Calendrier du 06 décembre 2023
Development Economics Seminar
Du 06/12/2023 de 16:30 à 18:00
R2.01
HEATH Rachel (University of Washington)
Monitoring Harassment in Organizations
écrit avec Laura Boudreau (Columbia University), Sylvain Chassang (Princeton University), Ada González-Torres (Ben Gurion University)
We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harass-
ment in organizations. To do so, we partner with a large Bangladeshi garment manu-
facturer and experiment with different designs of phone-based worker surveys. “Hard”
garbling (HG) responses to sensitive questions, i.e.,
automatically
recording a random
subset as complaints, increases reporting of physical harassment by 290%, sexual harass-
ment by 271%, and threatening behavior by 45%, from reporting rates of 1.5%, 1.8%,
and 9.9%, respectively, under the status quo of direct elicitation. Rapport-building and
removing team identifiers from responses do not significantly increase reporting. We
show that garbled reports can be used to consistently estimate policy-relevant statistics
of harassment, including: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible
for the misbehavior? and, How isolated are its victims? In our data, harassment is
widespread, the problem is not restricted to a minority of managers, and victims are
often isolated within teams.
Economic History Seminar
Du 06/12/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
VALENCIA CAICEDO Felipe (Vancouver SE)
Bourbons reforms and State capacity in the Spanish empire
We study state modernization and its fiscal and political consequences in the Spanish empire in the Americas in the 18th century. We focus on the intendancy system, which introduced a new corps of provincial governors to address misgovernance by local colonial officers. Our empirical strategy leverages the staggered implementation of this reform across the empire, extending from present-day USA to Argentina. Using administrative data from the royal treasuries, we show that the intendancy system led to a sizable increase in Crown revenue, driven by a strengthening of state presence far from the traditional centers of power and the disruption of local elite capture. The reform also caused a reduction in the incidence of rebellions by indigenous peoples, who were harshly exploited under the status quo. However, the intendancy system also heightened tensions with the local creole elites, as reflected by naming patterns, and plausibly contributed to the nascent independence movement.