Calendrier du 19 octobre 2020
Régulation et Environnement
Du 19/10/2020 de 17:30 à 18:30
https://zoom.us/j/98281389413?pwd=cWxiVzVPdVdCYm1Ec2pDcDYybk5tQT09
HSIANG Solomon (Berkeley)
Accounting for Unobservable Heterogeneity in Cross Section Using Spatial First Differences
écrit avec Hannah Druckenmiller
We develop a simple cross-sectional research design to identify causal effects that is robust to unobservable heterogeneity. When many observational units are dense in physical space, it may be sufficient to regress the “spatial first differences” (SFD) of the outcome on the treatment and omit all covariates. This approach is conceptually similar to first differencing approaches in time-series or panel models, except the index for time is replaced with an index for locations in space. The SFD design identifies plausibly causal effects, even when no instruments are available, so long as local changes in the treatment and unobservable confounders are not systematically correlated between immediately adjacent neighbors. We demonstrate the SFD approach by recovering new cross-sectional estimates for the effects of time-invariant geographic factors, soil and climate, on long-run average crop productivities across US counties — relationships that are notoriously confounded by unobservables but crucial for guiding economic decisions, such as land management and climate policy.
Paris Migration Seminar
Du 19/10/2020 de 17:30 à 18:20
LEVAI Adam (UCLouvain)
The Impact of Immigration on Workers Protection
Even though the current literature investigating the labor market impact of immigration assumes implicitly or explicitly labor market regulation as exogenous to immigration (both in terms of size and composition) - this is not necessarily the case. This paper shows that the composition of the immigrant population affects the degree of workers protection over a sample of 70 developed and developing countries from 1970 to 2010. After building a workers protection index based on 36 labor law variables and exploiting a dynamic panel setting using both internal and external instruments, we find that migrants impact the destination countries' workers protection mainly through the degree of workers protection experienced in their origin countries, captured by an "epidemiological" effect. On the other hand, the size of the immigrant population has a small and rather insignificant effect. The results are robust to alternative and competing immigration effects such as diversity, polarization and skill-selection. The effects are particularly strong across two dimensions of the workers protection index: worker representation laws and employment forms laws. This paper provides suggestive evidence that immigrants' participation to unions and its implications for the political actors is one of the potential mechanisms through which the epidemiological effect could materialize. Finally, calculations based on the estimated coefficients suggest that immigration contributes to a reduction of the degree of workers protection, particularly in OECD high-income countries.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 19/10/2020 de 13:00 à 14:00
https://zoom.univ-paris1.fr/j/97838602106?pwd=SGtZS2ZnOUd2M1FxTlNtSGIxRHd3UT09
LONDON Melina (AMSE)
Cross-Sector Interactions in Western Europe: Lessons From Trade Credit Data
Both the ongoing US-China trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic have induced supply-chain disruptions. They have shown the importance of international cross-sector connections in disseminating distress. Yet, little is known about how those connections relate to trade credit. To fill the gap, this study investigates how firms' trade credit payments interact across sectors and the relation of these interactions with already documented production links. To do so, it uses an original database from one of the top three credit insurers in the world. It measures payment behavior in each sector using data on defaults on trade credit between 2007 and 2019. Data are collected for sectors in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Using a two-step high-dimensional method, this article identifies Granger causalities across sectors. Results highlight the existence of predictive relationships between sectors' payment behavior on trade credits. A few
sectors – among which construction, wholesale and retail, and motor vehicles – tend to display a wider set of predictive relationships towards other sectors than the average. The existence of these relationships, as well as their magnitude, is positively and significantly related to intermediate good owing from one sector to the other. Such result is consistent with sector-level shock propagation patterns working through production links such as highlighted in the production network literature.
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