Calendrier du 28 septembre 2022
Development Economics Seminar
Du 28/09/2022 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R2.21 Campus Jourdan
MUNOZ-MORALES Juan (IESEG)
Signaling Specific Skills and the Labor Market of College Graduates
We study how signaling skills specific to the major affects labor market outcomes of college graduates. We rely on census-like data and a regression discontinuity design to study the impacts of a well-known award given to top performers on a mandatory nationwide exam, which constitutes a graduation requirement for college seniors in Colombia. Students who can rely on the signal when searching for a job have a wage premium of 7 to 12 percent compared to otherwise identical students. This positive return persists even five years after graduation. The signal mostly benefits workers who graduate from low-reputation colleges, and allows workers to find jobs in more productive firms and in sectors that better use their skills. We rule out that the positive wage returns are explained by human capital. The signal favors mostly less advantaged groups, implying that less information frictions about students' skills could potentially reduce earnings gaps. Our results imply that information policies like those that formally certify specific skills can improve the efficiency in talent allocation of the economy and level the playing field for workers who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
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Histoire des entreprises et de la finance
Du 28/09/2022 de 16:00 à 17:30
Salle R1.14, Campus Jourdan
HANNAH Leslie ()
Large quoted manufacturing employers circa 1880: why the UK and France led the US in the scale and scope of enterprise and the divorce of ownership from control
Economic History Seminar
Du 28/09/2022 de 12:00 à 13:30
Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan
ROSENTHAL Jean-Laurent (California Institute of Technology)
Do Entrepreneurs Want Control? A Historical and Theoretical Exploration
écrit avec Joint with Naomi Lamoreaux (Yale and Michigan)
There are a number of accounts in US business history of entrepreneurs who secured financial backing for startups only to find that their investors were more intent on profiting from the initial discovery than in funding ongoing innovation. The entrepreneurs we tend to know about quit those ventures, often forfeiting their intellectual property as a consequence, and found backing to start additional ventures that were very successful. In the late nineteenth century US entrepreneurs could do little about this problem of conservative investors. The only way they could secure control over their startups was to own more than fifty percent of the equity. But in Great Britain or on the European continent, it was possible to separate income rights from control rights, and entrepreneurs could lock in control at the time the enterprise was formed. The purpose of this paper is to explore the circumstances under which they would want to take this step using a simple two-period model in which entrepreneurs get a benefit from innovating that is not captured by the firm or its investors. This additional benefit means that there are projects the entrepreneur would want to take on in the second period that would impose losses on the investor. Knowing this, the investor would require an additional payment upfront if the entrepreneur wanted to lock in control. The model suggests that entrepreneurs can only bear this cost in circumstances where the opportunity cost of capital is low and/or the externality is high. That is, having permissive legal rules is only sometimes useful.