Calendrier du 17 mars 2022
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 17/03/2022 de 16:00 à 17:15
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
LEVCHENKO Andrei (University of Michigan)
News Media and International Fluctuations
écrit avec Ha Bui, University of Texas at Austin and Zhen Huo, Yale University
We develop a multi-country multi-sector model with global value chains and informational frictions. Producers in a sector do not perfectly observe shocks to other countries and sectors, and their output decisions respond to beliefs about the productivity innovations worldwide. To discipline the agents’ information sets, we collect a novel quarterly dataset of the frequencies of industry-specific economic news reports by leading newspapers in the G7 plus Spain. Newspapers in each country publish articles on select events in both domestic and partner-country sectors, and not every event is reported worldwide. We show in reduced-form regressions that (i) greater news coverage is associated with smaller GDP forecast errors; and (ii) sectors more covered in the news exhibit greater business cycle comovement, even controlling for their trade intensity. We then use the news coverage data to discipline the key parameters in the quantitative model, namely the precision of the public signals about country-sector productivities. Noise shocks about TFP throughout the global value chain can be a quantitatively important source of international GDP comovement. Furthermore, these shocks would appear as labor wedges in standard models without dispersed information.
Texte intégral
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 17/03/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
LEUVEN Edwin (U. Oslo)
Sorting, Screening and College Admission
Quantitative measures of academic preparedness play a key role in college admissions around the world. We study the use of high-school GPA as opposed to the use of alternative objective and subjective criteria in college admission. Our context is the Danish higher education system where most programs admit applicants in two quotas. In a first quota, admission is based on high-school GPA. If rejected, applicants can also compete in a second quota where candidates are ranked on alternative criteria such as the subjective evaluation of CVs, essays and interviews, or specific grades and college entry tests. Applicants in both quotas are ranked and admitted based on their rank priority score. We show conceptually that alternative evaluation can affect admission outcomes through two channels; on the one hand it can affect selection into application, while on the other it will change screening conditional on application. We build on the features of the admission process to implement a regression discontinuity design across the two quotas to estimate how admission affects program and college completion. We investigate the relative importance of sorting and screen, and investigate how admission outcomes depends on the evaluative criteria used.
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 17/03/2022 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
PASQUAMARIA SQUICCIARINI Mara (Bocconi)
Religiosity and Science: an Oxymoron? Evidence from the Great Influenza Pandemic
écrit avec joint with Enrico Berkes, Davide Coluccia, and Gaia Dossi
This paper studies the impact of the Spanish influenza pandemic (1918-20) on religiosity and science. Focusing on the United States during the 1900-1930 period, we define a novel indicator of revealed religiosity that leverages naming patterns of newborn babies, and measure scientific progress through the universe of patents granted over this period. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the pandemic, we find that relatively more affected counties became both more religious and more innovative. Moreover, we document that the relationship between religiosity and science changed over time, being negative before 1918, and positive thereafter, a finding at odds with the current literature. We use individual-level data to shed light on the mechanisms. We show that in counties affected by the pandemic: i) individuals in science-related fields, who were less religious before the shock, became even less religious than the rest of the population; ii) pre-existing differences in religiosity increased, leading to a polarization of religious beliefs.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 17/03/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1.15, Campus Jourdan 75014 Paris
GOURSAT Laure (PSE)
How Do I Know How Much I Like You? Valuation and v-stability for matching markets with incomplete information
In this project, I set a one-to-one matching market with no transfer and incomplete information - only the current state of the market (matching and realized match utilities) is observed. I wonder: (1) How do agents estimate counterfactual match utilities? (2) How does this estimation affect the market outcome? To address those questions, (1) I define a heuristic termed “valuation” - an agent who considers blocking with a target extrapolates from his current utility and the current utility of the target’s current partner. (2) I characterize v-stable matchings – unblocked matchings when blocking decisions are based on comparisons of valuations. The necessary and sufficient condition for v-stability is “happiness sorting” - any two partners must hold the same within-side rank according to realized match utilities. Working with various standard classes of preferences illustrates that the size and relation to the u-stable set are very changeable. In the general case, the lack of existence of a v-stable matching and the lack of convergence of a dynamic decentralized v-blocking pair process predict persistent moves on the market. I consider several extensions of the valuation heuristic: accounting for the possibility of unmatched agents, allowing extrapolation on the utility’s arguments rather than on the utilities themselves, generalizing to mixed matchings.
Behavior seminar
Du 17/03/2022 de 11:00 à 12:00
Salle R2.21, Campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MULLER Laurent (GAEL)
A Global & Analytical Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation Method. The case of the Corporate Social Responsibility attribute for wine
This paper develops a willingness-to-pay elicitation method that combines the strengths of choice experiments and experimental auctions. While these tools are standard for estimating consumer values of goods and their attributes, they tend to produce dissimilar results since their methodological discrepancies may trigger distinct types of behaviour. The Global & Analytical willingness-to-pay elicitation method (G&A method) generates for each individual two measures of willingness-to-pay, one derived from an initial holistic approach and the other from a reflective assessment about the relative importance of the attributes composing the good. We applied this method to the wine market, and in particular to the question of how consumers value the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) attribute. We show that while analytical assessment leads to reduced willingness-to-pay for wine, the marginal willingness-to-pay for CSR increases relatively to the other attributes.