Calendrier du 15 mars 2018
Development Economics Seminar
Du 15/03/2018 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
FAFCHAMPS Marcel (Stanford University )
Can Referral Improve Targeting? Evidence from a Vocational Training Experiment
Abstract
We seek to improve the targeting of agricultural extension training by inviting past
trainees to select future trainees from a candidate pool. Some referees are rewarded or
incentivized. Training increases the adoption of recommended practices and improves per-
formance on average, but not all trainees adopt. Referred trainees are 3.7% more likely
to adopt and randomly selected trainees, but rewarding or incentivizing referees does not
improve referral quality. When referees receive ?nancial compensation, average adoption
increases and referee and referred are more likely to coordinate their adoption behavior. Ad-
dtional adopters induced by incentivizing referral adopt imperfectly and incur losses from adoption; they also tend to abandon the new practices in the following year.
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 15/03/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
BAHAR Dany (Brookings)
Diasporas, return migration and comparative advantage: a natural experiment of Yugoslavian refugees in Germany
écrit avec Andreas Hauptmann (IAB), Cem Ozguzel (PSE), Hillel Rapoport (PSE)
During the early 1990s Germany received over half-million Yugoslavians escaping war. By 2000, most of these refugees were repatriated. In this paper we exploit this episode to provide causal evidence on the role migrants play in expansion of the export baskets of their home countries after their return. We find that the elasticity of exports to return migration is between 0.1 and 0.25 in industries were migrants were employed during their stay in Germany. In order to deal with endogeneity issues we use historic rules of random allocation of asylum seekers across different German states to construct an instrumental variable for the treatment. We find our results to be externally valid when expanding the sample to all countries. We also find that the effect is over 10
times stronger for migrant workers in white collar occupations, as opposed to non-white collars. Similarly, the effect is 3 and 4 times larger upon return migration of workers with occupations intensive in analytical and cognitive tasks (as opposed to manual ones) and with high problem-solving content (as opposed to low content), respectively. Our results point to knowledge diffusion as the main channel driving the link between
migration and productivity as measured by changes in comparative advantage.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 15/03/2018 de 12:30 à 13:30
salle R2-20, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan 75014 PARIS
KOPYLOV Igor (University of California, Irvine)
Combinatorial Subjective State Spaces
I construct subjective state spaces S for preferences over finite menus. The additive representation of Kreps (1979) is relaxed to a weaker model called coherent aggregation. This model improves the identification of subjective states in several ways. First, the minimal size of S can be specified explicitly in terms of preferences. It allows combinatorial applications: starting from monotonic preferences over menus that have at most k elements, one can identify subjective state spaces that have up to k states. Second, coherent aggregation can be non-monotonic and hence, accommodate preferences for commitment. The case of singleton S delivers Gul and Pesendorfer's (2005) model of changing tastes. Third, the coherent aggregation model has equivalent interpretations in terms of incomplete dominance relations and choice functions that are both induced}endogenously by preferences. The induced dominance has a Pareto representation with subjective states. The induced choice function C is rationalized via strict maximization of subjective states. The path-independence of C characterizes the case where all subjective states are linear orders, as in Aizerman and Malishevski (1981).
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 15/03/2018 de 12:30 à 13:45
LICHTER Andreas (IZA)
The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany
écrit avec Co-authors: Max Löffler and Sebastian Siegloch
We investigate the long-run effects of government surveillance on trust and economic performance. We study the case of the Stasi in socialist East Germany, which implemented one of the largest state surveillance systems of all time. Exploiting regional variation in the number of spies and the specific administrative structure of the system, we combine a border discontinuity design with an instrumental variables approach to estimate the long-term causal effect of government surveillance after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We find that a larger spying density in the population led to persistently lower levels of interpersonal and institutional trust in post-reunification Germany. We also find evidence of substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi spying, resulting in lower income and higher exposure to unemployment.
Behavior seminar
Du 15/03/2018 de 11:00 à 12:00
New building R2-21
HANAKI Nobuyuki (Universite Cote d’Azur, CNRS, GREDEG)
An experimental analysis of the effect of Quantitative Easing
In this paper we report the results of a repeated experiment in which a central bank buys bonds for cash in a quantitative easing (QE) operation in an otherwise standard asset market setting. The experiment is designed so that bonds have a constant fundamental value which is not affected by QE under rational expectations. By repeating the same experience three times, we investigate whether participants learn that prices should not rise above the fundamental price in the presence of QE. We find that some groups do learn this but most do not, instead becoming more convinced that QE boosts bond prices. These claims are based on significantly different behaviour of two treatment groups relative to a control group that doesn't have QE.