SEMINARIOS Y WORKSHOPS

Fecha: 18/11/2021, 11:00

Modalidad:

Presentador: Moritz Drupp (University of Hamburg)

Autor: Moritz Drupp

We study the variation of global and unilateral carbon pricing recommendations and their determinants. To this end, we provide survey evidence on carbon pricing from more than 400 publication-based experts across 39 countries. We quantify the extent of disagreement among experts but also reveal that a majority of experts can agree on short- and medium-term global carbon prices, and on unilateral carbon prices in almost all countries. Furthermore, our results provide no evidence for free-riding on carbon prices and show that border carbon adjustment facilitates higher carbon prices and can also increase agreement on carbon prices. We analyze how carbon pricing recommendations vary with additional survey data, observable information on experts and key country characteristics.

Fecha: 17/03/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Micaela Sviatschi

Autor: Micaela Sviatschi

How can territorial control by armed non-governmental actors impact long-term development? This article investigates the economic, social, and political consequences of guerrilla's territorial control in the Salvadoran Civil War. It employs spatial regression discontinuity design and census data to compare areas around and close to the boundary of guerrilla's controlled territories between 1981 and 1991. Results indicate that areas inside and in close proximity to guerrilla-controlled boundaries have significantly less night light density, worse education outcomes, and lower wealth indexes relative to the areas outside in the 2010s. These effects are primarily driven by the erosion of labor markets, lower public goods provision, and higher political discontent and mistrust.

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Fecha: 24/03/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: José Gallegos

Autor: José Gallegos

A vast literature has documented that US inflation persistence has fallen in recent decades. However, this empirical finding is difficult to explain in monetary models. Using survey data on inflation expectations, I document a positive co-movement between ex-ante average forecast errors and forecast revisions (suggesting forecast sluggishness) from 1968 to 1984, but no co-movement afterwards. I extend the New Keynesian (NK) setting with noisy and dispersed information about the aggregate state, and show that inflation is more persistent in periods of greater forecast sluggishness. My results show that the change in firm forecasting behavior, documented in survey data, explains around 90% of the fall in inflation persistence since the mid 1980s. I also find that the disconnect between inflation and the real side of the economy in recent decades can be explained by the change in information frictions. Contrary to the literature which has emphasized a flattening of the NK Phillips curve in recent data, I do not find any evidence of the change in the structural slope of the Phillips curve once I control for the change in information frictions.

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Fecha: 31/03/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Elisa Facchetti

Autor: Elisa Facchetti

The effect of neighbourhood police on citizens’ welfare is poorly understood. Yet, thisis a key parameter in evaluating the impacts of reductions of police spending. I exploit alarge wave of austerity cuts to police forces in London, which resulted in the closure of 70% of police stations, while preserving the police force size. I combine novel granulardata on reported crime, location of police stations and their closure, and information onindividual crimes’ judicial outcomes. I show that the reduced local police presence ledto a persistent significant increase in violent crimes, consistent with lower deterrence, andreduced clearance rates, indicating lower police effectiveness. I also provide suggestiveevidence consistent with reduced reporting of non-violent crimes, as citizens internalise ahigher reporting cost. Overall, the policy led to a sizeable reduction in citizens’ welfare,which I document by showing a decrease in house prices concentrated in high-crime andmore deprived census blocks, further exacerbating already existing inequality. Together,the closures produced considerable distributional and efficiency losses, and generated coststhat substantially outweigh the benefits in terms of lower public expenditure for the criminaljustice system.

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Fecha: 07/04/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Cecilia Díaz

Autor: Cecilia Díaz

Standard health insurance contracts generate nonlinear pricing through the presence of deductibles and caps on out-of-pocket spending, in which the out-of-pocket price paid by consumers decreases as the cumulative use of health care increases. This nonlinear benefit structure, coupled with the uncertainty intrinsic to future health care demand, provides dynamic incentives for consumers’ choices: health care utilization today reduces future expected prices. Standard analyses of insurance contracts study the trade-off between the welfare gains from risk protection and the welfare losses from moral hazard, which I relabel as static moral hazard. In this paper, I study a new source of moral hazard, dynamic moral hazard, which I define as the additional health care utilization when individuals internalize that current utilization lowers future expected prices via the nonlinearities of the contract. By leveraging the random assignment of families to health plans from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, I am able to focus specifically on moral hazard, avoiding the typically confounding adverse selection present in insurance markets. I develop and estimate a dynamic, stochastic model of weekly health care utilization at the family level that incorporates the dynamic pricing effects. My estimation framework allows for flexibly-correlated multidimensional unobserved heterogeneity related to family health risk, preferences for visiting a doctor, and price sensitivity. I document that 40 percent of total moral hazard is attributed to dynamic moral hazard. Using my estimated model, I study the welfare implications of dynamic moral hazard in the setting of employer-sponsored health insurance. My results show that the presence of dynamic moral hazard can severely dampen the welfare gains associated with higher cost-sharing and plays a crucial role, distinct from static moral hazard, in determining optimal insurance contract design.

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Fecha: 19/04/2022, 11:36

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Rafael Dix-Carneiro (Duke)

Autor: Rafael Dix-Carneiro (Duke)

 
We examine how to interpret estimates from a commonly used migration regression relating changes in local population to exogenous local labor demand shocks. Using a simple model of local labor markets with mobility costs, we find that common conclusions drawn from migration regression estimates are likely to be substantially misleading. Intuitively, the conventional migration regression is misspecified due to the bilateral nature of location choices. Workers choose where to live based not only on the shock to their current location, but also on the shocks to potential alternative locations, which are omitted from the regression. The resulting biases are particularly acute when workers face industry switching costs in addition to geographic mobility costs. Analytical results and simulations based on Brazilian data show that conventional migration regression estimates are inaccurate for the within-sample effects of observed shocks on local populations and uninformative on the effects of counterfactual shocks to local labor demand. A simple alternative approach leveraging the model's structure exhibits far better performance.

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Fecha: 21/04/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Roman Merga (Rochester)

Autor: Roman Merga (Rochester)

Developing countries trade less than rich countries. I show that this lack of involvement in trade arises because high domestic volatility discourages exporters' investments in foreign market access. At the cross-country level, I find that country's TFP volatility explains 40% of the relationship between trade and GDP per capita. Using Colombian micro-level data, I document that exporters facing higher domestic sales volatility export less. In industries with more domestic sales volatility, new exporters expand relatively less over their life cycle. This dampening of the firm-level export expansion path is more severe in products with more variable markups. Motivated by these novel firm-level findings, I develop an international trade model with new exporter dynamics and non-CES demand that can account for the novel facts at the firm and the cross-country levels. These findings suggest that trade frictions calculated using static trade models reflect the interactions of domestic volatility and exporters’ investment decisions to grow into foreign markets. Indeed my quantitative findings show that the volatility differences across countries are equivalent to a 30% higher trade cost in developing economies. These volatility differences account for 40% of the differential trade cost estimated by static models.

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Fecha: 26/04/2022, 00:00

Modalidad: Presencial Auditorio 3 Casa Pedro Fermin

Presentador: Luigi Minale

Autor: Luigi Minale

Despite the vast interdisciplinary literature on social capital and its impact on economic and political development, the very notion of social capital remains remarkably blurry, both from the theoretical and the empirical point of view. In this paper, we try to tackle various issues related to the measurement of social capital by exploiting novel and unique survey data from Italy, covering a sample of over half a million respondents interviewed between 2000 and 2015. In particular, we explore what the main components of social capital are and how they relate to each other. Second, we study how different facets of social capital correlate to individual socioeconomic characteristics and community-level characteristics. Third, also building on prior influential contributions, we study what dimensions of social capital are relevant for different outcomes, such as economic, health, and political ones. Our results provide empirical support for the view that social capital is a multifaceted object with several dimensions intertwined but distinct from each other. The paper calls for using accurate measures to “unpack” the different dimensions of social capital when testing the empirical relationship between the latter and the outcomes of interests to minimise the risk of interpreting spurious relations as causal.

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