LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar

The LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar is an informal forum where researcher present their work in progress in details and  receive criticism and feedback from colleagues. 

Presentations on the blackboard are also welcome. PhD students entering the job market this year are strongly encouraged to present their job market paper.

Practical details

Who are the Organizers? 

• Karine Moukaddem (Since March 2026)
• Silvia Peracchi
• Prof. Joseph Gomes

When does the LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar take place? 

The LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar takes place on Tuesdays from 12:45 to 14:00. 

Where does the LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar take place? 

The LIDAM Internal Economics Seminar takes place at the Doyen 22, Doyen Building, Place des doyens 1, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve. 

Book your sandwich

Sandwiches are provided to participants. To make sure to get one, do not forget to register by the Friday before the meeting by filling this form. 

Programme - Academic year 2025 - 2026

September

16 Johannes Johnen (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Consumer Protection in Economies with Limited Attention 

Abstract
We investigate the effects of consumer-protection regulations limiting post-purchase harm when there are many markets and consumers have limited attention to examine prices or product features. Such regulation lowers the attention necessary for valuable purchases, which can allow a consumer to purchase in more markets, or serve to induce competition. The first benefit is most important when few markets are regulated, while the second emerges when regulatory scope is sufficiently broad to create “spare” --- i.e., in equilibrium unused --- attention. Because little spare attention can enforce competition in many markets, consumer welfare can be highly non-linear in regulatory scope. The benefits of regulating a market often accrue in other markets, and there is a sense in which overly tight regulation outperforms overly lax regulation. Broad consumer protection can help the economy reach productive efficiency, and when this is achieved less regulation may suffice.

(joint with Paul Heidhues and Botond Koszegi)

23 Marco Pinchetti (Banque de France)
Geopolitical Risk and Inflation: The Role of Energy Markets

Abstract

Geopolitical shocks are not all alike – different classes of geopolitical shocks can have different macroeconomic implications, particularly on inflation. This paper exploits the comovement between the Geopolitical Risk Index (GPR) and oil prices across major geopolitical events to disentangle two types of geopolitical shocks within a structural VAR model for the US economy. The VAR estimates suggest that geopolitical shocks  associated with disruptions in energy markets are on average inflationary and contractionary. In contrast, geopolitical shocks associated with macroeconomic developments that are unrelated to energy markets are on average deflationary and contractionary. To validate this interpretation, the paper exploits the heterogeneity across sectoral output and prices of the US economy to show that a sector’s response to a geopolitical shock depends on its energy intensity. Sectors characterized by higher energy intensity are subject to larger output losses and price increases in response to geopolitical energy shocks.

30 Nathan Hancart (University of Oslo)
The Optimal Menu of Tests

Abstracts

A decision-maker can test a privately informed agent prior to making a decision. Instead of choosing the test himself, the decision-maker requires the agent to choose the test from a menu. By offering a menu, the decision-maker can use the agent’s choice as an additional source of information. The decision-maker must accept or reject the agent who always wants to be accepted. I show that the decision-maker does not benefit from commitment in this context. Using this result, I show in several economic environments when the decision-maker benefits from offering a choice of tests. When the set of feasible tests contains a most informative test, I provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the introduction of a less informative test in the optimal menu. I also show when the decision-maker benefits from a menu when tests vary in difficulty or types are multi-dimensional.

October

7 Kam Pui Tsang (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Dirty Green Transition: Chinese Critical Mineral Investment and Protest in Sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

China has become a leading investor in critical mineral extraction, a sector central to energy transition technologies. These investments often attract heightened scrutiny and are frequently associated with rising social unrest in host regions. This paper investigates how Chinese-owned critical mineral mining projects shape local protest dynamics across fifteen sub-Saharan African countries. Leveraging a novel panel dataset of geocoded Chinese critical mineral mining investments and a triple-differences design, I show that the opening of Chinese-owned mines raises the likelihood of local protest by 15 percentage points and increases protest events by 52% compared to similar non-Chinese mines. These effects are moderated in settings with stronger democratic institutions and higher-quality governance but show no consistent variation with measures of environmental sensitivity. Suggestive evidence points to substantial negative environmental externalities as a plausible channel linking Chinese critical mineral mining investment to elevated unrest.

14 Gianmarco Luu (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Deceptive Counterfeits and Consumer Protection

Abstract

Deceptive counterfeits—fake products that consumers purchase unintentionally—are an increasing concern in e-commerce, posing financial and health risks. Particularly dangerous examples include counterfeit pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronics, and automotive parts. We develop a model in which some consumers mistakenly believe fake products are genuine. Our first contribution is to introduce a framework where some consumers are harmed by fakes directly through unintentional purchases - the first model to directly analyze how deceptive counterfeits harm consumers. The extent of unintentional purchases depends on the degree of competition between counterfeit products and the authentic brand. We analyze two enforcement strategies: persecuting counterfeit sellers and providing authenticity aids. The effectiveness of these strategies depends on whether the brand competes for deceivable consumers. When a brand chooses to compete in this segment, both the brand and counterfeits offer the same price range. In such cases, authenticity aids can backfire—by shifting equilibrium prices, they may increase unintentional counterfeit purchases. Conversely, when a brand withdraws from competing for deceivable consumers—as in traditional counterfeit markets where fakes are more easily recognized—authenticity aids reduce counterfeit purchases. These findings highlight the importance of distinguishing between deceptive and non-deceptive counterfeits when designing effective anti-counterfeit policies. Finally, we study the incentives of a platform to fight deceptive fakes, arguing that more established platforms may have stronger incentives to protect consumers.

21 Margaux Clarr (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Strategic Drones

Abstract

US drone strikes are popular with the electorate and overseen by the President. This paper investigates whether the US President uses drone strikes strategically for political gain. We document that US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen are significantly more likely before US elections, when popularity has high payoffs. We find no changes for unpopular piloted airstrikes. Consistent with unusually high drone approvals, abnormally cloudy skies before US elections lead to a postponement or redirection of strikes to other target countries. To examine whether drone strikes are used strategically to divert attention from damaging media coverage, we gather closed captions from all cable TV coverage of the President and analyze their tone using natural language processing. Drone strikes are more likely in weeks when news anchors cover the President more negatively,  a relation that holds both during and outside of election periods. We find no such relationship for piloted airstrikes or during weeks of high news pressure.

28 Charles de Pierpont de Burnot (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
The Roman roots of the Western European trade linkages

Abstract

This research examines the persistent legacy of Roman integration in current trade linkages across Western Europe. Using a sample of 16,256 Western region pairs, it provides evidence that regions jointly integrated for a longer period within the Roman states trade significantly more with each other today. Part of this influence reflects subsequent political history, the current transport networks, which sometimes follow past Roman roads, as well as geographic features that may have induced trade without the Roman intervention, such as resource differences and geographic connectivity. However, a remaining sizeable part of the estimated net effect of the Roman rule is attributable to cultural convergence measured by preference and linguistic similarities. These findings highlight a long-lasting influence of past political and network (infra)structures on the European market integration.

November

4 Vincent Notte (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Exchange rate pass-through and monetary policy: a counterfactual SVAR analysis

Abstract

Understanding how exchange rate fluctuations are transmitted to inflation is critical for monetary policy design. While former literature finds that the exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) varies with the underlying shocks, it largely abstracts from the role of endogenous monetary policy responses. This paper investigates the contribution of monetary policy to shock-dependent ERPT. Using a structural VAR framework, we identify a broad set of structural shocks and estimate ERPT across 26 emerging markets and advanced economies. We then construct a counterfactual scenario in which monetary policy remains unresponsive to these shocks. Our results show that 90 percent of the observed variation in ERPT across shocks stems from the monetary policy response. When policy reactions are neutralized, the ERPT becomes nearly uniform across shocks and, on average, twice as large. These findings disentangle structural from policy-driven components of the shock-dependent ERPT, thereby providing a more informative measure for central bank decision-making.

18 Karine Moukaddem (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Dreaming Beyond Borders: Aspirations, Networks, and Migration Intentions of Young Women in Lebanon

Abstract

Migration intentions are widely recognized as key precursors to actual migration. Using nationally representative data on 1,500 young women in Lebanon, we examine two stages of migration intention: the desire to migrate and the expectation of doing so. Overall, 41% express a desire to migrate internationally, while 16% expect to realize this desire within five years. Migration desire is more common among women with lower wealth and education, whereas migration expectation is higher among those who are younger, unmarried, and living with their parents. Both outcomes are positively linked to recent adverse shocks. Social exposure also matters: women with family or close friends who intend to migrate—or who have already experienced migration—are significantly more likely to express migration desire and expectation. Finally, we explore how aspirations in education, career, and family relate to migration intentions. Higher educational and career aspirations are strongly associated with a greater desire to migrate, but only aspirations that women expect to achieve—including marriage age aspirations—are linked to migration expectations. Together, these findings highlight how economic conditions, family context, and personal aspirations jointly shape young women’s migration intentions.

25 Jing Su (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Consumers’ perception of fairness on data-based personalized pricing

Abstract

Online platforms increasingly employ consumer data to infer their attributes and implement personalized pricing strategies. This practice has generated considerable debate concerning fairness.  Consumers’ perceptions of fairness vary depending on the types of data utilized and the inferred attributes upon which pricing decisions are based. Our project is to examine which types of data and inferred attributes are perceived as more acceptable by consumers, and how these perceptions are influenced by the inference process linking data to attributes. The findings are expected to provide evidence that can help policymakers and regulatory authorities in monitoring and evaluating data-based pricing practices.

December

2 Charles de Beauffort (National Bank of Belgium)
Tradable Goods Demand and Fiscal Policy in HANK

Abstract

We revisit the effects of government consumption expansions in an open-economy New Keynesian model with two production sectors—tradable goods and non-tradable services. Empirically, we show that both consumption and output rise in each sector, even though government consumption is concentrated in services. Introducing household heterogeneity helps resolve these previously puzzling sectoral co-movements. Our quantitative framework incorporates local content in distributed foreign goods and imperfect labor mobility across sectors. Disposable income increases with public demand, boosting private consumption in both sectors. Under plausible calibration, these income-driven consumption gains outweigh the adverse competitiveness effects, generating a positive response of tradable output. Finally, when we allow government consumption to contain a realistic share of tradable inputs, the heterogeneous-agent model delivers sectoral dynamics that closely align with those implied by structural Bayesian VAR estimates for the United States.

9 David de la Croix (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Forced Displacement of Scholars and Academic Output During the Scientific Revolution

16 Anna Jolivet (UNamur)
Kinship Structure and Fertility: evidence from sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

We examine the relationship between the social organization of communities, in particular their emphasis on lineage organization, and fertility. In lineage-based societies descent is traced primarily through either the mother's or the father's side, which strongly determines social identity, increases cohesion, and reinforces interdependence within the lineage. We show that, across countries, unilineal societies have higher fertility levels. These results are validated within sub-Saharan Africa using a spatial regression discontinuity design along ancestral ethnic boundaries. Among mechanisms explaining this difference, we highlight the role of the motive to continue the lineage.

February 2026

03 Aliénor Bisantis (AMSE)
Gender and Academic Mobility

Abstract

What explains the gender gap in academic careers? This paper studies how geographic mobility constraints contribute to gender disparities in academic hiring, using novel administrative data covering the universe of PhD graduates in France between 2009 and 2021 across all academic fields. I link individuals to the full set of job openings in their field and year of first application to analyze job search behavior and outcomes. First, I show that women apply to fewer positions, over shorter distances, and are more likely to target universities near their PhD institution. Second, I leverage quasi-random variation in the geographic structure of the job market across fields and cohorts to show that candidates facing more distant openings apply to fewer positions and are less likely to secure a job. Women respond more negatively to geographically distant markets, making them more exposed to these spatial frictions. Finally, I quantify the extent to which mobility constraints contribute to gender gaps in hiring: conditional on facing the same job market structure, women’s stronger sensitivity to distance lowers their probability of securing a position by 1.71 percentage points relative to men, representing about 20% of the average hiring rate. Taken together, the findings highlight geographic mobility constraints as a meaningful and previously underexplored mechanism contributing to gender disparities in academic careers.

10 Luca Neri (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Beyond Validity: SVAR Identification Through the Proxy Zoo

Abstract

This paper develops a framework for robust identification in SVARs when researchers face a zoo of proxy variables. Instead of imposing exact exogeneity, we introduce generalized ranking restrictions (GRR) that bound the relative correlation of each proxy with the target and non-target shocks through a continuous proxy-quality parameter. Combining GRR with standard sign and narrative restrictions, we characterize identified sets for structural impulse responses and show how to partially identify the proxy-quality parameter using the joint information contained in the proxy zoo. We further develop sensitivity and diagnostic tools that allow researchers to assess transparently how empirical conclusions depend on proxy exogeneity assumptions and the composition of the proxy zoo. A simulation study shows that proxies constructed from sign restrictions can induce biased proxy-SVAR estimates, while our approach delivers informative and robust identified sets. An application to U.S. monetary policy illustrates the empirical relevance and computational tractability of the framework.

17 Ricardo Guzman (AMSE)
The Arrival of Patented Agricultural Technologies

Abstract

Low-income countries are increasingly establishing intellectual property rights (IPR) for plant varieties as a means to encourage innovation in crop technologies. Whether such policies spur agricultural development is unclear: On one hand, IP protection can bring new crop technologies to markets, expanding the set of plant varieties with agronomic traits that benefit farms. On the other hand, the policy can raise input prices and reshape informal markets for traditional seed. This paper studies these tradeoffs in a context of a landmark reform that strengthened IP protection for plant varieties in Tanzania. I first combine the universe of registered plant varieties released in the national market with an event study to establish that IP protection brought in new plant varieties. I then estimate the effect of the arrival of these patented technologies on agricultural outcomes using rich farm-level data and a shift-share design that leverages the staggered release of new varieties and agro-climatic variation in crop suitability across regions. I find that the policy lifted supply-side constraints: a 1SD increase in exposure to patented technologies boosted adoption of improved varieties by 6.7 percentage points. However, the resulting productivity gains were unevenly distributed: the policy delivered higher yields, crop revenues, and profits for larger and better-connected farms, while small and remote farmers experienced little to no benefit. Supporting evidence points to two channels that explain the unequal gains from adoption: rising seed prices in local markets and small farmers’ inability to adjust use of land, labour, and material inputs that complement new technologies.

24

March 2026

03 Chun Chee Kok (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Interethnic Proximity, Complementarities, and Politics in Malaysia

Abstract

Are there particular social structures that allow ethnic diversity to coexist with political stability and economic prosperity? This paper examines the effects of interethnic proximity on political identity and economic development. We exploit fine-grained spatial variation from a British colonial resettlement policy in Malaysia (1948-1951), which forcibly relocated over half a million ethnic minority Chinese into segregated “Chinese New Villages” (CNVs). We find that ethnic majority Malays residing in polling districts closer to CNVs exhibit lower contemporary electoral support for the ethnonationalist coalition, potentially reflecting a moderation of ethno-nationalistic political identity. We also observe moderately positive impacts on contemporary economic prosperity. Positive political effects are stronger in regions with initial, historical interethnic complementarities—even in the absence of persistent economic prosperity. Novel primary survey data reveal that Malays living in closer proximity to CNVs report greater contact with Chinese, higher interethnic trust, and weaker zero-sum beliefs. Suggestively, these effects appear to be reversed in areas with greater interethnic competition. Throughout, broader impacts on social integration remain muted. Our findings highlight the promise and pitfalls of intergroup contact in jointly underpinning political moderation and economic development.

10 Silvia Peracchi (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Violence Next Door: How Conflict Reconfigures Regional Trade and Development

Abstract

Conflicts and civil wars have major economic consequences, both domestically and beyond their borders. This paper examines a key cross-country implication of civil wars, namely their role as external shocks to trade linkages. To do so, it exploits the 2002 civil war in Côte d’Ivoire as a quasi-natural experiment for causal evidence. The conflict temporarily harmed Ivorian markets and limited access to the Port of Abidjan, prompting its landlocked trade partners, Mali and Burkina Faso, to redirect regional and overseas trade flows to other coastal countries in West Africa. We analyze whether coastal countries competing with Côte d’Ivoire benefited from this redirected trade. Treatment is defined as areas in West African coastal countries best connected to international trade routes. Our findings suggest persistently higher economic activity in areas more exposed to international corridors following the exogenous trade shock. These effects are observed in the form of land-cover indicators of human settlement and cropland extent, built-up areas, population, and nighttime lights. Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys further point to increases in female employment and human capital. Taken together, these results highlight how conflict-induced trade disruptions can generate significant agglomeration effects and lead to persistent spatial reallocation of economic activity.

With Evie Graus (University of Luxembourg)

17 Angel Pandit
Female Political Leaders and Women’s Labor Supply: Evidence from Close Elections in India

Abstract

I examine whether female political representation affects women’s economic behavior in India. I combine a large nationally representative household panel tracking individual employment outcomes from 2016 to 2024 with detailed state assembly election results. To identify causal effects, I exploit close elections between male and female candidates in a regression discontinuity design. I find that when a female candidate narrowly defeats a male opponent, women in the constituency significantly increase their hours worked, conditional on already being employed. However, female leadership does not increase women’s new entry into the labor force, and overall female labor force participation remains unchanged. These findings suggest that female political representation operates along the intensive margin of labor supply rather than by expanding participation at the extensive margin.

24 Luigi Boggian (PSE)
Financial Incentives for Diabetes Management in Primary Care: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Italy

Abstract

This study evaluates the causal impact of a pay-for-performance program on diabetes monitoring quality in primary care. Introduced in 2014 in the Province of Verona (Italy), the program offered general practitioners capitation-based bonuses for improving the completeness of electronic health records for diabetic patients aged 65 and above. Using administrative data on approximately 200 GPs across three Local Health Units over 2010–2017, we employ two complementary identification strategies: a staggered event study exploiting the temporal rollout of the policy and a difference-in-discontinuities design leveraging the age-65 eligibility threshold.

We address three research questions using five outcomes. First, we examine whether the incentive improved diabetes monitoring on the extensive margin (share of patients receiving at least one annual HbA1c test) and the intensive margin (average number of HbA1c tests per patient). Second, we assess its effect on diagnostic documentation quality, measured as the share of diabetic patients with a formal diagnosis recorded in the GP's clinical records. Third, we investigate potential spillover effects on broader healthcare utilisation, captured by average GP consultations and antidiabetic prescriptions (ATC code A10) per patient.

Both approaches yield consistent results. The incentive produced immediate and significant increases in HbA1c monitoring, raising the share of patients tested by approximately 13–14 percentage points and increasing test frequency. These effects concentrate in the first two post-treatment years and emerge precisely at the age-65 threshold. Importantly, we find no significant effects on GP consultations, diagnostic recording, or prescription intensity, indicating improved adherence to monitoring protocols without distortions to broader care patterns. Gender-stratified analyses reveal similar responses for male and female patients. Robustness checks—including donut-hole designs, spillover tests, and placebo cutoff analyses—support the identifying assumptions and suggest that mild pre-trends in some specifications reflect beneficial within-physician spillovers rather than anticipatory behavior. Our findings demonstrate that even modest administrative incentives tied to electronic record quality can meaningfully improve chronic disease monitoring in publicly contracted primary care systems.

31 Sandy Tubeuf (IRSS, UCLouvain)
Recognition and discouragement: asymmetric effects of success and failure on academic performance

We study how brief motivational shocks administered during a break in a mathematics test affect student performance. In a cluster randomized controlled trial involving 296 schools and approximately 7,400 Grade 8 students in rural Bangladesh, students were randomly assigned to one of four arms: (i) a recreational break (control), (ii) completing a maze puzzle before the break, (iii) maze completion followed by public disclosure of success after the break, and (iv) maze completion followed by public disclosure and a symbolic reward. We find that maze completion significantly increases post-break mathematics performance among students who solve the maze correctly, but reduces performance among those who fail. Public announcements amplify both effects: recognition boosts high performers while further discouraging low performers. Introducing a symbolic reward raises performance among successful students relative to the control group, though less than simple public recognition, and intensifies negative effects for unsuccessful students. These findings highlight how seemingly benign micro-interventions can magnify achievement gaps during high-stakes tasks.

(with Niaz Asadullah, Alain Trannoy, Gaston Yalonetzky)

April 2026

07 Rossana Scebba (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Network-mediated screening under uncertainty: Evidence from early modern academic publishing (1500-1800)

Abstract

 In markets with limited information about individual quality, economic agents might turn to relational structures to screen unknown counterparts, even more so in times of uncertainty. I study this mechanism in the early modern academic book trade of the historical Low Countries. The Low Countries occupied a unique position in the European Reformation: as the Habsburg dynastic heartland and home to the Catholic bulwark of the University of Louvain, they were at the forefront of systematic anti-heresy censorship as Calvinist and Lutheran ideas spread rapidly across the region. This generated an unusually intense and well-documented sequence of regulatory shocks, until the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) fractured the market into a censorial Catholic South and a tolerant commercial North, with the 1585 Fall of Antwerp marking a sharp divergence in censorship regimes. Using scholars' affiliation records from the Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae (RETE) to reconstruct collegial ties based on co-presence at European university faculties, and inferring professional ties between academic authors and printers/publishers from bibliographic records of the Short Title Catalogues of Flanders and the Netherlands (STCV; STCN), I examine whether reputational spillovers shaped access to first publication and whether censorship-induced uncertainty amplified their role.

14 William Parienté (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
How Big Does a “Big Push” Need to Be? Evidence from Randomizing Asset Transfer Size

Abstract

Poverty is persistent, but the evidence regarding the existence of poverty traps is mixed. In the presence of a poverty trap, only cost-intensive “big push” interventions such as the increasingly popular poverty graduation model can durably improve living standards. We carry out a cluster randomized trial of a graduation program in Upper-Egypt varying experimentally the size of the transfer (between full- and half-transfer), and evaluate these interventions up to 40 months after the start of the intervention. Positive impacts on asset ownership and consumption are sustained over time and remain sizeable at the 40-month mark, for both half- and full-transfer beneficiaries. A test comparing the effect of the half- and full-transfer treatments on post-transfer asset dynamics at different points in the baseline asset distribution yields no support for the presence of an asset-threshold poverty trap in our context.

(With R.Assaad, A.Osman and C.Valente

May 2026

05 Auguste Debroise (Unamur)
The social image cost of motherhood. Evidence from the movie industry

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the child penalty in the movie industry. Using career data from IMDb for nearly 5,000 actors and actresses who appeared in top-grossing films between 1990 and 2022, combined with a database of approximately 30 million newspaper articles, we document how motherhood shapes both professional trajectories and public representation. We find a substantial and persistent child penalty for actresses. Ten years after their first birth, women experience a 15–20 percentage point decline in the number and quality of roles, as well as a 20 percentage point drop in total box office exposure. Notably, this penalty extends beyond on-screen work: off-screen occupations such as directing and producing are even more severely affected, suggesting that the penalty is not driven solely by audience preferences. On the media side, we document a striking divergence: controlling for career activity, mothers receive only half the newspaper mentions of fathers a decade after the birth of their first child. When they do appear in the press, coverage increasingly frames them in family-related terms rather than professional ones. Crucially, exploiting variation in gender norms across US states, we find that the drop in media coverage is significantly larger in more conservative states, holding maternal behavior constant. This provides suggestive causal evidence that the disappearance of mothers from public discourse is not solely driven by changes in their own behavior, but also reflects how society's perception of women shifts upon motherhood.

12 Sumit Shrivastav (CORE/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
Two-sided platform competition with fixed wages

Abstract
This paper studies how fixed, wage-like compensation affects competition between two-sided platforms. We develop a two-sided Hotelling model with heterogeneous sellers who choose between interaction-based pay and a fixed wage, while buyers value both the number and the intensity of seller interactions. Platforms decide whether to offer a wage option and set access prices on both sides. We characterize equilibria when no platform, both platforms, or only one platform offers a wage, and compare profits and participation. Fixed wages act as a screening device for seller types and can raise platform profits and seller surplus.

(with Paul Belleflamme)

19 Fabio Mariani (IRES/LIDAM, UCLouvain)
The shadow of Rome: Fascism, nation building and the political legacy of history.

Abstract

In pre-WWII Italy, the Fascist regime mobilized the country’s shared Roman heritage for nation-building. Roman history offered a unifying identity and a rich repertoire of nationalist symbols for a country that had remained fragmented since the fall of the Roman Empire. We advance and empirically test the hypothesis that this narrative resonated more strongly in municipalities with a deeper Roman legacy, proxied by the presence of Roman settlements and inscriptions (from archaeological records).

We show that this translated into stronger support for post-Fascist nationalist parties following the return to democracy. Conversely, municipalities with a more tangible Roman past were less susceptible to centrifugal political forces and were less likely to vote for regionalist parties, particularly the Lega following its independentist turn. We explore potential mechanisms linking Roman heritage to local political identity through cultural and ideological values.

Finally, we show that in the absence of a political reactivation of history, past Roman presence does not predict the success of nationalist parties.

26 Matt Lowe (Vancouver School of Economics)
Identity Uncertainty

Abstract

Social identity is not always directly observable: individuals may choose to mask identity markers, and these strategic decisions may or may not succeed in shifting others’ beliefs about their identity. We study the economic and social effects of identity concealment in the context of caste in India—a social identity that is not visibly discernible. We paired high- and low-caste men for data entry tasks and randomly assigned these pairs to interact under one of three conditions: with knowledge of full names, including caste-distinctive surnames (Revealed); with first names only, giving participants the freedom to hide or reveal identity (First Name Only); or with instructions to keep caste identity hidden (Hidden). The First Name Only and Hidden conditions have strong negative effects on whether a participant correctly guesses their partner's caste at endline, and increase uncertainty in their guesses. These identity-concealment conditions reduce trust and weaken social relations, with little effect on productivity. Additional analyses suggest that the key mechanism is uncertainty about caste identity. Our findings are contrary to the conventional wisdom that group boundaries hinder social relations—we find that disclosure of group identity brings partners together.

June 2026

16 Artur Doshchyn (University of Bristol) 

30 Adeola Oyenubi (University of Witwatersrand Johannesburg)
Country and firm-level heterogeneity in gender gaps during a crisis: Does pre-existing inequality matter?

Abstract

Nascent literature on individual-level gender gaps reveals that the gap is heterogeneous, such that it is possible to identify individual characteristics associated with very large, as well as very small (or even reversed) gender gaps. This indicates that women are not a homogeneous group when it comes to the gender gap. This study is the first to apply similar logic to gender gaps at the firm level under the hypothesis that women-owned informal firms are not homogeneous regarding gender inequality in labour productivity.
The study is based on the most comprehensive cross-country data on informal enterprises in urban developing contexts. First, using an interaction model, I explore the relationship between pre-COVID-19 pandemic country-level gender-related inequality (measured by the UNDP’s Gender Inequality Index (GII)) and the gender gap in labour productivity during the pandemic. Second, I generalize the interaction model using the Sorted Effects analysis which provides a complete mapping of heterogeneity in firm-level gender productivity gap by ordering the full distribution of the partial effects from largest to smallest.
Results show a robust negative relationship between pre-pandemic GII and productivity during the pandemic. Further, female-owned informal enterprises in less egalitarian (or high GII) countries experienced larger gender gaps than their counterparts in more egalitarian countries. The result also supports the hypothesis of heterogeneity in gender gaps. Specifically, I found that the gender gap is heterogeneous in owner, firm and country-level characteristics. Result suggests that improving gender equity is a prudent way to prepare for economic crisis.