SEMINARIOS Y WORKSHOPS

Fecha: 12/08/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Jorge Garcia (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid)

Autor: Garcia, Jorge

Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them return to prison only a few years after their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crime desistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reduce crime and incarceration rates. This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to provide causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter. Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders by more than 11 percentage points. This effect represents a drop of 18% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We discuss three classes of mechanisms that could explain our results: social support, promotion of Evangelical values, and social monitoring. We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an important driver of our findings. This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.

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Fecha: 19/08/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Andrew Dustan (Vanderbilt University)

Autor: Dustan , Andrew D

The gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) widens during high school, due both to differences in student choices and institutional barriers to accessing STEM education. Using rich data from Mexico City and a structural model of high school choice, we show that most of the gap is due to gendered choices but that exam-based assignment also restricts access to selective STEM schools. Simulations reveal the potential for policies to decrease the STEM gap with differential effects by student achievement. Targeted affirmative action and policies increasing females’ willingness to travel to STEM schools would reduce the gap significantly.

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Fecha: 02/09/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: María Lombardi (UTDT)

Autor: Lombardi, María

We study the impact of granting tenure to civil servants on turnover in the context of public school teachers in Chile. We take advantage of a law that required all public education administrators to grant a permanent contract to temporary teachers with at least three consecutive years of experience in 2014. Using an instrumental variable strategy embedded in a difference-in-differences setting, we compare the subsequent turnover of primary and secondary school teachers with temporary contracts who had two and three years of experience in 2010-2014. We find that permanent contracts reduce teacher turnover by 23.5 percentage points, an 85 percent reduction over the mean. We provide suggestive evidence that this reduction in turnover is higher for teachers with low scores in a nationwide teaching evaluation. These findings highlight a potential pitfall of providing high job security irrespective of job performance.

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Fecha: 16/09/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Melissa Rubio

Autor: Rubio, Melissa

Black males constitute 6.5% of the US population but account for 40% of the prison population. The extent to which this disparity reflects differences in criminal conduct and socio-economic background, as opposed to differential treatment is a long-standing question. However, little is known about the roots of this disparity. This paper uses US decennial censuses for the period 1850 to 1940 to show that the race gap in incarceration can be traced back to the abolition of slavery in 1865. In particular, I exploit the variation in the prevalence of slavery across counties in southern states to estimate the short- and long-run impact of slavery on black incarceration rates. I document a substantial increase in black incarceration immediately after the abolition of slavery, with no comparable effect on whites, and that this black-white incarceration gap continued to grow. These baseline OLS results are not driven by omitted variables given their robustness to: (i) observable controls, which proxy for racial attitudes and socioeconomic and geographic characteristics, (ii) analyses of neighboring counties that are more likely to be comparable on unobservable dimensions, and (iii) an IV analysis that instruments for slavery intensity with a county’s suitability for growing cotton. Using novel historical data on prison work camps from the Department of Labor, I provide evidence that the high levels of black incarceration in the US started, at least in part, due to labor scarcity in which convict labor was used to replace slave labor. This mechanism is further supported in analyses of three natural experiments – land grant allocations, Boll Weevil cotton pests, and the Mississippi River floods – that reduced the demand for labor; these reverse shocks are associated with lower black incarceration rates.

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Fecha: 23/09/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Martin Valdivia (GRADE)

Autor:

Can small or microentrepreneurs’ decisions and actions be affected by behavioral biases that limit their growth and profitability? We explore this question with the help of a field experiment with microentrepreneurs operating in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in which we provide information and reminders to informal microentrepreneurs about the advantages and convenience of a formalization program (MEI). Our average results suggest that informative visits do increase the knowledge about MEI and even the interest in formalization, but that reminder messages are needed to increase formalization. That is, treatment groups that received only informative sessions alone or messages alone show no effect, while those receiving both do show an increase in formalization of 7.2 percentage points. Then, we explore the differentiated effects by the level of violence between competing drug-related criminal groups, and the mobility restrictions they tend to impose on their residents and businesses. We find that none of the treatments have positive effects in the neighbourhoods most affected by conflicts with the police and competing drug-related criminal organizations. On the other hand, the effect of informational visits plus reminding messages increases to 29% in the neighbourhoods least affected by such violence, but informative visits alone also increase formalization by 17 percentage points. We interpret these results as evidence in support of the importance of limited attention and procrastination when explaining low rates of formalization by microentrepreneurs, but also show that drug-related violence may be a key negative conditioning factor for microfirms’ growth prospects.

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Fecha: 30/09/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Sandra Rozo (Banco Mundial)

Autor:

What are the impacts of regularization on migrant’s lives? This study examines the effects of the PEP visa, an opportunity for regularization for half a million Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. We collect a survey of 3,455 migrant families and leverage four identification strategies to assess the effects of the program in migrant’s life outcomes. Causal effects are estimated using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design that compares the wellbeing of migrants who arrived to Colombia close to June 8th, 2018 (eligible for the program) and those who arrived later (not eligible). The results indicate that migrants with a PEP visa have 18% and 24.5% higher consumption and income per capita relative to the other migrants. Migrants with a PEP visa also have more access to safety nets and financial services, better labor conditions, less food insecurity, are more integrated to the Colombian society, and showed more resilience to the COVID-19 crisis. The program had negligible effects on migrant’s labor formalization.

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Fecha: 07/10/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Presencial

Presentador: Stanislao Maldonado (URosario)

Autor: Maldonado Stanislao

Prosocial drivers of human motivation have recently attracted the attention of scholars interested in improving civil servant performance in developing countries. Unfortunately, the existing literature is unclear about which drivers are more relevant to motivate public officials in these settings. We implement a field experiment that varies the salience of different dimensions of prosocial motivation to enforce policy compliance among civil servants from a school maintenance program in Peru. In particular, we study the role of altruism, commitment to a mission, and identity in a large-scale intervention to induce civil servants to invest school maintenance funds and report the use of monetary transfers to monitor corruption. We find that commitment to a mission and identity are cost-effective ways to promote policy compliance, whereas altruism does not play a role in this regard. Our results highlight the importance of a better understanding of the role of different sources of prosocial motivation of civil servants in settings where the state lacks institutional mechanisms to enforce compliance.

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Fecha: 28/10/2021, 11:00

Modalidad:

Presentador: Mariano Scapin (University of Bristol)

Autor: Mariano Scapin

We study the relation between CEO industry tournament incentives, measured as the distance between CEO-pay and the highest-paid CEO among similar firms by industry and size, and conditional accounting conservatism. Conditional conservatism imposes a faster recognition of bad news in earnings, vis-à-vis good news. We hypothesize and find that the relation between industry tournaments and conditional conservatism varies substantially with debt contracting. Our evidence shows that firms with lower debt contracting pressures exhibit a negative relation between conservatism and tournament incentives; however, as debt contracting pressures increase, this negative relation disappears. Overall, we provide evidence that debt contracting affects the relation between CEO industry tournaments and financial reporting.

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