Calendrier du 23 novembre 2020
Paris Migration Seminar
Du 23/11/2020 de 17:30 à 18:20
SLUNGAARD MUMMA Kirsten (Harvard University)
Immigrant Integration in the United States: The Role of Adult English Language Training
écrit avec with Blake Heller
While current debates center on whether and how to admit immigrants to the United States, little attention has been paid to interventions designed to help immigrants integrate after they arrive. Public adult education programs are the primary policy lever for building the language skills of the over 23 million adults with limited English proficiency in the United States. We leverage the enrollment lottery of a publicly-funded adult English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program in Massachusetts to estimate the effects of English language training on voting behavior and employer-reported earnings. Attending ESOL classes more than doubles rates of voter registration and increases annual earnings by $2,400 (56%). We estimate that increased tax revenue from earnings gains fully pay for program costs over time, generating a 6% annual return for taxpayers. Our results demonstrate the social value of post-migration investments in the human capital of adult immigrants.
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 23/11/2020 de 17:00 à 18:00
online
MEYER Meg (Oxford)
Choosing Joint Distributions: Theory and Application to Information Design
In many economic settings, a decision-maker chooses a joint distribution of random
variables (X1,…,Xn) to maximize the expected value of an objective function V(X1,…,Xn), taking
the marginal distributions of the Xi’s as given. Problems of the above form arise in optimal
transport, where the marginal distributions reflect resource constraints; in multi-product
design, where the marginal distributions reflect buyers’ valuations for each separate variety of
product; and in information design, where the marginal distributions reflect characteristics of
receivers.
In models of information design where a sender communicates privately with multiple
receivers, the sender’s strategic problem is the choice of a joint distribution of signals to the
receivers, conditional on each state of the world. In some settings, the sender’s problem
decouples: the optimal marginal distribution of the signal to each receiver, in each state,
depends only on that receiver’s characteristics, and the optimal joint distribution can then be
determined, taking the marginal distributions as given.
The first part of this paper derives three stochastic dominance theorems showing how the
solution to a decision-maker’s problem of the form above depends on the properties of the
objective function and the characteristics of the given marginal distributions. Specifically, it
examines the impact of greater “heterogeneity” within the set of marginal distributions,
providing three distinct generalizations of the majorization ordering of dispersion to capture
heterogeneity among sets of univariate distributions. For each definition of greater
heterogeneity of the given marginal distributions, the corresponding stochastic dominance
theorem identifies a class of objective functions for which greater heterogeneity is sufficient to
guarantee a lower maximized expected payoff for the decision-maker, for any objective in that
class. Two of the three theorems also demonstrate that greater heterogeneity of the marginals
according to the corresponding definition is necessary for the conclusion above.
The second part of the paper applies these stochastic dominance theorems to a family of multireceiver
models of private Bayesian persuasion. I derive new characterizations of feasible and
optimal signal structures and new comparative statics results.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 23/11/2020 de 12:00 à 13:00
https://zoom.us/j/98281389413?pwd=cWxiVzVPdVdCYm1Ec2pDcDYybk5tQT09
ALLAIN Marie-Laure (CREST)
The Effect of Input Price Discrimination on Retail Prices: Theory and Evidence from France.
We develop a model with
competing retailers selling both national brand and private label products to analyze the effect of a ban on input price discrimination on final prices, in a secret contracting environment. We show that, when discrim- ination is allowed, tariffs are cost-based. A a ban on input price discrimination affects the input price of national brand products and leaves that of private label products unaffected. A reform authorizing input price discrimination took place in France in 2008 and our paper uses this natural experiment to test our predic- tions. Using a consumer panel dataset of food prices in France over the period 2006-2010, we run a difference-in-differences analysis and show that on average the reform has led to a decrease in prices of national brands by 3.36% compared to private labels.