Research Seminars

We estimate the effects of cash transfers on child well-being. To do so, we leverage program eligibility due to date of birth cutoffs and year-to-year variation in payment size from a universal and unconditional cash transfer, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD). Using linked individual-level administrative data on PFD payments and child maltreatment referrals, we find that an additional $1,000 to families reduces the likelihood that a child is referred to Children’s Services by age 3 by 2.0 percentage points, or about 10 percent, on average. Effects are driven by declines in neglect and physical abuse. Additionally, we show that larger cash transfers increase the probability that children live with their mothers and lower mortality by age 5.

The COVID-19 pandemic cut across geographical, sectorial and policy boundaries and imposed difficult health, economic and social challenges. Among many learnings, after the 2007/8 global financial crisis and the austerity period which followed it, what happened in 2020 offers an important experience to make local governments more financially resilient and ready to deal with similar shocks. This paper builds on a recent framework to investigate the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on local government financial vulnerability looking at both contingent and structural aspects. It addresses the need for a multi-country perspective on the effects of the pandemic and responds to calls to test existing models. Seven countries were chosen to represent different administrative contexts and traditions to understand what factors impact the local level in a time of crisis. Results demonstrate that not only contingent aspects, but also structural factors and the initial level of financial vulnerability influenced the responses to the pandemic, confirming findings about the importance of initial conditions and “path dependency” by previous studies.

There is an established literature looking at the effects of school entry age and age within cohort on general well-being, social capital, and measures of human capital formation. in primary and secondary school. Researchers have additionally turned their attention to longer term university and adult labor market outcomes. Prior results are mixed, but when statistically significant impacts are found they have typically been favorable. This study uses a nationwide sample of undergraduate college students from over 360 institutions to ascertain if relative age is related to reported mental health at graduation. Various identification strategies are incorporated into the study including Regression Discontinuity Design and Instrumental Variable (IV) methods incorporating student birth date relative to kindergarten age cutoff as well as relative age within cohort via ordered logit models. Results suggest being older within cohort to be positively related to increased to incidence of depression and homesickness in the last year at college graduation, more consistently for females.

It is well-recognized that news coverage varies significantly between countries. The differences include what events are reported at what frequencies and in what tones. It is also well established that these differences contribute to variations in the economic development of countries. In addition, substantial heterogeneity characterizes the news media at the subnational (regional) level, which is most evident in the large numbers of regional newspapers and media outlets. In contrast to the national level, this heterogeneity has received much less attention in contemporary literature. More precisely, little is known about the degree that newspaper readers in distinct locations are exposed to different information, topics, journalistic opinions, and sentiments. Similarly, how regional socio-economic characteristics shape local news and how these in turn influence people’s behavior is far from being sufficiently researched. More often than not, it is the lack of data limiting empirical investigations.

The presentation will give an overview of the contemporary literature and highlight existing research avenues. It will be based on several empirical investigations utilizing the recently established RegNeS database, which features more than 16 million German-language media headlines published between July 2019 and February 2023 obtained from more than 250 regional and national news outlets. The empirical studies give insights into the relationship between regional news and regions’ socioeconomic development from various angles including innovation activities being reflected in regional news and the latter’s impact on COVID19-related health behavior.

In this talk, I will describe a model explicating telework as a dynamic process, theorizing that teleworkers continuously adjust – their identities, boundaries, and relationships – to meet needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness in their work and nonwork roles. The model uses the lens of job crafting to posit changes teleworkers make to enhance work-nonwork balance and job performance, including time-related individual differences to account for contingencies in dynamic adjustments. I will also discuss how feedback from work and nonwork role partners and one's self-evaluation results in an iterative process of learning to telework over time. In the second part of the talk, I will present empirical evidence that offers preliminary support for the dynamic telework crafting model, based on data collected from individual teleworkers as well as teleworking teams.

The rapid development of information technology and smartphone applications has introduced new and unique transportation services. This article introduces one of these recently established systems in South Korea, called application-based taxi pooling service (ATPS). The service differs from regular ridesharing in that the participating drivers are already registered taxi drivers. This study aims to investigate users’ willingness to use ATPS from the perspective of service attributes during the morning commute time and late-night. For this, a discrete choice experiment survey was conducted over one week in 2019, targeting 1,000 Seoul citizens who used taxis at least once over the past month. As a methodology, mixed-effect logistic regression modeling is used to jointly predict users’ behavioral processes of ATPS adoption for different choice experiments constructed based on the combination of four service attributes: fare, route matching degree, detour time, and waiting time. The estimated models revealed the dynamic impacts of all four service attributes on the acceptance of ATPS, which vary depending on the time of the day. In particular, the impacts of discounted fare were almost zero during late-night, and users brought higher value to the waiting and detour times. Users’ conventional taxi use experience and personal preferences were also found to be important elements in the acceptance of ATPS. The findings of this study will provide reasonable guidelines for the deployment of ridesharing services in car-dominant cities where citizens have not yet been introduced to the concept of ATPSs.

Exploiting a novel data set of criminal trials in 19th century London, we evaluate the impact of an accused’s right to counsel on convictions. While lower-level crimes had an established history of professional representation prior to 1836, individuals accused of committing a felony did not, even though the prosecution was conducted by professional attorneys. The Prisoners’ Counsel At of 1836 remedied this and first introduced the right to counsel in common law systems. Using a difference-in-difference estimation strategy we identify the causal effect of defense counsel. We find the surprising result that the professionalization of the courtroom led to an increase in the conviction rate, which we interpret as a consequence of jurors feeling that the trial became fairer. We go further and employ a topic modeling approach to the text of the transcripts to provide suggestive evidence on how the trials changed when defense counsel was fully introduced.

During economic, health, or political hardships, politicians often leverage citizens’ discontent and scapegoat minorities to obtain political support. This paper tests whether political campaigns scapegoating migrants for the health crisis affect social, political, and economic attitudes and behaviors. We implement an online nationally-representative survey experiment in Italy to analyze the effects of the strategic use of information about immigration on socio-political and economic attitudes and behavior. We manipulate the quantity and the content of information, including facts emphasizing the potential health consequences of immigration. Results show that information provisions associating immigration with health threats do not generate sizeable add-on effects compared to that based on immigration only. If anything, it increases disappointment towards Italians, reduces social and institutional trust, and undermines partisanship among extreme-right supporters. Overall, political campaigns based on these narratives appear relatively ineffective or, when successful, counterproductive from social and political viewpoints.

This paper studies the labor market effects of out- and in-migration in the context of cross-border commuting. It investigates an EU policy reform that granted Czech citizens full access to the German labor market, resulting in a Czech commuter outflow across the border to Germany. Exploiting the fact that the reform specifically impacted the Czech and German border regions, I use a matched difference-in-differences design to estimate its effects on local labor markets in both countries. Using a novel dataset on Czech regions, I show that municipalities in the Czech border region experienced a decrease in unemployment rates due to the worker outflow, while vacancies increased. For German border municipalities, I find evidence for slower employment growth (long-term) and slower wage growth (short-term), but no displacement effects for incumbent native workers.

A rich literature has long studied the asymmetric effects of monetary policy over the business cycle, generally presenting mixed results. Most of the empirical work, however, focuses on the responses of output and prices. Given the key role it plays in the transmission of monetary policy and the relatively scarce studies on the subject, this paper centers the analysis on the dynamics of the markup. Recent empirical findings suggest that, even when the New Keynesian models are not able to reproduce such dynamic, the markup decreases in response to a monetary policy tightening shock. This paper, by putting forward a local projections approach and analyzing the response of the markup during the period 1990m2-2016m12, argues that the dynamic of the markup may depend on whether the monetary policy tightening shock takes place during a period of expansion or recession. In this latter case, for instance, the New Keynesian model seems to do a good job, suggesting that only tightening mistakes may be successfully addressed within the basic New Keynesian framework.

This paper seeks to quantitatively assess the key role of the three components of heterogeneity in open economies, namely the consumption gap between hand-to-mouth and Ramsey households, the consumption dispersion between Ramsey households and the existence of a fixed share of the two groups of households (HANK model) in the conduct of monetary policy in Europe and the US, as the two economies trade with each other. Using Bayesian estimation techniques, we estimate three models, a model with representative agents (RANK model), a model with heterogeneous agents so that the share of the two groups of households remains constant over time (TANK model) and the HANK model. We conclude that the HANK model plays a key role in the conduct of monetary policy in Europe and the United States and in the mitigation of cycles and fluctuations. The American economy is more sensitive to heterogeneity than the European one, because the differences in parameters between the models are greater in the USA than in Europe. Coordination between the two central banks on price stability always reveals that the HANK model attenuates fluctuations more than the other two models.

We explore whether marginal Q and investment fluctuate due to revisions in expected marginal profits or discount rates, and by how much of each. We infer marginal Q from the marginal cost of investment, derive a present-value relation, and conduct a VAR-based variance decomposition for marginal Q. We find that discount rates (expected investment returns) drive the bulk of fluctuations in average Q and investment in the time series, but play no role in driving the cross-section of portfolios' average Q and investment. That is, marginal profits are the sole determinant of the cross-section of marginal Q and investment.

This paper studies the response of firms’ research and development (R&D) expenditure to monetary policy shocks in the US economy. Empirical results suggest that a 20 basis point increase in the interest rate decreases the aggregate R&D expenditure by 0.6 percent. Using Compustat firm-level data, I confirm that a monetary contraction leads to a persistent decline in US firms’ R&D expenditure. The effect on R&D expenditure is stronger for interest rate hikes and when firms face higher uncertainty. This is because economic uncertainty decreases firms’ leverage ratio and makes them more financially constrained, rendering R&D investment more vulnerable to contractionary policy shocks. I build a medium-scale DSGE model with endogenous output growth and financial frictions to interpret the empirical findings. The theoretical model highlights the importance of the credit channel for altering the effects of monetary policy on firms’ investment in R&D in the presence of economic uncertainty

This paper shows that the impact of credit supply on economic activity is conditioned by banks’ equity distribution. Using a myriad of publicly available data on bank’s balance sheet, and mortgage and business lending from the United States, we offer novel empirical evidence on how changes in the level of bank equity affects the impact of credit supply on economic activity. Our results show that areas exposed to lenders with high level of bank equity experience high levels of economic growth and employment. We also construct a quantitative model that rationalises this empirical evidence by showing how aggregate lending is influenced by banks’ equity distribution. Our model shows that the higher the bank equity exposure of an area is, the more credit supply is provided to the area. While the model shows that banks’ equity distribution matters for understanding the impact of mortgage credit on economic performance, it does not have the same explanatory power to explain the impact of business credit on economic growth, which may be more influenced by risk-return trade-off decisions.

Economic logic posits that a bank’s stock price should contain the relevant information about its financial health. For this reason, bank depositors may anchor their withdrawal decisions on their bank’s stock price in situations of financial stress. In doing so, the mere inference of “bad news” from the bank’s stock price can trigger a self-fulling bank-run. However, if the bank’s shareholders anticipate that depositors’ withdrawal behaviour may depend on the bank’s stock price, would “bad news” still be reflected in stock prices? Recognising this, would depositors still rely on stock prices to draw inferences about the bank’s health?

What is the compliance effect of experiencing a tax audit? Empirical studies typically report a positive effect, while laboratory experiments frequently report a negative effect. We show experimentally that whether a tax audit increases or decreases subsequent compliance hinges on the balance of learning opportunities, misperception of audit risk, and the confounding effect of censoring. After an audit, taxpayers lower their perceived risk of audit – consistent with a bomb-crater effect – when audit selection is exogenous. However, for an endogenous audit rule under which taxpayers can learn to reduce their audit risk by reporting higher income, learning effects outweigh probability misperception, resulting in an increase in post-audit tax compliance. Finally, we show that accounting for censoring effects can eliminate on its own the negative post-audit compliance effect frequently observed in laboratory experiments.

Support for welfare system is conventionally measured by two different concepts. One focuses on people’s approval of redistribution principles and aims to capture citizens’ acceptance of a welfare state arrangement or some of its constitutive parts (i.e., specific welfare programs). Second option is more general and captures to what degree citizens trust the institutions and their main representatives. Both concepts – support for redistribution and political trust – inspired two broad streams of literature and thus it is surprising that the research has brought them together only to conclude that they have little in common (Svallfors 2002). This paper argues otherwise and proposes a theoretical argument that material circumstances constitute the common denominator impacting two distinctive supports for welfare system in a mutually exclusive way. As people are becoming wealthier, they are decreasingly willing to share their “well-deserved” resources, while their political trust increases possibly because they believe that the current political representation contributed to the improvement in their lives. On the other hand, as people are getting poorer, they tend to blame, and hence distrust the government, while their support for redistribution rises because it improves their own situation. This theoretical proposition is supported via several empirical tests. First, the very existence of these two opposite tendencies across various political systems is demonstrated via the cross-sectional European Social Survey data. Second, the internal validity of the role of material circumstances in people’s political trust and redistribution preferences is supported via analyses utilizing three wave panel surveys conducted in Norway and Germany. These findings advance our understanding of the role of material circumstances in peoples support for welfare systems—most importantly, they imply that welfare systems can enjoy only one kind of support within the same individuals.

This paper assesses whether facilitating the digital access to healthcare services impacts healthcare utilization. We exploit the introduction of a user-friendly web portal allowing women aged 25-65 to manage online their appointments in the public cervical cancer screening program carried out by a North-Eastern Italian Local Health Unit (LHU) in November 2019. We report quasi-experimental evidence on how this intervention affected both the program participation and the ability of the LHU to collect information on women’s screening behaviour outside the program.

This paper studies experimentally the use of voluntary consumption quotas as a strategy to deal with energy shortages. We run an online experiment where subjects play a two-round Nash demand game that captures key features of electricity consumption decisions. Each player is assigned to a group of 10 players. In round 1 the total energy pool is 100 while in round 2 there is a 50% probability that the pool is halved. Players can choose to play the game or accept a quota policy that will guarantee them a given payoff per round. We test 3 different policies. The first guarantees a fixed payment of 5 while the others a fixed share of either 10% or 6% of the pool. Our results show that in the baseline treatment players usually over-extract leading to energy shortages. Moreover, in case of power cuts, players adjust their demand downwards but less than the decrease in the pool. When quota policies are offered, the majority of players accept them. However, the fixed payment has a significantly lower acceptance rate while the 10% is the most accepted. Finally, we simulate 20000 groups per treatment to check the effectiveness of quotas in reducing over-extractions. While in the baseline the outage rate is close to 100% in each round, every quota is effective in reducing the shortages. In this case, the 6% policy is the most effective in every round.

Tertiary education is largely accepted to be one of the most important determinants of lifetime earnings and, consequently, of social mobility. Despite low tuition fees and limited entry barriers, Italy and Germany show a lower level of attainment at the tertiary education level with respect to the EU average and the 2030 targets. We propose an agent-based model where agents decide whether attending university or leaving education and entering the labour market right after school. Individual preference to enrol at university will depend on (i) economic motivations, represented by expectations on future income; (ii) influence from peers; (iii) individual effort to obtain a university degree. Agents may benefit from a scholarship to pursue their university study career. The aim is to analyse the (economic) effect of the scholarship in the two countries and investigate potential differences given by their respective socioeconomic context.

In this paper, we use contribution decisions in a multilevel public goods game to investigate attitudes toward national public budgets and the European public budget in six countries members of the EU: Italy, Germany, France, Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal. The experimental design allows us to test whether and to what extent there are differences in the propensity to contribute to both national and European public goods in the six countries and whether there are differences in the degree to which each country group changes decisions when relative efficiency between the two public goods changes. Two hundred residents from each country were recruited through Prolific, and an overall sample of 1200 subjects participated in the online experiment. Overall we find evidence of the absence of marginal crowding-in, a presence of substitution effect, and a leveling-up effect. A few interesting differences emerge from the cross-countries analysis. At the same time, the control strategy gives insights into individual characteristics (e.g., feeling of belonging to a country vs. feeling of being a European citizen) associated with the choices. Attitudes toward the European budget seem to be grounded on beliefs that precede the most recent events, i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

We estimate the impact of lockdown during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on abortion-seeking behavior in Spain. We exploit the unexpected announcement and immediate implementation of a strict, nationwide lockdown which started in mid-March 2020 and lasted for 8 weeks. We explore two channels through which lockdown could have affected the need for and access to abortion services in Spain: limited social interactions and a potentially lower accessibility of health care services. We find evidence that due to a decrease in social interactions, the number of unwanted pregnancies conceived during lockdown fell by 45% among affected women. We do not find any effect on the supply side: neither travel restrictions nor overcrowded hospitals seem to have altered the accessibility of abortion services in Spain. In future work, we plan to explore also the third channel through which lockdown could have affected abortion-seeking behavior – the demand for abortion services.

This paper investigates how non-cognitive skills, e.g., memory, empathy, attention, imagination, and social skills – measured by personality characteristics – relate to the relative labour market performance of immigrants. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Five-Factor Model of personality as a proxy for the non-cognitive skills, we show that these skills matter for the labour market integration of immigrants in the host country. We use two comparison benchmarks. Compared to an average native, immigrants’ non-cognitive skills, e.g., extroversion or emotional stability, can lead to 5–15 percentage points lower life-time employment probability disadvantage implying faster and better overall integration on average. Comparing immigrants and natives with the same type and level of non-cognitive skills suggests that returns of extroversion and openness to experience are higher among immigrants, leading to 3–5 percentage points lower lifetime employment probability disadvantage. These results are robust with respect to self-selection, non-random returns to the home country, stability of personality, and estimators. Our detailed analysis suggests that non-cognitive skills (especially extroversion) are substitutes for cognitive skills (e.g., formal education and training) among low educated immigrants, while there is no significant relative return of non-cognitive skills among highly educated immigrants.

Is in utero exposure to testosterone correlated with health and healthy lifestyle? Does religiosity have a non-linear effect on illness? We will discuss these research questions in close connection to our previous findings. In the past, using a large sample of individuals from the RMLS-HSE longitudinal survey, we observed clear links between a prenatal testosterone biomarker - measured 2D:4D digit ratios - and the levels of education obtained by men. Statistically significant positive associations of 2D:4D (lower prenatal T) with higher levels of education were found using difference generalized ordered logistic regressions. Moreover, using the same survey, we found that lower digit ratios (higher T) correlated with higher wages for women and for men. There was also some evidence of a potential non-linear, inverse U-effect of digit ratios on wages but this was sensitive to the choice of specification. These findings were consistent with earlier work on prenatal T and success in careers Coates et al. (2009) but inconsistent with the work of Gielen et al. (2016) who found differing effects for men and women. Besides, in our recent work Bryukhanov & Fedotenkov (2021), we documented a strong and causal relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction. Analogous identification strategies can be applied to health outcomes in causal and comparative context. (Paper 1, Paper 2, Paper 3)

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The study of how paternal absence due to circular migration affects the socio-emotional skills of children left behind is complicated by the potentially offsetting effects of fathers’ absences and remittances. To isolate the effect of a father’s absence, this paper focuses on remittance-receiving households and compares children whose fathers were at home with children whose fathers were still working abroad. Using data from a parent-child linked survey and experiment conducted in Fall 2019 in the Ternopil region of Ukraine, this paper finds evidence of the negative effect of a father’s current absence on children’s perseverance skills. Overall, this result suggests that circular migration is not necessarily a “triple-win” solution that benefits all involved parties. Indeed it can generate unintended consequences for the development of the socio-emotional skills of children left behind if not combined with complementary initiatives aimed at providing high-quality schooling in origin countries. (Paper)

It is well established that students taught by same-race teachers improve their performance on exams. However, little is known about whether the positive impact extends beyond test scores to student non-test academic outcomes, which are known to predict student long-term success. Using the random assignment of teachers within the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, I show that same-race teachers not only improve the test scores of Black students, but also increase the effectiveness of communication as reported by Black students. I find evidence supporting one of three potential underlying mechanisms of the communication effect. Specifically, I find that neither i) higher general communication ability of Black teachers nor ii) more teacher attention directed towards same-race students can explain this effect. Rather, my results suggest that the effect is driven by more effective communication between Black teachers and Black students, which aligns with the literature on culturally relevant pedagogy. Overall, the findings suggest that training non-minority teachers in using culturally relevant pedagogy may improve the performance of disadvantaged minority students in the short term as a complement to diversification of the teacher labor force. (Paper)

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of inflation targeting in 44 emerging market economies (EMEs) during 1970–2017. We estimate a dynamic panel data model, taking into account the endogeneity of the inflation targeting regime and controlling for a variety of factors affecting macroeconomic performance in EMEs. The main findings from our empirical investigation are as follows: First, inflation targeting is associated with lower average inflation, though its favorable effects, as compared to alternative monetary strategies, are negligible; second, we provide firm evidence against the proposition that inflation targeting lowers inflation volatility. Our results are robust with respect to various modifications in the estimation procedure and to the inclusion of additional control variables (Paper).

In response to the increasing fiscal burden imposed by public-pension systems, many countries have successfully encouraged older workers to delay retirement. These career extensions may significantly affect both the hiring and firing decisions of firms and the career progression of younger workers. To study these effects, we leverage reforms in the Netherlands in 2011 / 12 that gradually increased the eligibility age for public-pension benefits across birth cohorts. Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we first show that the reforms have significantly extended careers, doubling employment rates at ages that were directly affected by the reform. Next, we show that firms respond to the career extensions by delaying hiring, and hiring fewer workers overall. Co-workers experience slower earnings growth over the period of career extensions, which is mainly attributable to a reduction in hours worked rather than lower hourly wages, but their separation rates from the firm are not affected. We support these findings with a descriptive analysis of an earlier Dutch reform in 2006, which reduced the share of older workers taking up early retirement and reveals similar dynamics.

The findings from prior studies on the impact of low-stakes monitoring (monitoring unaccompanied by explicit incentives or punishments) on student achievement in developing countries are mixed. Moreover, as most of these initiatives were conducted on a small scale by non-governmental organizations, their findings may not be generalizable to large-scale government interventions. The current work investigates the educational impact of the Semaforo Escuela program – a large-scale monitoring system in Peru that conducts unannounced monthly school inspections, with the results reported to local education officials. I exploit the random variation in the selection of visited schools in the program’s first year to estimate the causal effects of low-stakes monitoring on student’s math and reading scores. Although I fail to find evidence that a monitoring visit enhances school-level student performance on average, I find that urban schools located at the bottom of the performance distribution or visited in the months preceding the exam date have a significant positive effect on reading test scores. (Paper)