You will have the opportunity to discover what working at RBB Economics could mean for you, what kind of profiles they are looking for and how you can apply for an internship or a permanent position. The presentation will be followed by a drink where you will have the opportunity to have a more informal conversation with representatives of RBB.

If applying economic theories to the real world and working on complex competition law assignments seems like the right challenge for you, don't hesitate to register to that presentation.

We are looking forward to meeting you!

Peter Egger

ETH Zurich

will give a presentation on

Empirical productivity distributions and international trade

CANCELLED

Johannes Haushofer

(Stockholm University)

will give a presentation on

TBA

Sonia Bhalotra

(Warwick University)

will give a presentation on

Antidepressant use and academic achievement: Evidence from Danish administrative data

Abstract :

We investigate impacts of antidepressant use in childhood on academic achievement at age 16 using linked register data on individuals in Denmark. Leveraging quasi-random assignment of patients to child psychiatrists with different prescribing tendencies, we find that antidepressant treatment significantly increases test scores. Treatment effects are larger and only precisely estimated for math (rather than Danish) and for girls (rather than boys). Marginal treatment effects are positive across a large part of the distribution, and the slope of the MTE curve reveals selection on unobservables into gains. Investigating heterogeneity in treatment effects on observables, we find the reverse: treatment effects are driven by the children of less educated mothers but, taking all cases rather than the marginal cases picked out by the instrument, these families are less likely to be treated. Overall, our results indicate large detrimental impacts of mental health disorders on cognitive performance, and high returns to antidepressant treatment. They are consistent with evidence that depression and anxiety have a larger impact on math performance, and that girls are more sensitive to these conditions.

Joint paper with Meltem Daysal, Mircea Trandafir, Nis Vestergård Lydiksen

 This seminar will be held remotely. To access it please use this Zoom Link. 

Joanne Haddad

(ULB)

will give a presentation on

Settlers and Norms

Abstract:

The distinctive traits of early settlers at initial stages of institutional development may be crucial for cultural formation. In 1973, the cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky postulated this in his doctrine of “first effective settlement”. There is however little empirical evidence supporting the role of early settlers in shaping culture over the long run. This paper tests this hypothesis by relating early settlers’ culture to within state variation in gender norms in the United States. I capture settlers’ culture using past female labor force participation, women’s suffrage, and financial rights at their place of origin. I document the distinctive characteristics of settlers’ populations and provide suggestive evidence in support of the transmission of gender norms across space and time. My results show that women’s labor supply is higher, in both the short and long run, in U.S. counties that historically hosted a larger settler population originating from places with favorable gender attitudes. My findings shed new light on the importance of the characteristics of immigrants and their place of origin for cultural formation in hosting societies.

Andréa Renk

(UNamur)

will give a presentation on

Sterilizations and immunization in India: the Emergency experience (1975-77)

Abstract:

This paper investigates whether the intense sterilization campaign in 1976-77 in India led to a decrease in demand for health services, with the idea that this coercive campaign could have generated distrust. We use administrative data to discuss and build a measure of coercion intensity. Outcome-wise, we focus on immunization and institutional delivery using survey data collected only a few years after the event. We take advantage of retrospective data to build a panel, to compare outcomes across siblings or children within the same village based on children’s birth date. Results show a strong decrease in use of formal medicine, with a decline of 17% in the probability to receive any vaccine post-Emergency when coercion increases by one standard deviation. Heterogeneity analysis highlights distance to health infrastructure and parents’ literacy matter

ELI/UClouvain

will give a presentation on

Structural transformation and the gender pay gap in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract:

The focus of this study is the implications of structural transformation for gender equality, specifically equal pay, in Sub-Saharan Africa. While structural transformation affects key development outcomes, including growth, poverty, and access to decent work, its effect on the gender pay gap is not clear ex-ante. This paper provides evidence on the extent and drivers of the gender pay gap in non-farm wage- and self-employment activities across three countries at different stages of structural transformation (Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania). The analysis leverages nationally-representative survey data and decomposition methods, and is conducted separately among individuals residing in rural versus urban areas in each country. The results show that women earn 40 to 46 percent less than men in urban areas, which is substantially less than in high-income countries. The gender pay gap in rural areas ranges from (a statistically insignificant) 12 percent in Tanzania to 77 percent in Nigeria. In rural as well as urban areas, the gap is mostly explained by differences in workers’ characteristics, including education, occupation and sector. If men and women had similar characteristics, 74 percent of the rural gap and 76 percent of the urban gap would disappear. Our detailed decomposition results suggest that structural transformation does not consistently help bridge the gender pay gap. Gender-sensitive policies are required to ensure equal pay for men and women.

(ULB)

will give a presentation on

Moving Up the Social Ladder? Intergenerational Earnings Mobility Among Female and Male Immigrants in Belgium

Abstract:

As second-generation immigrants from developing countries represent a sizeable share of the working-age population in developed countries, their labour market integration requires careful attention. Using a matched employer-employee database of 1.3 million observations for the Belgian private labour market between 1999 and 2016, our weighted multilevel linear regressions and reweighted, recentered influence function Oaxaca-Blinder (RIF-OB) decompositions indicate that second-generation female and male workers from developing countries earn more than their first-generation peers. Nonetheless, for each gender group, the overall wage gaps between workers born in developed countries, including Belgian natives, and workers from developing countries remain substantial across two generations to an increasing extent across the wage distribution. After accounting for a wide range of covariates (inter alia, demographics, human capital, occupations, sector and firm fixed effects), we find that, unlike the first generation, there is no clear-cut evidence of an adjusted wage gap for the second generation. Finally, reweighted RIF-OB decompositions suggest that whilst the overall wage gaps for the first generation are explained by unfavourable human capital, employment and sector characteristics, those for the second generation are mainly driven by their lower levels of age and tenure.

(AMSE)

will give a presentation on

Commuting costs and spatial job search

Abstract:

Among a series of environmental measures taken in 2008, the French government implemented in 2009 the half-reimbursement by the employer of the public transport costs. This paper aims to estimate the effect of a decrease in commuting costs on job search behavior, using an administrative database with information on employment and unemployment spell. I use a differences-in-differences strategy exploiting variation in the use of public transport at the communal level. I find that a 10\% increase in the treatment intensity increases the commuting distance by 3.2\% and the hourly wage by 0.5\%. The effect is stronger for women and low-paid workers. Finally, a sketch of modeling based on Manning and Petrongolo (2017) is introduced. In this framework, lower transport costs improve the accessibility of jobs but can create congestion effects. The structural estimation of the model will allow quantifying the different mechanisms and performing counterfactual exercises.

Marion Richard

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

TBA

Abstract:

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Hiring subsidies for low-skilled youths in Wallonia: Short-term impact on employment

Abstract:

Targeted labour cost reductions are commonly used to tackle unemployment of disadvantaged groups in the labour market. The intent is to encourage firms to hire workers from a specific group by lowering their costs. This paper evaluates the impact of a hiring subsidy targeted to low- and medium-skilled unemployed youths in Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium. As of July 2017, this scheme entitles employers hiring young workers with at most a high school diploma to a € 500 monthly subsidy up to three years. Using administrative data, we exploit the discontinuity in the age requirement to estimate the impact of the subsidy on transition to work and cumulative employment of the eligible population. We find that the subsidies do not create new job opportunities for the targeted youths in the short-run: the take up of the subsidy just produces a full deadweight loss. Moreover, there is evidence that overall employment is negatively affected, low-skilled youth turning away from regular -unsubsidized- jobs. These results are robust to different validity tests.

Joint work with Muriel Dejemeppe (IRES/UCLOUVAIN) and Matthieu Delpierre (IWEPS).

(Johannes Gutenberg-University)

Will give a presentation on

Unilateral Tax Policy in the Open Economy

Abstract:

This paper examines the effects of a unilateral reform of the redistribution policy in an economy open to international trade. We set up a general equilibrium trade model with heterogeneous agents allowing for country asymmetries. We show that under international trade compared to autarky, a unilateral tax increase leads to a less pronounced decline in aggregate real income in the reforming country, while income inequality is reduced to a larger extent for sufficiently small initial tax rates. We highlight as a key mechanism a tax-induced reduction in the market size of the reforming country relative to its trading partner, resulting in a firm selection effect towards exporting. From the perspective of a non-reforming trading partner, the unilateral redistribution policy reform resembles a unilateral increase in trade costs leading to a deterioration of terms-of-trade and a decline in both aggregate real income and inequality.

Joint with Philipp Richter.

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Market forces in Italian Academia today (and yesterday)

Abstract:

This paper investigates the operation of the academic market in Italy, mapping current scholars’ location choices. I build a new dataset of current professors, associating each scholar with a composite indicator of their quality. The analysis includes the quality of the university and the features of the city where the institution is located. I estimate the strength of different factors: gravity (distance), agglomeration (scholars are attracted to higher quality universities), selection (better scholars travel longer distances), and sorting (the better the scholar, the more the quality of universities is weighted). I find that all of these factors have an effect, and do not vary according to scholars’ gender. I find a greater expected utility for scholars in choosing private universities over public ones, through a consistent nesting procedure. Comparing these forces to historical trends in Italian academia, the sorting effect delineates a new momentum for the current academic market in Italy.

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Beyond the Veil of Ignorance: Does Disclosure of Nationalities in Police Press Releases foster Migration Skepticism?

Abstract:

The alleged link between immigration and crime has been amongst the key narratives behind the recent upsurge of right-wing populism all around the globe. Whether the police should systematically reveal offenders’ national origins in press releases is a highly controversial topic. Advocates of systematic disclosure argue that unconditional transparency prevents mistrust in state institutions and media, while opponents point out the risk that systematic reporting of nationality in the context of crime could promote prejudices by suggesting a causal link between citizenship and delinquency. We analyze how different reporting practices influence natives’ perceptions of immigrants. To this end, we collected over 1.5 million police press releases between 2015 and 2020 from 220 local police authorities. We apply text-mining methods to classify offenses and nationalities in individual press releases. We document large heterogeneity in practices across and within German federal states. In a second step, we map indicators of local exposure to geo-referenced survey data on individual attitudes towards migration in Germany. To establish a causal link between police practices and individual attitudes we exploit the conditionally random allocation of cases to authors with heterogeneous preferences within police stations, measured by their historic reporting behavior. In line with recent research on the representation of foreigner crime in print media, our preliminary findings suggest that a systematic indication of nationalities in all press releases would lower concern about immigration. This finding emphasizes the importance of transparency as a suitable tool to dispel fears instigated by right-wing populist rhetoric.

(Tilburg University)

will give a presentation on

Developing Goals for Development: Experimental Evidence from Cassava Processors in Ghana

Abstract:

We train a random sample of small informal Ghanaian cassava processors on two simple practices: production measurement and goal setting. The former is essential for any firm to survive, let alone grow. The latter is an ubiquitous practice in the western world and a proven method to enhance productivity. Despite their importance, these practices are not systematically used by small informal firms in the developing world. While neither practice requires substantial material resources to be implemented, both may require a change in mind-set and deep-rooted norms. We follow the cassava processors for two months after training, and collect daily data on production and goals. We find a significant positive effect of goal-setting on productivity. Firms trained in goal-setting increase their productivity by 50% relative to those trained in production measurement only. In particular, male employers and employers who are less well-educated, with less experience in goal-setting, with smaller firms, and who are more impatient and more risk-averse set higher goals. Finally, we observe that, on average, workers systematically underachieve their daily production targets to a moderate extent, which suggests that goals are kept rather high as a motivational device. All in all, we confirm that goal setting can be an elective and inexpensive tool to increase productivity amongst small informal enterprises in non-western cultures.

Mine Senses

(Johns Hopkins University)

will give a presentation on

TBA

Abstract:

(University of Southern Denmark)

will give a presentation on

The effect of domestic violence on cardiovascular risk

Abstract:

The prevalence of metabolic risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease (CVD), such as hypertension and high plasma glucose levels have seen a substantial increase globally. Violence elevates stress and increases CVD risk and yet, there is sparse evidence on the relationship between domestic violence and CVD risk factors. This study presents new empirical evidence by leveraging biomarker data from a large nationally representative survey. I find (i) a consistent positive causal effect of physical violence on prevalence of hypertension amongst women, (ii) a positive causal effect of emotional and sexual violence on prevalence of hypertension amongst women, (iii) No discernible effects of domestic violence on CVD risk for the men in these relationships.

(University of Luxembourg)

will give a presentation on

New York, Abu Dhabi, London or Stay at Home? Using a Cross-Nested Logit Model to Identify Complex Substitution Patterns in Migration

Abstract:

We propose a cross-nested logit (CNL) approach to address the question of how people revise their migration decisions when facing changes in the global environment. Compared with the popular logit model, the CNL allows for more sophisticated substitution patterns between destinations. Using migration aspiration data from India, we show that the CNL approach outperforms competing approaches in terms of quality of fit and predictive power, implies stronger heterogeneity in responses to shocks, and highlights complex and intuitive substitution patterns. We document the low degree of substitutability between the home and foreign alternatives as well as within subgroups of particular countries. This approach allows to capture spillover effects of a given immigration policy on immigration pressures faced by other countries of destination.

Joint with Michel Bierlaire and Frédéric Docquier.

Pilar Garcia-Gomez

Erasmus University of  Rotterdam

will give a presentation on

Gender and performance of collaborative research: evidence from student teams

Abstract:

Research is increasingly a collaborative team exercise involving multiple researchers, yet little is known about how the composition of such teams affects their research output. This paper examines how the gender composition of research teams influences their performance. We take advantage of a field experiment in which first-year economics students are randomly paired together and perform research-like tasks. We find large differences in research performance, as measured by the grades they receive, by gender composition. All-male teams are significantly outperformed by both mixed and all-female research teams. These differences remain even when comprehensively controlling for the individual research aptitude of the group members. No comparable compositional effect is found for other characteristics, such as ethnicity and socio-economic status.

Joint with Max Coveney, Teresa Bago d'Uva

Laurence J. Kranich

SUNY at Albany

will give a presentation on

Subject to Influence: Endogenous Effects on (Social) Preferences

Abstract:

Jean-Baptiste Michau

Polytechnique

will give a presentation on

Fiscal Policy under Secular Stagnation: An Optimal Pump-Priming Strategy

Abstract:

How can the government move the economy from a secular stagnation equilibrium, with under-employment and a permanently binding zero lower bound, to a neoclassical equilibrium, with full employment? This can be achieved through a temporary, but massive, fiscal stimulus to overheat the economy such as to raise the inflation anchor. Despite the substantial cost of overheating the economy, this policy is typically optimal. The lack of fiscal space cannot prevent the government from pump priming the economy through fiscal policy. It may in fact help spur inflation. To keep a tight control over the price level, government debt should have a sufficiently long maturity.

Olivier Sterck

Oxford University

will give a presentation on

The Freedom to Choose: Theory and Quasi-Experimental Evidence on Cash Transfer Restrictions

Abstract:

Should cash transfer programmes restrict consumer choice? For example, should food assistance delivered in cash be restricted to food and exclude temptation goods? Theoretically, Southworth (1945) showed that restrictions induce (1) a substitution effect away from restricted goods and (2) a negative wealth effect if transfers are extra-marginal and resale of goods is costly. The welfare impact on transfer recipients is negative. We test Southworth’s theory by exploiting a natural experiment in a refugee settlement in Kenya, where some refugees receive monthly cash transfers restricted to food while others get unrestricted cash transfers. We corroborate Southworth’s predictions empirically: restricted transfers increase participation in a shadow resale market and negatively affect non-food expenditure, temptation-goods spending, and subjective well-being. Consistent with theory, restrictions have no significant effect on food consumption. Our results show that policy-makers should avoid restrictions to maximise positive impacts on transfer beneficiaries.

Co-authored with Jade Siu and Cory Rodgers.

 !! CANCELLED !!

Gilat Levy

LSE

will give a presentation on

Political social-learning: short-term memory and cycles of polarisation

Abstract:

In this paper we explore the effect of short-term memory on political outcomes in a model in which politics is viewed as a collective learning process. We analyse a dynamic model in which voters use past observations to make inferences about the true data generating process, and political parties are self-interested with polarised ideal policies. Voters balance party loyalty with a desire to vote for the party whose policy is a based on a better interpretation of past observations. We show that short-term memory leads to political cycles of polarisation and consensus. A short-term history involving only periods of consensus implies little variation in voters’ data, and hence less precise knowledge about the true state of the world; this allows parties to push their self interests. Alternatively, periods of polarisation imply sufficient variation which at some point allows voters to be confident about what is the true model; this forces parties to converge on the policy that fits that model. Our framework also sheds light on the relation between policy uncertainty and political polarisation, and on the effects of crises on political competition.

Carnegie Mellon

will give a presentation on

"Does Work-Time Regulation Cost Jobs? The Impact of PTO Regulation”

Abstract:

"Paid time off is one of the most common and most valued amenities of employment contracts. This study analyses the labor market effects of mandating paid time off. We leverage a German court ruling that mandated more time off for specific age groups in some industries and find that the ruling significantly increased paid time off, with no adverse effects on employment or wages. We interpret these results through the lens of canonical labor market models and find evidence for imperfect competition in the labor market. Our results suggest a similar degree of market power of employers over low and high-paid workers."

ULB

will give a presentation on

Cultural Inheritance and the European Marriage Pattern

Abstract:

Eric Turkheimer famously stated as a Law "All human behavioral traits are heritable.'' But this poses a puzzle for pre-industrial demographic systems, such as the European Marriage Pattern, where individuals made behavioral choices that limited fertility. Why were these behaviors not replaced over time with those that generated higher fertility? Some have argued the solution to this puzzle is that limited fertility in the first generation was actually maximal fertility in subsequent generations. But we show that there was no fertility penalty to future generations from higher fertility in the initial generation in both England and Quebec. Here we argue instead that the European Marriage Pattern survived for more than 500 years because, for pre-industrial fertility behavior, Turkheimer's Law does not hold. Even though at the social level fertility limiting behaviors transmitted strongly, there was scant familial inheritance of fertility behaviors. So fertility enhancing deviations did not get transmitted across generations, and the European Marriage Pattern could persist indefinitely.

co-authored with Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Internal Migration as a Response to Soil Degradation: Evidence from Malawi

Abstract :

We study how slow deterioration of soil, caused by climate change, affects internal migration and household resettlement. Rural households are expected to move when they face worsening soil conditions, as soil degradation is detrimental for agricultural productivity. The
other possibility is that they can get stuck in a poverty trap. We use the Integrated Household Survey in Malawi for the years 2010-2016. Soil depletion is not a random process and to account for its endogeneity, we instrument soil degradation by using distant climate shocks and controlling for recent weather conditions. We find that severe soil nutrients constraints push households to send their members away. The underlying mechanism is that soil degradation is harmful for agricultural productivity, and therefore food security, which incentivizes households to seek for better opportunities through pushing their members to migrate.

Co authored with Stefanija Veljanoska

Ludwig-Maximilian Universität München

will give a presentation on

The Direct and Indirect Effects of Services offshoring on local labour market outcomes

Abstract:

I provide new empirical evidence on the direct and indirect impact of services offshoring on local labour market outcomes.I employ a unique dataset on firms in the UK for the period 2000-2015 and exploit the variation of services offshoring across labour markets coming from the different geographical distribution of firms in the UK. Applying the new development of the literature on shift-share instruments, I show that indeed services offshoring increases overall employment and wages within local labour markets. I then decompose the results depending on firms' behaviour towards offshoring, finding that the spillover effect drives a substantial part of the positive results. Non-offshoring firms are affected by the offshoring of other firms located in the same sector and local labour market, a new finding in the offshoring literature.

(Institut national d’études démographiques (Ined), Centraal Planbureau (CPB) - The Hague, Netherlands, Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) - Paris, France.)

donnera une présentation sur le thème :

Mortalité différentielle et redistribution dans le système de retraite français

(Bank of England )

Will give a presentation on

A tail of labor supply and a tale of monetary policy

Abstract:

We study the interaction between monetary policy and labor supply decisions at the household level. We uncover evidence of heterogeneous responses and a strong income effect on labor supply in the left tail of the income distribution, following a monetary policy shock in the US and the UK. That is, while aggregate hours and labor earnings decline, employed individuals at the bottom of the income distribution increase their hours worked in response to an interest rate hike. Moreover, their response is stronger in magnitude relative to other income groups. We rationalize this using a two-agent New-Keynesian (TANK) model where our empirical findings can be replicated with a lower intertemporal elasticity of substitution for the Hand-to-Mouth households. This setup has important implications for the impact of inequality on the transmission of monetary policy. We unveil a novel dampening effect on aggregate demand generated by the Hand-to-Mouth substitution of leisure for consumption following a negative income shock. Therefore we show that the impact of inequality on the transmission mechanism of monetary policy is highly dependent on the different layers of heterogeneity on the household side and the different combinations of nominal and real frictions. More inequality does not necessarily generate a stronger response of aggregate demand after a monetary policy shock.

(LSE)

will give a presentation on

Risk and social preferences predict risky sexual behaviour amongst youth in a high HIV-prevalence setting

Abstract:

Young people in sub-Saharan Africa are particularly at high risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Using data from incentivized economic experiments conducted amongst 1,568 persons aged 15-29 years in Zimbabwe, we document the association between key individual preferences - risk aversion, altruism, present-bias and future-bias - at baseline and laboratory confirmed Herpes Simplex Virus type-2 (HSV-2) status and number of sexual partners, measured 12 months later. We find preferences are predictive of HIV risk behaviours. Women measured to be more altruistic at baseline were more likely to be HSV-2 positive 12 months later. Men measured to be risk averse at baseline were less likely to be HSV-2 positive at follow-up. There is limited association of preferences with number of sexual partners. We also show that preferences make a prominent relative contribution to predicting HIV risk behaviours, compared to other observable factors. Results highlight gender differences in the influence of preferences on HIV risk behaviours and potential for future research to design targeted interventions based on preferences.

(CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Using religious participation to insure mental health in Ghana

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

The Most Important Event? The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of French Monasteries

Abstract:

During the French Revolution, a massive redistribution took place, where all Church property was confiscated and auctioned. As a result, some areas experienced a radical change in their ownership structure, while in others the pre-revolutionary ownership structure remained virtually unchanged. In this study, I use the auction of monastic properties to trace the economic and social consequences of this massive redistribution. I show that arrondissements with a larger redistribution shock experienced higher levels of industrial and agricultural productivity in the mid-19th century. I trace these increases in productivity to higher investments in steam power, more efficient land use, land tenure and greater land inequality. I also show that the redistribution had a positive effect on the number of economic elites and on the modernization of political preferences, consistent with a rise of the bourgeois class after the Revolution.

LSE

will give a presentation on

Political social-learning: short-term memory and cycles of polarisation

Abstract:

In this paper, we explore the effect of short-term memory on political outcomes in a model in which politics is viewed as a collective learning process. We analyse a dynamic model in which voters use past observations to make inferences about the true data generating process, and political parties are self-interested with polarised ideal policies. We model a probabilistic voting model where voters balance party loyalty with a desire to vote for the party whose policy provides higher expected utility. We show that short-term memory may lead to political cycles of polarisation and consensus. A short-term history involving only periods of consensus implies little variation in voters' data, and hence less precise knowledge about the true state of the world; this allows parties to push forwards with their self-interest. Alternatively, periods of polarisation imply sufficient variation which at some point allows voters to be confident about what is the right policy; this forces parties to converge on this policy. Our framework also sheds light on the relation between policy uncertainty and political polarisation, and on the effects of crises on political competition.

University of Kent

will give a presentation on

Are complex technologies nurturing knowledge dependencies?

University of Alicante will give a presentation on

Refugees in the Mediterranean: Economic Consequences

Abstract:

We investigate the long-term economic consequences of mass refugee inflow. After the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1922, 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were forcibly resettled from Turkey to Greece, increasing the host population by more than 20 percent within a few months. Building a novel geocoded dataset of more than 10,000 settlements in Greece, we examine the educational and occupational outcomes of refugee and native villages and their variation across birth cohorts throughout the 20th century. Using a Diff-in-Diff empirical approach, we find that refugee villages invested more in education and experienced greater structural transformation and industrialization relative to native ones. We find evidence in support for the “uprootedness” hypothesis, with forced migration (i) causing a shift in preferences toward investment in human portable assets (as opposed to physical) (ii) reducing the utility cost of leaving farming, as refugees are less attached to the land in their new location (relative to natives).

Joint with Nikos Benos, Stelios Karagiannis, Stelios Michalopoulos, Elias Papaioannou, and Seyhun Orcan Sakalli

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Recovering within-country inequality from trade data

Abstract :

This paper develops a novel method to estimate inequality within a country based on what it imports. If preferences are non-homothetic, rich and poor individuals in a country have different consumption profiles. Observing imports can thus inform us about the income distribution in a country. The global availability of trade data allows us to estimate inequality using the same transparent and comparable method for a large sample of countries over time. Compared to conventional data, we feature an especially good coverage of developing countries. We provide a number of robustness checks and cross-validation exercises to gauge the performance of our method.

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

The Anticompetitive Effect of Trade Liberalizations

Abstract:

Recent decades have been characterized by a surgein firms' market power both in the U.S. and the EU. In this paper, we study the role played by globalization in determining the observed evolution of markups and other measures of market power. We use detail firm-level balance sheet and trade data for Belgian manufacturing over the period 2000-2015 to estimate firm-level markups in the manufacturing sector. Building on the identification strategy proposed in Acemoglu et al. (2016), we provide a causal analysis of the impact of rising trade exposure on various measures of market power. We estimate that, following the surge of Chinese trade with Belgium, in relatively more exposed industries the aggregate markup increases over time, in particular using conservative estimates, we quantify the impact of China to account for a fourth of the total increase in markups over the period. We further find evidence of increasing market concentration and markup dispersion going along increasing aggregate productivity. These changes are not driven by reallocation between firms, but by within adjustments of the incumbents. Overall, these evidences point to a winner-take-all type of rational behind the observed increase in market power.

Toulouse School of Economics

will give a presentation on

Anticompetitive Bundling when Buyers Compete

Abstract:

We study the profitability of bundling by an upstream firm who licenses technologies to downstream competitors, and who faces competition for one of its technologies. In an otherwise standard “Chicago-style” model, we show that the existence of downstream competition can make inefficient bundling profitable. Forcing downstream firms to use a less efficient technology can soften competition, thus allowing the upstream firm to extract more profit through the licensing of its monopolized technology.

With Greg Taylor.

CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Competition for Prominence

Abstract:

Intermediaries linking retailers to buyers may influence consumers' purchasing decisions by assigning a prominent position to one retailer. In this paper, we study the business strategy employed by intermediaries (in particular, online marketplaces) of grouping all the offers for a specific product available in the market under a single listing, and selecting a default retailer for it. As a share of consumers only consider the prominent offer, obtaining the default position translates into exclusive access to some consumers. We show that such a market design can lead retailers to fiercely (endogenously) compete for prominence, significantly benefiting the intermediary by drastically mitigating the double marginalization problem otherwise present.

joint with Leonoardo Madio

Copenhagen Business School

will give a presentation on

TBA

Abstract:

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Globalization and the urban-rural divide in France

Abstract:

University of Bergamo

will give a presentation on

Flow of Ideas: Economic Societies and the Rise of Useful Knowledge

Abstract:

Economic societies emerged during the late eighteenth-century. We argue that these institutions reduced the costs of accessing useful knowledge by adopting, producing, and diffusing new ideas. Combining location information for the universe of 3,300 members across active economic societies in Germany with those of patent holders and World’s Fair exhibitors, we show that regions with more members were more innovative in the late nineteenth-century. This long-lasting effect of societies arguably arose through agglomeration economies and localized knowledge spillovers. To support this claim, we provide evidence suggesting an immediate increase in manufacturing, an earlier establishment of vocational schools, and a higher density of highly skilled mechanical workers by mid-nineteenth century in regions with more members. We also show that regions with members from the same society had higher similarity in patenting, suggesting that social networks facilitated spatial knowledge diffusion and, to some extent, shaped the geography of innovation.

Leo Czajka

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

TBA

Abstract:

Monday 19^th December 2022

Chairman : Fabio Mariani

Tuesday 20^th December 2022

Chairman Joseph Gomes

Chairman : Luca Pensieroso

© image Image de rawpixel.com sur Freepik

(AMSE)

will give a presentation on

Productivity Shocks and Optimal non linear Income Taxation

Abstract:

In the literature on inequality and risk, changing distribution densities at the margin has been popularized as mean-preserving spreads by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970). We import this idea to propose a definition of a positive productivity shock into the optimal nonlinear income tax framework à la Mirrlees. We then study the impact of a positive shock on productivity, taking place on a given interval I, on the optimal allocation and optimal marginal tax rates. We derive a general result for the class of rank-dependent social welfare functions consistent with Lorenz ordering (Simula and Trannoy, 2022a,b), including the maximin as limit case, with no condition on the elasticity of taxable income. Specifically, we show that the change in optimal marginal tax rates is non-monotonic on I. Our theoretical findings have meaningful empirical implications and can be used as a test of the optimal income tax model. We look at the fiscal situation in the US to provide an example where the predicted tax change according to the theory is verified, roughly speaking.

joint with Laurent Simula (ENS Lyon )

(Indian Institute of Management Bangalore)

will give a presentation on

Using social recognition to address the gender difference in volunteering for low-promotability tasks

Abstract :

Research shows that women volunteer significantly more for tasks that people prefer others to complete. Such tasks carry little monetary incentives because of their very nature. We use a modified version of the volunteer’s dilemma game to examine if non-monetary interventions, particularly, social recognition can be used to change the gender norms associated with such tasks. We design three treatments, where a) a volunteer receives positive social recognition, b) a non-volunteer receives negative social recognition, and c) a volunteer receives positive, but a non-volunteer receives negative social recognition. Our results indicate that competition for social recognition increases the overall likelihood that someone in a group has volunteered. Positive social recognition closes the gender gap observed in the baseline treatment, so does the combination of positive and negative social recognition. Our results, consistent with the prior literature on gender differences in competition, suggest that public recognition of volunteering can change the default gender norms in organizations and increase efficiency at the same time.

Joint with Priyoma Mustafi

(Bloomberg)

will give a presentation on

Striking a bargain: narrative identification of wage bargaining shocks

Abstract :

We quantify the effects of wage bargaining shocks on macroeconomic aggregates using a structural vector auto-regression model for Germany. We identify exogenous variation in bargaining power from episodes of minimum wage introduction and industrial disputes. This narrative information disciplines the impulse responses to a wage bargaining shock of unemployment and output, and sharpens inference on the behaviour of other variables. The implied transmission mechanism is in line with the theoretical predictions of a large class of search and matching models. We also find that wage bargaining shocks explain a sizeable share of aggregate fluctuations in unemployment and inflation, that their pass-through to prices is very close to being full, and that they imply plausible dynamics for the vacancy rate, firms' profits, and the labour share.

With Žymantas Budrys and Mario Porqueddu

(Toulouse School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Collateral Damage? How World War One Changed the Way Women Work

Abstract: Drawing on individual-level data from the 1911 and 1921 population censuses and census-linking techniques, we analyze the consequences of World War I in France on female labor force participation. Our results suggest that the war induced many women to enter the labor force: in municipalities that experienced greater military death rates, women were more likely to declare an occupation after the war than they did before the war. In contrast with results in the literature, in our sample, these effects are driven by women moving out of waged occupations outside the home (and inactivity) into farming activities.

joint with Lionel Kesztenbaum, PSE, INED)

(PSE)

will give a presentation on

Follow the Money! Combining Household and Firm-Level Evidence to Unravel the Tax Elasticity of Dividends

Abstract:

We estimate behavioral responses to dividend taxation using recent French reforms: a rate hike and, five years later, a cut. Exploiting tax data at household and firm-level, we find very large dividend tax elasticities to both reforms. Individuals who control firms adjust dividend receipts instantaneously, accounting for most of the aggregate dividend reaction. Investment is insensitive to dividend taxation, except in small firms whose reaction is moderately negative. Dividend adjustments are instead driven by corporate saving, as owner-managers treat firms as tax-free saving vehicles. Small businesses’ profits decline following dividend tax increases, suggesting firms also serve as tax-free consumption vehicles.

Joint with Laurent Bach, Brice Fabre, Arthur Guillouzouic, Claire Leroy et Clément Malgouyres

Most economists working abroad come back home for Christmas. So, why not bring them together for a conference? This simple observation led to the creation of the Christmas Meeting of Belgian Economists.

It originally started at IRES (UCLouvain) in 2011 and rapidly 3 other universities joined the adventure. Nowadays, they organize the Christmas Meeting in turns.

This year the Christmas meeting will take place at ULB.

Registration

Attendance is free but registration is compulsory. Please register by filling the registration form.

Programme

Map to the venue

University of California Davis

will give a presentation on

Religiosity and Educational Attainment Among the Roma: Shedding an Oppositional Identity?

Abstract:

The Roma have faced poverty, discrimination and even enslavement and extermination since immigrating to Europe from India in the early 12thcentury. Persistent disparities between Roma and non-Roma throughout Europe have prompted recent integration initiatives. Drawing on a conceptual framework suggested by the literature on oppositional identity, aspirations, social capital, and the economics of religiosity, we explore the impacts of religious engagement on the integration of this marginalized population into broader society as captured by increased educational attainment. Using data from 12 Eastern European countries, we estimate the effect of religiosity on education with an instrumental variable (IV) approach that leverages exogenous variation in communist-era religious restrictions. We find that higher parental religiosity significantly increases child educational outcomes. Results indicate that religiosity also closes the gap between Roma respondents and their non-Roma neighbors for beliefs and other indicators. A placebo test among non-Roma households reveals no similar religiosity effects on educational outcomes of non-Roma children. Although more research is needed to identify specific mechanisms, these results suggest that religious engagement may soften oppositional identities in favor of alternative norms and aspirations. The role religious institutions may play in ultimately integrating the Roma and enhancing their future prospects merits further attention.

With Justin D. Kagin

(Kings College London)

will give a presentation on

Technological Distance: Grow Up or Grow Out?

Abstract:

Using multiproduct sales patterns and transitive production relationships across firms, we recover a continuous measure of distance between every pair of products and firms to uncover disjoint firm-product clusters. Within clusters, products closest to a firm are the most likely to be adopted and firms closer to potential new products grow and increase their scope faster. In higher sales clusters firms grow up with higher sales and less scope; in higher entrant clusters, firms grow out with lower sales and more scope. Firms with close competitors grow up more slowly but grow out more quickly, and are more likely to merge with these same competitors. Each extra rank of product distance decreases the frequency of adoption by one per cent relative to the base rate and one third of product adoptions are in the Top 10 closest products.

(University of Oslo)

will give a presentation on

Political Motives and the News Market: Quasi-experimental Evidence and New Data from India

Abstract:

To what extent are media markets in democracies influenced by changes in political motives? We build a novel panel dataset of newspaper markets in India between 2002 and 2017 to measure the impact of changes in electoral incentives on how these markets develop over time. We exploit the announcement of an exogenous change in the boundaries of electoral constituencies to causally identify the relationship between the (future) electoral importance of news markets and the change in the number and circulation of newspapers. Using an event study and a staggered difference-in-difference approach, we show that markets that became more electorally important experienced a significant rise in both circulation and number of titles per capita. Both supply and demand seem to drive the increase, but we estimate that the former explains almost all the variation in the short run and around $60\%$ in the long run. Finally, we document how effects vary with prior levels of political competition and newspapers characteristics, and discuss implications for voting behavior and democratic accountability.

(co-authored with Julia Cagé and Guilhem Cassan)

(IAE Barcelona)

Will give a presentation on

Dynamic Early Warning and Action Model

Abstract: This document presents the outcome of two modules developed for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO): 1) a forecast model which uses machine learning and text downloads to predict outbreaks and intensity of internal armed conflict. 2) A decision making module that embeds these forecasts into a model of preventing armed conflict damages. The outcome is a quantitative benchmark which should provide a testing ground for internal FCDO debates on both strategic levels (i.e. the process of deciding on country priorities) and operational levels (i.e. identifying critical periods by the country experts). Our method allows the FCDO to simulate policy interventions and changes in its strategic focus. We show, for example, that the FCDO should remain engaged in recently stabilized armed conflicts and re-think its development focus in countries with the highest risks. The total expected economic benefit of reinforced preventive efforts, as defined in this report, would bring monthly savings in expected costs of 26 billion USD with a monthly gain to the UK of 630 million USD.

(CREST)

will give a presentation on

From Public Labs to Private Firms: Magnitude and Channels of R&D Spillovers

Abstract: Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spillovers from academic research to private firms. Private sector firms in the top quartile of exposure to the funding shock increase their R\&D effort by 20% compared to the bottom quartile. We then use qualitative evidence, exploiting reports produced by the funded clusters, as well as quantitative evidence, using administrative data on labor mobility and R&D public--private partnerships, to shed light on the channels for these spillovers. We show that spillovers are driven by contracting between the private and public sectors and, to a lesser extent, by labor mobility from one to the other and by informal contacts. We discuss policy implications of these findings.

(with Antonin Bergeaud, Arthur Guillouzouic and Emeric Henry)

(RWTH Aachen University )

will give a presentation on

Distribution of natural resource rents and deindustrialization: the role of luxury goods

Abstract: Developing natural resource-rich countries are important destinations for luxury manufacturing goods, while they are not capable of producing these products domestically. Based on these insights, we theoretically show that in the presence of trade costs and with increasing return-to-scale technologies in the manufacturing sector, the demand for luxury goods exacerbates the deindustrialization (Dutch disease) effect of natural resource rents. Linking an increase in the demand for luxury goods to income inequality, our model provides a testable prediction on the nexus between income distribution and the intensity of the Dutch disease effect of natural resource rents. We use a sample of around 95 non-OECD countries and employ pooled mean group ARDL, the system GMM, and triple diff-in-diff methods to test the main theoretical prediction of our model. The results show that income inequality intensifies the deindustrialization effect of resource rents, consistent with the theoretical prediction.

(Georgetown University in Qatar)

will give a presentation on

Gender-Based Labor Legislation and Employment: Historical Evidence from the United States

Abstract: Gender-based labor laws are designed to improve women's conditions and potentially increase their participation on the labor market, but their effects can be undermined if employers substitute away from female labor. This paper examines the impact of the rise of Seating, Regulatory and Night-work laws between 1860 and 1940 across the United States. Given that not all U.S. states adopted these laws, and the staggered nature of adoption for the ones that did, we rely on a difference-in-differences strategy design to estimate their causal effect on female gainful employment. We find that the likelihood of female employment increased upon implementation of laws regulating health and safety conditions and those limiting women's night work. The impact of these laws was however absent on male employment. An industry-specific analysis of these ``protective'' laws documents an increase in the share of women employed in manufacturing and a decrease in the share of women employed in personal services' occupations. 

(joint work with Joanne Haddad (Université Libre de Bruxelles))

(CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Hysteresis for the young: search capital and unemployment

Abstract:

This paper argues that search ability should be considered a distinct type of human capital. Workers are endowed with a search ability that determines their effectiveness of search, or their intrinsic job arrival rate. Workers build up their job search capital by interacting with the labour market, finding and moving on to different jobs. Long, stable employment spells without search erode their search capital over time. This channel has notable implications for modelling and policy in all labour markets, but it is particularly relevant in dual labour markets. In the presence of large, persistent negative shocks like the Great Recession, the inability of young workers to accumulate search capital can explain why they suffer larger increases in unemployment and long-term unemployment, something traditional hysteresis models struggle to explain. Using administrative data, I show that search capital, as proxied by the number of jobs a worker has had, is negatively correlated with unemployment duration. I build a heterogeneous agent search model with both productive and search human capital to show the effect that dynamic search capital has on workers’ lifetime utility. The calibrated model shows that despite the protective effects of accumulating search capital against aggregate shocks, the cost in terms of uncertainty outweighs the benefits. The model favours active labour market policies over employment incentives to tackle long-term unemployment among young workers.

(IRES/LIDAM, UClouvain)

will give a presentation on

Static Model of Violent Groups: Give me my Dollars!

Abstract: African countries, where most contemporary civil conflicts are concentrated, have a high unexplained variation in the number of violent groups. This project aims to explore this variation constructing a theoretical framework based on Industrial Organization literature of market entry. This framework treats the number of violent groups as endogenous outcomes, modelling the potential entrant decision to enter or not in a region. Observing how violent groups decisions change, as their choice sets and region condition changes, we can shed light about the role of different variables explaining the number of violent groups across regions in Africa.

(Brown University)

will give a presentation on

Climate Change, Population Growth, and Population Pressure

Abstract: We develop a novel method for assessing the effect of constraints imposed by spatially-fixed natural resources on aggregate economic output. We apply it to estimate and compare the projected effects of climate change and population growth over the course of the 21st century, by country and globally. We find that standard population growth projections imply larger reductions in income than even the most extreme widely-adopted climate change scenario (RCP8.5). Climate and population impacts are correlated across countries: climate change and population growth will have their most damaging effects in similar places. Relative to previous work on macro climate impacts, our approach has the advantages of being disciplined by a simple macro growth model that allows for adaptation and of assessing impacts via a large set of climate moments, not just annual average temperature and precipitation. Further, our estimated effects of climate are by construction independent of country-level factors such as institutions.

(National Bank of Slovakia)

will give a presentation on

Prescriptions for Monetary Policy when Inflation Is High

Abstract: Inflation in most western advanced economies has been rising at a fast pace since the middle of 2021. The necessary condition for central banks to maintain price stability is to prevent temporary shocks to inflation from feeding into the mechanisms of wage and price formation (Bernanke 2007, Draghi 2014). The monetary theory prescription to avoid these self-fulfilling inflation expectations and prevent long-term inflation expectations from de-anchoring is to follow the Taylor principle, according to which the nominal interest rate should rise more than proportionally with inflation. We show that once inflation is high, the distribution of prices across products widens and inflation uncertainty rises, the Taylor principle is no longer sufficient for inflation stability. Anchoring of inflation expectations then requires a considerably more aggressive monetary stance, focusing strictly on targeting inflation and abstaining from virtually any aim to stabilize the real side of the economy.

(Università di Bologna)

will give a presentation on

College education, intelligence, and disadvantage: policy lessons from the UK in 1960-2004

Abstract : University access has greatly expanded during the past decades and further growth figures prominently in political agendas. We study possible consequences of historical and future expansions in a stochastic, general equilibrium Roy model where tertiary educational attainment is determined by intelligence and disadvantage from low socioeconomic status or poor non-cognitive skills. The enlargement of university access enacted in the UK following the 1963 Robbins Report provides an ideal case study to draw lessons for the future. We find that this expansion led to the selection into college of progressively less intelligent students from advantaged backgrounds and to a declining college wage premium across cohorts. Our structural estimates indicate that the implemented policy was unfit to reach high-ability, disadvantaged individuals as Robbins had instead advocated. We show that counterfactual meritocratic selection policies would have attained that goal and so would have also been progressive.

(with Andrea Ichino and Aldo Rustichini)

Link to the paper

(University of Luxembourg)

will give a presentation on

The Migration Crisis in the Local News: Evidence from the French-Italian Border.

Abstract:

This paper investigates the impact of local exposure to the migrant crisis on the local news market. Exploiting a narrow geographical setting, it explores a policy dating from June 2015, whereby French authorities introduced militarized controls at the Italian frontier. With the border controls in place, groups of migrants and asylum seekers who had planned to cross the border irregularly were pushed back to the Italian lands. With rejected migrants clustering at the border, natives residing along the Italian region were unevenly exposed to their settlement. Taking advantage of this unequal treatment as a natural experiment, this study uses novel data collected on the text and on the number of local news items for the border areas of Liguria, Italy, between 2011 and 2019. It documents that the backlog of migrants in the Italian border area was substantially mediatized: coverage of migration rose most in the most exposed municipalities. Conversely, anti-immigrant discourse in the news grew more in areas least directly in contact with the border. Exploring further this framing dimension, the bias effect turns out to be shaped by readers’ demand and to be closely associated with local news penetration. Finally, this study documents that anti-immigrant slant and voting preferences share a similar broad direction, while a related broad pattern also appears in hate-crime records.

(University of Wisconsin - Madison)

will give a presentation on

Mitigating international supply-chain risk with inventories and fast transport

Abstract: We study, theoretically and empirically, how firms use inventories and alternative transport modes in the presence of demand and supply shocks. We build an sS model of an importer reselling an input subject to stochastic demand with fixed and variable input ordering costs that differ by the speed of shipment. We show that 1) U.S. supply chains outside of NAFTA can be managed like those in NAFTA using air shipments; 2) having the option to ship products by air is valuable and the value is proportional to the reduction in inventories; 3) large positive industry demand shocks are accommodated by a shift to air; 4) distant supply chains can better adjust to large industry demand shocks owing to the extra inventories on hand and the ability to shift to air shipment.

(Stockholm School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

The incidence of affirmative action: Evidence from quotas in private schools in India

Abstract: We study the effects and incidence of one of the world’s largest affirmative action programs in schooling: a 25% quota in all Indian private schools for disadvantaged students. Receiving a quota seat through lotteries increases private school attendance by 25 percentage points. Quota students also attend more expensive and preferred schools, on average. However, because applicants are disproportionately drawn from more-educated and better-off households within eligible castes, _67% of per-child expenditure is inframarginal for school choice. We investigate the causes of this regressive selection. Rich survey data on preferences show that low demand for private schools does not rationalize undersubscription. A follow-up randomized intervention that eased information constraints and application complexity increased application rates by 43% but did not reduce regressive selection (due to further unaddressed frictions). Our results highlight the distinction between undersubscription and regressive selection for policy design, and the importance of the joint incidence of multiple constraints in determining program take-up.

(joint with Mauricio Romero)

(University of Zurich)

will give a presentation on

Interventionist Preferences and the Welfare State: The Case of In-Kind Nutrition Assistance

Abstract: Poverty assistance is often administered in-kind even though cash transfers might raise recipients’ welfare more effectively. We characterize the political economy constraint that paternalistic motives impose on the welfare system. In our experiment, a representative sample of U.S. citizens reveal their motives by deciding whether to constrain real U.S. food stamp recipients’ choices between in-kind donations and cash equivalents we disburse. The modal respondent (40%) imposes the strictest possible constraints, while 30% impose no constraints. Hence the majority’s behavior is consistent with deontological motives rather than trade-off thinking. Yet, because of biased beliefs about recipient preferences, respondents underestimate the restrictiveness of their interventions, suggesting that they are partly misguided. When respondents decide between restricting recipients whom they believed should be restricted and giving choice to those whom they believe should have choice, they place substantially more weight on the former motive, which, too, tends to increase the severity of restrictions. Overall, respondents’ goal is not to ensure sufficient healthy nutrition, but to prevent consumption of items deemed inappropriate. While respondents reveal racial and gender stereotypes in various survey questions, neither donor nor recipient demographics have substantial effects on restriction decisions, though restrictions increase with respondents’ political conservatism. In-experiment behavior correlates strongly with views about government policy.

(Joint with B. Douglas Bernheim, Tony Q. Fan, Zach Freitas-Groff)

(KU Leuven)

will give a presentation on

A putty-clay model to evaluate the aggregate and distributional effects of a carbon tax

Abstract: Which firms and households will be most impacted by a carbon tax? To answer that question, I set up a heterogenous agent, multi-sector model with putty-clay technology. A tax of $100 per ton of carbon emissions cuts emissions by 25% after 5 years, but it also reduces output by 1% in the short run and 1.75% in the long run. In the short term, the tax is slightly progressive despite poorer households spending more on carbon-intensive goods, the prices of which are rising. The putty-clay model’s inherent complementarity of capital and energy causes a sharp decline in capital income, a major source of income for top earners, and the resulting decline in investment causes job cuts in the capital goods-producing industries that employ high-income earners. In the longer run, as factor prices adjust, the tax becomes regressive and pre-tax real income in the lowest income percentile drops by 4%, 0.5 percentage points more than for the average household.

(European Central Bank)

Will give a presentation on

Density forecasts of inflation: a quantile regression forest approach

Abstract:

(Université de Namur )

will give a presentation on

Environmental Political Cycles

Abstract: This paper analyzes the impact of adverse business cycle shocks on environmental regulation. Using the 2018 US-China trade war as a natural experiment, we find that higher exposure to Trump tariffs leads to lower regulation targets in China, inducing an increase in air pollution and carbon emissions. Politically-motivated changes in environmental policies rationalize our results: the central government and local party secretaries relax environmental regulations to mitigate the negative consequences of trade protection for the polluting industries. This paper is the first to document how politicians manipulate environmental regulation to curb negative GDP shock. Furthermore, our results suggest that the effect of trade policy on the environment can be asymmetric. While trade liberalizations increase pollution because of a rise in production scale, protectionism causes a rise in pollution because of a politically induced change in environmental regulation.

(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore)

will give a presentation on

Heterogeneity and the Equitable Rate of Interest

Abstract : The equitable rate of interest represents a benchmark to evaluate the cross-sectional effects of monetary policy. I define it as the real rate of interest that minimizes the welfare losses associated to cross-sectional heterogeneity, under flexible prices. In a large class of models, it can be expressed as the payoff of a suitably chosen portfolio. In a Two-Agent New Keynesian model the deviations of the optimal policy prescription, relative to a Representative-Agent benchmark, can be traced back to the equitable rate gap: the difference between prevailing real rates and the equitable rate. This parallels the way in which the natural rate is the reference stick to evaluate the stance of monetary policy with regards to aggregate stabilization. Indeed, the difference between the natural rate and the equitable rate marks the tradeoff between aggregate and cross-sectional stabilization, faced by a welfare-maximizing policymaker.

(Yale University)

will give a presentation on

Using a New Legal Form: The GmbH, 1892-1914

Abstract: Germany introduced the Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH) in 1892 in response to dissatisfaction with the menu of business enterprise forms then available to its entrepreneurs. The GmbH combines some features of the corporation with the flexibility of the partnership, and can be compared to vehicles such as the Limited Liability Company (LLC) popular in the United States today. The new form quickly became popular and is now the most common enterprise form in Germany. In creating this new legal form, the legislator engaged in a rare form of institutional innovation; other enterprise forms such as the partnership and corporation date to at least medieval times. Pre-introduction arguments reflected assumptions about how business firms would use the GmbH. This paper compares the predictions to the reality for the period prior to 1914. GmbHs became more popular than most expected. Critics of the new form exaggerated some practices they viewed as abuses, probably because they relied on specific examples of problem firms rather than comprehensive data. The lower contracting costs implicit in the GmbH led to its wide use in many sectors and sometimes for entirely new purposes.

Prof. Damian Clarke (Univerdad de Chile) will visit UCLouvain on 2 June 2023 to deliver a lecture (primarily aimed at our grad students) providing an overview of the latest DID literature : 

• panel event study,
• Synthetic DID,
• de Chaisemartin and D’Haultfoeuille,
• Callaway and Sant Anna etc.

Damian Clarke is one of the leading practitioners of these methods, having himself written some of the Stata modules to implement these methods (see, e.g., his latest publication "Synthetic Difference in Differences Estimation", with Daniel Pailañir, Susan Athey and Guido Imbens). During his visit, he will also be available for meetings.

The tentative format will be as follows: We will start the day (time yet to be decided) with a lecture providing an overview of the new methods. This will be followed by one-to-one meetings with grad students and faculty who will be able to discuss their research with him.

Graph on the right part of the illustration : Danni Ruthvan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

(IRES/LIDAM)

will give a presentation on

Using third-party data to improve tax compliance in a context of low enforcement

Abstract: This paper investigates a potentially cost-effective way to improve tax compliance when enforcement capacity is low, by leveraging inter-firm relationships and third-party reporting by the largest firms. We randomize a low-cost communication intervention which induces the largest firms to better comply with a policy whereby they must yearly provide the list of all payments made to their suppliers, indicating the suppliers’ fiscal identifier, or the amount of 5% tax withheld from those which are not registered. Following the intervention, we show that treated firms submit more complete information about their suppliers. This information can subsequently be exploited to identify potentially under-reporting taxpayers and large informal firms. Targeted firms also declare more withholding tax although early results on the actual payments suggest that part of the newly declared amounts had already been paid for.

(Aix-Marseille School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Collective Action and Gender Norms: Evidence from Suffragette Demonstrations

Abstract: Can collective action shape cultural norms? I study the effect of local exposure to suffragette demonstrations on gender norms. I exploit several crosscounties marches in the US undertaken by the suffragettes in the early 20th century to demand women’s right to vote. I build a novel historical database using local newspaper archives to map the itinerary of the marches. Using individuallevel information from the US censuses (1880-1920) and correcting for the nonrandom choice of routes taken using an established instrumental variable strategy, I find that being exposed to suffragette demonstrations decreases both fertility and marriage rates.

(IRES/LIDAM)

will give a presentation on

Permanent exemption from social security contributions in Belgium: An evaluation with a directed search model

Abstract: Since 2016, Belgium has permanently exempted new employers from paying social security contributions to the gross wage of one of their employees. This paper aims to evaluate the spillover effects of this policy on non-eligible employers and on the agents' decision to start a business. We assess these effects using a directed search model estimated on Belgian firms' panel data.

(IRES/LIDAM)

will give a presentation on

Keeping the Long-term Peace – The Dynamic Effects of UN Peacekeeping Missions on Local Fatalities

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of UN peacekeeping missions on conflict reduction and their long-term dynamics. Combining geo-coded peacekeeping data with the UCDP conflict event dataset, we construct a comprehensive grid-year panel dataset covering all UN missions in Africa from 1994 to 2020.

We utilize the difference-in-differences methodology, drawing from recent econometric literature. In contrast to previous studies, our event study approach expands on the single difference-in-difference coefficient by introducing yearly coefficients that capture peacekeeping missions' long-term dynamic treatment effect. Moreover, our estimation framework accommodates staggered adoption and heterogeneous treatment effects, distinguishing it from the fixed-effect models employed in prior literature.

Our findings demonstrate that peacekeepers effectively reduce local fatalities and promote long-term peace, albeit with a time lag in establishing their impact. Furthermore, we identify heterogeneity in the treatment effect based on the duration of the peacekeeping intervention.

This paper contributes to the UN peacekeeping literature by incorporating state-of-the-art econometric methods and rigorously addressing concerns related to identification and endogeneity.

(University of Cyprus)

will give a presentation on

The Cross Section of Household Preferences and the Marginal Propensity to Consume: Evidence from high frequency data.

Abstract: By leveraging high-frequency retail consumption data from the US, we non-parametrically (set) identify the distribution of household preferences. Our estimates are robust to the presence of household liquidity constraints of arbitrary form, and hence we can accommodate samples that include the 2007-2009 financial crisis. We furthermore investigate the effect of preferences on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC), a key statistic for the transmission of macroeconomic policy interventions. Heterogeneous preferences can explain some of the latent heterogeneity in the MPC, after controlling for liquidity constraints and other household characteristics. We also find supportive but mixed evidence on the role of preferences in determining the average hand-to-mouth status over the sample.

The 2023 Spring Doctoral Workshop will take place on May 26th at Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve.

We invite all the doctoral students from Université Catholique de Louvain, Université de Namur and Université Saint-Louis to present their research. Both theoretical and empirical contributions at any stage of completion are welcome. Students from other universities are also warmly invited to participate, but in the event that not enough slots are available, priority will be given to students of the organizing universities. Researchers and Professors from the organizing universities, research institutes and other universities are kindly invited to participate in this event.

Programme

Registrations

Lunch will be served and a Cheese & Wine will be offered in the evening. Please fill out the form below, even if you will not present. This will help us better organize the event.

Registrations are now open and can be accessed here.

Members of the organizing team

• UCLouvain:

  • Gerritse Esmeralda – gerritse.esmeralda@uclouvain.be

• UNamur:

  • François Woitrin – francois.woitrin@unamur.be
  • Pablo Alvarez – pablo.alvarez@unamur.be

• Saint-Louis:

  • Arnaud Deseau – arnaud.deseau@usaintlouis.be
  • Audric De Bevere – audric.debevere@usaintlouis.be
  • Jérôme Dollinger – jerome.dollinger@usaintlouis.be

Fediris Workshop

Regards prospectifs sur les finances de la Région Bruxelles Capitale:  à la croisée des institutions et de la dynamique socio-économique​"

---

"De toekomst van de Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest financiën: de rol van de instellingen en socio-economische dynamiek".

Ce workshop  fait partie du projet de recherche FEDIRIS (UCLouvain), financé par INNOVIRIS. Ce projet explore les futurs possibles des finances publiques de la région Bruxelloise au départ d’une analyse qui croise i) la question des institutions, de la loi spéciale de financement et ii) celle de la dynamique socioéconomique de la région bruxelloise. ​

Deze workshop maakt deel uit van het FEDIRIS onderzoeksproject (UCLouvain), gefinancierd door INNOVIRIS. Dit project verkent de mogelijke toekomst van de overheidsfinanciën in het Brussels Hoofdstedelijk Gewest op basis van een analyse die de rol van i) de instellingen, de bijzondere financieringswet en ii) de sociaaleconomische dynamiek van het Brussels Gewest met elkaar verbindt.

Formulaire d'inscription / Registratie Formulier

Programme Provisoire

• Présentation par l’équipe FEDIRIS «La dynamique socio-économique Bruxelloise: enjeux de prospective budgétaire» : 30’​
• 2 panels consécutifs (4 intervenants: 12’ présentation + 8’ questions)​
• Mot de clôture/conclusion

Voorlopig programma

• Presentatie door het FEDIRIS-team "De sociaaleconomische dynamiek van Brussel: begrotingsvooruitzichten": 30'.
• 2 opeenvolgende panels (4 sprekers: 12' presentatie + 8' vragen)
• Slotopmerkingen/conclusie

Panelists

• Etienne de Callataÿ (UCLouvain)
• Vincent Frogneux (FPB Bureau du plan)
• François Meuwissen & Sébastien Thonet (UNamur)
• Pierre-François Wilmotte & JP Hermia  (IBSA)
• Maxime Fontaine (ULB)
• Stefan Cornelis (Kabinetschef Minister Gatz)
• Frederic Troussart (Head of department at the Finance and Budget Board) tbc
• Tom Truyts (St Louis-UCLouvain)

Autres Participants / Andere Deelnemers

•  Personnes non affiliées/ Mensen niet aangesloten
•  Chercheurs/  Onderzoekers 
• Étudiants/ Studenten

Join this one-day course and discover how to revolutionize healthcare research!

Patient-oriented research is essential for transforming healthcare and improving patient outcomes and experience. Placing the patient at the centre of research allows us to gain critical insights into their unique needs, experiences and preferences, identify gaps in care, design innovative solutions, and adapt treatments and services for specific patient populations.

Discrete choice experiments (DCE) are an approach to understanding individual preferences and making informed decisions; and have a vast array of applications in the healthcare field from individual decision-making to resource allocation and policy development.

This method combines the power of integrating the voices and perspectives of individuals to quantify and compare preferences across diverse populations, enabling you to design better interventions for specific patient groups or optimize resource allocation strategies.

Led by Mark Harrison (University of British Columbia, Canada), Associate Professor in Health Economics, this course combines a background into the tenants of patient-oriented research, an introduction to discrete choice experiments (theory, design, and analysis), and real-world case studies to provoke thoughtful discussion and critical reflection on this emerging area. No prior experience of patient-oriented research or DCE is required. This course is designed to be applicable to participants from any background.

Day Programme

09h30-12h30 Introduction to DCE methods (anatomy of a DCE, attributes and levels, experimental design, data analysis)
12h30-13h30 Lunch
13h30-16h30 Patient-oriented research using DCE (introduction to patient-oriented research, involving patients in the design of DCE, example of analysis and interpretation of a patient-oriented DCE)

Registration

Please register via this form if you would like to attend. The course is free, if you decide not to attend, please let us know as places are limited.

Organizers

For more information, please contact sandy.tubeuf@uclouvain.be or charlotte.desterbecq@uclouvain.be

Michela Giorcelli

UCLA

will give a presentation on

The Effects of Business School Education on Manager Career Outcomes

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of business school education on manager career outcomes, using evidence from the Engineering, Science, and Management War Training (ESMWT), that offered MBA-style education to middle managers and production supervisors working at U.S. war industrial facilities during WWII. Employing a regression discontinuity design (RD), I show that managers who scored right above the ESWMT entry exam threshold had a substantially higher probability of being promoted to both middle and top management positions during their career, and engaged systematically more in self-employment and innovative entrepreneurial activities than similar managers who scored right below. These effects were stronger for nonwhite and female managers. In terms of mechanisms, the increased promotions followed sizable improvements in facility performance, consistent with the idea that the program content mattered, more than with a signaling hypothesis. Finally, exposure to a network of classmates from better-performing firms resulted in higher chances of moving into peer companies and founding a business with them.

Sophie Hatte

(ENS Lyon)

will give a presentation on

Connecting the Unconnected: Facebook Access and Female Political Representation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: Can social media promote female access to political positions? Internet and social media have facilitated a number of evolutions regarding ideas, perceptions and attitudes towards women and their role in society. This paper focuses on the sub-Saharan African context, where female political under-representation is particularly salient, and which experienced a rising penetration of Facebook over the past decade. We build a novel panel dataset at the constituency-election level and exploit variation in the electoral outcomes observed across 8,162 races occurring in the context of 63 parliamentary elections in 17 countries. We leverage the staggered introduction of Facebook's Free Basics -i.e. free access to Facebook through partner mobile operators- across constituencies and time, and document the success of this connectivity shock and its subsequent effect on female political representation. We find that Facebook's Free Basics significantly fosters the election of female candidates, but only in the medium-run. This effect is driven by female candidates endorsed by the established political parties, and running for the first time. Finally, we uncover several mechanisms. Using survey data, we highlight a political demand mechanism: social media users, and especially the compliers of the Facebook access shock, have more favorable attitudes towards women and their presence in politics. Exploring the universe of Facebook posts of the candidates, we also document a political supply mechanism [work in progress]. Preliminary content analysis suggests gendered differences in online campaigning practices.

(with J. Loper and T. Taylor)

Nathan Lachapelle

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Introducing the degressivity of unemployment benefits: does it bring unemployed back to work

Abstract: We estimate the causal effect of unemployment benefits (UB) on the transition to work and job quality by exploiting a Belgian reform that changed a constant unemployment benefit profile into a declining one, but only for claimants of unemployment benefits with low previous labor market earnings. The peculiarity of the reform is that it introduces the degressivity in two different ways for two different groups of unemployed job seekers: one group benefits from an increase of their unemployment benefits during the first three months, while another group experiences both the increase of UB and a decrease later in the spell. Leveraging rich administrative data on a sample of new entrants into unemployment before and after the implementation of this reform, we use a difference-in-difference design to estimate the causal impact of this reform on the transition to work and job quality. We compare labor market outcomes of unemployed job seekers for which a declining benefit profile was introduced with job seekers who were not affected by the reform. Our main finding is that the reform increased the transition rate to salaried employment for unemployed job seekers affected by the drop of UB later in the spell, but not for the increase during the first three months. We also find no evidence that the reform affected job quality.

Eva Raiber

(Aix-Marseille University)

will give a presentation on

For better or for babies? The effect of the two-child policy in China on who gets married

Abstract: Can fertility policies have unintended effects on who gets married? We investigate the effect of the relaxation of the one-child policy, one of the strictest large-scale fertility policies of all time, on marriage. Before everyone was allowed to have two children with the two-child policy, some were already exempted from the strict one-child limit. Those exempted could have a "child advantage in the marriage market". In a context with a strong sex ratio imbalance with more men than women, the advantage can increase men's chances of getting married. Preliminary findings show that with the end of the one-child policy, those previously exempted as less likely to get married. The effect is exclusively driven by men -- the likelihood of women getting married stays unaffected. The results suggest that there was indeed a significant child advantage in the marriage market which, coupled with the skewed sex ratio, distorted who got married.

Co-author: Lucie Giorgi

Leo Czajka

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

Fraud Detection under Limited State Capacity: Experimental Evidence from Senegal

Abstract: Information on taxpayers is essential to efficiently allocate tax administrations' scarce resources in low income countries, but it is complex to collect. In the context of Senegal, this paper shows that a randomized low-cost communication campaign can induce some of the largest firms to submit more complete third-party reports about their service suppliers. The intervention increases the prevalence of suppliers' numerical ID in third-party reports by 52% on average. We estimate this improves identification information for about 18,546 client-suppliers pairs in total, thereby facilitating the tracking of $1.6 billion, i.e the equivalent of 6 % of GDP. Matching suppliers' ID to the tax registry and the universe of tax declaration we show that the new information increases the probability to detect payments going to under-reporting formal suppliers by 44%. A simple simulation exercise shows that exploiting the newly available information to strategically audit the largest under-reporting formal suppliers could increase audit returns by 115%.

Rohini Somanathan

(Dehli School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Nudging Marriage Norms through Conditional Transfers

Abstract: We explore the ability of conditional cash transfer programs to reduce child marriages in the presence of heterogeneous social norms.  Contrary to popular belief, we show that groups strong child marriage norms can exhibit larger program effects for a given transfer than groups with weak norms. We empirically explore this relationship between norms and transfers by combining household data reflecting marriage ages with administrative data on one of the earliest and largest programs to reduce child marriage in North India.  Consistent with our theoretical results, we find that regions and households with strong early marriage norms do exhibit large effects. Our results suggest that norms can be influenced by modest financial incentives depending on the configuration of norms and laws relative to household preferences. It is not therefore surprising that attempts to aim to change culturally driven behavior through cash transfers have had mixed success.

Charles de Pierpont de Burnot

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Does immigrants birthplace diversity impact wages? Evidence from new migration flows composition in the US

Abstract: The increasing arrival of people from different origins in high-income countries raises the issue of the coexistence and the exchange of different norms and ideas that affect productivity. This article documents the impact of immigrants birthplace diversity on workers wages at both metropolitan overall and sector-occupation population levels using US data between 2005 and 2019. It exploits the skill similarities and the high levels of interaction of workers from those groups to disentangle the diversity effects from general skill heterogeneity related to national specialisations. It also exploits the rich compositions of the 21st century's migration flows to take cultural and economic distances into account. We find that metropolitan immigrants diversity of workers from the same sectors and occupations is significantly positively related to their wages, especially for occupations with a high content in abstract tasks. These gains tend to be maximised when immigrants birthplace diversity is the result of migrations from countries close economically and culturally.

Dylan Glover

(INSEAD)

will give a presnetation on

Job Search under (Perceived) Discrimination

Abstract: Evidence is lacking on how jobseeker search effort reacts to the expected level of discrimination they face in the labor market. Bridging this gap is important for understanding the channels through which discrimination affects final labor market outcomes. Using administrative data on job search and hiring from a large public job board, I show that an exogenous shock that plausibly increases the level of (perceived) discrimination towards minorities leads to a drop in minority search effort in the weeks that follow. This drop in search intensity is accompanied by an increase in match quality and increased hires in vacant jobs posted with the job board. I explore the role of selection and view the results through the lens of a directed search model in which jobseekers jointly determine the number of applications they emit and the types of jobs they apply to.

Julius Koschnik

(LSE)

will give a presentation on

Teacher-directed scientific change: The case of the English Scientific Revolution

Absract: While economic factors in directed technical and scientific change have been widely studied, the role of teacher-directed scientific change has received less attention. This paper studies teacher-directed scientific change for one of the largest changes in the direction of research, the Scientific Revolution. Specifically, the paper considers the case of the English Scientific Revolution at the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. It argues that exposure to different teachers shaped students' direction of research and can partly account for the successful trajectory of English science. For this, the paper introduces a novel dataset on the universe of all 111,242 students at English universities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century and matches them to their publications. Using machine learning, the paper is able to quantify personal interest in different research topics. To derive causal estimates of teacher-student effects, the paper exploits a natural experiment based on the expulsion of fellows following the English Civil War and uses an instrumental variable design that predicts students’ choice of college based on their home regions. The paper finds strong empirical evidence of teacher-directed change in the English Scientific Revolution. These results illustrate how teacher-directed change can contribute to paradigm change.

Chiara Zanardello

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Early Modern Academies, Universities, and Economic Growth

Abstract: Using a novel micro-level database of Early Modern scholars and educational institutions, I study the influence of innovative knowledge on economic growth of Europe from 1500 to 1800. I exploit advanced DID estimators robust to heterogeneous treatment and staggered effects. Proxying economic development with city population, I do not find any detectable effect in the entire sample of experimental academies. However, when classifying institutions on the field of study of their members, I find that the creation of scientific academies increases population growth rates by 15% after 150 years in cities hosting them, while humanistic academies have no discernible positive effect on long-term growth. Moreover, I show that scientific academies rapidly enhance 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, driving also the modernization of universities.

25ème congrès des économistes belges

Réussir la transition vers une économie zéro carbone

Programme

Lieu du congrès

31, boulevard Solvay, 6000 Charleroi – Campus Charleroi Métropole

Afficher une carte plus grande

Inscriptions

Les inscriptions se font via le site du congrès des économistes

Lukas Rosenberger 

(LMU, Munich)

will give a presentation on

Why Britain? The Right Place (in the Technology Space) at the Right Time

Abstract: How did Britain sustain faster rates of economic growth than comparable European countries, such as France, during the Industrial Revolution? We argue that Britain possessed an important but underappreciated innovation advantage: British inventors worked in technologies that were more central within the innovation network. We offer a new approach for measuring the innovation network using patent data from Britain and France in the 18th and early 19th century. We show that the network influenced innovation outcomes and then demonstrate that British inventors worked in more central technologies within the innovation network than inventors from France. Drawing on recently-developed theoretical tools, we quantify the implications for technology growth rates in Britain compared to France. Our results indicate that the shape of the innovation network, and the location of British inventors within it, help explain the more rapid technological change and industrial growth in Britain during the Industrial Revolution.

(joint with Walker Hanlon and Carl Hallmann)

Rossana Scebba

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Integrating library and prosopographical data in the publication network of the Old University of Louvain

Abstract : The present work strives to offer an interdisciplinary perspective to the study of academic communities as real-world networks, using the Old University of Louvain as case study. Building upon the metadata of the Collectio Academica Antiqua, we describe, analyze, and visualize the network behind these rare books of the premodern University of Louvain held in the collections of the two Louvain libraries. We process the metadata records from their original MARC21 XML format and perform data-cleaning techniques to retrieve the names and personal information of the historical figures who contributed to the collection under various roles. Then, we use Social Network Analysis to visualize the web of relationships among these individuals, based on shared book collaborations. We propose a novel rolling-window approach to compute time-consistent network metrics and study the evolution of the network and the role of its components, i.e., prominent figures in the history of the University. Lastly, focusing on the coauthors’ network, we introduce an innovative interpretation of Louvain scholars’ social presence, and compare it to an extant proxy of human capital.

Sandra Sequeira

(LSE)

will give a presentation on

Forced Displacement and Human Capital

Abstract: We study the impact of conflict-driven displacement on human capital accumulation and occupational shifts. We focus on the Mozambican civil war (1977 − 1992), during which millions of civilians fled to the countryside, to cities, and to refugee camps in neighboring countries. We reconstruct the movements of the entire Mozambican population during this period to examine the consequences of multiple displacement trajectories in a unified setting. First, we describe the educational outcomes of the universe of individuals displaced during their school-going age. Second, we identify their age at move and implement a movers design to estimate exposure effects, focusing on moves occurring in high-conflict areas. We find that children who were still in their primary school-going years experienced strong and positive displacement effects on schooling. Third, we compare children of families separated during the war, using children who stayed behind as a counterfactual to each child’s displacement trajectory. Displacement is associated with increases in educational investments and shifts out of agricultural employment, with the largest effects experienced by rural-born children escaping to urban areas. The children who stayed behind do not report lower levels of schooling compared to their respective cohorts in their districts of birth. Fourth, we unpack the mechanisms and jointly estimate place-based and uprootedness effects. Fifth, we conduct a survey in Mozambique’s largest northern city, whose population doubled during the civil war: those displaced to the city have significantly higher education than their siblings in the countryside, and have converged to the levels of schooling of the non-mover urban-born individuals. However, those displaced exhibit significantly lower social/civic capital and have worse mental health, even three decades after the war ended. Our findings demonstrate that displacement shocks can stimulate human capital investments and break ties with subsistence agriculture. However, this comes at the cost of enduring social and psychological traumas.

Jérémy Do Nascimento Miguel

(Bordeaux School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Fixing markets for unobservable quality, Lab-in-the-field evidence from rural wheat traders in Ethiopia

Abstract: Enhancing the access of smallholder farmers to profitable value chains can improve their incomes and overall well-being. This requires farmers to adopt new practices and technologies that raise productivity and improve product quality. We focus on the role of the intermediating sector, particularly on the role of traders’ expectations regarding the quality of produce supplied by farmers, and analyze incentives for farmers to produce high-quality output. Our theoretical model demonstrates how quality expectations can be a self-fulfilling prophecy—perpetuating either bad equilibria (low quality, low prices) or opening up good ones (high quality, high prices)—and how an institutional innovation such as the introduction and promotion of certification services can set in motion a development trajectory from the bad to the good steady state. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment among wheat traders in Ethiopia to study how “demand” for high quality crops is mediated by expectations and certification. Our experimental results provide mixed support for theoretical predictions. While trader expectations regarding farmer supply matter for trader investments, we also find that traders fail to optimally respond to new opportunities created by certification.

Joint work with Gashaw T. Abate (IFPRI), Tanguy Bernard (Bordeaux School of Economics), Erwin Bulte (Univ. Wageningen),  and Elisabeth Sadoulet (UC Berkeley).

Bartosz Maćkowiak

(European Central Bank)

will give a presentation on

Rational Inattention and the Business Cycle Effects of Productivity and News Shocks

Abstract: We solve a real business cycle model with rational inattention (an RI-RBC model). In the RI-RBC model, the growth rates of employment, investment, and output are about as persistent as in the data, with an amount of inattention consistent with survey data on expectations. Moreover, consumption, employment, and output move in the same direction in response to news about future productivity. By contrast, the baseline RBC model produces neither persistent growth rates nor business cycle comovement after news shocks.

Marion Richard

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Soldiers versus Laborers: Legacies of Colonial Military Forced Labor in Mali”.

Abstract: We study the coercive military forced labor regime instituted by the French colonial authorities in colonial Mali between 1927 and 1950. Due to endemic labor scarcity, the colonial authorities resorted to activating military reservists as forced laborers for public infrastructure construction. This acted as an in-kind tax on the most productive workforce, as only the 20\% healthiest individuals were selectively recruited by the conscription system. By digitizing more than 180,000 hand-written individual soldier files as well as colonial-time district conscription tables, we find that historically speaking, the activation of military forced labor was strongly correlated with local population density and specific demands of different public infrastructure projects. We further document that the severe working conditions in this coercive labor system seems to have propelled the conscripts to join the regular army as volunteers, whose total numbers were capped. In the long run, greater exposure to forced labour seems correlated with worse human capital outcomes.

Jan de Loecker

(KU Leuven)

will give a presentation on

Markup Estimation using Production and Demand Data.
An Application to the US Brewing Industry

Abstract: Relying on data from the US brewing industry, we implement two distinct approaches to estimate markups, using either production or demand data. We find that the two approaches produce similar estimates of average markups and both point to a significant upward trend. We combine the two approaches to evaluate the common (but controversial) assumption that retail markets operate competitively. Ultimately, our results suggest that demand-based markups recovered with the assumption of competitive retail markets are accurate, in our context, as long as downstream costs are properly accounted for.

(Joint with Paul T. Scott)

This seminar is CANCELLED

Gaia Spolverini

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Cooperation and prosocial behavior: evidence from the american frontier

Abstract: What are the origins of prosocial behavior? Can it coexist with individualistic cultural traits? In this paper, I investigate this question in the US case, following Alexis de Tocqueville (1830)’s doctrine of “self-interest, rightly understood”, which postulates that the rise of associations in America acts as a check on rising individualism. I build on the idea that when facing both extremely volatile weather conditions and a lack of state capacity, individuals are more prone to cooperate and incentives for self-reliance are weaker. I focus on the historical setting of the American frontier expansion and construct an interaction term using the Total Frontier Experience (TFE) measure from Bazzi et al. (2020) and a measure of weather variability following Buggle and Durante (2021). I show that the positive effect of TFE on individualism is lower in counties with higher weather variability. To investigate mechanisms, I look at church membership as a measure of social capital, and I find that while the overall TFE effect on church membership is negative, it turns positive in places where weather variability is high, consistently with the idea that religious institutions act as a network for risk-sharing and cultural transmission. These effects are stronger in predominantly agricultural counties and where the historical presence of the state is low.

THIS SEMINAR IS CANCELLED

Camille Landais

(LSE)

will give a presentation on

Wealth and Property Taxation in the United States

Abstract:We study the history and geography of wealth accumulation in the US, using newly collected historical property tax records since the early 1800s. The US General Property Tax was a comprehensive tax on all types of property (real, personal, and financial), making it one of the first “wealth taxes.” Drawing on many historical records, we construct long-run, consistent, high-frequency wealth series at the county, state, and national levels. We first document the long-term evolution of household wealth in the US since the early 1800s. The US experienced extraordinary wealth accumulation after the Civil war and until the Great Depression. Second, we reveal that spatial inequality in the US has been large and highly persistent since the mid-1800s, driven mainly by Southern states, whose long-run divergence from the rest of the US predated the Civil War. Before the Civil war, enslaved people were assessed as personal property of the enslavers, representing almost one-half of total taxable property in Southern states. This system is morally abhorrent and implies wrongly counting forced labor income as capital. The regional distribution of wealth and the effects of the Civil war appear very different if enslaved people are not included in the property measure. Third, we investigate the determinants of long-term wealth growth and capital accumulation. Among others, we find that counties with a higher share of enslaved property before the Civil War or higher levels of wealth inequality experienced lower subsequent long-run growth in property.

The 2023 Winter Doctoral Workshop will take place on December 6th at the University of Namur.

We invite all the doctoral students from Université de Namur, Université Catholique de Louvain and Université Saint-Louis to present their research. Both theoretical and empirical contributions at any stage of completion are welcome. Students from other universities are also warmly invited to participate, but in the event that not enough slots are available, priority will be given to students of the organizing universities. 

Researchers and Professors from the organizing universities, research institutes and other universities are kindly invited to participate in this event.

Deadline for presenters

The deadline for submitting presentation titles and abstracts is November 20th, 2023. 

We kindly ask the participants who intend to present their job market paper to contact the organizers as soon as possible.

Types of presentations

Four kinds of presentation are possible:

Short session: 20 minutes + 10 minutes of questions from the audience

Regular Session: 30 minutes of presentation + 5 minutes of questions

Regular Session with discussant: 30 minutes of presentation + 10 minutes of discussion + 5 minutes of questions

Job Market presentation with discussant: 45 minutes of presentation + 10 minutes of discussion + 5 minutes of questions from the audience

The short session is specifically aimed at PhD students at an early stage of research/want to present a research idea and that want to get some feedback on their current ideas rather than on an already very formalized paper (around 10-12 slides).  

Regarding the regular session, students can choose between a session without or with a discussant. If they decide for the latter, they should indicate and contact the discussant by themselves. For your presentation, be concise (max. 20-23 slides) so that discussant/audience may play their role. If you wish to have a discussant, you should send her/him a draft of your paper or at least your slides a week before the workshop at the latest.

In order to properly benefit from the DW, it is recommended that students notify their supervisors of the date and time of their presentations as soon as the information becomes available.

Each academic year, it is compulsory for all PhD students in Economics at UCLouvain, UNamur and USL to present at least once at the DW, either in winter or in spring. Attendance to all the doctoral workshops is also compulsory.

Deadline for non-presenters

The deadline for non-presenters is November 29th.

Lunch and coffee breaks will be offered during the day. A Cheese & Wine will follow at the end of the workshop.

Registration

Please fill in the form to register even if you are not presenting.

Program

The programme is available on this page.

Deniz Atalar

(university of Cambridge)

will give a presentation on

Plastic Turkey: International leakages of China's waste contamination policy

Abstract :

Practical Details

The Leuven-Louvain Trade workshops are held online (Zoom). If you would like to attend, please contact :

• Serana Chellini (KULeuven)
• Charles de Pierpont de Burnot (UCLouvain)

Wenke Yang

(Southeast University)

will give a presentation on

 “Do blue barriers put on a good face?"

Practical Details

The Leuven-Louvain Trade workshops are held online (Zoom). If you would like to attend, please contact :

• Serana Chellini (KULeuven)
• Charles de Pierpont de Burnot (UCLouvain)

Sekyu Choi

(University of Bristol)

will give a presentation on

What She/He Wants in a Job

Abstract: In this paper we study preference heterogeneity by gender over job characteristics. Using information of both job postings and job seekers from an online job board, we document how job search behavior is strongly influenced by described job characteristics. We proceed in several steps: first, we define consideration sets of job ads for applicants using the network formed by job applicants, where each node is defined by joint applications by job seekers. Second, using text analysis of job descriptions, we identify jobs in terms of requirements and explicit diversity statements, along other characteristics. Third, we estimate application choice decisions by individuals on our entire sample. We document dimensions of jobs which attract females more than males, such as female-wanted, remote work, inclusive policies, and minorities recruiting. We also show that, while all individuals with higher wage expectations prefer inclusive policies, this is stronger for women. Finally, a social-interaction effects model also allows us to estimate that applicants prefer jobs with fewer expected applications, an effect that is larger for females. By providing evidence across the entire wage distribution, this paper differs markedly from most of the related literature, where either experimental settings or surveys of narrow segments of the labor market (e.g., economics undergraduates) may show only part of the story in terms of the root causes of gender differences in labor market outcomes.

Jeffrey Campbell

(University of Notre Dame)

will give a presentation on

Effective Time-Consistent Quantitative Easing under Ricardian Equivalence

Abstract: This paper considers monetary and fiscal policy when tangible assets can be created and stored after shocks that increase desired savings. The model's flexible-price allocation uses saving to smooth consumption. With nominal rigidities, monetary policy that eliminates liquidity traps leaves the economy vulnerable to confidence recessions with low consumption and investment. Real Quantitative Easing, a fiscal policy that purchases either obligations collateralized by reproducible tangible assets or the assets themselves, eliminates both liquidity traps and confidence recessions by putting a floor under future consumption. This requires no commitment to a time-inconsistent plan. In a small open economy, the monetary authority can implement Real Quantitative Easing with a sterilized currency-market intervention that accumulates foreign reserves. This can improve outcomes even if it leaves nominal exchange rates unchanged.

Luigi Boggian

(IRSS / IRES)

will give a presentation on

Prescribing Equality: Minding the Gap in Anxiolytics and Antidepressants Prescriptions between Immigrants and Natives in Spain

Abstract: Fair access to pharmacological and non-pharmacological mental health treatments for immigrants is essential to reach health equity goals and to support immigrants’ integration. Several studies document country-specific inequalities between immigrants and natives in the prevalence and incidence of anxiety and depression disorders. Using administrative data on health and healthcare from Spain, this paper explores inequalities between natives and immigrant groups in doctors’ prescriptions for benzodiazepines (BZDs) and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Both disparities in drug access and in the quantity of medication consumed for BZDs and SSRIs are investigated. All analyses are adjusted to standard demographic and socioeconomic individual controls, areas of origin to define immigrant groups, and doctors’ diagnoses of health problems as a measure of needs for medications. Regression results show that all immigrant groups are less likely than natives to be prescribed BZDs and SSRIs, and this persists in particular among diagnosed individuals. In addition, I find that all immigrant groups receive fewer units of BZD and SSRI medications. By also controlling for time-varying predictors, including a vector of weather variables across provinces over the 12 months of 2018, I show that immigrants are less treated both in terms of number of monthly prescriptions and in terms of monthly defined daily doses, a standardised measure of drug consumption capturing the quantity of active principle.  Disparities in BZDs and SSRIs prescriptions can reflect barriers in drug access, differences in individual preferences, as well as cultural beliefs and stigmatisation of mental health services.

Anna Gasten

(University of Göttingen)

will give a presentation on

Are FDI restrictions inducing international migration? Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract:  Using disaggregated dyadic panel data on international migration flows from Indonesian districts, this paper provides causal evidence for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and international migration being substitutes. Our empirical analysis exploits regulatory changes in the Negative Investment List, a product-specific FDI policy, that have been implemented by the Indonesian government from 2007 to 2014. Using a shift-share approach to measure the district-country-pair-level exposure to the sector-specific tightening of FDI regulation, we analyze the impact of changes in bilateral FDI inflows on international migratory movements of the population living in FDI receiving areas. We document that relative reductions in dyadic FDI inflows in the aftermath of the reform triggered an increase in emigration to the investor countries, especially among those with tertiary education.

Programme

Registration

Attendance is free, but registration is compulsory via this link.

Venue

This year the Annual Christmas Meeting of Belgian Economist will take place at Ghent University.

Yannik Schenk

soutiendra publiquement sa dissertation pour l'obtention du grade de Doctorat en sciences économiques et de gestion

“Climate, Migration and Intolerance: Three Essays in Empirical Economics”

Abstract

The ongoing surge in migration over recent decades introduces constantly evolving challenges for both the societies of origin and those hosting migrants. This thesis revolves around three central themes, spanning from the pivotal role of climate change as a driver of migration, to the interplay of police communication, right-wing populism, and social media discourse in host societies, and the potential of progressive radio programming to foster a more tolerant society.

The first chapter delves into the link between climate change and its impact on internal mobility in Senegal, where millions depend on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods. Combining data on migration histories of 13 million individuals, with remotely sensed data on local climatic conditions, we uncover that droughts have reduced medium to long-run migration from rural to urban areas. Severe financial constraints that limit costly migratory moves for individuals dependent on agricultural income are the most likely explanation for our results.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus away from the drivers of migration to potential challenges in host societies. Drawing upon a unique dataset of over 1.5 million police press releases and corresponding Twitter conversations in Germany, we probe the impact of disclosing perpetrators' national origins in crime reports on the discourse on social networks. Employing an instrumental variable approach that exploits variations in press release authorship, we isolate the causal effects. Our findings reveal that disclosing nationalities boosted user engagement with respective press releases and triggered an upsurge in hateful posts.

Adhering to the theme of media and inter-group intolerance, the third Chapter focuses on the iconic radio show "The Adventures of Superman" and its role in promoting tolerance and confronting the bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan in 1946. Through state-of-the-art radio propagation models and comprehensive analysis of a sudden and sharp shift in the story arcs of the of the broadcast, we document the program its profound effects on socioeconomic outcomes. Our findings unveil a remarkable reduction in support for segregationist political candidates, along with enduring effects on attitudes toward racial desegregation, interracial relationships, and participation in the Vietnam war.

Résumé 

L'augmentation constante des migrations au cours des dernières décennies pose des défis en constante évolution tant pour les sociétés d'origine des migrants que pour celles qui les accueillent. Cette thèse s'articule autour de trois thèmes centraux : le rôle central du changement climatique comme moteur de la migration, l'interaction entre communication policière, populisme de droite réseaux sociaux dans les sociétés d'accueil, et le potentiel des programmes radiophoniques progressistes pour favoriser une société plus tolérante.

Le premier chapitre examine le lien entre le changement climatique et son impact sur la mobilité interne au Sénégal, où des millions de personnes dépendent de l'agriculture pluviale pour leur subsistance. En combinant des données sur l'historique des migrations de 13 millions d'individus et des données de télédétection sur les conditions climatiques locales, cette étude montre que les sécheresses ont considérablement ? réduit les migrations des zones rurales vers les zones urbaines à moyen et long terme. Ces résultats s'expliquent très probablement par de graves contraintes financières qui limitent les mouvements migratoires coûteux pour les personnes qui dépendent des revenus agricoles.

Le deuxième chapitre 2 adopte un angle d’analyse différents de celui des moteurs de la migration pour s'intéresser aux défis potentiels dans les sociétés d'accueil. En nous appuyant sur un ensemble de données unique de plus de 1,5 million de communiqués de presse de la police et des conversations correspondantes sur Twitter en Allemagne, nous étudions l'impact de la divulgation de la nationalités des auteurs de crimes dans les rapports officiels sur le discours des réseaux sociaux. En utilisant une approche de variable instrumentale qui exploite les variations dans l’identité des policiers chargées de rédiger ces rapports, nous isolons les effets causaux. Nos résultats révèlent que la divulgation des nationalités stimule l'engagement des utilisateurs à l'égard des communiqués de presse respectifs et suscite une augmentation des messages haineux.

Dans le cadre du thème des médias et de l'intolérance entre les groupes, le troisième chapitre se concentre sur l'émission de radio emblématique "The Adventures of Superman" et son rôle dans la promotion de la tolérance et la lutte contre le fanatisme du Ku Klux Klan en 1946. Grâce à des modèles de propagation radiophonique de pointe et à une analyse complète d'un changement soudain et brutal dans le narratif de l'émission, nous documentons des effets substantiels de l'émission sur des indicateurs socio-économiques. Nos résultats révèlent une réduction remarquable du soutien aux candidats politiques ségrégationnistes, ainsi que des effets durables sur les attitudes à l'égard de la fin de la ségrégation raciale, des relations interraciales et de la participation à la guerre du Vietnam.

Membres du jury 

Prof. Frédéric Docquier (LISER), co-promoteur
Prof. Joseph F. Gomes (UCLouvain), co-promoteur/secrétaire du jury
Prof. Jean-Francois Maystadt (UCLouvain), présidente du jury
Prof. Hillel Rapoport (PSE), évaluateur externe
Prof. Mathias Thoenig (University of Lausanne), évaluateur externe

Coralie Helleputte

soutiendra publiquement sa dissertation, pour l'obtention du titre de Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de Gestion

« Evaluation de l’impact (social) et impact de l’évaluation dans les entreprises sociales : une recherche transdisciplinaire »

Résumé : Si les entreprises sociales sont soumises à des pressions grandissantes pour évaluer leur impact social, l’implémentation d’une telle évaluation soulève de nombreux enjeux épistémologiques, méthodologiques, politiques et organisationnels. C’est dans ce contexte que la thèse vise à approfondir les connaissances sur la mise en œuvre d’une évaluation d’impact social au-delà des discours, sur base d’expériences concrètes qui s’inscrivent dans un temps long. Par une démarche de recherche transdisciplinaire, constructiviste, mixte et critique, elle éclaire ces différentes questions : Quels effets peuvent être mis en évidence à travers une évaluation d’impact social ? Comment une entreprise sociale peut-elle surmonter les considérations conflictuelles qui émergent au cours d’un processus (formel) d’évaluation d’impact social ? Quels effets l’évaluation d’impact social peut-elle générer sur une entreprise sociale ? Comment une entreprise sociale peut-elle développer un outil de suivi de l’impact social approprié (pertinent et accepté) ?

Membre du Jury

Pr. Laurent Taskin (UCLouvain), Président
Pre. Anaïs Périlleux (UCLouvain), Promotrice
Pre. Marthe Nyssens (UCLouvain),
Pre. Sybille Mertens (ULiège)
MCF Laurent Gardin (Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France-)
 

Pour la bonne organisation de celle-ci, merci de bien vouloir signaler votre présence à Coralie Helleputte via ce formulaire.

Bas Gorrens

(VIVES, KU Leuven)

will give a presentation on

 “Carbon Taxation, investment and leakage"

Abstract:

To get the zoom link, please contact Charles de Pierpont de Burnot

Emmanuel de Veirman

(De Nederlandsche Bank)

will give a presentation on

How Does the Phillips Curve Slope Relate to Repricing Rates?

Abstract: In sticky price models, the Phillips curve slope depends positively on the probability of price adjustment. I test this implication using a series for the empirical frequency of price adjustment. I find that empirically, the Phillips curve slope does depend positively on the repricing rate. My results support the implication from New Keynesian theory with Calvo pricing that the Phillips curve slope is a convex function of the repricing rate. However, at all observed values of the price adjustment frequency, the empirical Phillips curve is much flatter than sticky price models with Calvo pricing or state-dependent pricing would imply.

Antoine Germain

(CORE)

will give a presentation on

Working time regulations and redistribution

Abstract: All countries except the US are mandating paid time off. Why? In standard labor supply models, working time regulations are inefficient as they clash with individuals' own choices. In this paper, I provide a novel welfare analysis of any working time regulations. Labor is unbundled into jobs and hours worked while firms are controlling schedules. I find that careful combinations of minimum wages and working time reductions erode monopsony power and may redistribute efficiently from firms' positive profits to workers' welfare. I disaggregate these welfare gains and losses in a model with directed search and matching frictions. I show that the elasticity of profits and employment to the reform are sufficient statistics for policy evaluation.

Karine Moukkadem

(AMSE)

will give a presentation on

Arab Spring Protests and Women’s Marriage Outcomes:

Evidence from Egypt

Abstract: The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 has triggered important socio-economic changes directly affecting women, who have played an unprecedented role in protests. However, few has been said on the consequences of exposure to Arab Spring protests on the Egyptian marriage market outcomes, notably for women. Using a novel dataset from the Egypt Labour Market Panel Survey, this paper investigates the changes in marital payments, spousal characteristics and types of matches after the Arab Spring. Relying on governorate-level data, from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, on demonstrators who died during protests, I exploit the variation in local exposure intensity to run a difference-in-difference strategy. I find that an increase of exposure to protests' intensity of 1 percentage point is associated with a decline of 1.4% in the average bride price paid by the groom and his family at marriage to women married after 2011. It however increases the average deferred dower promised by the grooms in case of separation by 5.6%. This suggests that there might be a substitution effect between the two main types of marital payments. I also show that the higher exposure rises the probability of marrying a blood-related of 0.3% in most exposed governorates, which is in line with lower bride price levels.

Jing-Rong Zeng

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

In Search of Lost Peace: The Local Effects of Peacekeepers on Conflict Dynamics in Africa

Abstract: This study investigates the influence of peacekeeping intervention on the evolution of local conflict intensity, offering the first quantitative insights into their long-term effectiveness. Using a robust difference-in-differences approach and an event study design, it captures dynamic treatment effects annually post-deployment. The findings initially suggest a promising reduction in local fatalities due to the peacekeepers’ presence. However, accounting for unobserved country-specific differential trends nullifies the positive impacts. Upon peacekeepers’ withdrawal, local conflict may further escalate. Comparably, there is little evidence that peacekeepers are beneficial for revitalizing local economic activities, as indicated by nighttime lights.

Given the complex nature of peacekeeping operations amidst concurrent peace talks and political agreements, the study underscores the importance of country-specific macro trends. The paper diverges significantly from previous literature, which generally indicates a positive impact of peacekeepers’ presence on short-term conflict reduction. In contrast, the study provides evidence suggesting that the mere presence of peacekeepers may not be the primary causal factor in conflict stabilization. Furthermore, the results on the nightlights raise questions regarding the extent to which a peace dividend exists and highlight the challenges of economic recovery in conflict-affected areas.

Andrew Rhodes

(Toulouse School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Personalization and Privacy Choice

Abstract: This paper studies consumers' privacy choices when firms can use their data to make personalized offers. We first introduce a general framework of personalization and privacy choice, and then apply it to personalized recommendations, personalized prices, and personalized product design. We argue that due to firms' reaction in the product market, consumers who choose to share their data often impose a negative externality on other consumers. Due to this privacy-choice externality, too many consumers share their data relative to the consumer optimum; moreover, more competition, or improvements in data security, can reduce aggregate consumer surplus by encouraging more consumers to share their data.

Joint with Jidong Zhou.

Carmen Camacho

(Paris School of Economics)

will give a presentation on

Pollution diffusion, limited production factors, non-monotonic growth and the emergence of spatially heterogeneous steady states

Abstract: We develop a spatial growth model for an agricultural economy where pollution diffuses in the soil. At each location, the only production factor is fertile soil, which is at the same time naturally bounded by the amount of available land, and eventually exposed to pollution diffused from neighboring locations. We develop a novel technique to obtain the policymaker’s optimal solution, which is analytical in the case of an homogeneous economy and covers all cases, for impatience rates ranging from almost zero to extremely high. When agents are very patient, the policymaker starts by making fully fertile all land before allowing for positive consumption. For slightly more impatient agents, the policymaker will allow for some consumption from the beginning, in the cleaning-up stage. With time, abatement stops, consumption raises and land becomes fully polluted in the long term. We provide with some general results for the general spatially heterogeneous economy and its long-run, completing our study with some numerical exercises. Worth noting, simulations reveal that also in the non-homogeneous economy, optimal consumption may transit through four different stages in time, responding to changes in fertile land and not necessarily in a smooth manner.

Florian Schuett

(KULeuven)

will give a presentation on

Platform Design and Rent Extraction

Abstract: We study the design of online platforms that aggregate information and facilitate transactions. Leading players in the industry hold two types of platforms in their portfolio: revealing platforms that disclose the identity of transaction partners (like Booking.com) and anonymous platforms that do not (like Hotwire.com). Anonymous platforms offer discounts but lead to inefficient matching between consumers and firms. We develop a model in which horizontally differentiated firms sell to heterogeneous consumers both directly and via a platform that enlarges the pool of consumers they can attract. The platform charges firms for transactions it intermediates and can choose to offer an anonymous sales channel in addition to a revealing one. We show that offering both sales channels is profitable not only because it allows the platform to implement price discrimination, as suggested by the literature on opaque selling, but also because it improves rent extraction. The anonymous channel breaks the link between the price on the revealing channel and the firms' outside option; moreover, it can reduce double marginalization. The welfare impact of the anonymous channel is ambiguous: while it sometimes leads to market expansion, it also causes inefficiently high transport costs.

(joint with Amedeo Piolatto)

Sarah Langlotz

(University of Goettingen)

will give a presentation on

Terrorist Propaganda

Abstract: This paper examines the influence of Islamic State (IS) propaganda on public opinion in Afghanistan. We leverage granular survey data to investigate how plausibly exogenous exposure to IS content influences views towards local and international forces. We employ two distinct designs. First, we leverage high-frequency time variation in IS content and survey data collection to investigate how global videos distributed digitally impact local attitudes. Second, we exploit plausibly exogenous signal penetration of a prominent IS radio tower in Nangahar province constructed during the sample period to evaluate how analog transmissions impact civilian preferences in Eastern Afghanistan. Our findings suggest that thematic variation in content and timing matters.

(Joint work with Travers Child, Rossella De Sabbata, Kai Gehring, and Austin Wright).

Laura Gati

(European Central Bank )

will give a presentation on

Monetary communication rules

Abstract: Does the Federal Reserve follow a communication rule? We propose a simple framework to estimate communication rules, which we conceptualize as a systematic mapping between the Fed’s expectations of macroeconomic variables and the words they use to talk about the economy. Using text analysis and regularized regressions, we find strong evidence for systematic communication rules that vary over time, with changes in the rule often being associated with changes in the economic environment. We also find that shifts in communication rules increase disagreement among professional forecasters and correlate with monetary policy surprise measures. Our method is general and can be applied to investigate systematic communication in a wide variety of settings.

Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

(IRES/LIDAM)

Globalization and the urban-rural divide in France

Abstract: The growing economic divide between globalized urban centers and left-behind rural places is a powerful narrative in many countries. This paper uses rich administrative micro data to quantify whether urban-rural economic linkages have decreased in France over the period 1995-2015. In a set of reduced form exercises, we first show that employment growth in urban areas outperformed the rest of the country, especially in the second half of the period. This happens at the same time as a reduction in positive spillovers of urban growth to neighboring rural areas. We then build and calibrate a spatial general equilibrium model of trade and migration featuring a variety of linkages. We find little evidence of disappearing links between urban and rural territories, and no role for globalization on economic linkages between urban and rural areas.

Joint with F. Mayneris and D. Verdini

Diego Malo Rico

(IRES/LIDAM)

will give a presentation on

Ethnic Remoteness Reduces the Peace Dividend from Trade Access

Abstract: This paper shows that ethnically remote locations do not reap the full peace dividend from increased market access. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the U.S.-initiated Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and using high resolution data on ethnic composition and violent conflict for sub-Saharan Africa, our analysis finds that in the wake of improved trade access conflict declines less in locations that are ethnically remote from the rest of the country. We hypothesize that ethnic remoteness acts as a barrier that hampers participation in the global economy. Consistent with this hypothesis, satellite-based luminosity data show that the income gains from improved trade access are smaller in ethnically remote locations, and survey data indicate that ethnically more distant individuals do not benefit from the same positive income shocks when exposed to increased market access. These results underscore the importance of ethnic barriers when analysing which locations and groups might be left behind by globalization.

Kam Pui Tsang

(KU Leuven)

will give a presentation on

Sanctioning forced labour in China: Evidence from the US cotton ban

Abstract: Over the last two decades, the use of targeted sanctions has been on the rise. A more recent phenomenon has been the rise of humanitarian sanctions aiming at curbing human rights abuses and corruption. Our paper focuses on the region-wide cotton ban imposed by the US government on the importation of cotton-containing products from Xinjiang since December 2020 as a case study. Using a triple-differences strategy, we observe that the US's sanction reduces the export of sanctioned products from China to the US by 20% at the intensive margin and 5 percentage points at the extensive margin. Regions such as Xinjiang and other Chinese provinces, which heavily relied on Xinjiang for cotton-containing materials, experienced more substantial losses due to the cotton ban. Additionally, we identify negative but significant spillover effects of the US's sanction on the export of cotton-containing products from China to the EU, despite the EU not imposing any trade sanctions against Chinese products. By delving into various mechanisms, the study suggests that the fear of reputational damage linked to the utilization of Xinjiang cotton-containing products could explain the observed negative spillover effects.

Mathilde Pourtois

(IRIS-L)

will give a presentation on

Tightening Eligibility Requirements for Unemployment Benefits: Impact on Housing Autonomy

Abstract: Leaving the parental home is a pivotal event in the life of every individual, marking the first step towards an independent adult life. In the economic literature, the role of the state in influencing the timing of the transition out of the parental home has been relatively understudied. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the causal link between welfare generosity and housing autonomy. Specifically, we analyse the impact of a reform that tightened the eligibility requirements for the activation allowance - a youth-specific unemployment insurance in Belgium - on the decision to leave the parental home. We use a difference-in-differences strategy for estimating the causal impact of this reform. While the overall impact on young adults' decisions to stay at their parental home is negligible when considering both genders together, a deeper analysis reveals gender-differentiated reactions. Notably, the reform significantly influences young men's decisions to remain at the parental home. In contrast, young women demonstrate adaptability by increasing their participation in the labour market. Our paper highlights how a similar financial incentive can provoke gender-specific behavioural reactions.

Michael Waugh

(Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis)

will give a presentation on

Heterogeneous Agent Trade

Abstract: This paper studies the implications of household heterogeneity for trade. I develop a model where household heterogeneity is induced via incomplete markets and results in heterogeneous price elasticities. Conditional on exposure to trade, heterogeneous price elasticities imply that different households value price changes differently, and thus rich and poor households experience different gains from trade. I calibrate the model to match bilateral trade flows and micro-facts about household-level expenditure patterns and elasticities. I find gains from trade that are pro-poor and that the average gains from trade are substantially larger than representative agent benchmarks.

Matthias Doepke

(LSE)

will give a presentation on

The Political Economy of Laws to `Protect' Women

Abstract: During the first half of the 20th century, the US introduced state laws that imposed restrictions on women's labor market opportunities. This so-called `protective legislation' included minimum wage laws for women, maximum hours laws, requirements to provide chairs for female employees, and restrictions on working the night shift. Eventually, these laws were lifted in the 1960s and 1970s through a series of Acts and Supreme Court rulings, such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  In this paper, we investigate the political economy of both the introduction and the repeal of these laws. Specifically, we investigate the hypothesis that labor market competition from women was the main driver of political change. To do so, we first use a political economy model to spell out the mechanism. Second, we show that when calibrated to US data, the model explains both the rise and fall of protective labor legislation remarkably well. Third, we use new and comprehensive cross-state data to provide empirical evidence for the mechanism and contrast these findings to alternative explanations.

(with Hanno Foerster, Anne Hannusch and  Michele Tertilt)

Victoire Girard

(Nova Lisbon)

will give a presentation on

Artisanal mining in Africa: Green for gold?

Abstract: The livelihoods of 130 to 270 million people depend on artisanal mining, a labor-intensive and often informal extractive activity. Leveraging research in geology and exogenous changes in gold prices, we build the first continent-wide proxy of artisanal gold mining. We show that the historical increase in the gold price is responsible for 8% of deforestation continent-wide, 28% in gold areas. Artisanal gold mining also increases local economic wealth, but the magnitude of these economic impacts is comparatively modest. Turning to mechanisms, the primary driver of deforestation appears to be the mining activity itself, while mining-induced changes in human settlements or local demand have limited impacts. The final section investigates potential policy solutions.

Fabio Blasutto

(ULB)

will give a presentation on

Pension Caregiver Credits and the Gender Gap in Old-Age Income

Abstract: We study a 2001 pension insurance reform in Germany that introduced additional caregiver credits for working mothers with children between the ages of 3 and 10. Using administrative social security data from Germany combined with a difference-in-differences design, we find that the reform leads to a 66.5% increase in yearly retirement contributions during the eligibility period. 66% of the total effect can be explained by a change in the labor market outcomes of eligible mothers, while the remaining 34% is the mechanical effect of the reform. We find a significant increase in employment earnings, driven by both an increase in employment and a switch from marginal to employment subject to social security contributions. This translates into a 9.1 percentage point (18.3%) reduction in the gender gap in lifetime non-marginal earning points. Finally, a simple life-cycle model predicts that the pension reform leads to a 9.8% increase in retirement income and a 12% reduction in the gender gap in old-age income.

(with Ashley Wong and Francesca Truffa)

Patrick Arni

(University of Bristol)

will giva a presentation on

TBA

Abstract:

Louvain FRESH Workshop 2024

Institutions, human capital, and long-term development:

Lessons from pre-modern Europe.

Organizers

David de la Croix (UCLouvain), Sandra de Pleijt ( Wageningen University), Paula Gobbi (ULB).

Programme

June 23^th

19:00-22:00 Informal dinner for early arrivers at "Le Cambridge".

June 24^th

June 25^th

Venue

The workshop will take place at the Foyer Royal of the Louvain House (1st floor of the Louvain House)

The address of the Louvain House is :

For those staying at the Martin's Hotel, the Louvain House is next to the hotel.

How to get to the Louvain House ?

Sponsors

Programme of the IRES Afternoon

Charles de Pierpont de Burnot

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

The Legacy of the Roman Empire Network Integration in the Western European Trade

Abstract: This research examines the path-dependence relationship between economic integration in Western Europe under Roman rule from 75BC to 200AC and economic integration between the current European regions, intending to determine whether the border effect observed in the trade literature is mitigated by previous economic integration. Based on gravity models that allow the role of several geographical factors and current trade costs to be excluded from the estimates, it provides preliminary results supporting that European NUTS2 regions that were highly integrated through the Roman Roads Network under the Roman Empire were still more economically integrated in the early 21st century.

If you would like to attend the seminar, please send an e-mail to Charles de Pierpont de Burnot or to Serena Chellini to get the details of the online meeting.

Serena Chellini

(KU Leuven)

will give a presentation on

Trade Liberalization and Green Transformations within Firms

Abstract:

If you would like to attend the seminar, please send an e-mail to Charles de Pierpont de Burnot or to Serena Chellini to get the details of the online meeting.

Natalie Chen

(University of Warwick)

will give a presentation on

Trade diversion and labor market outcomes

Abstract: In 2018 the US administration has increased tariffs on imports from China. Do these tariffs merely reduce imports from China into the US, or do they at the same time lead to more imports from other countries such as Mexico? Standard trade theory predicts that a change in relative trade costs leads to trade diversion. The aim of this paper is to test this proposition empirically using detailed Mexican firm-level export and import data. We find evidence of trade diversion from China to Mexico as higher US tariffs against China have increased Mexico's export growth to the US. Higher US tariffs against China have also reduced Mexico's export growth to China and increased Mexico's import growth from the US. We then combine the trade data with matched employer-employee data to investigate the labor market outcomes of formal workers employed in Mexico's manufacturing sector. We find that trade diversion has increased the demand for labor of firms exposed to higher US tariffs against China, with low-wage individuals including female, unskilled, and younger workers experiencing a disproportionate increase in employment and wages.

Anna Maria Mayda

(Georgetown University)

will give a presentation on

Do immigrants hurt local public finances? Evidence from Italy

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the causal impact of immigration to Italy on local public finances, at the municipality level (Comuni), between 2008 and 2015. We make use of administrative data from SIOPE and MEF to analyze revenues and expenditures disaggregated by type. We find that, when immigrants arrive, total (current plus capital) revenues increase while total expenditures are not affected, giving rise to an increase in the surplus of the municipality (all outcome variables in the paper are defined in per capita terms). The arrival of immigrants increases current revenues and, in particular, property tax revenues, fees and other revenues, as well as transfers from other levels of government. We show that there is an increase in property tax revenues from “secondary residences,” which are often rented out and are subject to higher taxation compared to owner-occupied units. On the expenditure side, immigrant inflows lead to greater current spending in total and on various items such as: garbage collection, local police, cultural programs, and public transportation. Capital expenditures decrease instead when immigrants arrive.

joint with Rama D. Mariani (Roma Tre University), Furio C. Rosati (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”) and Antonio Sparacino (Bank of Italy)

Amma Panin

(CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Do Exclusionary Policies Reduce Cognitive Bandwidth and Harm Economic Outcomes of Marginalized Groups?

Abstract: Ethno-nationalist governments frequently adopt policies that challenge the status of target ethnic minorities as equal members of the nation. Such policies – even when purely symbolic – may have tangible consequences for the marginalized groups they target. We propose that exclusionary policies negatively impact the cognitive bandwidth of individuals belonging to marginalized groups. We test this hypotheses in India, where the party in power, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), promotes a nationalist ideology that favours Hindus over Muslims. We employ close to 1000 workers in the Indian state of West Bengal to work on basic data entry and information processing tasks. We randomize whether workers encounter content that mentions either symbolic or material exclusionary policies (or placebo policies). We measure how exposure to exclusionary policies affects productivity in a separate, unrelated transcription task. We also give workers the opportunity to select one of two payment contracts, and we measure how treatment changes the probability of choosing the “wrong” contract in terms of earnings. Our main outcomes are accompanied by cognitively demanding tests (such as, Raven’s Matrices and a numerical Stroop task) that allow us to establish whether the treatments increase cognitive load as hypothesised.

Esther Arenas Arroyo

(Vienna University)

will give a presentation on

Low-Wage Jobs, Foreign-Born Workers, and Firm Performance

Abstract:

We examine how migrant workers impact firm performance using administrative data from the United States. Exploiting an unexpected change in firms' likelihood of securing low-wage workers through the H-2B visa program, we find limited crowd-out of other forms of employment and no impact on average pay at the firm. Yet, access to H-2B workers raises firms' annual revenues and survival likelihood. Our results are consistent with the notion that guest worker programs can help address labor shortages without inflicting large losses on incumbent workers.

Tiziano Toniolo

IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain

will give a presentation on

In-work benefits and labour supply: Analysis of the introduction and expansion of the social work bonus for Belgium

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the introduction and subsequent expansion of the social work bonus, a payroll tax reduction with legal incidence on low-wage employees in Belgium. Using administrative individual panel data, we evaluate the effects of the policy on labour market outcomes, including participation in salaried employment, number of days worked, and wages.

Giorgos Morakis

(IMT Lucca)

will give a presentation on

“Indirect Exporters in the Global Value Chain"

Elisa Navarra

(ULB)

will give a presentation on

The Effects of Corporate Subsidies Along Supply Chains

Pauline Corblet

(NYU Abu Dhabi)

will give a presentation on

The Impact of Education Expansions on Life-cycle Earnings

Abstract: I evidence changes in wage profiles over the life-cycle between the late 1990s and 2010s in France. Young labor market entrants enjoy higher wages than more senior workers at the same age but experience a flatter wage progression. These decreasing returns to experience are especially salient among higher education graduates: the cohort that entered the labor market in 1998 benefited from 5.8% yearly wage increases in their early career, while the cohort that started working in 2010 only obtained 4.2% increases. To conjointly explain the higher starting wages and flatter wage progression, I build a model of human capital acquisition over the life cycle, which features two occupations that differ by the amount of human capital they allow workers to accumulate. Through the lens of the model, I show that an educational expansion leads to occupation downgrading, which in turn produces the two empirical facts outlined previously.

Jaime Marques Pereira

(Lancaster University Management School)

will give a presentation on

Trumping the News: A High-Frequency Analysis

Abstract: Does mainstream media actively amplifies politicians' social media statements, and does this amplification influence individuals' political opinions? I first study cable news coverage of Donald J. Trump's tweets using novel high-frequency coverage measures for CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. I show that Trump was able to set the agenda of cable news outlets through Twitter, with cable outlets covering his tweets minutes after these had been posted. I then leverage a large public opinion survey to investigate the impact of TV coverage of Trump's tweets on public opinion. I find that CNN's primetime coverage of Donald J. Trump's tweets caused CNN viewers to decrease their approval of President Trump hours after coverage. Conversely, primetime coverage on Fox News resulted in an increase in President Trump's approval ratings among Fox News viewers. These findings shed light on a new channel through which social media impacts political opinions.

Edwin Fourrier-Nicolaï

(University of Trento)

will give a presentation on

Digital Technologies and Firm's Employment and Training

Abstract:This study examines the causal influence of digital technologies, specifically operational (ODT) and information digital technologies (IDT), on firms’ employment structure using Italian firm level data. It employs a unique empirical approach, constructing instrumental variables based on predetermined employment composition and global technological progress, proxied by patents. Findings indicate that IDT investment positively affects employment, favoring a skilled, IT-competent workforce, as supported by firms’ training and recruitment plans. Conversely, ODT investment does not significantly alter total employment but skews the workforce towards temporary contracts. The study contributes methodologically by distinguishing between ODT and IDT and highlighting nuanced employment dynamics within firms.

Lan Lin

(Peking University)

will give a presentation on

Digital Imports and Firm-Level Employment

Abstract:

Huixin Bi

(Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City)

will give a presentation on

Dynamics of Job Search Effort and Vacancies: Evidence from Classified Advertisements

Abstract: We introduce a new dataset of job search effort and vacancies from the early twentieth century, providing new insights of the response of search effort to labor market conditions. Combining scanned images of U.S. newspapers with morphological operations, we construct local and national measures of job posts placed by both firms and job seekers in the classified advertisements. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically document and use the ``situation-wanted'' advertisements placed by job seekers. We use moments from our national measures to discipline a model of equilibrium search effort by the unemployed to examine its implications for labor market dynamics.

(joint with  Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Nora Traum, and Greg Woodward)

Patrick Arni

(University of Bristol)

will give a presentation on

Heterogeneous Impacts of Trade Shocks on Workers

Abstract: This paper identifies the causal effects of trade shocks on worker outcomes. We exploit a unique setting based on three pillars: (i) a large, unanticipated appreciation of the Swiss franc in 2015, (ii) detailed data with firm-level exposure to trade via output markets (both domestic and foreign) and imported inputs (distinguished by their foreign labor content), which we match to (iii) worker-level panel data with rich information on labor-market outcomes. We find that increased competition in output markets induces negative effects on earnings for workers of affected firms. Conversely, a price drop of foreign inputs generates positive effects for workers of importing firms, but less so the higher the labor content of these imported inputs. All these patterns are consistent with a parsimonious model of task-based production. Moreover, positive and negative earnings effects are especially strong for workers in the lower tail of the within-firm wage distribution and, in particular, for workers who change their employer, pointing at involuntary (voluntary) job separations from firms that are negatively (positively) affected by the exchange rate appreciation.

(joint with Peter H. Egger, Katharina Erhardt, Matthias Gubler, Philip Sauré)

Riccardo Turati

(Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

will give a presentation on

Digging Up Trenches: Populism, Selective Mobility & the Political Polarization of Italian Municipalities

Abstract: We study the effect of local exposure to populism on net population movements by citizenship status, gender, age and education level in the context of Italian municipalities. We present two research designs to estimate the causal effect of populist attitudes and policies. Initially, we use a combination of collective memory and trigger variables as an instrument for the variation in populist vote shares across national elections. Subsequently, we apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor on population movements. We find three converging results. First, the exposure to both populist attitudes and policies, as manifested by the vote share of populist parties in national elections or the close-election of a new populist mayor, reduces the attractiveness of municipalities and leads to larger population outflows. Second, the effect is particularly pronounced for young, female, and highly educated natives, who tend to move across Italian municipalities rather than internationally. Third, we find no effect on the foreign population. Our results highlight a foot-voting mechanism that may contribute to a political polarization in Italian municipalities.

(with L. Bellodi, F. Docquier, S. Iandolo and M. Morelli)

The Spring Session of the Doctoral Workshop 2024 will take place on Friday, May 31, 2024 at the Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve.

The workshop will be followed by a Cheese&Wine in the evening.

Registration

To register, please fill in this form.

The registration deadline for presenters is May 20, 2024. For non-presenters who wish to join the lunch and/or cheese & wine the deadline is May 24.

Types of sessions

• Short session: 20’ presentation + 10’ questions
• Regular session: 30’ presentation + 5’ questions
• Job market session: 45’ presentation + 10’ discussant + 5’ questions

Programme

More information?

If you would like to get further information, please visit the website of the Doctoral Workshop.

Venue

LECL61 and LECL62
Place Montesquieu 1
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve

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(University of Manchester)

will give a presentation on

Welfare Consequences of Anti-Avoidance Measures:
Evidence from Uganda

Abstract: Profit shifting by MNCs is a major drain on resources of developing countries. UNCTAD estimates that stopping profit shifting could cut in half the annual financing gap of $200 billion African countries face to achieve their Sustainable Development Goals. Thin capitalization, whereby MNCs use intra-firm debt to shift profits out of high-tax jurisdictions, is a major channel for profit shifting. In this project, we have partnered with the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) to estimate the magnitude of profit shifting from Uganda through thin capitalization by MNCs. The project leverages a tax reform introduced in Uganda in 2018 through which the country introduced the measures proposed by Action 4 of OECD, strengthening its enforcement regime against tax-motivated profit shifting. Using the universe of corporate tax returns, we estimate how much revenue Uganda loses annually because of tax-motivated profit shifting through the thin capitalization channel. We find that the adoption of new measures led to a significant decrease in both the leverage and interest expenses of treated companies. Yet, there was no corresponding decrease in either profits or tax liability. The shift was also associated with a decline in real economic activity with the net book value of treated firms going down after the reform. Using these reduced-form effects, we estimate the welfare consequences of anti-avoidance measures in developing economies.

Andualem Assefa Welde

(University of Macerata)

will give a presentation on

Social Division and Preferences for Redistribution

Abstract: Why is income redistribution almost nonexistent in Sub-Saharan Africa, despite it being one of the most unequal regions? Rising inequality does not automatically lead to redistributive taxation. The main aim of this study is to identify the key factors that shape individual preference for redistribution policies, with an emphasis on issues related to social stratification, such as ethnic favoritism and discrimination. The study relies on data from the 8th round Afrobarometer survey (2019-2022) , which introduced a range of questions on redistribution.

Diego Malo Rico

(IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)

will give a presentation on

Economics or Culture? Social Identification in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract: This paper examines how an individual’s ethnic group’s economic status and its cultural distance from the nation affect their social identification in Sub-Saharan Africa. I use the agricultural value of each ethnic group as a proxy for economic status and measure cultural distance based on the linguistic distance of each ethnic group within its country. Focusing on ethnic versus national identification, I find that as the economic status of ethnically distant groups improves, individuals in these groups tend to identify more strongly with their ethnic group. Conversely, individuals from less ethnically distant groups increasingly identify with the nation as their group’s economic status rises. Additionally, the findings reveal that more superficial linguistic cleavages have a stronger impact on social identification than deeper linguistic differences, suggesting that people respond more strongly to easily recognized traits. These patterns highlight the potential for economic shifts to polarize identities, emphasizing the interconnected roles of economic conditions and cultural factors in shaping group affiliations.

Michael McMahon

(University of Oxford)

Will give a presentation on

Tough Talk: The Fed and the Risk Premium

Abstract: We study how monetary policy affects financial risk premia. Unlike existing studies, we focus on the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC’s) forward-looking policy stance, beyond the current announcement and macroeconomic forecasts, which we derive from the policymakers’private deliberations. A more hawkish policymakers’ stance in the FOMC meeting predicts lower risk premia during the intermeeting period. This effect is not explained by the content of the FOMC statement and unfolds gradually after the announcement. We document the importance of intermeeting communication via speeches and minutes to show how communicating forward-looking stance is vital in managing policy-induced risk perceptions.