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Andrew Wooders "The Impacts of Social Activism on Discrimination" Speaker: Seung Hyeong Lee "Guidance-Driven Heterogeneity and Forecast Dispersion"   Abstract for "The Impacts of Social Activism on Discrimination":  “We study the effects of social activism on racial discrimination and social attitudes, and how these effects are manifested in market outcomes. We study three distinct social activism events that occurred in response to police brutality against African Americans in the United States -- the Philando Castile shooting, Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, and the George Floyd protest. Following over 1.2 million transactions across over 10 years in the secondary market for baseball cards, we find differential changes in market prices between cards of black and white players following each of these social justice events. We exploit novel institutional details combined with a difference-in-difference framework to identify and quantify these market trends as changes in racial attitudes. For example, we find that the George Floyd protests in May 2020 resulted in an average 8.3\% increase in prices of black cards, which we attribute to changes in racial attitudes and perceptions in favor of African Americans. Our results both identify and quantify the impact of social activism on racial discrimination in markets, and provide novel insights into the role of social activism in bringing forth important behavioral changes in individuals, markets, and society."   Abstract for "Guidance-Driven Heterogeneity and Forecast Dispersion":  "We analyze how equity analysts systematically utilize firms' earnings guidance and announcements when making forecasts. Approximately 35% and 52% of analysts' (sums of) quarterly EPS forecasts deviate by less than 1 cent and 2 cents, respectively, from their corresponding benchmarks implied by annual guidance and announced quarterly earnings. We identify two channels that affect forecast dispersion: how closely forecasts align with the benchmark and the number of `free forecasts' analysts have to match the annual guidance. We create measures to capture these channels and empirically test their relationship with forecast dispersion. Our long-short portfolio generated from two measures yields a monthly abnormal return of 1.08%. The findings suggest researchers should be cautious when interpreting dispersion across analysts' forecasts as a measure of heterogeneous beliefs or risk."
January 24, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarHugo Reichardt (LSE): “Scale-Biased Technical Change and Inequality" Abstract: Scale bias in technical change is the degree to which technical change increases the productivity of large relative to small firms. I propose that this dimension of technical change is important for inequality. I first develop a tractable framework with heterogeneous households choosing to work for wages or earn profits as entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs choose from a set of available production technologies, defined by a fixed and a marginal cost. Large-scale-biased technical change lowers entrepreneurship rates and leads to larger firms on average. With fewer and larger firms, top entrepreneurs are capturing a larger share of the profits which increases top income inequality. Small-scale-biased technical change has the opposite effects. I test the theory by comparing the effects of two technologies that vary in scale bias, but are similar in purpose: steam engines (large-scale-biased) and electric motors (small-scale-biased). Using newly collected data from the United States and the Netherlands, I verify that these two technologies had opposite effects on firm sizes and inequality. Steam engines increased firm sizes, while electric motors decreased them. Steam engines led to increased inequality, electric motors did not. Consistent with scale bias (rather than skill bias), I find that adopting entrepreneurs were the main drivers of inequality increases after steam engine adoption. 
January 24, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker:  Andrea Ferrara
January 23, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarCody Cook (Stanford): “Where to Build Affordable Housing? Evaluating the Tradeoffs of Location” with Pearl Z. Li and Ariel J. Binder Abstract: How does the location of affordable housing affect tenant welfare, the distribution of assistance, and broader social objectives such as racial and economic integration? Using administrative data on households living in units funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), we first show that tenant characteristics such as income, race, education, and family structure vary widely across neighborhoods, despite common eligibility thresholds. To quantify the welfare implications, we develop and estimate a residential choice model in which households choose from both market-rate and affordable housing options, where the latter are priced below-market and must be rationed. Moving a new development to a neighborhood with less poverty and better access to good schools and jobs increases aggregate tenant welfare and reduces both racial and economic segregation. However, it is also more costly to provide and disproportionately benefits more moderate-need, non-Black/Hispanic households. This change in the distribution of assistance arises in part because of the rationing process: households that only apply for assistance in opportunity-rich neighborhoods crowd out other households willing to apply anywhere. Relative to the choice of where to build, policy levers available post-construction—such as lowering the eligibility thresholds—have only limited effects on outcomes.
January 22, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarAnaïs Fabre (TSE): “The Geography of Higher Education and Spatial Inequalities" Abstract: This paper shows that the within-country spatial distribution of colleges largely contributes to spatial inequalities. Using data on the universe of college applicants and programs in France, I document that higher education options are unevenly distributed across space while students' demand is highly sensitive to geographic proximity. This creates inequalities in access to higher education across space, feeding gaps in educational attainment and spatial skill sorting. To quantify these effects, I build a dynamic model linking equilibrium sorting on the higher education market and location choices of entry-level workers. I show that students' and programs' preferences can be identified and estimated from data on choices and equilibrium outcomes. One-third of regional gaps in educational attainment are explained by the interaction of the uneven distribution of colleges and mobility frictions. Eliminating the latter, however, generates a trade-off, as it benefits students from low-opportunity areas but accelerates their migration to higher education hubs, magnifying regional inequalities. Low-opportunity areas could halt this brain drain and outsource the education of their local labor force by tying mobility scholarships and incentives to return.
January 22, 202412:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq.: E. Jácome (IPR/Economics) - Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety"Immigration Enforcement and Public Safety" by Elisa Jácome, Assistant Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow Abstract: How does immigration enforcement affect public safety? Heightened enforcement could reduce crime by deterring and incapacitating immigrant offenders or alternatively increase crime if it discourages crime reporting by victims. Jácome and her colleagues study the U.S. Secure Communities program, which significantly increased enforcement against unauthorized immigrants. Using nationwide survey data, they find that the program increased victimizations against Hispanics and reduced their crime reporting rate. Total reported crimes are unchanged, masking these opposing effects. In this talk, Jácome will provide evidence that reduced Hispanic reporting is a key driver of the increase in victimization. The findings underscore the importance of directly measuring victim reporting for evaluating criminal justice policies. The Winter 2024 IPR Monday Fay Lomax Cook (FLC) Colloquium Series will be held in person. No virtual attendance options are available.
January 19, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarFrank Yang (Stanford): "Nested Bundling" Abstract: A nested bundling strategy creates menus in which more expensive bundles include all the goods of the less expensive ones. We study when nested bundling is optimal and determine which nested menu is optimal, when consumers differ in one dimension. We introduce a partial order on the set of bundles, defined by (i) set inclusion and (ii) sales quantity when sold alone. We show that, under quasiconcavity assumptions, if the undominated bundles with respect to this partial order are nested, then nested bundling is optimal. We provide an iterative procedure to determine the minimal optimal menu that consists of a subset of the undominated bundles. The proof technique involves a new constructive monotone comparative statics theorem. We present partial converses. Additionally, we provide distributionally robust characterizations of nested bundling. We also show that under suitable conditions it is possible to extend our analysis to allow multidimensional heterogeneity.
January 18, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarAlice Wu (Harvard): "Reveal or Conceal? Employer Learning in the Labor Market for Computer Scientists" Abstract: The efficient allocation of labor relies on the identification of talent. When employee output is not publicly observable, employers have an incentive to take advantage of private information, potentially leading to the misallocation of labor among firms. This paper provides empirical evidence of employer learning and quantifies the impact of learning on job mobility and innovation outputs in the labor market for computer science (CS) Ph.D.'s. CS conference proceedings provide public information on research effort by existing CS workers. Among papers authored by researchers from industry, about one-quarter can be matched to a contemporaneous patent application - an indicator of a more valuable innovation. Yet the fact of the application remains private information at the incumbent employer for 18 months. Consistent with public learning, researchers with a new paper have higher inter-firm mobility rates than do coworkers without a paper. Initially, authors of papers with a matched patent are less likely to move than authors without a patent application. But once the patent application becomes public, their mobility rates cross over. Authors of papers with a matched patent are also 35% more likely to move to a top tech firm. These patterns confirm the predictions of a model in which incumbent firms have initially private information on more productive researchers. Structural estimates of the model suggest that if papers and patents were disclosed simultaneously, high-ability workers would sort more quickly to high-productivity firms. The implied increase in allocative efficiency would increase innovation outputs by about 5%.
January 17, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarRyungha Oh (Yale): “Spatial Sorting of Workers and Firms”  Abstract: Why do productive workers and firms locate together in dense cities? I develop a new theory of two-sided sorting in which both heterogeneous workers and firms sort across space. Three forces are essential for generating spatial disparities: complementarity between worker and firm productivity, random matching within frictional local labor markets, and congestion costs. I demonstrate that the equilibrium exhibits excessive concentration of workers and firms, and dispersing them away from dense locations can mitigate congestion without reducing output. I then provide direct empirical evidence of two-sided sorting using German administrative microdata. An exogenous increase in the quality of the local workforce results in more productive firms choosing the same location. Finally, to quantify the implications of the model, I calibrate it to U.S. regional data and show that policies such as federal income taxes or local housing regulations, which relocate workers and firms toward less dense areas, can increase welfare.
January 17, 202412:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch Seminar Speaker: Xiaojie Liu
January 16, 20243:45 PM - 5:15 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarAnna Russo (MIT): “Additionality and Asymmetric Information in Environmental Markets: Evidence from Conservation Auctions” with Karl M. Aspelund  Abstract: Market mechanisms aim to deliver environmental services at low cost. However, this objective is undermined by participants whose conservation actions are not marginal to the incentive — or “additional” — as the lowest cost providers of environmental services may not be the highest social value. We investigate this potential market failure in the world’s largest auction mechanism for ecosystem services, the Conservation Reserve Program, with a dataset linking bids in the program’s scoring auction to satellite-derived land use. We use a regression discontinuity design to show that three of four marginal winners of the auction are not additional. Moreover, we find that the heterogeneity in counterfactual land use introduces adverse selection in the market. We then develop and estimate a joint model of multi-dimensional bidding and land use to quantify the implications of this market failure for the performance of environmental procurement mechanisms and competitive offset markets. We design alternative auctions with scoring rules that incorporate the expected impact of the auction on bidders’ land use. These auctions increase efficiency by using bids and observed characteristics to select participants based on both costs and expected additionality.
January 12, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarDev Patel (Harvard): “Learning About a Warming World: Attention and Adaptation in Agriculture Floods”  Abstract: Global warming threatens the livelihoods of 600 million low-income agricultural workers. I study how farmers learn about the environment and the consequences for climate change adaptation. Rice farmers in Bangladesh must form beliefs about local soil salinity, a climate danger exacerbated by rising sea levels that can be mitigated by planting salinity-tolerant seeds. Comparing beliefs about salt levels to agronomic readings, I find that on average farmers hold correct environmental perceptions, but this masks substantial errors across individuals. I explain this pattern using a conceptual framework of belief formation featuring an identification problem: farmers must learn about multiple unobserved environmental threats from ambiguous signals. As a result, farmers endogenously process data in support of their priors, e.g., someone worried about high salinity will interpret low yield as a sign of too much salt. Climate change amplifies this process by systematically altering the environmental risks farmers consider most threatening. I test and confirm the framework's predictions using a pair of natural experiments that capture two changes emblematic of global warming: salient shocks that capture attention (e.g., tidal flooding) and subtle shifts that go unnoticed (e.g., groundwater contamination through rising sea-levels). Despite equal effects on true salt levels, I find asymmetric impacts on beliefs as subtle groundwater intrusion causes no change in perceptions while saltwater floods spur significant overestimation. Analyses of rainfall and flooding perceptions exhibit similar patterns to those of soil salinity. In large-scale field experiments, I document major economic consequences of environmental beliefs: correcting misperceptions significantly alters farmers' demand for salinity-tolerant seeds with substantial impacts on profits. I use this experimental variation to estimate and validate a structural model of seed choice that allows me to simulate counterfactual policies and underscores the influence of environmental beliefs.
January 11, 202411:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Alina Mulyukova Title: "Services Liberalization and Product Variety of Manufacturing Firms" Abstract: "This paper investigates the effect of liberalization in the services sector on downstream manufacturing firms' product scope and the distribution of sales across products. I combine firm-level panel data for India with the services reform measure and exploit variation across manufacturing firms in their exposure to service inputs as well as time variation in services reform in a two-way fixed effects framework. My analysis yields that reforms in the services sector significantly increased the number of products of manufacturing firms and decreased the concentration of sales. Looking further at the characteristics of added products, I find that firms add products in the same 3-digit industry as their core product, which leads to a within-firm cannibalization effect. I present a model of multi-product firms in the presence of within firm demand linkages. I document that reforms in the services sector decrease firms' fixed cost of product innovation, whereas having no effect on the variable cost."
January 10, 20243:30 PM - 5:00 PMJunior Recruitment SeminarKunal Sangani (Harvard): "Markups Across the Income Distribution: Measurement and Implications" Abstract: I examine the relationship between customer income and firm markups using rich data on household transactions and wholesale costs. Over the observed purchases, high-income households pay 15pp higher retail markups than low-income households. Half of the markup gap is due to differences in markups paid at the same store. Conditional on income, markups paid by a household also increase when a household shops in high-income areas, shops at retail chains with locations in other high-income areas, or purchases products with a high-income customer base. A model in which household search intensity depends on opportunity cost of time can account for these facts. Consistent with the model’s predictions, I document that retail markups across cities rise with both per-capita income and inequality. Through the lens of the model, changes in the income distribution since 1950 account for a 10–14pp rise in retail markups, with 30 percent of the increase since 1980 due to growing income dispersion. This rise in markups consists of within-firm markup increases as well as a reallocation of sales to high-markup firms, which occurs without any change to the nature of firm production or competition.
December 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSenior Job TalkBasit Zafar (UMichigan): "Assessing the Costs of Balancing College and Work Activities: The Gig Economy Meets Online Education"Spectral and post-spectral estimators for grouped panel data models" with Esteban Aucejo and Spencer Perry Abstract: Balancing the demands of work and schooling is a challenging task for an increasing number of students who have to pay their way through college and for workers who intend to upgrade their skills. However, flexible learning and working environments could play an important role in easing many frictions associated with performing both activities simultaneously. Using detailed data from gig workers enrolled in online college education, we analyze how labor supply and study efforts respond to changes in labor market conditions and college activities/tasks. Ourfindings indicate that average weekly college activities reduce weekly time spent on the Uber platform by 1.7 hours, representing a "short run" opportunity cost of only $41 per week. We also show that study time is not particularly sensitive to changes in labor market conditions, where a 10% increase in average weekly pay reduces study hours by only 2%. Consistent with these results, we find that workers take advantage of their flexible schedules by changing their usual working hours when college activities are more demanding. Finally, we do not find adverse effects of work hours on academic performance in this context, or of study hours on workplace performance (as measured by driver ratings or tips). Overall, the evidence suggests that combining flexible working and learning formats could constitute a suitable path for many (low-SES) students who work to afford an increasingly expensive college education and for workers aiming to improve their skill set.
December 7, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSenior Job TalkDenis Chetverikov (UCLA): "Spectral and Post-Spectral Estimators for Grouped Panel Data Models" with Elena Manresa Abstract: In this paper, we develop spectral and post-spectral estimators for grouped panel data models. Both estimators are consistent in the asymptotics where the number of observations N and the number of time periods T simultaneously grow large. In addition, the post-spectral estimator is √NT-consistent and asymptotically normal with mean zero under the assumption of well-separated groups even if T is growing much slower than N. The post-spectral estimator has, therefore, theoretical properties that are comparable to those of the grouped fixed-effect estimator developed by Bonhomme and Manresa in [11]. In contrast to the grouped fixed-effect estimator, however, our post-spectral estimator is computationally straightforward.
December 6, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Yutong Zhang (Northwestern University): "Snitching on Peers"
December 5, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsAlex Torgovitsky (UChicago): "Empirical Analysis of Linear Supply and Demand in Heterogeneous Markets"
December 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationWill Rafey (UCLA): Title TBD
December 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Charles Williamson (Northwestern University): "Modeling Migration and Investment Decisions in Response to Climate Change"
December 1, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Mansa Saxena (Northwestern University): "Effects of Female Education on Dowry in India"
December 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker: Davis Kedrosky  Title: Expropriation, Reallocation, and Political Selection: Evidence from the Rise of the English Gentry Abstract: I study the emergence of Parliamentary government in England during the early modern period. In the century preceding the Civil War (1540-1640), Parliament was gradually transformed from an occasional assembly into a regular institution, developing formal operating procedures and the first stirrings of an independent legislative agenda. Which economic interests in the House of Commons drove this shift? To answer this question, I use biographical data on British MPs to investigate the effects of a shock to the distribution of landholding—the dissolution of the English monasteries—on the composition of Parliament. Sales of monastic land led to the expansion of the gentry and thus an increase in the number of gentlemen competing for seats. This presentation will discuss descriptive statistics and preliminary evidence on the changing social backgrounds and political activities of Parliamentarians. AND Speaker: Guohui Jiang Title: Trickle Down Cooperation: Draft Fairness and Voluntary Enlistment in World War II Abstract: This paper investigates the role of fairness in shaping voluntary enlistment decisions during World War II in the United States. Exploiting draft lotteries, I explore how individuals' draft affected their neighbors' voluntary enlistment.  I find that the drafting of higher-income individuals resulted in increased neighborhood enlistment, while drafting lower-income individuals discouraged their neighbors' enlistment. This divergence can be explained by fairness views. As higher-income individuals had more access to draft deferments, a relatively higher draft rate among them enhanced perceptions of draft fairness, thereby boosting enlistment of their neighbors. Administrative data and survey evidence confirm these. These findings highlight the importance of equity and fairness in sustaining social cooperation.
November 30, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker Ludovica Mosillo Title: The impact of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa embarked on an ambitious electrification effort, connecting nearly 90% of its population to the electrical grid. However, the aging coal-powered supply system has struggled to meet the growing demand for electricity, resulting in a persistent threat of countrywide blackouts. To mitigate this risk in 2007, Eskom, the national power utility, introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“Load Shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply. initially infrequent and of shorts duration, starting in 2019 Power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. This project aims to analyze the consequences of this phenomenon on South African households and firms
November 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Giovanni Pisauro Title: "The Determinants and Consequences of Telehealth"
November 29, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryLeticia Arroyo Abad (CUNY): “Gambling for America: The First Wave of Migration to the Americas, 1492-1540”.
November 29, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Pablo Sanchez "Credit Access and Housing Quality", joint with Kwok Yan Chiu and Diego Cid.
November 29, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Giacomo Marcolin (Northwestern University): "Gig Work as Income Insurance During Unemployment: Evidence from Germany"
November 28, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsCarlos Lamarche (University of Kentucky): “Quantile Regression with an Endogenous Misclassified Binary Regressor”
November 28, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsRicardo Perez-Truglia (Berkeley Haas): "What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking" with Zoe B. Cullen and Shengwu Li
November 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationNano Barahona (UC Berkeley): Title TBD
November 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Dalton Zhang (Northwestern University): "De-anchored Inflation? Flattened (and Steepened) Philips Curve"
November 21, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsAshesh Rambacham (MIT): "From Predictive Algorithms to Automatic Generation of Anomalies" with Sendhil Mullainathan Abstract: Economic theories often progress through the discovery of “anomalies.” Canonical examples of anomalies include the Allais Paradox and the Kahneman-Tversky choice experiments, which are constructed menus of lotteries that highlighted particular flaws in expected utility theory and spurred the development of new theories for decisionmaking under risk. In this paper, we develop algorithmic procedures to automatically generate such anomalies. Our algorithmic procedures take as inputs an existing theory and data it seeks to explain, and then generate examples on which we would likely observe violations of our existing theory if we were to collect data. As an illustration, we produce anomalies for expected utility theory using simulated lottery choice data from individuals who behave according to cumulative prospect theory. Our procedures recover known anomalies for expected utility theory in behavioral economics and discover novel anomalies based on the probability weighting function. We conduct incentivized experiments to collect choice data on our algorithmically generated anomalies, finding that participants violate expected utility theory at similar rates to the Allais Paradox and Common Ratio Effect. While this illustration is specific, our anomaly generation procedures are general and can be applied in any domain where there exists a formal theory and rich data that the theory seeks to explain.
November 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsZhen Huo (Yale): "Noisy Global Value Chains" with Ha Bui, Andrei Levchenko, and Nitya Pandalai-Nayar Abstract: We study international propagation of both fundamental and non-fundamental shocks in a global production network model with information frictions. Producers in a sector do not perfectly observe other country-sector fundamentals, and their production decisions depend on their beliefs about worldwide exogenous states as well as other producers’ behavior. In this environment, “noise” shocks – errors in the public signals about fundamentals – propagate internationally and generate aggregate fluctuations. Using a novel panel dataset containing the frequencies of country-industry-specific economic news reports by 11 leading newspapers in the G7 plus Spain, we show that greater news coverage is associated with both smaller GDP forecast errors, and less disagreement among forecasters. We use these empirical regularities to discipline the parameters governing the severity of information frictions. We find that noise shocks are a quantitatively important source of international fluctuations. Noise shocks propagate relatively more powerfully to the more distant parts of the network, while TFP shocks propagate less powerfully to the more distant sectors in the presence of informational frictions.
November 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Pablo Sanchez (Northwestern University): "Title TBA"
November 17, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Tom Fisher (Northwestern University): "Destructive Reputational Bargaining"
November 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 16, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Sebastian Sardon Title: TBD
November 16, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: “Illicit economies and economic growth”
November 15, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryMargaret Jones (Emory University): "Institutional Drift, Property Rights, and Economic Development: Evidence from Historical Treaties" with Donn Feir and Rob Gillezeau Abstract: For nearly three centuries, Indigenous peoples within the borders of present-day Canada engaged in treaty-making with the British Crown and other European powers. These treaties regularly formed the colonial legal basis for access to Indigenous lands. However, treaties were not negotiated everywhere, including in regions subsequently settled by Europeans. Consequentially, there is substantial regional variation in the legal status of occupied lands, jurisdiction over natural resources, and state commitments to Indigenous nations. We study how these legal institutions have shaped the path of economic development in Indigenous communities. Using restricted-access census data, we show that historical treaties substantially lower income in Indigenous communities today. We argue that this results from the constitutional and legal recognition of Aboriginal rights and title, which have dramatically increased bargaining power and, consequently, income growth in non-treaty Indigenous communities.
November 15, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Michael Cai
November 15, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Takaaki Sagawa (Northwestern University): "Sovereign Liquidity Shocks"
November 14, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsKohei Yata (UW Madison): "Optimal Decision Rules Under Partial Identification" Abstract: I consider a class of statistical decision problems in which the policy maker must decide between two alternative policies to maximize social welfare based on a finite sample. The central assumption is that the underlying, possibly infinite-dimensional parameter, lies in a known convex set, potentially leading to partial identification of the welfare effect. An example of such restrictions is the smoothness of counterfactual outcome functions. As the main theoretical result, I derive a finite-sample, exact minimax regret decision rule within the class of all decision rules under normal errors with known variance. When the error distribution is unknown, I obtain a feasible decision rule that is asymptotically minimax regret. I apply my results to the problem of whether to change a policy eligibility cutoff in a regression discontinuity setup, and illustrate them in an empirical application to a school construction program in Burkina Faso.
November 14, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsGustavo Bobonis (University of Toronto): "A Helping Hand Goes a Long Way: Long-Term Effects of Counselling and Support to Workfare Program Participants" with Aneta Bonikowska, Phillip Oreopoulos, W. Craig Riddell, and Steven P. Ryan
November 13, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationLulu Wang (Northwestern): "Regulating Competing Payment Networks”    Abstract: Payment markets are two-sided. Networks like Visa and Mastercard charge merchant fees to fund consumer rewards. I study how regulation, private entry, and public entry in this market affect prices, distribution, and welfare in equilibrium. I model consumer adoption and merchant acceptance of multiple cards, merchant pricing, and network competition. I estimate the model by matching data on consumers’ card holdings, merchant acceptance, network pricing, and the effects of debit rewards reductions. The estimated model matches external evidence on networks’ costs, merchants’ margins, and the effects of AmEx’s 2016 – 2019 cuts in merchant fees. Using the estimated model, I compare the effects of capping credit card merchant fees, increasing entry of private credit card networks, and introducing a low-fee public option like FedNow. Capping credit card merchant fees is progressive and increases annual welfare by $29 billion by reducing rewards, retail prices paid by cash and debit consumers, and credit card use. In contrast, because I estimate consumers’ reward sensitivity is ten times merchants’ fee-sensitivity, incumbents respond to competition by raising fees to fund rewards. A public option struggles to gain consumer adoption without rewards, limiting welfare gains. 
November 13, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Labor Seminar: Amanda PallaisAmanda Pallais (Harvard University)
November 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsPascual Restrepo Mesa (Boston University): "Automation and Rent Dissipation: Implications for Inequality, Productivity, and Welfare" with Daron Acemoglu
November 13, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Johanna Rayl (Northwestern University): "Energy Subsidies and Cash Transfers: Redistributive Policy in Indonesia"
November 10, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Evan Majic (Northwestern University): "Think Big: Solving Large-Scale Heterogenous Agent Models in Sequence Space"
November 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in DevelopmentTommaso Porzio (Columbia): "Self-employment within the firm" with Vittoria Bassi, Jung Hyuk Lee, Alessandra Peter, Ritwika Sen, and Esau Tugume Abstract: We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a general equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it with our data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. This setting is close, in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmark in which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing a production space. Given how firms are organized internally, the benefits from alleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: most African firms resemble artisanal workshops whose business model is not easily scalable.
November 9, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker Matteo Ruzzante Title TBD
November 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Claire Mackevicius Title: "Plugging Holes or Hoarding More? Toward an Understanding of Fundraising PTA Spending Dynamics at Public Schools"  Abstract: “Decades of policy efforts have aimed to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources across K-12 public schools, weakening the link between community wealth and government resources at schools (Chingos & Blagg, 2017). At the same time, fundraising PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), Organizations (PTOs), and “Friends of” groups) have grown dramatically in number and size (Nelson & Gazley, 2014). These nonprofit organizations provide supplemental funds at some public schools, though school funding research and policy do not systematically take fundraising PTAs into account–they represent an understudied source of discretionary funds at public schools. The limited extant literature rests on an untested presumption that these groups exist and spend money at public schools in response to government budget shortfalls. In this study, I test this presumption and do not find evidence that on average, fundraising PTA spending responds to shifts in government spending at schools. I use regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences event study approaches to estimate the causal effect of school budget referenda elections on fundraising PTAs, analyzing a dataset I constructed that links all fundraising PTAs in California to the public schools they support from 2005-2018. I find suggestive evidence that in racially homogenous districts, PTAs may be responsive to government spending at schools. I also consider whether PTAs may operate in ways more consistent with theorizing that suggests they facilitate community engagement and establish district identities as places that invest in public schools and/or reify economic and racial stratification. I discuss the potential portability of findings across other states and settings, describe implications for school funding research and policy more broadly, and deepen understandings of fundraising PTA organizations.”
November 8, 20237:30 PM - 9:00 PMLeon N. Moses Distinguished Lecture in TransportationPatrick Harker (President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia): "Perspectives on Economics Trends and Global Supply Chains"
November 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryYishay Yafeh (Hebrew University of Jerusalem): "The Rise of Scientific Research in Corporate America" with Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon, Konstantin Kosenko, and JK Suh
November 8, 202312:30 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Kilian Rieder  Title: Central Bank Communication by ??? The Economics of Public Policy Leaks
November 7, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsLihua Lei (Stanford GSB): "Model-Agnostic Covariate-Assisted Inference on Partially Identified Causal Effects" with Wenlong Ji and Asher Spector
November 7, 20232:30 PM - 3:45 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsAbigail Adams-Prassl (University of Oxford): "The Dynamics of Abusive Relationships" with Kristiina Huttunen, Emily Nix, and Ning Zhang Abstract: Domestic abuse encompasses a range of damaging behaviours beyond physical violence, including economic and emotional abuse. This paper provides the first evidence on the impact of cohabiting with an abusive partner on victim’s economic outcomes. In so doing, we highlight the systematic role played by economic suppression and coercive control in such relationships. Using administrative data and a matched control event study design, along with a within-individual comparison of outcomes across relationships, we document three new facts. First, women who begin relationships with (eventually) physically abusive men suffer large and significant earnings and employment falls immediately upon cohabiting with the abusive partner, which translates into a total household income loss. Second, this decline in economic outcomes is non-monotonic in women’s pre-cohabitation outside options. Third, abusive men impose economic costs on all their female partners, even those who do not report physical violence. To rationalize these findings, we develop a new dynamic model of abusive relationships where women do not perfectly observe their partner’s type, and abusive men have an incentive to use coercive control to sabotage women’s outside options and their ability to later exit the relationship. We show that this model is consistent with all three empirical facts. We harness the model’s predictions to revisit some classic results on domestic violence and show that the relationship between domestic violence and women’s outside options is crucially linked to breakup dynamics. 
November 6, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationChris Conlon (NYU Stern): "Estimating Preferences and Substitution Patterns from Second-Choice Data Alone" with Julie Holland Mortimer and Paul Sarkis Abstract: We consider identification and estimation of a model of consumer choice where the main source of variation is in the set of products made available to consumers. Instead of relying on variation in the choice environment (prices, product characteristics) we require first-choice probabilities and a subset of (conditional) second-choice probabilities. We develop a semiparametric low-rank approximation to the matrix of second-choice probabilities that is consistent with mixed logit models of demand but is defined in “product space” and does not require that product characteristics explain substitution patterns. In Monte Carlo experiments we show that our model can replicate a nested logit or random coefficients logit model. We apply our model to a single year of automobile data from Grieco et al. (2021) and show that we can fit substitution patterns with higher accuracy.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMDept. of History presents "China and the West" with Professor Joel MokyrWe invite you to a moderated discussion between University of Chicago Prof. Pomeranz and Northwestern Prof. Mokyr. On the Early Modern "Great Divergence" between the economies of China and of the West. Lunch starts at 12pm and the talk promptly at 12:30pm.
November 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsManuel Amador (University of Minnesota): Title TBD
November 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker TBD Title TBD
November 3, 20238:00 AM - 8:00 PMConference in Honor of Eddie DekelThis is a conference in celebration of Eddie Dekel's 65th birthday, bringing together the work of fellow economic theorists.
November 2, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ludovica Mosillo  Title: The impact of Load Shedding in South Africa Abstract: Following the end of Apartheid in 1994, South Africa embarked on an ambitious electrification effort, connecting nearly 90% of its population to the electrical grid. However, the aging coal-powered supply system has struggled to meet the growing demand for electricity, resulting in a persistent threat of countrywide blackouts. To mitigate this risk in 2007, Eskom, the national power utility, introduced a schedule of rotating power outages (“Load Shedding”) to be enacted in periods of low supply. initially infrequent and of shorts duration, starting in 2019 Power interruptions became a frequent occurrence, with households experiencing an average of 1,343 hours of outages in 2023 alone. This project aims to analyze the consequences of this phenomenon on South African households and firms
November 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Radhika Ramakrishnan Title: "The Second Specialist:  How Does Vertical Integration Affect Specialist Switching" (joint with Xingyue Xin) Abstract: “Vertical integration is particularly pervasive in healthcare markets.  In this work, we study vertical integration between generalist (primary care) and specialist physicians and establish a relationship between the vertical integration status of a primary care provider and the likelihood that patients switch specialist providers.  The ease with which a patient can switch specialist providers may be related to the health outcomes they experience in the future.  We propose ways to examine this as well as ways to examine underlying mechanisms for our results on vertical integration and switching.”
November 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Kwok Yan Chiu
November 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Andrea Di Giovanni Paolo (Northwestern University): "Intermediation: Screening Sellers Through Buyer Persuasion"
October 31, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsPeng Ding (UC Berkeley): "Causal inference in network experiments: regression-based analysis and design-based properties" with Mengsi Gao
October 31, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMJoint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP") and DevelopmentYoshi Katayama (Northwestern): "Readmission Penalty under Nonlinear Payment Schedules" Abstract: I examine how hospitals respond to financial incentives. In Japan, the per diem payment is designed to decrease as the length of stay increases to incentivize early discharge. However, under these nonlinear payment schedules, hospitals can increase reimbursements with repeated discharges and readmissions. Using administrative claims data, I study hospital responses to a national policy that penalizes immediate post-discharge readmissions to limit repeated admissions. Exploiting variations created by the program introduction, I find that hospitals delay readmissions to avoid the penalty for elective patients. In contrast, for non-elective patients, readmissions immediately after discharge decrease due to selective readmission. Moreover, there are no detectable effects on health outcomes. These findings suggest that hospital responses to financial incentives depend on patient health status.
October 30, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationFrancisco Pareschi (Northwestern): Title: Reducing Consumer Inertia in Tobacco Markets We study how industry structure influences the effect of tobacco control policies. Despite decades-long efforts to discourage smoking, the tobacco industry remains resilient. One of the main reasons is consumers' attachment to the products they smoke, which we call consumer inertia. We explore two reasons consumers are inert: they get addicted to nicotine and develop lasting brand loyalty to their products. Recently, regulators have proposed policies that would eliminate the addictive components of cigarettes and make consumers less loyal to their brands. Although such policies would directly impact consumers, we must understand firms' responses to assess the programs' overall impact on consumption. Inert consumers introduce dynamic incentives for the firms since future customers' choices depend on which product they patronize today. As a result, consumers become a valuable asset for the firm; capturing new customers is more costly, and exploiting existing ones is more attractive, significantly affecting how firms price, introduce, and discontinue products. To assess the empirical effect of reducing inertia in tobacco markets, we develop a model that accounts for consumers and firm responses: consumers have addiction and loyalty, and firms choose prices and product portfolios. We estimate the model leveraging rich variation from the Uruguayan industry and solve the equilibrium of the dynamic game for multiple levels of inertia. Our results indicate that industry responses can attenuate and even revert the positive impact of reducing inertia on smoking rates due to lower prices and more product availability. However, if the long-term profits generated by a person with tobacco addiction diminish enough, firms lower their investment in attracting new customers, which reinforces the direct effect policies have on consumers. These policies can be used together with taxation to reduce consumption without increasing the burden on tobacco consumers as much.
October 30, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Labor Seminar: Simon JägerSimon Jäger (MIT)
October 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloquium: Silvia Vannutelli: Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection"Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection" by Silvia Vannutelli, Assistant Professor of Economics and IPR Fellow So-called revolving door laws restrict public servants from representing private interests before the government after they leave office. While they mitigate potential conflicts of interest by imposing constraints on post-public service employment, these restrictions also bring about trade-offs as they might reduce the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the overall benefits of holding office. Vannutelli and her colleagues study the consequences of revolving-door laws for the selection of legislators across U.S. states, exploiting the staggered roll-out of revolving door laws between 1962 and 2017. They first show that, as anticipated, the laws reduce the probability that a legislator registers as a lobbyist after leaving office. More substantively, they show that treated states experience an increase in the probability of uncontested elections, driven primarily by a reduction in the entry of potential challengers and an increase in incumbents' probability of re-running. The researchers provide a simple model of politician career incentives to interpret the results. This event is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Fall 2023 Colloquium Series, where IPR researchers from around the University share their latest policy-relevant research. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
October 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsYuriy Gorodnichenko (UC Berkeley): Title TBD
October 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Tim Seida (Northwestern University): "Vertical Integration of Screening and Monitoring in US Mortgage Markets"
October 27, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Jana Obradovic (Northwestern University): "Mortgage Lock-In Effect and Housing Prices: Implications for Monetary Policy"
October 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker: Kilian Rieder (European Central Bank) Title: Taming Credit Booms: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Federal Reserve Policies in 1920-21 Abstract: How should policy-makers tame excessive credit growth? I exploit a single natural experiment to estimate the comparative causal effects of different financial stability policies on bank-level credit. In 1920, four Federal Reserve Banks hiked their interest rate indiscriminately to safeguard financial stability. Another four Reserve Banks employed targeted rate action aimed at over-leveraged banks instead. The remaining Federal Reserve districts did not take any measures. For identification, I draw on geographic border discontinuities across districts with different policy choices. In direct horse races, the uniform rate hike dampened the boom more successfully than targeted policies. Yet, contemporary local shocks also interacted with financial stability interventions to induce substantial heterogeneity in credit supply responses across the United States.
October 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in DevelopmentElias Papaioannou (London Business School): "Private Colonialism in Africa" with Giorgio Chiovelli, Etienne Le Rossignol and Stelios Michalopoulos
October 26, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Mahounan Yedomiffi (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Title: Does Parental Involvement Improve Student Learning? The Role of Monitoring Abstract: Sub-Saharan African nations are grappling with low school completion, marked by 44% completion rate in middle school. This study presents the findings of a randomized controlled trial that I conducted in Benin which investigates the effects of providing parents with information about their role in their child’s education through weekly phone calls. Including 2094 8th-grade students in 20 secondary schools, the intervention led to a substantial 6 percent increase in grade comple- tion. This stems from a statistically significant 0.11 standard deviation increase in the year-end GPA, driven by STEM subjects. The benefits of this intervention are especially pronounced for academically weaker students, elevating their likeli- hood of progression by 33 percent. These educational gains can be attributed to heightened parental awareness regarding their child’s academic performance, aug- mented parental involvement both within the school and at home, and a reduction in the burden of household chores placed upon the children. My intervention is highly cost-effective, with a negative net cost. These results offer a promising and cost-effective strategy to elevate educational outcomes for sub-Saharan Africa while saving on costs.    
October 26, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Sergio Lopez-Araiza Title: ”Border Walls, Drug Routes, and Violent Crime in Mexico” Abstract: “Violence related to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has dramatically escalated in Mexico since 2007. However, beyond the increase in the nation-wide homicide rate lies a huge time and spatial variation across Mexico’s 2,456 municipalities. One potential source of such heterogeneity is how valuable it is for DTOs to control a municipality for drug trafficking purposes. Using the expansion of the US-Mexico border wall that resulted from the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and leveraging the fact that it made trafficking drugs into the US more difficult, I study changes in the value of the municipalities shifted violence in Mexico.”
October 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryDavide Coluccia (Northwestern University): "Closing Ranks: Immigration and Organized Labor" with Gaia Dossi Abstract: How does innovation diffuse across countries? In this paper, we document that out-migration promotes the diffusion of innovation from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. Between 1870 and 1940, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the United States. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents over 1853–1899. Using a new shift-share instrument for bilateral migration and a triple-differences design, we document that migration ties contribute to technology diffusion from the US to the UK. Through highdimensional text analysis, we find that emigrants promote technology transfer, but they also nurture the production of original innovation. Physical return migration is an important driver of this “return innovation” effect. However, we find that the interactions between emigrants and their origin communities promote technology diffusion, even absent return migration. Additionally, we show that migration ties propel knowledge flows by fostering cross-border market integration.
October 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Matias Bayas (practice job talk)
October 25, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Avner Kreps (Northwestern University): "Monopsony Power, Airline Mergers, and the Pilot Shortage"
October 24, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsDeborah Kim (Northwestern University): "Test for Sign Agreement"
October 24, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMJoint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP") and DevelopmentGenia Rachkovski (Northwestern): "Beyond Test Scores: Does Public Information on School Satisfaction and Violence Levels Affect Parental School Choice?" Abstract: In 2012, a Supreme Court ruling mandated the public release of school-level test scores and non-academic school attributes in Israel. Leveraging this exogenous event, I investigate its impact on student school choice. Employing a discrete choice model, event study, and difference-in-difference approach, I find that in regions with multiple school options, parents increasingly opt for 'better' schools post-disclosure. Notably, this shift is primarily attributed to factors like violence and students' school satisfaction ratings, rather than test score information. Additionally, lower socio-economic status households exhibit greater responsiveness to non-test-related information. I also explore information sharing networks, as well as the connection to school value-added measures and implications for socio-economic integration and mobility.
October 23, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationJingyuan Wang (Northwestern): "Subsidizing Industry Growth in a Market with Lemons: Evidence from the electric vehicle market in China" Abstract: Consumer subsidies are common policies to foster growth in emerging green industries, such as electric vehicles (EVs). Ideally, such policies can expand the market and improve welfare by promoting firm entry and inducing technology spillovers to related industries. However, a poorly designed subsidy can attract ``lemon'' entrants with low and imperfectly observed quality, undermine the industry's reputation, and impede industry growth. Using data from the Chinese electric vehicle market from 2012 to 2018, this paper examines how subsidies affect the growth of a nascent industry. We develop a structural model of vehicle demand, firm entry and expansion, and EV collective reputation dynamics to analyze the subsidy’s equilibrium impact. Results suggest that the net welfare impact of the subsidy is nearly zero, and the reputation impact reduces subsidy benefits by 10.8%. Decreasing the subsidy level can improve policy efficiency and mitigate the reputation impact, and stringency in the attribute-based subsidy can serve as a screening tool that effectively filters lemons. This paper develops the framework for designing green industrial policies, highlighting the critical yet often neglected role of the reputation channel.
October 23, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsGiuseppe Moscarini (Yale): "The Job Ladder: Inflation vs. Reallocation" with Fabien Postel-Vinay
October 23, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Thu Tran (Northwestern University): "Power, Commitment, and Safety Net: Modeling Indian Women's Hidden Gold"
October 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker Myera Rashid Title: Engine of Mobility: The Typewriter and Women's Outcomes   Abstract: While much is known about the gendered effects of household technological changes, little is known about the impact of workplace technological changes on women's outcomes. In this project, I study the effect of the adoption of the typewriter into the US labor force on women's outcomes in the 20th century. Exploiting variation in the demand for typists across industries coupled with the geographic composition of industries, I document that the adoption of the typewriter and the resulting gendering of the typist occupation cause an increase in women's labor force participation and a decrease in their likelihood of being married and having children. I show that while the rapid adoption of the typewriter causes White women to leave the household and enter offices, it also increases the labor participation of Black women who replace White women by working in the household services industry. Lastly, I find that the typewriter acts as an engine of mobility for women through marriage. The typist occupation offers women the opportunity to work alongside and later marry men of higher socioeconomic status, a benefit not provided by alternate occupations for women at the time.  
October 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")  Jimmy Lee (Northwestern): "Costly Communication and Miscoordination in Agricultural Households: Experimental Evidence from Liberia" Abstract: Costly communication inhibits coordination in households. In a randomized evaluation of a school-based agricultural extension program in Liberia, this paper shows how costly communication leads households to miscoordinate responses to new information and restrict improvements in adolescents’ education and livelihoods. In a random subset of program schools, I randomize households into two informational treatments. The first provides promotional videos to students’ elders. The second, in addition, reveals elders’ expectations to students, which indicate elders anticipate positive program impact on their farming skills. After one year, many program effects are only detected when information is provided. While videos are effective in changing some household decisions, the revelation treatment improves additional outcomes, including students’ farm choices, incomes, school enrollment, and food security. Persistent effects of revelation imply costly communication within the household. I provide evidence that revelation improves coordination between students and elders, interpret the results in a household model with costly communication and asymmetric decision rights between students and elders, and test its implications.
October 19, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker Matheus Sampaio Title: The Ripple Effects of Floods on Long-term Financial Technology Adoption Abstract: Can adversity lead to long-term financial technology adoption? Can the adoption of one technology lead to the adoption of other financial technologies? Using identifiable data on bank transactions of every person and firm in Brazil, we studied how floods affect the long-term use of a new transfer technology, Pix. We find that, after a flood, the number of active Pix users increases by 3% for people and by 5% for firms. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting that people and firms adopt other types of financial technologies. Firms started accepting other forms of payment such as credit and debit cards, while people started to increase their use of digital bank accounts.
October 19, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Hyein Cho Title: "Value of Long-Term Care: Facility vs. Home" Abstract: “I quantify and compare value of two approaches to long-term care: facility-based care and home-based care. In order to control for patients' selection into different types of care, I exploit a natural experiment in the South Korean national long term care insurance scheme and its detailed administrative data. I find that facility-based care increases mortality by 8 percentage points (baseline mortality rate is 30%), and the effect is larger for individuals who previously had access to informal care. On the other hand, home-based care reduces medical care usage without sacrificing individuals' health outcomes.”
October 18, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryCarlo Medici (Northwestern University): Title TBD
October 18, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Diego Huerta (practice job talk)
October 17, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsEvan Rose (UChicago): "A Discrimination Report Card" with Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters
October 16, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationTomas Wilner (Northwestern): Title TBD
October 16, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Labor Seminar: Chinhui JuhnChinhui Juhn (University of Houston)
October 16, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsLuminita Stevens (University of Maryland): "Nominal Rigidities in U.S. Business Cycles" with Camilo Morales-Jimenez
October 14, 20239:00 AM - 12:30 PMNemmers Prize in Economics: ConferenceNemmers Conference.  This is associated with the awarding of the Nemmers Prize in Economics to Ariel Pakes.  Day 2 of 2.  Free registration required.
October 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker TBD Title TBD
October 13, 20239:00 AM - 5:30 PMNemmers Prize in Economics: ConferenceNemmers Conference.  This is associated with the awarding of the Nemmers Prize in Economics to Ariel Pakes.  Includes Professor Pakes' Nemmers lecture at 4pm. Day 1 of 2.  Free registration required.
October 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")  Ritwika Sen (Northwestern): TBD
October 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: "The Ripple Effects of Floods on Long-term Financial Technology Adoption." Abstract: “Can adversity lead to long-term financial technology adoption? Can the adoption of one technology lead to the adoption of other financial technologies? Using identifiable data on bank transactions of every person and firm in Brazil, we studied how floods affect the long-term use of a new transfer technology, Pix. We find that, after a flood, the number of active Pix users increases by 3\% for people and by 5\% for firms. Moreover, we find evidence suggesting that, people and firms adopt other types of financial technologies. Firms started accepting other forms of payment such as credit and debit cards, while people started to increase their use of digital bank accounts.”
October 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryGuido Alfani (Bocconi University): "Wealth inequality and the prevalence (and composition) of the rich, ca. 1300-today” 
October 11, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Fergal Hanks (practice job talk)
October 11, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Max Pienkny (Northwestern University): "From the Dial to the Aisle: Media Deregulation, Talk Radio, and Political Polarization"
October 10, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsBruce Hansen (UW Madison): "Jackknife standard errors for clustered regression"
October 9, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationMatt O'Keefe (Northwestern): "Firm Boundaries and External Costs in Marcellus Shale Wastewater Management"
October 9, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Labor Seminar: Gordon DahlGordon Dahl (University of California, San Diego)
October 9, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsJesus Fernández-Villaverde (UPenn): "Exploiting Symmetry in High-Dimensional Dynamic Programming" with Mahdi Ebrahimi Kahou, Jesse Perla, and Arnav Sood
October 9, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarAaron Wolf (Northwestern University): "Residential Schools and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma"
October 7, 20238:00 AM - 2:00 PM20th Annual CSIO/TSE Conference on Industrial OrganizationOrganized by the Center for the Study of Industrial Orgnization and the Toulouse School of Economics, the objective of the conference is to discuss recent advances in Industrial Organization. In keeping the spirit of previous years, the conference will foster collaboration between TSE and Northwestern's researchers, featuring contributions in theoretical and empirical IO. The event is invitation only.
October 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker: Davide Coluccia Title: Return Innovation: The Knowledge Spillovers of the British Migration to the United States, 1870-1940 Abstract: How does innovation diffuse across countries? In this paper, we document that out-migration generates a flow of technology from the country of destination to the country of origin of migrants. During the Age of Mass Migration, nearly four million British immigrants settled in the US. We construct a novel individual-level dataset linking British immigrants in the US to the UK census, and we digitize the universe of UK patents over 1853-1899. Through a new shift-share instrument for bilateral migration and a triple-differences design, we document that exposure to US technology through migrant ties contributes to the diffusion of innovation to the UK in 1870-1940. Using high-dimensional text analysis, we find that migrant ties promote technology transfer, but they also nurture the production of original innovation. The individual-level analysis indicates that this "return innovation" effect does not require the physical return of emigrants. Instead, we find that migration linkages generate information flows that facilitate the cross-border diffusion of knowledge.  
October 6, 20238:00 AM - 5:30 PM20th Annual CSIO/TSE Conference on Industrial OrganizationOrganized by the Center for the Study of Industrial Orgnization and the Toulouse School of Economics, the objective of the conference is to discuss recent advances in Industrial Organization. In keeping the spirit of previous years, the conference will foster collaboration between TSE and Northwestern's researchers, featuring contributions in theoretical and empirical IO. The event is invitation only.
October 5, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker Jose Flor Toro Title TBD
October 5, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: David Almog Title: “Algorithmic Oversight: Evidence from Centre Court” Abstract: “We leverage the introduction of the Hawkeye system in professional tennis as a natural experiment to assess the impact of algorithm oversight on workers – in this case, line judges in high pressure tennis matches. In subsequent lab experiments we intent to study how humans react to having their ”mistakes” corrected by algorithms.”
October 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryJosé-Antonio Espín-Sánchez (Yale University): Title TBD
October 4, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Clement Bohr (practice job talk)
October 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Myera Rashid (Northwestern University): "Engine of Mobility: The Typewriter and Women’s Outcomes"
October 3, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsAhnaf Rafi (Northwestern University): “Nonparametric inference for a class of functionals in the random coefficients logit model”
October 3, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMJoint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP"), Development, and IOAnran Li (Northwestern): "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
October 3, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMJoint Seminar in Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP"), Development, and IOAnran Li (Northwestern): "Commitment, Competition, and Preventive Care Provision"
October 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationGaston Lopez (Northwestern): “Price Discrimination under State-Ownership: Evidence from the Argentine Gasoline Industry"
October 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSaki Biglio (UC Los Angeles): "A Model of Credit, Money, Interest, and Prices"
October 2, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Therese Bonomo (Northwestern University): "Minimum Wages, Price Ceilings, and Access to the Safety Net"
September 29, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Miguel Jorquera (Northwestern University): "Wholesale Market Structure and Dynamic Retail Pricing in Electricity Markets"
September 29, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker Carlo Medici Title: Closing Ranks: The Effect of Immigration on Organized Labor Abstract: This paper shows that immigration caused the development of labor unions in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. I digitize archival data to construct a new dataset on unionization during 1900-1920 and use a shift-share instrument to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in immigration. My analysis yields several novel findings. I document that counties that received more immigrants experienced an increase in the share of unionized workers. Immigration also increased the number of union branches, their size, and the probability that a county had any labor union. Further, I show that the effect was driven by increased participation of U.S.-born workers. I explore the mechanisms behind this effect and find that unionization did not grow larger in counties more exposed to the immigrants' labor market competition. Instead, I provide evidence that cultural concerns drove unionization. First, the increase was more prominent for unions that adopted nativist positions during this period. Second, unions developed due to the arrival of culturally distant immigrants. Third, this effect was most prevalent in places with worse attitudes towards immigration. These findings identify an unexplored consequence of immigration: the development of organizations that aim to protect workers' status in the labor market. They also highlight immigration as a novel driver of unionization in the early twentieth century United States.        
September 28, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker Gina Eckhoff Title Putting Simplicity Back into New Economic Geography
September 28, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Xizhao Wang Title: “Human Capital and Firm's Innovation Direction” Abstract: “This paper studies how the sudden loss of personnel affects the direction of innovation in firms. This paper introduces three different measures (cosine distance, total variation distance, and Wasserstein distance) to quantify changes in firm's innovation direction. I exploit a difference-in-difference approach to assess the change in innovation direction within U.S. public firms following sudden deaths of personnel. I find that the loss of upper-tail inventors significantly alters a firm's innovation trajectory, whereas losses of lower-tail inventors and losses at the management level do not. The findings highlight the hard-to-replace nature and the role of inventive human capital, exploring the dynamic capabilities of firms.”
September 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryMegumi Murakami (Northwestern University): "Demand and Supply of Medical Knowledge"
September 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Diego Cid (practice job talk)
September 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student Seminar Rui Sousa (Northwestern University): "Doing Justice to Monti-Klein: Market Power and the Sensitivity of Bank Lending to Monetary Policy"
September 26, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsFlorian Gunsilius (University of Michigan): "Free Discontinuity Design" with David Van Dijcke
September 26, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsWilliam Evans (Notre Dame): "Prescription for Disaster:  The Changing Treatment Patterns of Physicians and the Drug Crisis"
September 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationJohn Vickers (University of Oxford): Title TBD
September 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsEric Swanson (UC Irvine): Title TBD
September 23, 20238:30 AM - 3:00 PM8th Annual Interactions WorkshopThe Interactions Workshop brings together the research of junior and senior Economists in the fields of Applied Microeconomics and Econometrics. This annual conference is sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
September 23, 20238:00 AM - 12:30 PMFifteenth Annual Conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition PolicyCo-presented by the Pritzker Center on Law, Business, and Economics and the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, this year’s conference will feature: Keynote Addresses by Carl Shapiro, (UC Berkeley), Susan Athey, (Stanford GSB), Aviv Nevo (UPenn), and Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School) And a Panel Discussion on The New U.S. Merger Guidelines with Carl Shapiro (UC Berkeley) as moderator, Michael Katz (UC Berkeley), Nancy L. Rose (MIT), Howard Shelanski (Georgetown Law), and Michael Whinston (MIT Sloan).
September 22, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Speaker Micah Villarreal (UC Santa Barbara) Title: Wealth Windfalls and Descendants of the Enslaved Abstract: Recent research contends that the largest determinant of the large and persistent wealth gap between Black and white Americans today is the extreme difference in initial wealth that the two groups held following the abolition of slavery in 1865 (Derenoncourt et al., 2022). In this project, I ask whether a “policy” that redistributed large stocks of wealth to the formerly enslaved and their descendants, fifty years following the end of slavery, may have reduced racial wealth inequality in the immediate and long-term. Due to Federal Indian policy of the late 1800s, thousands of acres of land fell into Freedman hands in Oklahoma around the year 1900. My initial data work indicates that oil would be discovered under at least 12 percent of this land over the following thirty years, and that these discoveries appear to be random. I characterize discovery of oil under a Freedman land allotment as a policy of wealth redistribution and test whether recipients of the policy look the same on observables as non-recipients. I interpret later statistical differences between the descendants of recipients and non-recipients as the causal effect of wealth redistribution.   If there is time, I will discuss proposed extensions to this analysis, such as exploring the effect of minority wealth on majority group backlash.
September 22, 20238:30 AM - 5:00 PM8th Annual Interactions WorkshopThe Interactions Workshop brings together the research of junior and senior Economists in the fields of Applied Microeconomics and Econometrics. This annual conference is sponsored by the Center for Econometrics and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
September 22, 20237:45 AM - 7:30 PMFifteenth Annual Conference on Antitrust Economics and Competition PolicyCo-presented by the Pritzker Center on Law, Business, and Economics and the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization, this year’s conference will feature: Keynote Addresses by Carl Shapiro, (UC Berkeley), Susan Athey, (Stanford GSB), Aviv Nevo (UPenn), and Louis Kaplow (Harvard Law School) And a Panel Discussion on The New U.S. Merger Guidelines with Carl Shapiro (UC Berkeley) as moderator, Michael Katz (UC Berkeley), Nancy L. Rose (MIT), Howard Shelanski (Georgetown Law), and Michael Whinston (MIT Sloan).
September 21, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint Seminar in Development and Health, Education, Labor, and Public Economics ("HELP")  Marie-Louise Decamps (Northwestern): "Shifting Landscapes: The Impact of Agricultural Innovation on Deforestation"
September 21, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarPresenter: Sultan Mehmood Title: Reform Multiplier Abstract: When and how can a reform create an amplifying effect? This paper provides evidence that a judge selection reform in Pakistan, which shifted the appointment power of judges from the President to a committee of judges had a multiplier effect on pro-government rulings in the decade following its implementation. As the first generation of committee appointee judges (first-degree of separation from the President) are replaced by the second generation of committee appointees (second-degree separation), the effect of the reform compounds judicial independence from the government. Nevertheless, as the reform amplifies anti-government rulings, it also results in a trade-off of fostering a network of patronage within the judge community: a compounding in the practice of hiring judges from the same law firms as the committee responsible for selecting new judges is observed. Despite this increase in patronage within the judiciary, there is no apparent deterioration in the quality of judicial decisions: a comparable multiplier effect on measures of decision quality is also observed. Rulings based on case merits and adherence to due process of law increase with each degree of separation from Presidential appointment. Career incentives to issue more anti-government and merit-based rulings appear to be an important explanation for the reform compounding: judges who are most likely to issue anti-government rulings are most likely to be promoted to the Supreme Court. Overall, our results underscore that measures increasing the independence of the judiciary can have enduring effects on judicial autonomy and decision quality, even when they concurrently alter the composition of the judicial elite by making it more concentrated.
September 21, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Netanel Ben Porath Title: "Gender Politics in the Roe vs Wade Era: Female Leaders and the Prevalence of Abortions" Abstract: “This work documents that during 1973-2020, electing a woman to be a state legislator or governor in the U.S. increased the prevalence of abortions in her state. We identify the causal effect of electing a female governor by using a Regression Disconti- nuity Design. For legislators, we establish causality by introducing a novel application of the Regression Discontinuity Aggregation methodology (Borusyak and Kolerman, n.d.). We do not find an effect on abortions when electing a Democrat to either role, suggesting leaders’ gender matters. When we focus on legislators, we uncover that the effect is driven by a change in regulation. In contrast, female governors make public discourse, as manifested in local newspapers, more favorable toward abortions. Since abortions are highly disputed in the U.S., this shift in public perceptions may make abortions less socially costly, explaining our main results.”
September 20, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryKatherine Hauck (Northwestern University): ""The Homesteading Act and the Process of Learning to Farm in the Late 19th Century" with Tiemen Woutersen"
September 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMMacroeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Gerard Maideu Morera
September 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarZhen Xie (Northwestern University): "Adversarial Sieve Estimation of Counterfactuals in Auction Models"
September 19, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsEric Mbakop (University of Calgary): "Identification in some discrete choice models: A computational approach"
June 12, 202312:00 PM - 2:00 PMSenior Lunch & Awards CeremonyEvery year the department holds a senior awards celebration to honor the students who were granted honors for their senior theses, students who received the Coen, Deibler, or Eisner Awards, and students who completed the BA/MA degree. We are excited to welcome the class of 2023 and their guests to this year's Senior Lunch & Awards Ceremony!
June 9, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarNick Ziebarth (Auburn University) Title: Racial Differences in Childhood Mortality during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries  Abstract: We study racial differences in childhood mortality between 1870 and 1940 in the rural South. We build a sample of children linked over time and infer child mortality based on whether we are unable to locate a child in the subsequent census. We find that the racial gap is relatively unchanged through 1900 before declining by around 5 percentage points in 1930. Adjusting for racial differences in underenumeration does not explain the gap. Neither does controlling for the father’s observable characteristics such as occupation. Finally, campaigns in the early 20th century to eradicate malaria and hookworm did not explain these changes either. 
June 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in Macroeconomics Speaker: Laura Murphy
June 8, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Carlo Medici Title: Immigration and Labor Unions Abstract: Increased immigration is commonly met with negative reactions from natives. One unexplored consequence of immigration is how it affects workers’ mobilization through participation in labor unions. In this paper, I assemble a novel dataset from newly digitized historical documents, and exploit exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. counties between 1900 and 1920, to study the effect of immigration on unionization. I find that immigration caused an overall increase in union membership. Exploring the mechanisms, I document that unions developed as a reaction to the labor competition exerted by recently arrived immigrants on native workers.
June 7, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsMallesh Pai (Rice University): Title TBD
June 6, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsRosa Matzkin (UCLA): “Unobservables in Structural Models”
June 5, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsŞebnem Kalemli-Özcan (University of Maryland): "Collateral Heterogeneity and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from Loans to SMEs and Large Firms" with Cecilia R. Caglio, R. Matthew Darst Abstract: Using matched firm-bank level administrative data for the U.S., we document new facts on heterogeneity in firms' financing conditions and quantify its effects on monetary policy transmission. Most private firms in the U.S. are small-medium-size-enterprises (SMEs), whose entire balance sheet debt comes from banks and is collateralized mostly with earnings and intangibles, i.e., their enterprise value. Highly leveraged SMEs' respond to monetary expansions more by increasing their credit demand. They borrow more at lower spreads by pledging earnings-based collateral, whose value increases with monetary expansions. Our results link the bank lending and firm investment channels of monetary policy and show that the impact of policy on investment is stronger in an environment with a large number of small firms, whose borrowing depends on earnings-based constraints.
June 2, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarFelipe Berrutti Rampa (Northwestern University): "Price Regulation of Agricultural Technology"
June 2, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarCarlo Medici (Northwestern) Title: Immigration, Labor Movement, and Workers’ Rights Abstract :    Increased immigration is commonly met with negative reactions from native workers, because of fear of job competition and lower salaries. As a direct consequence, immigration can affect workers’ mobilization efforts through increased participation in labor unions and strikes. In this paper, I assemble a novel dataset from digitized historical documents to study the effect of immigration on labor organizations in the context of the Age of Mass Migration. Exploiting exogenous variation in European immigration to U.S. counties between 1900 and 1920, based on immigrants' pre-existing settlement patterns, I find that immigration caused an overall increase in unionization. I document that labor unions developed as a reaction to the labor competition brought by immigrants to native workers, and as a result of the rising discrimination towards Southern and Eastern Europeans prevailing in this period. 
June 1, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSenior Recruitment Job TalkTill Marco von Wachter (UCLA): "UI Benefit Generosity and Labor Supply from 2002-2020: Evidence from California UI records" with Alex Bell, TJ Hedin, and Geoff Schnorr
June 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ryu Matsuura Title: "Access to Finance and Political Connections for Firms" Abstract: Firms in developing countries often suffer from the lack of access to finance. Some firms consequently substitute for political connections to ease financial constraints. However, there is limited evidence on whether banking sector reforms are effective at mitigating the degree of clientelism between business and politics. Moreover, political connections inhibit market competition, which distorts capital allocation in the economy. It is thus important to understand how an increase in access to finance changes the dependence of firms on political connections. However, there is limited evidence on what kind of economic policies are effective at mitigating the degree of clientelism between business and politics. In this project, I investigate how improved financial access affects the performance of politically connected firms. I will first document the effects of political connections on firm performance and then estimate the causal impacts of an exogenous increase in financial access on political connections effects. 
June 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchMaria Betto (Northwestern): Title TBD
June 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Fergal Hanks Title: TBA
June 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarPresenter: Halefom Nigus Title: Leveraging technology to improve youth employment in Ethiopia Abstract: This study aims to investigate the impact of three labor market interventions on youth's job search behavior, labor market beliefs, and employment outcomes using a randomized control trial. First, it aims to examine the impact of providing job seekers with access to job vacancy information, with the aid of a job aggregator website, on their job search behavior and employment. Second, the study will investigate the impact of helping job seekers signal their skills to prospective employers by certifying their cognitive \& non-cognitive skills, which are hard to observe for employers, on job seekers' employment prospects. Finally, this study aims to gauge the impact of rectifying job seekers' beliefs by providing actual labor market information on their labor market outcomes. The intervention targets unemployed university graduates in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. To this end, the study will leverage HahuJobs' technological setup.  Speaker:  Ludovica Mosillo Title: TBA
May 31, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsRon Siegel (Penn State): Title TBD
May 31, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryStephan Heblich (Toronto): Title TBD
May 31, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesCharlie Murry (Boston College): Title TBA
May 30, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsV. Joe Hotz (Duke): "Race Differences in the Impact of Parental Resources on Children’s College Attendance & Its Financing"
May 26, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarVageesha Bainwala (Northwestern University): "Bank Expansion & Formal-Informal Household Debt"
May 26, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarTan Hui Ren (National University of Singapore) Title: TBA
May 25, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Development EconomicsFiona Burlig (UChicago): "The value of forecasts: Experimental evidence from developing-country agriculture" with Amir Jina, Erin Kelley, Greg Lane, and Harshil Sahai Abstract: Climate risk is a key driver of low agricultural productivity in poor countries. We use a cluster-randomized trial to evaluate a novel risk-mitigation approach: long-range forecasts that provide information about the onset of the Indian summer monsoon well in advance of its arrival. In contrast to traditional ex post risk coping approaches, this novel ex ante technology provides accurate information significantly before the monsoon's arrival, enabling farmers to alter major up front input decisions. Moreover, forecasts have the potential to be disseminated cheaply, even at scale. We assign 250 villages to one of three groups: a control group; a group that receives an opportunity to purchase the forecast; and a group that is offered insurance. We present preliminary results, including on farmers' willingness-to-pay for forecasts; how forecasts affect farmer beliefs, up-front investments, and welfare; and benchmark these preliminary effects against the canonical ex post loss mitigation tool: index insurance.
May 25, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Nicoló Tomaselli Title: Licensed to Deal: A Lab in the Field Experiment with Auctioned Business Opportunities
May 25, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchNemanja Antic (Northwestern): Title TBD
May 25, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Matias Bayas Title: Optimal public debt and redistribution
May 25, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Devis Decet  Title: The Geography of State Capacity Abstract:  In this preliminary work, I employ census data to map the extent of public sector presence across 10 African countries and 1,203 regions. I show some descriptive facts about public sector workers' human capital and their allocation across regions. I conclude by proposing possible ways of using this measure to better understand the organization of the State in the Global South.  ////// Speaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: Transfer Cost and Financial Access: evidence from Brazil Abstract: Low-cost instantaneous transfer systems are being developed all over the world, and at the same time that central banks are worried that these technologies could increase bank deposit competition and destabilize the banking industry, these technologies could increase financial access and strengthen the financial sector. In this paper, We explore how the introduction of a free transfer system in Brazil, called Pix, disrupted individuals' financial access. We use rich confidential data from the Brazilian Central Bank on every individual and firm in Brazil, and a natural experiment in which 21 million families had to access governmental assistance either through Pix or at some determined withdrawal locations. The distance to those locations becomes an instrument to determine Pix's causality on several outcomes.
May 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsMichihiro Kandori (University of Tokyo): "Using Big Data and Machine Learning to Uncover How Players Choose Mixed Strategies" (with T. Hirasawa and A. Matsushita) Abstract: How do humans behave in a situation where (i) one needs to make one’s own behavior unpredictable and (ii) one needs to predict an opponent’s behavior? This is an important class of strategic situations, formulated as games with a mixed strategy equilibrium. If humans are put in such a situation, it is obvious that, rather than calculating the mixed equilibrium strategy, they use their hunches and some heuristics to achieve the aforementioned goals (i) and (ii). Exactly what kind of mechanisms are employed has not been fully understood. To address this issue, we use our unique big experimental data set about a game with a mixed strategy equilibrium, which has about 75,000 observations, and compare conventional behavioral economics models with some leading machine learning models. The use of big data enables us to examine the external validities of those models, i.e., compare the predictive powers of those models in data sets that are not used for parameter estimation. We found that machine learning models, most notably a version of the deep learning model LSTM, substantially outperform the leading behavioral model (EWA), and this happens only when the size of the data set for parameter estimation is sufficiently large. Finally, we try to improve the EWA model by incorporating the insights gained from the machine learning models.
May 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryVellore Arthi (UC Irvine): "Financial Scarring and the Failure of the Freedman's Savings Bank" with Gary Richardson & Mark Van Orden
May 24, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesMichael Dickstein (NYU Stern): Title TBA
May 24, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarRadhika Ramakrishnan (Northwestern University): "Economic conditions and the mortality decline, Italy 1901-1951"
May 23, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsTakuya Ura (UC Davis): "Slow Movers in Panel Data" with Yuya Sasaki Abstract: Panel data often contain stayers (units with no within-variations) and slow movers (units with little within-variations). In the presence of many slow movers, conventional econometric methods can fail to work. We propose a novel method of robust inference for the average partial effects in correlated random coefficient models robustly across various distributions of within-variations, including the cases with many stayers and/or many slow movers in a unified manner. In addition to this robustness property, our proposed method entails smaller biases and hence improves accuracy in inference compared to existing alternatives. Simulation studies demonstrate our theoretical claims about these properties: the conventional 95% confidence interval covers the true parameter value with 37-93% frequencies, whereas our proposed one achieves 93-96% coverage frequencies.
May 23, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsMichael Best (Columbia): "Greener on the Other Side: Inequity and Tax Compliance" with Luigi Caloi, François Gerard, Evan Kresch, Joana Naritomi, and Laura Zoratto Abstract: Do perceptions of unfairness and inequality in property tax liabilities contribute to delinquency? We study the urban property tax in Manaus, Brazil, one of the city’s main revenue sources. Households’ tax liability depends on which sector of the city they live in, but this can lead neighbors on opposite sides of a street, but who are in different sectors, to owe wildly different taxes, which is widely perceived as unfair. Combining administrative data on tax liabilities, payments and property transfers; reforms to the tax and liabilities in the different sectors, and an experiment informing households of the tax liabilities of other sectors, we study whether perceived unfairness affects tax payments.
May 22, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationNick Buchholz (Princeton): "Rethinking Reference Dependence: Wage Dynamics and Optimal Taxi Labor Supply" with Matthew Shum and Haiqing Xu Abstract: Workers with variable earnings and flexible hours offer unique opportunities to evaluate intertemporal labor supply elasticities. Existing static analyses, however, have generated well-known puzzles, suggesting evidence of downward sloping labor supply curves. Using a large sample of shifts of New York City taxicab drivers, we estimate a dynamic optimal stopping model of drivers’ work times and quitting decisions. Our model exploits a set of sufficient statistics for equilibrium interactions between supply and demand, allowing us to estimate driver opportunity costs via a single agent problem. Our results demonstrate that several apparent behavioral biases documented in the literature can be reproduced using entirely standard preferences. We use our model to provide new estimates of individual earnings elasticities and show that taxi drivers have similar elasticities to workers in markets where experimental evidence has been obtained. Finally, we use data spanning a 2012 fare change to estimate labor supply elasticities with respect to market prices, accounting for the equilibrium impact of prices on supply and demand. We find market elasticities to be approximately a tenth of the size of individual elasticities, suggesting that existing estimates of the benefits to recent earnings legislation in the taxi and ride-hail industries are overstated
May 22, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesPeter Buisseret (Harvard): "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 a segment of voters, or instead pursue a broad campaign that can appeal to the entire electorate. Relative to plurality, we find that RCV can intensify candidates’ incentives to pursue targeted rather than broad campaigns. The opportunity to secure voters' second preferences without being their most-preferred candidate can strengthen this incentive, rather than mitigate it. Our findings challenge widely-held contentions about the benefits of adopting RCV.
May 22, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsFrancesco Bianchi (JHU): "Monetary-Based Asset Pricing: A Mixed-Frequency Structural Approach" with Sydney Ludvigson and Sai Ma Abstract: We integrate a high-frequency monetary event study into a mixed-frequency macro-finance model and structural estimation. The model and estimation allow for jumps at Fed announcements in investor beliefs, providing granular detail on why markets react to central bank communications. We find that the reasons involve a mix of revisions in investor beliefs about the economic state and/or future regime change in the conduct of monetary policy, and subjective reassessments of financial market risk. However, the structural estimation also finds that much of the causal impact of monetary policy on markets occurs outside of tight windows around policy announcements.
May 22, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarElizabeth Jaramillo Rojas (Northwestern University): "Illegal Economies and Economic Growth"
May 19, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarHershdeep Chopra (Northwestern University): "Managing Trust"
May 19, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Christopher Sims (Northwestern) Title: Product innovation during the Industrial Revolution Jinlin Wie (University of Warwick) Title: Branching for caution: Banks in England and Wales during a Financial Crisis
May 18, 20231:30 PM - 3:00 PMCenter of Economic Theory Student-Invited SeminarMarina Halac (Yale): "Optimal Unique-Implementation Schemes" 
May 18, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Nicolo Tomaselli (visiting from the University of Florence) Title: TBA
May 18, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchShallabh Tiwari (Northwestern): Title TBD
May 18, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Miguel Santana
May 18, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Anastasiia Evdokimova  Title: Does the Internet Improve Health Behavior? Costly Information Acquisition Under Heterogeneity in Health-Related Risk Perception Abstract: This study explores the impact of online health information (OHI) acquisition on health-related behavior and investigates the underlying mechanism to address heterogeneity in its effects. The phenomenon of cyberchondria, characterized by unwarranted concerns based on online search results, has raised doubts regarding the potential benefits of OHI. I propose that the acquisition of OHI is a costly process influenced by individuals' heterogeneous risk perception of health-related information. Some individuals find it more difficult to be convinced of their healthiness compared to others, irrespective of the information source. To examine this, I develop a rational inattention model incorporating a novel cost function that captures heterogeneity in health-related risk perception and results in confirmation bias. Empirical evidence supports our theoretical framework, revealing that OHI usage is associated with increased health utilization overall. Furthermore, we find that individuals with lower risk tolerance regarding their health status exhibit even higher rates of health utilization when utilizing OHI. Speaker: Roma Poberegski Title: “Interlocking directorates, competition, and innovation” Abstract: “Holding concurrent seats on boards of rival firms, 'horizontal directors' dampen competition and increase firm performance. In the cross-section of public US firms, losing an interlock with a competitor decreases returns by 2 to 3 percentage points. I propose a mechanism of market segmentation where horizontal directors steer firms away from fierce direct competition. Using data on patenting, I show that horizontal interlocks help firms maintain distance in the competitive space and reduce redundancy, increasing innovation quantity and quality by 15 to 35 percent.”
May 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsMarina Halac (Yale): Title TBD
May 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryAllison Shertzer (Pitt): "The Price of Housing in the United States, 1890-2006" with Ronan C. Lyons, Rowena Gray, and David Agorastos
May 17, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarKenneth Fu (Northwestern University): "Kernel Regression for Graphon Estimation"
May 16, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsDavid Hughes (Boston College): "Estimating Nonlinear Network Data Models with Fixed Effects"
May 16, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsDavid Dorn (University of Zurich): "No Help for the Heartland? The Employment and Electoral Effects of the Trump Tariffs in the United States" with David Autor, Anne Beck, and Gordon Hanson Abstract: We study the economic and political consequences of the 2018-2019 trade war between the United States, China and other U.S. trade partners at the detailed geographic level, exploiting measures of local exposure to U.S. import tariffs, foreign retaliatory tariffs, and U.S. compensation programs. The trade-war has not so far provided economic help to the U.S. heartland: import tariffs on foreign goods neither raised nor lowered U.S. employment in newly-protected sectors; retaliatory tariffs had clear negative employment impacts, primarily in agriculture; and these harms were only partly mitigated by compensatory U.S. agricultural subsidies. Nevertheless, consistent with expressive views of politics, the tariff war appears to have benefited the Republican party. Residents of regions more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress. Foreign retaliatory tariffs only modestly weakened that support.
May 15, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationAriel Pakes (Harvard): "Unobserved Heterogeneity, State Dependence, and Health Plan Choices" with Jack Porter, Mark Shepard, and Sophie Calder-Wang Abstract: We provide a new method to analyze discrete choice models with state dependence and individual-by-product fixed effects, and use it to analyze consumer choices in a policy-relevant environment (a subsidized health insurance exchange). Moment inequalities are used to infer state dependence from consumers’ switching choices in response to changes in product attributes. We infer much smaller switching costs on the health insurance exchange than is inferred from standard logit and/or random effects methods. A counterfactual policy evaluation illustrates that the policy implications of this difference can be substantive.
May 15, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesEmily Sellars (Yale): Title TBD
May 15, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq. with J. Collins (Feinberg) - The Racial Disparity in Adverse Birth Outcomes"The Racial Disparity in Adverse Birth Outcomes: Putting the Spotlight on Structural Racism"* by James W. Collins, Jr., Zeisler Family Neonatology Leadership Professor and Professor of Pediatrics This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
May 15, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsKilian Huber (UChicago): "Corporate Discount Rates" with Niels Joachim Gormsen
May 15, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarDanil Fedchenko (Northwestern University): "On the Inconsistency of Recursive Partitioning with Continuous and Discrete Data"
May 12, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarFederico Crippa (Northwestern University): "Optimal Threshold Policies"
May 12, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarGrant Goering (Boston University) Title: The Progressive Era War on Vice: Public Health Consequences of Closing Red-Light Districts Bin Huang (University of Zurich) Title: TBA
May 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMJob Market Orientation for Economics Graduate StudentsStudents who are thinking about going on the market next year should attend an introductory meeting with Professor Alessandro Pavan, the Director of Graduate Placement. Any student in the third year and beyond who is curious about the job market process is welcome.
May 11, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Development EconomicsNick Bloom (Stanford): "How Hybrid Working From Home Works Out" with Ruobing Han and James Liang Abstract: Hybrid working from home (hybrid), whereby employees work a mix of days at home and at work each week, has become common for graduate employees. This paper evaluates a randomized control trial of hybrid on 1612 graduate engineers, marketing and finance employees of a large technology firm. There are four key results. First, hybrid was highly valued by employees on average, reducing attrition by 33% and improving job-satisfaction measures. Second, hybrid reduced working hours on home days and increased them on office days and the weekend, altering the structure of the working week. Third, hybrid increased messaging and video calls, even when all employees were in the office, reflecting a move towards more electronic communication. Finally, there were large differences in the valuations of hybrid between managers and non-managers. Non-managers were more likely to volunteer into the hybrid experiment, to work from home on eligible days, to predict positive impacts on productivity, and to reduce their attrition under hybrid. In contrast, managers were less likely to volunteer, less likely to work from home on eligible days, predicted a negative average impact of hybrid on productivity, and saw increased attrition rates under hybrid
May 11, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ashagrie Demile Moges (CEGA fellow) Title: Liquidity shock and bank lending: Evidence from a natural experiment in Ethiopia Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the lending channel of liquidity shock by exploiting the mandatory regulatory requirement in the least developing country, Ethiopia. The result from the difference-in-difference strategy using bank's balance sheet data shows that the policy change had an immediate and stronger negative effect on the bank's most liquid asset, cash on hand,  on banks that are larger and more liquid, and persisted for quite some time. The same estimation strategy using the loan-level data also reveals that the liquidity shock propagated to the bank's loan supply five months after the implementation of the regulation. The result is robust after controlling for the possible difference in credit demand by sectors, regions, and borrower types that banks face. The study further indicates that banks' response to the liquidity shock varies by borrowers’ industries suggesting that banks adjust their loan portfolio towards less risky loans.
May 11, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchPeter Kilbanoff (Northwestern): "Persuasion with Ambiguous Communication" with Xiaoyu Cheng, Sujoy Mukerji and Ludovic Renou
May 11, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Diego Cid Title: TBA
May 11, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarPresenter: Genia Rachkovski Title: Going Beyond Test Scores: Does Public Information about School Satisfaction and Violence Levels Affect Parental School Choice? Abstract: A 2012 Supreme Court ruling ordered the Ministry of Education in Israel to make school level test score information public, as well as publicizing a set of non academic school attribute survey information. This setting provides a natural and exogenous context to examine the effects of this information on student school choice. Using both an event study and a difference in difference analysis, I find that, in regions where parents had more than one school option, the share of parents sending their kids to `better’ schools has increased following the information reveal. This effect is mostly driven by violence and school satisfaction ratings, rather than test scores.  Finally, heterogeneity by parental education and the implications on socio economic integration are discussed.
May 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsIna Taneva (University of Edinburgh): "Strategic Ignorance and Information Design" with Tom Wiseman Abstract: We study information design in strategic settings when agents can publicly commit to not view their private signals. Ignoring the constraints that agents must be willing to view their signals may lead to substantial divergence between the designer’s intent and actual outcomes, even in the case where the designer seeks to maximize the agents’ payoffs. We introduce the appropriate equilibrium concept — robust correlated equilibrium — and characterize implementable distributions over states and actions. Requiring robustness to strategic ignorance can explain qualitative properties that standard information design cannot: the designer may provide redundant or even counterproductive information, asymmetric information structures may be strictly optimal in symmetric environments, providing information conditional on players’ choices rather than all at once may hurt the designer, and communication between players may help her. Optimality may require that players ignore their signals with positive probability.
May 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryVicky Fouka (Stanford): Title TBD
May 10, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesRaffaella Sadun (HBS): Title TBA
May 10, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarKyohei Okumura (Northwestern University): "Sample Design Under Fairness Concerns"
May 9, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsTetsuya Kaji (UChicago Booth): "Assessing Heterogeneity in Treatment Effects" Abstract: Treatment heterogeneity is often assessed with quantile treatment effects, which lack clear interpretation without rank preservation. We propose three new bounds on heterogeneity that complement quantile treatment effects. First, we bound on the average treatment effects for subgroups defined by Y0 < c for a user-specified value c. This is useful when we are interested in the treatment effect on one tail of the outcome, such as in poverty assistance programs, health insurance, and educational aids. Second, we establish bounds on the proportions of winners for the same subgroups. This bound is useful, e.g., when a policymaker wants to assess the share of winners from a policy change or when doctors want to make sure no patient is harmed by the treatment. Third, we derive a second-order stochastic dominance bound on the distribution of individual treatment effects. This is helpful when we are interested in a non-utilitarian welfare that is concave in the treatment effects. 
May 9, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsDavid Cutler (Harvard): "Why Has the Opioid Epidemic Lasted So Long?" with J. Travis Donahoe Abstract: Between 1990 and 2021, opioid overdose death rates in the U.S. rose nearly continuously. Such a long period of sustained increase goes against conventional theory, which suggests that the public and private policies that respond to harmful drug epidemics should reduce deaths over time. This paper examines why opioid deaths rose so greatly and for so long. We develop and estimate a model of addictive drug use dynamics which incorporates spillovers across people, which we refer to as “thick market externalities.” Thick markets may result from information spillovers across people, changes in the cost of using drugs as more people use them, and positive peer effects in consumption. When goods are addictive and there are spillovers across people, temporary shocks may lead to long-term increases in use. To test for the presence of these spillovers, we estimate our model using data on county opioid overdose death rates linked to geographic distance and peer connectedness, as measured by Facebook friendships. We find evidence of large spillovers in opioid use, particularly through friend relationships but also through geographically close areas. Our estimates imply the majority of opioid deaths in recent years are due to spillovers from historical dissemination of prescription opioids, rather than exogenous factors affecting the present.
May 8, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationJihye Jeon (Boston University): "Why Do Index Funds Have Market Power? Quantifying Frictions in the Index Fund Market" with Zach Brown, Mark Egan, Chuqing Jin, and Alex Wu
May 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq. with K. Jackson (IPR/SESP/Econ) - What Impacts Can We Expect From School Spending Policy? Evidence From Evaluations in the U.S."What Impacts Can We Expect From School Spending Policy? Evidence From Evaluations in the U.S." by Kirabo Jackson, the Abraham Harris Professor of Education and Social Policy, Professor of Economics, and IPR Fellow This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only.
May 8, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsAdam Guren (Boston University): “Do Credit Conditions Move House Prices?” with Dan Greenwald
May 8, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarSebastian Poblete Coddou (Northwestern University): "Do Mergers Change Costs? Why?Evidence from U.S. Airlines’ Networks"
May 5, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarGiovanni Pisauro (Northwestern University): "The Causes and Consequences of Physicians Hiring Frictions: Evidence from Physicians Market in Italy"
May 5, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarCarlo Medici (Northwestern University) Title: The Impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on the U.S. Economy Matteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University) Title: Revenge is best served cold: Brigandage and Monarchical Legitimacy in Southern Italy  Carlo Medici Abstract: This paper examines the economic effects of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States, across US counties between 1860 and 1940. The Act reduced the size of the Chinese population and employment in all major economic sectors, and lowered the quality of jobs among the Chinese who remained. Contrary to the expectations of its proponents, the Act also reduced the employment and the income of white workers, both native and foreign-born ones, and had sharp negative effects on manufacturing and agriculture. The negative impact of the Act was concentrated in the western United States, where the majority of Chinese immigrants lived in 1880, and persisted until at least 1940.  Matteo Ruzzante Abstract: Abstract: The power and tenure of kings rest upon the ability of providing order when coordination costs are high. Yet, cultural and institutional incongruities can weaken their traditional authority and lead to revolts. This paper studies whether an historical shock in the legitimacy of monarchic rule can have long-term, intergenerational consequences on political attitudes. The unification of Italy ignited a violent reaction against the new ruler in its Southern provinces, known as the  “Great Brigandage”. This uprising was effectively quelled by repressive military operations but left an indelible mark in the collective memory. We show that, ceteris  paribus, municipalities exposed to brigandage in the 1861-1870 period had lower turnout in the 1946 Institutional Referendum and were significantly less likely to vote for the survival of the monarchy. These results are reflected in increased support for anti-monarchist parties in the simultaneous Constituent Assembly election. We interpret our findings as evidence that latent preferences toward political systems are endogenously shaped by historical events and can be brought to the surface by changes in the institutional environment. 
May 5, 202311:30 AM - 12:00 PMTown Hall Meeting for Third Year Economics Graduate StudentsDGS Marciano Siniscalchi, and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
May 5, 202311:00 AM - 11:30 AMTown Hall Meeting for Second Year Economics Graduate StudentsDGS Marciano Siniscalchi, and Associate Chair Ian Savage will cover important deadlines, degree requirements, and good-progress milestones. They will also answer your questions.
May 4, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Development EconomicsImran Rasul (UCL): “Families as Drivers of Inequality: Experimental Evidence from an Early Childhood Intervention” with Pedro Carneiro and Francesca Salvati (paper link)    Abstract: Families shape inequality across individuals, by determining whether initial endowment differences across children are magnified or equalized through the intrahousehold allocation of resources over time. We study the link between early life circumstances, parental investments and child outcomes, over time and across multiple siblings in families in rural Northern Nigeria, where households reside in extreme poverty and sibling rivalry effects can be first order. We do so by evaluating a pre-natal intervention providing information and cash transfers to families triggered by the verified pregnancy of a target child. We track outcomes and child-specific parental inputs across older and younger siblings of the target child in 3600 families over four years. We find that unlike for the target child, stunting outcomes for older siblings do not improve, because they are too old when the intervention begins to gain from it in terms of height. We also document muted gains on height for younger siblings, and show this is because of endogenous responses to the intervention through shorter birth spacing between the target child and younger siblings, labor supply responses of mothers, and fade out of knowledge on specific peri-natal practices. However, on a raft of other outcomes such as health, nutrition and parental inputs more relevant outside the first 1000-days of life window, outcomes significantly shift forward for all siblings. Our results show parents behave as if to equalize inputs across siblings, despite differences in their physical endowments. Calculating the annualized IRR to the intervention based on this fuller set of family impacts, leads them to rise ten-fold over those based on target child outcomes alone. JEL: I15, O12. 
May 4, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Sergio Lopez-Araiza Title: "US Border Wall and Organized Crime in Mexico" Abstract: Violence related to drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has dramatically escalated in Mexico since 2007. However, beyond the increase in the nation-wide homicide rate lies a huge time and spatial variation across Mexico's 2,456 municipalities. One potential source of such heterogeneity is how valuable it is for DTOs to control a municipality for drug trafficking purposes.  Using the expansion of the US-Mexico border wall that resulted from the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and leveraging the fact that it made trafficking drugs into the US more difficult, I study how changes in the value of the municipalities shifted violence in Mexico. Using a TWFE estimator, I observe that municipalities whose closest border municipality get a wall segment see a decrease of 0.35 (44% with respect to the mean) in their homicide rate. The effect is concentrated in municipalities with DTO presence by 2005 and it seems to be present for at least 5 years.
May 4, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchEhud Kalai (Northwestern): "Beyond Dominance and Nash: Ranking Equilibria by Critical Mass" with Adam Kalai Abstract: We study critical-mass equilibrium concepts for n-person strategic games. These concepts explain observed strategic interactions that are not explained by dominant strategy equilibrium (DSE), Nash equilibrium (NE), and their refinements. This presentation would focus mostly on applications that go beyond standard game theory.
May 4, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Kwok Yan Chiu Title: Household Heterogeneity in MPC and Attention
May 4, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarPresenter: Yoshimasa Katayama Title: Readmission Penalty under Nonlinear Payment Schedules: Evidence from Japan Abstract: I study how hospitals respond to financial incentives. In Japan, the per diem payment is designed to decrease as the length of stay increases to incentivize early discharge. To discourage repeated discharges and readmissions, readmissions immediately after discharge have been penalized. Exploiting changes in readmission penalties, I find that overall readmission rates remain unchanged as hospitals change the timing of readmissions. All of the changes in readmission timing are driven by patients whose health status is unlikely to be affected. Among those who would be affected, immediate post-discharge readmissions decrease without such delays, which I interpret as a quality improvement.  
May 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsLeonie Baumann (McGill University): “Strategic Evidence Disclosure in Networks and Equilibrium Discrimination” with Rohan Dutta Abstract: A group of agents with ex-ante independent and identically uncertain quality compete for a prize, awarded by a principal. Agents may possess evidence about the quality of those they share a social connection with (neighbours), and themselves. In one equilibrium, adversarial disclosure of evidence leads the principal to statistically discriminate between agents based on their number of neighbours (degree). We identify parameter values for which an agent’s ex-ante winning probability is monotone in degree. All equilibria that satisfy some robustness criteria lie between this adversarial disclosure equilibrium and a less informative one that features no snitching and no discrimination.
May 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryDror Goldberg (Open University of Israel): "Easy Money: American Puritans and the Invention of Modern Currency" (abstract) Summary: Economists endlessly debate the nature of legal tender monetary systems—coins and bills issued by a government or other authority. Yet the origins of these currencies have received little attention. Dror Goldberg tells the story of modern money in North America through the Massachusetts colony during the seventeenth century. As the young settlement transitioned to self-governance and its economy grew, the need to formalize a smooth exchange emerged. Printing local money followed. Easy Money illustrates how colonists invented contemporary currency by shifting its foundation from intrinsically valuable goods—such as silver—to the taxation of the state. Goldberg traces how this structure grew into a worldwide system in which, monetarily, we are all Massachusetts. Weaving economics, law, and American history, Easy Money is a new touchstone in the story of monetary systems.  
May 3, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesWesley Yin (UCLA): “Randomized Acts of Kindness: Effects of Medical Debt Relief” Abstract: One in six Americans has unpaid medical debt in collections amounting to more than $140 billion nationally, yet there is limited understanding of its impacts on households. We analyze the effects of randomized medical debt relief totaling $175 million across more than 80,000 households using three data sources: (1) administrative data on future debt sent to collections; (2) quarterly credit report data spanning at least two years before and after debt relief; and, (3) survey measures of self-reported health (clinically-validated screenings for depression, anxiety, and general health), health care utilization, and financial well-being elicited one year after treatment. We detect no significant effects of debt relief on credit score or access to credit, and no  effects on mental or general health 12 months after the intervention. However, we estimate an increase in future medical bills sent to collections by the original health care provider, which are not reported to credit bureaus. Together, our results imply that reducing an individual's stock of medical debt has limited benefits, particularly for individuals facing a continued flow of health expenditures that are unmitigated by health insurance. (Please note abstract is currently for internal use only, do not post online).
May 3, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarPedro Ohi (Northwestern University): "A Model of Scientific Models"
May 2, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsMax Cytrynbaum (Yale): “Optimal Stratification of Survey Experiments"
May 2, 20232:15 PM - 3:45 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsNancy Qian (Northwestern): Black-White Income Inequality During Jim Crow:  Evidence from “Passing” for White Abstract: This paper investigates the phenomenon of “passing” for white by documenting several new descriptive facts. Exposure to racial discrimination was positively associated with Black men “passing” for white. Passing was associated with large income gains and increased economic mobility. However, passing was also associated with high social costs; beyond the loss of one's Black identity, passing was associated with higher separation rates from a person's community and family. Using the income of Black men who passed for white, we construct a range of Black-white income gaps to shed light on the extent to which discrimination against Black men curtailed their incomes during this period. The estimates imply that removing contemporaneous labor market discrimination would have increased the Black-to-white income ratio by at least 3 to 14 percentage-points.
May 1, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesGerard Padro i Miquel (Yale): Title TBD
May 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq. with E. Tipton (IPR/Statistics) - Modern Meta-Analysis "Modern Meta-Analysis"* by Elizabeth Tipton, Associate Professor of Statistics, Co-Director of the Statistics for Evidence-Based Policy and Practice (STEPP) Center, and IPR Fellow This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
May 1, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsPablo Ottonello (University of Michigan): "External Crises and Devaluations: A Heterogeneous-Firm Perspective" with Caitlin Hegarty, Matias Moretti, and Diego Perez
May 1, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarJose Higueras Corona (Northwestern University): "Regulating Firms Access to Consumer Data"
April 28, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch Seminar Lakshmi Iyer (University of Notre Dame) Alex Lehner (UChicago) Lakshmi Iyer title: No Taxation Without Representation? Evidence from Colonial India Alex Lehner Title: Culture, Institutions, and the Roots of Gender Inequality: 450 Years of Portuguese Colonialism in India  Lakshmi Iyer Abstract: I describe the construction of two new databases which track local government expenditures in urban and rural colonial India, respectively. The completed database will include more than 500 cities across 200 districts and four decades. We plan to use these data to investigate questions related to the fiscal effects of elected representation, to track the evolution of property wealth and inter-city trade and to examine how capital accumulation and human development respond to local taxation and spending decisions. Preliminary results from a small part of the database suggest that greater elected representation is associated with a greater share of local spending devoted to education.  Alex Lehner Abstract: When are economic phenomena persistent over time, and when are they not? If they are, do inequalities persist forever, or do they converge, and if so, at what speed? By analyzing the Indian state of Goa, this research makes use of a historical quasi-natural experiment to study the effect of Portuguese (catholic) colonialism. To achieve econometric identification, I apply a spatial regression discontinuity design alongside a border that was abandoned in the 18th century. I establish that historical disparities in female education can be overcome, albeit much slower than for males. In contrast, male-biased sex ratios stay virtually unchanged - highlighting the differential degree persistence of deeply rooted preferences. This provides a rare opportunity to isolate and identify the effect of culture, holding constant geography, income, and institutions.  
April 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Development EconomicsChris Woodruff (Oxford): "Interventions to improve the quality of lawyer matches: Evidence from labour courts in Mexico"
April 27, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchWojciech Olszewski (Northwestern): "Local Version Tarski Theorem and Monotone Comparative Statics" Abstract: Local versions of Tarski (1955) theorem are provided. Tools similar to those used in the proofs are proposed for comparative statics in monotone settings. The concepts and results generalize Samuelson (1947) and Echenique (2002). The usefulness of the results is illustrated by applications to networks, network effects in imperfectly competitive markets, and dynamics of income distribution.
April 27, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Diego Huerta
April 27, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ashagrie Demile Moges Title: Liquidity shock and bank lending: Evidence from a natural experiment in Ethiopia. Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on how a liquidity shock induced by regulation affects banking lending behavior in a developing country, exploiting the mandatory regulatory requirement of bill purchase as a natural experiment. We find that the effect of the policy change on the bank's most liquid asset, cash on hand, is immediate, stronger, and persisted for quite some time for banks that are larger and more liquid. The effects of the shock, however, propagated to the bank's loan supply five months after the implementation of the regulation. The result is robust after controlling for credit demand that may vary by sectors, regions, and loan types for some banks relative to others. The study further shows that banks' response to the liquidity shock varies by borrowers’ industries suggesting that banks adjust their loan portfolio towards less risky loans. and  Speaker: Giacomo Marcolin Title:  Giacomo Marcolin presenting “Gig Work as Income Insurance during Unemployment: Evidence from Germany"
April 26, 20236:30 PM - 9:30 PMChicagoland Friends of Economic History DinnerPlease join the Department of Economics and the Center for Economic History for our biannual Chicagoland Friends of Economic History Dinner. Kevin O'Rourke (NYU Abu Dhabi) will present "The Ends of 27 Big Depressions".
April 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsDavid Dillenberger (UPenn): Title TBD
April 26, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryKevin O'Rourke (NYU): "The Empire Project: Trade Policy in Interwar Canada"
April 26, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesHans-Joachim Voth (Zurich): Title TBA
April 26, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarAndrea Ferrara (Northwestern University): "Optimal Monetary Policy Under Partial Information"
April 25, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsKarun Adusumilli (UPenn): "How to sample and when to stop sampling: The generalized Wald problem and minimax policies"
April 25, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsCrystal Yang (Harvard): “Algorithmic Recommendations and Human Discretion” with Victoria Angelova and Will Dobbie
April 24, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationYunmi Kong (Rice University): "Liquid Markets: An Empirical Analysis of a Water Exchange" Abstract: This paper empirically analyzes the performance of one of the world’s most developed water exchanges, which operates as a primitive limit order market. Upon modeling participants’ incentives to shade their order prices and their choice between limit and market orders, I identify the distribution of participants’ willingness to pay (or accept) from the observed orders and trades. The model flexibly allows for dynamics, risk aversion, and default behavior. Counterfactual simulations suggest the observed exchange attains substantially lower trade surplus than periodic uniform-price market clearing. Droughts exacerbate the gap in surplus per unit traded. The exchange exhibits noticeable price dispersion, which enables suboptimal buyer-seller matching and incentivizes price shading
April 24, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSanjay Singh (UC Davis/SF Fed): "The long-run effects of monetary policy" with Oscar Jorda and Alan M. Taylor Abstract: We document that the real effects of monetary shocks last for over a decade. Our approach relies on (1) identification of exogenous and non-systematic monetary shocks using the trilemma of international finance; (2) merged data from two new international historical cross-country databases; and (3) econometric methods robust to long-horizon inconsistent estimates. Notably, the capital stock and total factor productivity (TFP) exhibit strong hysteresis, while labor does not. Allowing for asymmetry, we find these effects are present when interest rates tighten, but not when they loosen. We also compare our findings to other monetary shocks studied in the literature.
April 24, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarAndrei Iakovlev (Northwestern University): "Optimal Information Loss"
April 21, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarSebastian Sardon (Northwestern University): "Commodity Booms, Local State Capacity, and Development"
April 21, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarMegumi Murakami (Northwestern) Title: A history of medical knowledge in the market
April 20, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Matheus Sampaio Title: TBA
April 20, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchKota Saito (Northwestern): "Axiomatization of Random Utility Model with Unobservable Alternatives" Abstract: The random utility model is one of the most fundamental models in discrete choice analysis in economics. Although Falmagne (1978) obtained an axiomatization of the random utility model, his characterization requires strong observability of choices, i.e., that the frequency of choices must be observed from all subsets of the set of alternatives. Little is known, however, about the axiomatization when a dataset is incomplete, i.e., the frequencies on some choice sets are not observable. In fact, it is known that in some cases, obtaining a tight characterization is NP hard. On the other hand, datasets in reality almost always violate the requirements on observability assumed by Falmagne (1978). We consider an incomplete dataset in which we do not observe frequencies of some alternatives: for all other alternatives, we observe frequencies. For such a dataset, we obtain a finite system of linear inequalities that is necessary and sufficient for the dataset to be rationalized by a random utility model. Moreover, the necessary and sufficient condition is tight in the sense that none of the inequalities is implied by the other inequalities, and dropping any one of the inequalities makes the condition not sufficient.
April 20, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Joao Guerreiro Title: TBA
April 20, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Elizabeth Jaramillo Title: Sibling Spillovers in Education: The Impact of College Merit-Based Financial Aid for Low-Income Students
April 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsKota Saito (Cal Tech): "Approximating Choice Data by Discrete Choice Models" with Haoge Chang and Yusuke Narita Abstract: We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which random-coefficient discrete choice models such as the mixed logit models are rich enough to approximate any nonparametric random utility models across choice sets. The condition turns out to be very simple and tractable. When the condition is not satisfied and, hence, there exists a random utility model that cannot be approximated by any random-coefficient discrete choice model, we provide algorithms to measure the approximation errors. After applying our theoretical results and the algorithms to real data, we found that the approximation errors can be large in practice
April 19, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryJared Rubin (Chapman): "Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Science in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis"
April 19, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesEkaterina Khmelnitskaya (Virginia): “Competition and Attrition in Drug Development” Abstract: With fewer than 10% of new drugs reaching the market, the drug development process is notorious for its high attrition rate. It is well-known that drugs get discontinued after clinical failures. However, surveys suggest that firms also withdraw drugs for commercial reasons. Disentangling the sources of attrition is necessary for predicting the impact of government policy on pharmaceutical innovation. This paper separately estimates the two components of attrition using a continuous-time dynamic model of the drug development process. I find that commercial withdrawals account for 8.4% of all discontinuations, and up to 35% for some diseases. Without commercial withdrawals, the rate at which new drugs reach consumers would be 23% higher. Large subsidies for clinical trials help realize some of that gain, but the effect is small. Regulatory adjustments that marginally lower the probability of late-stage clinical failures can achieve the same results.
April 18, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsLidia Kosenkova (University of Virginia): "Inference in strategic-interaction models with censored action spaces"
April 18, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsSonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick): "Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence" with Diogo Britto, Paolo Pinotti, and Breno Sampaio Abstract: We estimate impacts of male job loss, female job loss, and male unemployment benefits on domestic violence in Brazil. We merge employer-employee and social welfare registers with administrative data on domestic violence cases from criminal courts, public shelters and health provider records. Leveraging mass layoffs for identification, we show that both male and female job loss, independently, lead to large and pervasive increases in domestic violence. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design, we show that unemployment benefits do not reduce domestic violence while benefits are being paid, and that they lead to higher domestic violence once benefits expire. We argue that these findings can be explained by the negative income shock brought by job loss and by increased exposure of victims to perpetrators, as partners tend to spend more time together after either is displaced. Although unemployment benefits partially offset the income drop following job loss, they reinforce the exposure shock as they increase unemployment durations. 
April 17, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationNicola Rosaia (Columbia GSB): "Competing Platforms and Transport Equilibrium"
April 17, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesFederica Izzo (USCD): Title TBD
April 17, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsHassan Afrouzi (Columbia): “Inflation and GDP Dynamics in Production Network: A Sufficient Statistics Approach”
April 17, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarNina Fluegel (Northwestern University): "Dynamic Adverse Selection, Endogenously Persistent Types, and Commitment"
April 14, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarBruno Nunes Fava (Northwestern University): "Beyond the Average: Estimating Distributional Treatment Effects"
April 14, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarSonia Bhalotra (University of Warwick) Title: Investments Over the Life Course and the Black-White Earnings Gap    Abstract:    The stability of the race pay gap highlights the importance of systemic disadvantages faced by blacks, which weaken the force of one-off investments in single domains. We examine investments across two domains and two stages of the lifecourse: a positive early life health shock owing to the arrival of the first antibiotics in 1937, and a positive labor market shock owing to minimum wage legislation in 1967. We find evidence of complementarities between the two in producing adult earnings, with larger interaction effects for black than for white men. Our estimates suggest that the complementarity reduced the racial earnings gap by 13.4%. In addition, exposure to minimum wage increases in adulthood reversed the widening of the racial earnings gap among cohorts benefiting from the early health shock. 
April 13, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMDevelopment Economics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Halefom Nigus (CEGA fellow) and Sebastián Sardón Title: TBA
April 13, 202312:15 PM - 1:15 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Bag LunchRomans Pancs (Northwestern): "Two-Sided Markets and Restricted Boltzmann Machines" with Tetsuya Hoshino Abstract: We extend the standard two-sided market model by allowing benefits from pairwise interactions to differ across all pairs of agents. These benefits, along with agents’ standalone values from joining the market, can be estimated in a computationally efficient manner by observing agents’ repeated decisions whether to participate in the market. Computational efficiency owes to the methods we borrow from the study of restricted Boltzmann machines, a prominent class of neural networks. The estimated parameters can be used in the construction of rich but tractable pricing schemes.
April 13, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Giovanni Sciacovelli Title: TBA
April 13, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Ryu Matsuura Title: Public Services Delivery to Muslim Villages by BJP Government Abstract: We have seen the rapid rise of populism across the globe. However, the impacts of populist parties on the socio-economic status of minority groups have been understudied in developing countries partly due to the lack of microdata. By utilizing the newly available microdata in India, I provide suggestive evidence of the negative effects of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on public services delivery to Muslim villages. My findings suggest that villages with a high Muslim population share receive fewer public facilities as well as public jobs in the states ruled by the BJP.
April 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMJoint CET/CMS-EMS Theory WorkshopsEvan Sadler (Columbia): "Making a Swap: Network Formation with Increasing Marginal Costs" Abstract: I propose a simple theory of strategic network formation that accounts for many empirical patterns. Three parts help forge the theory: i) convex linking costs, ii) local linking benefits, and iii) swap-proofness, a new refinement of pairwise stability. If players agree about who is a more desirable neighbor, then a unique swap-proof stable graph generically exists, and stability robustly begets homophily and clustering. With similar assumptions on players' desire for links, stable graphs take on structures---strong hierarchies or ordered overlapping cliques---that mirror real networks in different domains. Strong hierarchies in particular compel certain patterns in network games with strategic complements, highlighting a mechanism through which status rankings replicate themselves across unrelated contexts. A more general existence theorem unifies several results in the matching literature, and a statistical model to which it applies suggests one approach to preference estimation.
April 12, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic HistoryBrian Marein (Toronto): "Migration in the Early 20th Century Caribbean: Evidence from Dominican Residency Permits"
April 12, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesMarco Ottaviani (Bocconi): “Grantmaking” with Jerome Adda Abstract: The paper develops a model of non-market allocation of resources through grantmaking. On the supply side, the available budget of grants is awarded to applicants who are evaluated most favorably according to the noisy information available to reviewers. On the demand side, stronger candidates are more likely to obtain grants and thus self-select into applying. Leveraging a technique based on the quantile function, we characterize a broad set of allocation rules under which an increase in evaluation noise in a field raises applications in that field—and reduces applications in all other fields. We illustrate the practical relevance of the model by exploiting a change in the budget allocation rule at the European Research Council, showing that a one standard deviation increase in own evaluation noise leads to a 0.3 standard deviation increase in the number of applications and budget share. We also derive some subtle implications for the design of grantmaking institutions in terms of the endogenous choice of noise by fields and the optimal pooling of fields into panels.
April 12, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Laura Murphy Title: TBA
April 12, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarChristopher Sims (Northwestern University): "Fertilizing Industry: Guano in 19th Century Britain"
April 11, 20234:00 PM - 5:30 PMSeminar in EconometricsChen Qiu (Cornell): “Treatment choice with nonlinear regret”
April 11, 20232:30 PM - 4:00 PMSeminar in Health/Education/Labor/Public EconomicsKatherine Meckel (UCSD): “Dependent Coverage and Parental Job Mobility: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act” with Hanna Bae and Maggie Shi  Abstract: A common feature of employer-sponsored insurance is coverage for dependents. While prior evidence suggests that employees trade o  job mobility for their own cov- erage--a phenomenon known as job lock--there is less evidence on the extent to which employees value dependent coverage. This study examines the e ects of an ex- pansion in dependent coverage using a large panel of private insurance claims that links family members and records job tenure. We develop a regression discontinuity design that exploits variation in coverage length by dependent birth date. We  nd that a one percent increase in dependent coverage likelihood increases parental job retention by 0.28 percent. The elasticity of parental job duration to dependent coverage duration is 0.09. We  nd larger elasticities for parents on plans without additional dependents, for parents nearing early retirement age, and for parents of dependents with higher pre-period medical spending.
April 10, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationWill Rafey (UCLA): "Conservation priorities and environmental offsets: Markets for Florida wetlands" (with Daniel Aronoff)
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq. with M. Schanzenbach (Pritzker/IPR) - What Is the University-Student Contract?"What Is the University-Student Contract?"* by Max Schanzenbach, the Seigle Family Professor of Law and IPR Associate This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Fay Lomax Cook Monday ColloquiaMax Schanzenbach (Pritzker/IPR): "What Is the University-Student Contract?"
April 10, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsCorina Boar (NYU): "Nonlinear Inflation Dynamics in Menu Cost Economies" with Andres Blanco, Callum Jones, and Virgiliu Midrigan
April 10, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarGabriel Jardanovski (Northwestern University): "Carbon Leakage in the EU ETS"
April 10, 202310:00 AM - 11:00 AMYoung Scholar's Webinars on Climate Finance and Economics: How Much Will Global Warming Cool Global Growth?Young Scholars Webinars on Climate Finance and Macroeconomics Speaker: Ishan Nath, Economist at The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Moderator: Diego Känzig, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University This paper combines indirect evidence on economic growth with new empirical estimates of the dynamic effects of temperature on GDP to argue that warming has persistent, but not permanent, effects on growth.  Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/9016799961958/WN_7hmQPHnZQXmXUUD4N93l8w#/registration
April 7, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarShuyan Huang (Northwestern University): "Adaptive Treatment Assignment in Sequential Experiments towards Optimal Targeting Policy"
April 7, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarNetanel Ben-Porath (Northwestern University) Title: Financial Crisis in a Socialist Setting: Impact on Political Behavior, Social Trust, and Economic Values Abstract:    Research on the political and social impacts of financial crises has focused chiefly on free market economies, hindering our understanding of their effects in other settings. We exploit an episode of a financial crisis that hit the Israeli kibbutzim to study its impact in a socialist context. Contrary to findings in capitalistic economies, the crisis led to increased support of liberalized labor markets and reduced support for leftist political parties. These effects persisted in the long run, especially among the young. The crisis also reduced trust in leadership, but trust was restored shortly after agreements to settle the debt were signed, relieving the severity of the crisis. Our findings suggest that economic shocks may have different effects in a free market and socialist systems, in both cases leading individuals to question their current system.    Contact for zoom link.
April 6, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsSpeaker: Clement Bohr Title: TBA
April 6, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Xizhao Wang  Title: Innovation Commercialization and Patent Disclosure Abstract: This paper studies how the commercialization of innovation affects patent disclosure. I measure the innovation disclosure by using textual analysis methods to construct the readability scores of each patent's detailed description, claims, and brief summary texts. To identify the causal impact of innovation commercialization on innovation disclosure, this paper uses the difference-in-difference approach.  First, this paper uses the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act which gave universities a potential realization of the economic benefits of the invention as an exogenous shock and leverages the readability change of university patents and non-university patents. Second, this paper considers the technology transfer office establishment as an exogenous shock of innovation commercialization to patent inventors. This paper finds a decrease in readability in patent detailed description by inventors affiliated with universities after the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act and the TTO's establishment. Such decrease in readability did not apply to patent claims and patent brief summary. This paper points out a possible strategic innovation disclosure behavior, a finding that when inventors foresee patent commercialization, they would strategically decrease the readability of patent detailed descriptions and lower openness in sharing how to make and use the invention.
April 5, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Economic History Mara P. Squicciarini (Bocconi): "Dealing with Adversity: Religiosity or Science? Evidence from the Great Influenza Pandemic" Abstract: How do societies respond to adversity? After a negative shock, separate strands of research document either an increase in religiosity or a boost in innovation efforts. In this paper, we show that both reactions can occur at the same time, driven by different individuals within society. The setting of our study is the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in the United States. To measure religiosity, we construct a novel indicator based on naming patterns of newborns. We measure innovation through the universe of granted patents. Exploiting plausibly exogenous county-level variation in exposure to the pandemic, we provide evidence that more-affected counties become both more religious and more innovative. Looking within counties, we uncover heterogeneous responses: individuals from more religious backgrounds further embrace religion, while those from less religious backgrounds become more likely to choose a scientific occupation. Facing adversity widens the distance in religiosity between science-oriented individuals and the rest of the population, and it leads to the polarization of religious beliefs. 
April 5, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesKyle Myers (HBS): Title TBA
April 5, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarValerio Di Tommaso (Northwestern University): "Estimating the Average MPC Under Minimal Assumptions"
April 3, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationShengmao Cao (Northwestern): "Equilibrium Effects of Pharmaceutical Bundling: Evidence from India"
April 3, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesAlessandra Casella (Columbia): Title TBD
April 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMIPR Colloq. with W. Brady (Kellogg/IPR) - Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility"Overperception of Moral Outrage in Online Social Networks Inflates Beliefs About Intergroup Hostility"* by William Brady, Donald P. Jacobs Scholar, Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, and IPR Associate This colloquium is part of the Fay Lomax Cook Monday Spring 2023 Colloquium Series. Please note all colloquia this quarter will be held in-person only. * This presentation will cover work in progress.
April 3, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in MacroeconomicsMartin Beraja (MIT): "Inefficient Automation" with Nathan Zorzi Abstract: How should the government respond to automation? We study this question in a heterogeneous agent model that takes worker displacement seriously. We recognize that displaced workers face two frictions in practice: reallocation is slow and borrowing is limited. We analyze a second best problem where the government can tax automation but lacks redistributive tools to fully alleviate borrowing frictions. The equilibrium is (constrained) inefficient and automation is excessive. The reason is that there is a conflict between how firms and displaced workers value the effects of automation over time. The government finds it optimal to tax automation on efficiency grounds, even when it does not value equity. Slowing down automation increases aggregate consumption and redistributes early on during the transition, precisely when displaced workers value it more. Using a quantitative version of our model, we find that the optimal speed of automation is considerably lower than at the laissez-faire. The optimal policy improves efficiency and achieves substantial welfare gains. 
April 3, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarLudovica Mosillo (Northwestern University): "Gender in Leadership"
March 31, 20232:00 PM - 3:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarMatteo Ruzzante (Northwestern University): "Soil Heterogeneity and Agricultural Innovation: Evidence from Africa"
March 31, 202312:00 PM - 1:00 PMEconomic History Lunch SeminarNarly Dwarkasing (Erasmus University) Title: The Evolution and Economic impact of African American banks: The USA from 1900 to present.  Abstract: This study presents new empirical findings on the long-term economic effects of African American owned banks. We collect data on nearly all African American Banks that have operated in the United States between 1900 and 2020. We examine the impact of African American Banks on various economic indicators for African Americans living in the same county, including Black home ownership rates. Additionally, we employ an instrumental variable approach based on Freedman Banks' branches to address endogeneity issues that may arise from the selection of African American banks into certain communities and geographical locations. Contrary to existing consensus, as suggested by Baradaran (2017), that African American Banks had no significant impact on economic outcomes for African Americans, the results of this study indicate that these banks did in fact stimulate Black home ownership rates, which is a primary indicator of wealth accumulation, in the counties where they were active. 
March 30, 202312:00 PM - 1:30 PMSeminar in Macroeconomics Speaker: Santiago Camara Title: TBA
March 30, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMApplied Microeconomics Lunch SeminarSpeaker: Clément Brébion  Title: Unemployment Insurance Eligibility and Employment Duration Abstract: While the literature on unemployment insurance (UI) has extensively documented the role of benefit level and duration, little is known about the effect of UI eligibility conditions. These conditions often impose a minimum work history to qualify for UI benefits. In this paper, we exploit a French reform that softened this requirement after 2009 to evaluate the impact of UI eligibility conditions on employment duration. Using administrative panel data matching employment and unemployment spells, we provide evidence that the reform induced a jump in employment exits at the new threshold. Our results show that firms’ hiring decisions are instrumental in this separation response: they schedule fixed-term contracts such that their duration coincide with the new minimum work history condition. The reform also affects the employment duration of workers beyond those seeking UI eligibility, which indicates the emergence of a new norm in contract length.
March 29, 20231:45 PM - 3:00 PMKellogg Strategy Department Seminar SeriesPierre Dubois (TSE): “Bargaining and International Reference Pricing in the Pharmaceutical Industry" with Ashvin Gandhi and Shoshana Vasserman Abstract: The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the effects of a US international reference pricing policy that would cap prices in US markets by those offered in reference countries. We estimate a structural model of demand and supply for pharmaceuticals in the US and reference countries like Canada where prices are set through a negotiation process between pharmaceutical companies and the government. We then simulate the counterfactual equilibrium under such international reference pricing rules, allowing firms to internalize the cross-country externalities introduced by these policies. We find that in general, these policies would result in much smaller price decreases in the US than price increases in reference countries. The magnitude of these effects depends on the number, size and market structure of references countries. We compare these policies with a direct bargaining on prices in the US.
March 28, 202311:00 AM - 12:00 PMEconomics 501: Graduate Student SeminarCristoforo Pizzimenti (Northwestern University): "Falling Interest Rates and Rising Risk: The Case of U.S. Public Pension Funds"
March 27, 20233:30 PM - 5:00 PMSeminar in Industrial OrganizationGregor Matvos (Northwestern): Title TBD
March 27, 202312:15 PM - 1:30 PMPoliEcon Seminar SeriesTorsten Persson (Stockholm University): Title TBD
March 20, 202310:00 AM - 11:00 AMYoung Scholar's Webinars on Climate Finance and EconomicsTuomas Tomunen (Boston College) will present his paper “Is Physical Climate Risk Priced? Evidence from Regional Variation in Exposure to Heat Stress”.   Moderator: Michael Barnett, Assistant Professor of Finance, Arizona State University - W. P. Carey School of Business This study looks at regional variations in exposure to heat stress to study if physical climate risk is priced in municipal and corporate bonds as well as in equity markets. During this webinar, Tuomas Tomunen will examine the impact of physical climate risks – heat, drought, flooding, hurricanes and sea level rise – on financial asset prices, focusing attention specifically on the pricing of heat stress risk. The E-axes Forum is an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization on macroeconomic policies and sustainability. If you are interested, you can register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/5616783993274/WN_qYdDPx4uRqylb2cVM8LtCw.