Our Seminars & Workshops

Distortions in time perception: A Novel Measure of Non-Pecuniary Utility (with Holger Gerhardt)

Title: Annexing the Suburbs: The Effects of Large Municipal Boundary Expansions on Local Public Finance

Title: When Teachers Break the Rules: Imitation, Reciprocity, and Community Structure in the Transmission of Ethical Behavior (with Moses Shayo - Hebrew University of Jerusalem, King's College London).

Abstract: We study how teachers' rule violations in grading affect students' ethical behavior. Using administrative data from high-stakes exams, combining teacher-assigned internal scores with externally graded national exam scores, we track teacher grading violations and subsequent student cheating. We explore three potential mechanisms: imitation (learning that rules can be broken), positive reciprocity (responding favorably to favorable treatment), and negative reciprocity (retaliating against unfavorable treatment). Exploiting within-student variation in exposure to different teachers, we find students are significantly more likely to cheat when teachers break the rules to their detriment (systematically under grading), consistent with both imitation and negative reciprocity. However, when teachers systematically over grade, responses vary by community structure. In heterogeneous communities, over grading increases student cheating, suggesting imitation dominates. In homogeneous communities, students respond by cheating less, consistent with positive reciprocity dominating. This pattern holds across multiple homogeneity measures, including surname concentration and residential clustering. Survey measures of mutual respect and support between students and teachers confirm this pattern.

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Two 30 minutes presentations:

Anisha will present Political Consequences of Urban Landscaping: Evidence from India.

Luc will present How to Silence Researchers? Evidence from Illiberal Policies in Hungary.

Abstract: Since the late 1990s, a growing number of countries have shifted toward “illiberal democracy”— regimes that maintain “free but unfair” elections while systematically undermining the rule of law. In this paper, we argue that contemporary illiberal democracies have detrimental effects on innovation, and specifically on academic research. Using national and international bibliometric data, we show that academics’ research trajectories diverge sharply depending on their perceived political alignment. Researchers perceived as political opponents experience substantially larger declines in both publication output and collaboration networks, with each decreasing by about a quarter of its pre-shock level per year. At the same time, they are more likely to publicly criticize the regime. Similarly, researchers working on gender-related topics are also disproportionately affected: they experience a decrease of 10% in total publications and 30% in publications in top journals. Finally, we conduct cross-country, individual-level comparisons to estimate the broader effect of the loss of freedom on academia. We find that Hungarian researchers increasingly shift their publication efforts toward lower-quality, national-language journals and are more likely to leave the country altogether.

Title: Keeping the agents in the dark: Competing Mechanisms, Private Disclosures, and the Revelation Principle (with Andrea Attar, Eloisa Campioni, and Alessandro Pavan).

Abstract: We study the design of market information in competing-mechanism games. We identify a new dimension, private disclosures, whereby the principals asymmetrically inform the agents of how their mechanisms operate. We show that private disclosures have two important effects. First, they can raise a principal's payoff guarantee against her competitors' threats. Second, they can support equilibrium outcomes and payoffs that cannot be supported with standard mechanisms. These results call for a novel approach to competing mechanisms, which we develop to identify a canonical game and a canonical class of equilibria, thereby establishing a new revelation principle for this class of environments.

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Details TBC

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Title: We're writing what? A meta analysis on economics scholarship.

Joint work with Annika Johnson (Bristol)

Two 30 minutes presentations.

Titles to be advised.

Title: Quantifying the Internal Validity of Weighted Estimands (with Alexandre Poirier),

The paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14603.

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Gender Differences in Self-Promotion and Career Advice

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Title: Credit Spreads, Financial Development and Growth

Two 30minutes presentations.

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Title: Signaling with Plausible Deniability joint with Andrew McClellan

This is a new paper so there is no draft yet.

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Dynamics of belief networks

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Two 30 minutes presentations.

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