Research Seminars

Research Seminar Series offers a unique opportunity for our Faculty to engage with leading international scholars. Distinguished researchers from the world's top universities are invited to present their latest research and engage in lively discussions on the latest trends and developments in various areas of economics. All seminars are conducted in English and are comprised of a 50-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute discussion session. These seminars are open to the public, and we warmly welcome spontaneous attendance. 

Coordinators: Martin Guzi, Štěpán Mikula, Miloš Fišar, and Luca Fumarco.

Upcoming seminars

Past events Show current

26 Apr
2022

Take a complete picture of the Youth Guarantee

Miroslav Štefánik (The Institute of Economic Research of Slovak Academy of Sciences) ESF Room P201 Personal website

Using administrative data on jobseekers registered by the public employment agency, we describe the implementation of the Youth Guarantee through the Slovak active labour market policy (ALMP). By adopting a novel, double-machine-learning-based, dynamic estimation technique, we generate evidence on the impact of various types of ALMP programmes provided in different periods of the unemployment spell. The spectrum of ALMP programmes ranges from classroom training through hiring incentives and subsidised employment in the private sector to public works organised at the municipality level. We identify the impact of participation in a particular ALMP programme or sequences of ALMP programmes on the absence from registered unemployment after three years. Our empirical approach allows painting a complex picture of the Slovak Youth Guarantee implementation, yielding evidence in line with international experiences generalised by ALMP impact-evaluation meta-analyses. We contribute to this literature, by generating affirmative evidence from a particular case study which is only allowed thanks to the advanced functionality of our estimator.  (Authors: Soňa Dulíková, Lukáš Lafférs, Miroslav Štefánik)

25 Apr
2022

An explanatory mixed methods test of the impact of membership dues structures and mission orientation on association donations

Cleopatra Charles (Rutgers University) ESF Room P304 Personal website

This experimental study examines the effect of organizational membership fees on the willingness of association members to make charitable contributions (donations) to their association. Theoretically, the design tests six scenarios where public and private benefit are more prominent to explore and whether the amount of publicness in an organization’s mission (mission orientation) influences the donation amount. Practically, nonprofit leaders need more information regarding the relationship between membership dues and giving behavior to gauge the optimal membership scenario for maximum revenue generation. Using an explanatory sequential mixed methods design, the study assesses individuals’ willingness to donate to associations under three dues scenarios (no dues, dues with benefits, and sliding scale dues) with varying levels of public and private benefits. Responses demonstrate a significant difference between both professional and community association donations as well as between treatment groups. Themes emerged regarding dues and dues structures, personal finances, and the autonomy of giving to other charities.

21 Apr
2022

CANCELLED Low-Skilled Jobs, Language Proficiency and Refugee Integration: An Experimental Study

Mats Hammarstedt (Linnaeus University) --

We study the causal effects of previous experience and language skills when newly arrived refugees in Sweden apply for job openings by means of a field experiment. Applications were sent from randomly assigned fictitious Syrian refugees with experience in jobs with low skill requirements and completed language training in Swedish to employers advertising low-skilled job vacancies. We find no evidence of sizeable effects from previous experience or completed language classes on the probability of receiving callback from employers. However, female applicants were more likely than males to receive a positive response. We conclude that previous experience and completed language training seem to provide at best a small positive signaling value when refugees apply for low-skilled jobs through formal channels.

7 Apr
2022

Health’s Kitchen: TV, Edutainment and Nutrition

Francesco Principe (University of Padova) ESF Room S313

This paper investigates whether and how media exposure affects health behaviours. We exploit the idiosyncratic switchover to digital television in Italy and the consequent shift in the supply of food-related contents shown on the TV. By using a unique data-set based on four sources of data, we first provide evidence that food-shows contents affected individual choices, based on patterns of cuisine related information and recipes on the web. Then, we find that digital transition increased the size and improved the macronutrient composition of households’ food baskets, leading to a reduction in BMI among more exposed individuals. These findings question the negative stereotypes often associated with TV and highlight its potential as brand-new health policy lever.

Website

This event is both online and in person. Join Teams meeting.

28 Mar
2022

Education and Domestic Violence: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Turkey

Jan Fidrmuc (Université de Lille) ESF Room P106

We utilize a natural experiment, an education reform increasing compulsory schooling from five to eight years in Turkey, to obtain endogeneity-robust estimates of the effect of male education on the incidence of domestic violence against women. We find that husband’s education lowers the probability of physical, emotional and economic violence. Schooling lowers also the likelihood of an arranged marriage, and makes men less inclined to engage in various socially unacceptable behaviors. We show that these findings are very robust, and can be attributed to men’s education rather than to the education of their wives.

Website

This event is both online and in person. Join Teams meeting.

24 Mar
2022

Loan Supply and Asset Price Volatility: An Experimental Study

Gabriele Iannotta (Politecnico di Milano) ESF Room S313

This paper investigates credit cycles by means of an experiment based on a Kiyotaki & Moore (1997) model with heterogeneous expectations. The aim is to examine how a credit squeeze caused by high lender-level risk perceptions affects the real prices of a collateralised asset, with a special focus on the macroeconomic implications of rising price volatility in terms of total welfare and the number of bankruptcies that occur. To do that, a learning-to-forecast experiment (LtFE) is run where participants are asked to predict the future price of a collateralised asset and then rewarded based on the accuracy of their forecasts. The setting includes one lender and five borrowers in each of the twelve sessions split between six control groups (G1) and six treatment groups (G2). While in G1 the lender always satisfies borrowers’ loan demand (bankruptcies permitting), in G2 he/she is forced to close the entire credit market in case three or more bankruptcies occur in the previous round. Experimental results show that negative risk-driven supply shocks amplify the volatility of collateral prices. This surge in uncertainty worsens the agents’ ability to predict the future value of the collateralised asset and, as a consequence, the number of defaults increases and total welfare deteriorates.

Website

This event is both online and in person. Join Teams meeting.

17 Mar
2022

The Gates Effect in Public Goods Experiments: How Donors Focus on the Recipients Favored by the Wealthy

Luca Corazzini (University of Venice) Live stream in Room VT202

MS TEAMS online link

Experiments involving multiple public goods with contribution thresholds capture many features of charitable giving environments. We present results from a laboratory experiment that introduces endowment and preference differences into such a framework to explore the impact of donor heterogeneity on public good success and payoffs. We observe that donors tend to focus on the recipients preferred by the wealthiest contributors, ignoring other potential recipients. We refer to this collective focus on the preferred good of the wealthiest as the Gates Effect, showing that the public goods preferred by the wealthiest are more salient even in the absence of seed money, matching grants, misperception of payoffs. The Gates Effect can reduce inequality within donor groups that succeed in funding a public good; however, it also affects the philanthropic agenda, reducing the variety of public goods that receive funding."

Website

3 Mar
2022

Nudging for Tax Compliance: A Meta-analysis

Armenak Antinyan (Cardiff Business School) Live stream in Room VT202

MS TEAMS online link

Abstract: Nudging has become an important policy instrument to improve tax collection. Nudges in the taxation context are mainly notifications sent to taxpayers on behalf of tax authorities. Despite their similarity, these interventions have differential impact across countries and regions. We synthesize the growing experimental literature in a meta-analytical framework and provide estimates of the average effects of different nudges on tax compliance. Compared to the average share of compliant taxpayers that receive no notifications in the control group (29.8%), i) a neutral notification increases the probability of compliance by 6.4%, ii) non-deterrence nudges, various notifications that do not contain threats, increase the probability compliance by 12.8%, and iii) deterrence nudges, notifications that contain threats of audit or punishment, increase the probability of compliance by 22.8%. Lastly, our findings suggest that the sample of studies under scrutiny may be susceptible to selective reporting of results, and highlight few study characteristics that can make nudging interventions more effective.

Website

8 Feb
2022

Minimum Tax Reforms and Inter-temporal Shifting of Corporate Income: Evidence from Administrative Tax Records

Ján Palguta (University Carlos III of Madrid) P403

We estimate how policies that facilitate inter-temporal shifting of corporate tax liability via tax carry-forwards increase responsiveness of corporate tax base to taxation. Using administrative 2010-2018 tax return data from Slovakia and bunching designs, we estimate corporate elasticity of taxable income (CETI) at kinks in the marginal rate schedule. Using reforms of tax carry-forwards, we estimate that shifting via carry-forwards can account for the entire CETI at kinks for top 13% companies with turnover above €500k and 21% of CETI for VAT non-registered companies. We provide corrected estimates of marginal excess burden net of intertemporal shifting.

Paper

You can attend the seminar in person or join us via MS Teams.

7 Feb
2022

Revealed value of volunteering: A volunteer centre network

Jakub Dostál (College of Polytechnics Jihlava) P403

This article deals with the revealed value of volunteering. The revealed value approach is one way to determine the value of non-market goods or services. Most studies focused on the value of volunteering have built their research on the presumption that there is no way to reveal the value of volunteering, and therefore proxies must be used. This research uses a plausibility probe case study to explore and identify revealed information about the value of volunteering. The research was conducted using data over a seven-year period (2012–18) from ADRA, a large volunteer centre network in the Czech Republic that has 14 volunteer centres coordinating more than 2,500 volunteers in about 50 cities. I used the data about all the public funding of all the centres in this network between 2012 and 2018 in order to calculate the revealed value of volunteering from the perspective of various governmental institutions. I calculated the total value of volunteering, including financial grants, donations, and the value of volunteer hours. Interestingly, all three values were found within or slightly around the interval estimate of the value of volunteering.

Paper

You can attend the seminar in person or via MS Teams.

17 Dec
2021

Can Survey-based Sentiment Affect Stock Returns? A Meta-analysis

Zuzana Gric (Czech National Bank, Masaryk University) P106

Abstract: It is a standard practice to explain future stock returns by factors such as size or value premium. But the history of systemic events that led to asset bubbles and the advances in the behavioral finance field emphasized the importance of another factor influencing stock returns -- sentiment. Focusing on the direct survey-based measures of sentiment, we collect 1311 estimates from 30 primary studies to conduct the first meta-analysis of the underlying relation shedding light to ambiguous outcomes of current empirical literature. Our results suggest that there is non-negligible and negative relationship between sentiment and stock returns. In majority of specifications researchers tend to report this effect much stronger than it actually is but we also found presence of positive publication bias driving the results to less negative or even positive area. We reveal that sentiment effect is significantly stronger when flowing from individual investors compared to large institutions or when affecting stock market in US compared to Europe. Further, the effect also depends on several data and model characteristics. Finally, we propose implied estimates that may help to enhance predictive power of stock market models, but also conducting stress tests of financial markets and assessing risks to financial stability. Our results might be applied to specific pairs of survey-based sentiment and return series, but in general, we quantified the average effect of one unit increase in sentiment on monthly returns to be -0.54pp.

Authors: Zuzana Gric (ČNB, MUNI),  Josef Bajzík (ČNB, IES FSV UK), Ondřej Badura (VŠB)

The research seminar will be streamed on MS Teams: Link HERE

 

2 Dec
2021

Informing Risky Migration: Evidence from a field experiment in Guinea

Giacomo Battiston (Free University of Bozen) Microsoft Teams meeting

Click here to join the webinar

Abstract: Can information provision reduce the risks associated with irregular migration? We address this question conducting a large-scale experiment with about 7,000 secondary school students in Guinea. Combining aggregate statistics and video-testimonies by migrants who settled in Europe, we study the effect of three information treatments: (i) about risks and costs of the journey; (ii) about economic outcomes in the destination country; and (iii) a treatment pooling (i) and (ii). We find that one month after the intervention, all three treatments affect beliefs about risks and economic conditions. However, 1.5 years after the intervention, only the first has a significant effect on migration outcomes: providing information about the risks and costs of the journey reduces international migration by 49%. The effect is driven by a decrease in migration without a visa (i.e., potentially risky and irregular). Furthermore, the reduction is bigger for students who at baseline underestimated the risks connected to international migration.

Personal website

19 Nov
2021

Connectivity, centralisation and "robustness-yet-fragility" of interbank networks

Andrea Toto (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) ESF Room P106

This paper studies the effects that connectivity and centralisation have on the response of interbank networks to external shocks that generate phenomena of default contagion. We run numerical simulations of contagion processes on randomly generated networks, characterised by different degrees of density and centralisation. Our main findings show that the degree of robustness-yet-fragility of a network grows progressively with both its degree of density or centralisation, although at different paces. We also find that sparse and decentralised interbank networks are generally resilient to small shocks, contrary to what so far believed. The degree of robustness-yet-fragility of an interbank network determines its propensity to generate a too-many-to-fail problem. We argue that medium levels of density and high levels of centralisation prevent the emergence of a too-many-to-fail issue for small and medium shocks whilst drastically creating the problem in the case of large shocks. Finally, our results shed some light on the actual robustness-yet-fragility of the observed core-periphery national interbank networks, highlighting the existing risk of systemic crises.

Website

Online stream in Microsoft ​Teams

11 Nov
2021

Dying for ignorance? 1918-influenza mortality, vaccination skepticism and vaccination behavior

Christian Ochsner (CERGE-EI) ESF Room P106

How do societies respond to epidemic crisis in both stated political preferences and revealed health-related behavior? To answer this question, we link overmortality during the 1918-influenza to the political support of compulsory vaccination and to real vaccination behavior before and after the 1918-flu. We rely on the 1922 popular vote in Grisons when Grisons’ voters have to decide about compulsory vaccination in their canton. We find that a 1% higher overmortality during the 1918-flu reduces the support of the compulsory vaccination bill by almost 3%. The results are robust to different specifications regarding the definition of flu-affectedness, the inclusion of regional fixed effects and socio-economic variables. Other popular votes, by contrast, do not correlate with overmortality neither before nor after 1918. We are now digitizing real vaccination behavior at the municipality level using smallpox vaccination reports from 1907 to 1933. We aim to show whether revealed health-related behavior differ from the political statement by investigating a potential shift in vaccination abstinence after 1918. We further aim to distinguish among two potential channels to explain the results – cognitive dissonance and mistrust into experts or the government. The results might improve our understanding how epidemics might shift a society towards ignorance and mistrust into experts. Parallels to the COVID-19 epidemic show that part of the population are still acting ignorant today as our ancestors have done so 100 years ago.

Website

21 Oct
2021

Delegation and overhead aversion with multiple threshold public goods

Miloš Fišar (Vienna University of Economics and Business, and Masaryk University) ESF Room S315

Abstract: Experimental studies have modeled individual funding of social projects as contributions to a threshold public good. We examine contributors’ behavior when faced with multiple threshold public goods and the possibility of coordinating contributions via an intermediary. Employing the experimental design developed in Corazzini (2020), we vary both the size of a ‘destination rule’, which places restrictions on the intermediary’s use of a contributor’s funds, as well as the overhead cost of the intermediary, modeled as a sunk cost incurred by the intermediary whether or not any public good is successfully funded. In an online experiment with live interaction, we show that subjects behave in line with equilibrium predictions with regard to the size of the destination rule, only increasing their contributions when there is no threat of expropriation by the intermediary. However, we find that the positive effect of a high destination rule is undone in the presence of overhead costs for the intermediary. While this is in direct conflict with the theory that predicts no role of such costs, it is in line with the sunk-cost bias as well as the phenomenon of ‘overhead aversion’ that is commonly exhibited by donors when selecting charities.

Website

12 Oct
2021

Unintended Consequences of Immigration Policy on Children’s Human Capital

Esther Arenas Arroyo (Vienna University of Economics and Business) ESF Room P304

This study examines the unintended consequences of immigration enforcement policies on children’s human capital. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the enactment of immigration enforcement policies, we find that English language proficiency of U.S.-born children with at least one undocumented parent is negatively affected by the introduction of immigration enforcement laws. We show that the reduction in children’s English proficiency are caused by changes in parental investment behavior. Increasing fear of being detected and deported leads undocumented parents to substitute children’s time in formal non-mandatory pre-school education with parental time spent at home. We find evidence that parental time investment is not as productive as time spent in pre-school. These developments lead ultimately to a reduction in children’s human capital. 

Website

7 May
2021

The Promised Land: The Effects of the Land Restitution Program in Colombia

Francesco Bogliacino (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) online Personal website

We estimate the causal effect of the Colombian land restitution program on access to microcredit for agriculture. We use the timing of the restitution as the source of identification in an event study approach. Using administrative data from the program and all formal credit transactions, we show a significant increase in access to agricultural microcredit. The effects are stronger two years after the restitution when individuals acquire full property rights. Impacts are mainly driven by loans through the Agrarian Bank and supported by guarantees from the Agricultural Guarantee Fund, which are institutions specifically designed to promote investment in agriculture.

7 May
2021

20 years of emotions and risky choices in the lab: A meta-analysis

Matteo M. Marini (University of Florence) online Personal website

This paper is a meta-analysis of experimental studies dealing with the impact of incidental emotions on risky choices, so as to explain traditional heterogeneity of outcomes in the literature. After devising a standard search strategy and filtering out studies that do not comply with a list of eligibility criteria, we include 24 articles from which 109 observations are drawn at the treatment level. At this point, we code a set of moderator variables representing experimental protocols and adopt Hedges’s g as comparable metric. Subgroup analysis and meta-regressions find causal impact of both sadness and fear on risk aversion, albeit to a small extent, as well as highly contrasting patterns depending on the nature of incentives offered in the experiments. The use of monetary incentives turns out to reduce data variability and affects information processing by making subjects more susceptible to emotions. When studies provide real stakes, our results also show that emotions lead to take more risks in individualist countries than in collectivist societies. We discuss possible interpretations of our findings.

7 May
2021

Offshoring and Well-Being of Workers

Selen Savsin (Örebro University) online

Using long panels of industry-specific offshoring information and subjectively reported well-being datasets from Germany, the UK, and Australia from 2000 to 2013, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between offshoring and workers’ well-being in the source country. We employ panel data fixed-effects models with time-variant personality measures and industry-specific measures to alleviate the bias stemming from the non-random sorting of individuals in industries. Our findings suggest that offshoring negatively affects workers’ well-being. The result is unexceptionally consistent across the countries with different labor markets, and the effect is larger in business services and among high-skilled workers. We extensively discuss how contextual “fear-factors” prevailing in the source countries interact with the angst generated by the negative framing of offshoring. To single out such angst, we first show that objective and subjective job security concerns, job characteristics, and labor market conditions only marginally relate to the well-being effect of offshoring. Then, we investigate how the effect of offshoring on well-being is amplified by a larger set of contextual factors pertaining to temporary economic shocks, negative narrative about offshoring during electoral cycles, partisan political preferences, and high immigration rates. Finally, we show that a recent skill upgrade significantly diminishes the negative effect of offshoring on well-being.

6 May
2021

Comparing the Behavior of Teams and Individuals in a Public Goods Game with Ostracism - A Null Result?

Silvio Städter (University of Regensburg) Personal website

We provide evidence from a public goods game with ostracism, i.e. the possibility to vote and consequently ostracize others from the game. We focus on how the decisions of individuals and teams differ in this setup. Participants either form groups of individuals or they form groups of two-member-teams to play the public goods game. Concerning contributions, we find a null-result. Concerning earnings, however, we find differences. The ostracism mechanism does not increase average earnings for individuals, but for teams. This is the consequence of a different use of the ostracism mechanism. Teams play a trigger strategy. The mere threat of being punished triggers cooperative behavior, i.e. higher contributions. The punishment as such, however, is seldom really executed. Individuals exclude more and earlier, yielding less earnings since ostracized members’ contributions are missing.

4 Mar
2021

The Fragmentation of Views in a Democracy

Arseniy Samsonov (University of California) online Personal website

Are voters in democracies more competent if there are more media outlets? To answer this question, I provide a game-theoretic model of media capture and political persuasion in democratic countries. In the model, there are two politicians, the Incumbent and the Challenger. They co-opt the media by offering them access to information. In exchange, the media support politicians who are available for interviews or include journalists in press pools. Voters choose like-minded media. I show that if the Incumbent is sufficiently popular and has little policy information, then media bias in her favor weakly increases in the number of media outlets. Otherwise, media bias in the Incumbent’s favor weakly decreases in the number of media outlets. The welfare of voters weakly increases and decreases in the relative cases. The intuition is that, in equilibrium, the Incumbent can co-opt only one media outlet and ensure that enough voters read it. In this case, media outlets compete for access to the Incumbent and agree for a higher bias as their number increases.

4 Mar
2021

For the love of God? Proselytization, Religious Restrictions and Social Conflicts in India

Prashant Poddar ( Indian Institute of Management Amritsar) Personal website

I study the social effects of religious restrictions in the context of proselytizing activities which form an important part of some religions. To establish causality, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation from the Anti-conversion legislations enacted in several Indian states during the period 1956-2006. I use administrative data on geo-coded riots to find evidence for reduced social conflicts as a result of the acts. The finding suggests that the curtailment of religious freedom by restricting ‘forced or induced’ conversions in a religiously diverse country like India can have an unintended positive consequence in the form of reduced rioting. Improvement in the subjective well being of the individuals on account of the introduction of the law is the plausible channel causing this effect. I also show that these legislations do not affect individual related crimes such as murder and dacoity in any manner. The findings of the paper remain robust to the use of alternative methodology (synthetic controls).

29 Apr
2020

Financial Impact of Trust around the World

Luděk Kouba (Mendel University) ESF room P304 Personal website

We investigate the financial impact of social trust, institutional quality, and regulations. As a testing ground we employ a unique, large, and hand-crafted dataset of more than 850 000 lending-based crowdfunding projects from 155 platforms across 55 countries during 2005-2018. We show that the impact of social trust is positive but economically less pronounced than that of institutional trust proxied by legal and property rights protection and regulation. Moreover, the financial impact of social trust is greater at the national level, while impact of institutional quality dominates at the international level. Nevertheless, the financial impact of trust and institutional quality around the world is positive, which is an encouraging implication under increasing anonymity and internationalization of financial environment.

20 Apr
2020

The price of change: evidence for excess entry in a deregulated industry

Biliana Yontcheva (Vienna University of Economics and Business) ESF MU Room P304 Personal website

The paper analyses the effects of deregulated entry on a retail pharmacy market. Using data from the Slovak healthcare market, we demonstrate that additional entry leads to substantial market expansion for the first additional entrant. Furthermore, the entry of a first competitor doubles firm fixed costs. The current entry level on the market is substantially higher than it would be if the firms were maximizing profits jointly. In a counterfactual analysis, we evaluate how the prevalence of chains may counteract the incentive for excess entry. The welfare outcomes in each regulatory regime depend crucially on the kind of investment behavior engaged by the firms.

17 Apr
2020

Working while studying: labour decisions due to social networks

Maria Marchenko (Vienna University of Economics and Business) ESF MU

A high share of university students all over the world decides to take up a job already during their studies. This phenomenon can have negative consequences for the university due to the inefficient distribution of university resources. However, it is not always bad for the students themselves. In order to better understand the effect of the high share of working friends on their future performance, it is crucial to analyse the underlying reasons. The paper fills up the literature gap by exploring the social influences on the probability to combine work and studies. I am using panel data of a cohort of university students from a highly competitive university in Russia (Higher School of Economics). I am exploring the self-reported friendship links data to identify the endogenous peer effect. Preliminary results suggest a lower probability of combining work and study for students with many working friends. The reason for that may be a negative impression of the students who work and study at the same time for non-working students, which intensifies with the increasing share of working friends. This effect might also be specific to the institutional setting of the highly competitive university, which is not always encouraging the combination of work and study.

26 Mar
2020

Equilibrium Selection in similar repeated games: experimental evidence on the role of precedents and efficiency

Enrico Longo (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia) Academic club (ground floor) Personal website

Our aim is to examine behaviour and equilibrium selection in two similar, indefinitely repeated games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner’s Dilemma under anonymous random matching. We are interested in the role that historical precedents may play for equilibrium selection between these two repeated games. Duffy and Fehr (2018) find no significant spillover effects in this setting but they only vary the temptation parameter. We revise their experiment through the approach of Mengel (2018) and the theory of LiCalzi and Mühlenbernd (2019) and want to explore whether varying the efficiency parameter can alter their results.

20 Mar
2020

Offshoring and Skill-Biased Technical Change in the Context of US Protectionism

Jana Hromcová (NEOMA Business School) ESF MU

We discuss the effects of offshoring on the labor market in a matching model with endogenous adjustment of educational skills. We carry out a comparative statics analysis and show that offshoring leads to a restructuring of the economy through skill-biased technical change (SBTC) where overall welfare is improved. In a policy exercise we show that, if offshoring were to be opposed by a protectionist agenda, labor market flexibility can bring about the same welfare gain. In addition, we offer an empirical analysis aimed at verifying the correlation between offshoring and SBTC in US manufacturing industries in recent years. Our results show that different offshoring strategies affect SBTC differently. In particular, the evidence suggests that while high-skill offshoring strategies open the skill gap, low-skill offshoring strategies tend to work in the opposite direction.

Website

29 Nov
2019

Learning principles of individual and collective behavior from data

Katarína Boďová (Comenius University) S305

Have you ever wondered how are colonies of ants able to efficiently search for food, birds or fish collectively defend themselves against predators by forming flocks or schools, and why crowds of people behave like a fluid? Recent advances in automated tracking technology resulted in high-resolution recordings of individual trajectories and behavior of groups, often complemented by identification of stereotypical behaviors. But the main hurdle still remains to be data analysis and inference of informative models. I will talk about a class of probabilistic models, which is general enough to apply to a broad range of systems, incorporating individual and collective behavior, spatial and temporal dependence, discrete and continuous variables, deterministic and stochastic components and internal cognitive or behavioral state dependence. Our approach has two desirable features: (1) the maximum likelihood inference is tractably solvable by gradient descent, (2) model selection can be used to adjust model complexity to data. Multiple toy/real examples will be shown during the talk.​

22 Nov
2019

Gulags, Crime, and Violence: Origins and Consequences of the Russian Mafia

Jakub Lonsky (University of Pittsburgh) ESF MU Room S305

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian Mafia (vory-v-zakone). Using a web scraping method, I obtained a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2018. Using this data, I first show that Russian Mafia originated in the Gulag - Soviet system of forced labor camps which housed around 18 million prisoners between 1920s-1950s. Second, I document that the distance to the nearest camp is a strong negative predictor of mafia presence in Russia's communities in the mid-1990s. Finally, using an instrumental variable approach which exploits the spatial distribution of the gulags, I examine the effects of mafia presence in mid-1990s on local crime and violence. In particular, I show that the communities with mafia presence experienced a dramatic rise in crime driven by turf wars which erupted among rival clans around 1993 and lingered on until the late 1990s. This is suggested by a sharp increase in attacks against members of Russia's economic elite in places under mafia control.  Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that mafia presence led to a spike in violence against businessmen, fellow criminals, as well as law enforcement officers and judges, while the attacks against politicians remained unaffected.

Website

31 Oct
2019

Rank incentives and social learning: evidence from a randomized controlled trial

Marco Faravelli (University of Queensland) Academic club

In a 1-year randomized controlled trial involving thousands of university stu- dents, we provide real-time private feedback on relative performance in a semester-long on- line assignment. Within this setup, our experimental design cleanly identifies the behavioral response to rank incentives (i.e., the incentives stemming from an inherent preference for high rank). We find that rank incentives not only boost performance in the related assignment, but also increase the average grade across all course exams taken over the semester by 0.21 standard deviations. These beneficial effects remain sizeable across all quantiles and extend beyond the time of the intervention. The mechanism behind these findings involves social learning: rank incentives make students engage more in peer interactions, which lead them to perform significantly better across the board. Finally, we explore the virtues of real-time feedback by analyzing a number of alternative variations in the way it is provided.

Paper
Website

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