24/25 Term1
- 02/10/24 Valentina Tonei (University of Southampton): Gender Stereotypes in the Family
- 09/10/24 Dimitrios Gounopolous (University of Bath): The Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Real Estate Market
- 16/10/24 Sergey Popov (Cardiff University): Tactical Refereeing and Signaling by Publishing
- 23/10/24 Jan Stuckatz (Copenhagen Business School): Money in Politics at Work
- 30/10/2024 Francesco Loiacono (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London):Matching With The Right Attitude: The Effect of Matching Firms with Refugee Workers
- 06/11/2024 Damian Damianov (University of Durham): Shared Occupancy and Property Tax Arrears
- 13/11/2024 Paul Elhorst (University of Groningen): Econometric Modelling of Spatial Interactions and Spillovers
- 20/11/2024 Damian Clarke (University of Exeter): Does Increasing Public Spending in Health Improve Health? Lessons from Constitutional Reform in Brazil
- 27/11/2024 Christiane Szerman (London School of Economics and Political Science): The Labor Market Effects of Disability Hiring Quotas
- 04/12/2024 Sunčica Vujić (University of Antwerp): Refugee Exposure and Polarisation: Poland in the Aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine War
- 11/12/2024 Francisco J. Pino (University of Chile): Group (Mis)perception and Strategic Behavior in Protests: Evidence from the Women’s March
- 18/12/2024 Giuseppe Destefanis (Brunel University of London): Latest advancements in LLMs for teaching and research
24/25 Term 2
- 22/01/25 Rodrigo Reis Soares (Insper): Socially Optimal Crime and Punishment
- 29/01/25 Richard Baillie (King’s College London): Robust Inference in Time Series Regression with Application
- 05/02/25 Cheng Yan (University of Essex): Marijuana Legalization and Firms’ Cost of Equity
- 12/02/25 Ronald Wendner (University of Graz): Present-biased Envy, Inequality and Growth
- 19/02/25 Lorenzo Neri (University of Rome “Tor Vergata”): The Effects of Temporary Confiscation of Vacant Housing
- 26/02/25 Benita Rose Mathew ( University of Surrey): AI in Taxation and Tax Administration
- 05/03/25 Michele Battisti (Università degli Studi di Palermo): Inter-firm Heterogeneity in Production
- 12/03/25 Jaideep Roy (University of Bath): Citizens Candidates and Activists
- 19/03/25 PhD Symposium
- 26/03/25 Davide Rigo (London School of Economics and Political Science): Work from Home and Firm Productivity: The Role of ICT and Size
- 02/04/25 Francesco De Pascalis (Brunel University of London), Alan Brener ( University College London): Open Banking: Global Development and Regulation
- 04/04/25 Roberto Ganau (Padova University): Enlightenment and the Long-term Persistence of the Habsburg Administrative Tradition
List of Abstracts
Valentina Tonei (University of Southampton)
Gender Stereotypes in the Family
We study how a child’s gender affects parental perceptions of their children’s academic abilities in reading and mathematics. Our findings show a clear gender bias, with parents underestimating girls’ mathematical skills and boys’ reading abilities. Using exogenous variation in the timing of parental interviews, we demonstrate that providing parents with information on standardised test scores significantly reduces gender bias in mathematics, but not in reading. Finally, we find that these biased beliefs have a lasting impact on children’s academic performance, contributing to the widening gender gap in STEM and humanities subjects.
Sergey Popov (University of Cardiff)
Tactical Refereeing and Signaling by Publishing
The institution of peer reviewing is used ubiquitously in hiring, promotional, and evaluation decisions, within academia and beyond. It is usually conducted to allocate limited resources, such as the budget of a funder or the pages of a journal. With limited capacity, peer review may bias evaluations, precisely because approving a peer’s worthy project consumes capacity, making the referee’s own project less likely to be approved. I show that limited capacity is inconsistent with a hypothesis that the decision-maker’s policy is chosen to stimulate efforts, and I discuss possible decision-maker motivations that could lead to a limited capacity policy.
Dimitrios Gounopolous (University of Bath)
The Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Real Estate Market
Using detailed housing transaction data in the U.S. covering 2010-2019 period, we find that wildfire-generated smoke negatively predict both housing valuation and real estate market liquidity. Listings in smoke-exposed areas experience longer outstanding days, suffer a widening opening-closing price spectrum, thus leading to overall market activity reduction. The exogeneity of smoke incidence to local economic activities suggests a causal relationship of how wildland-fire by-product determines the U.S. housing market. Besides concentrating in areas experiencing multiple incidences in a year, smoke reveals its strongest effect on property market within the first 6 to 12 months before dissipating one year later. We observe the most pronounced effect in areas whose population is generally concerned about climate change. Our findings attribute smoke influencing on housing market to migration channel.
Francesco Loiacono (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London)
Matching With The Right Attitude: The Effect of Matching Firms with Refugee Workers
We study the effect of exposure to a refugee worker on firms’ hiring of refugees. We conduct a randomized controlled trial randomly matching local firms with refugee workers. The experiment subsidizes local firms to hire a refugee worker for one week. We find that these internships effectively double local firms’ hiring of refugee workers two years after the experiment. Moreover, they enhance firms’ support of refugees’ integration and improve firm owners’ beliefs about refugees’ skills. This underscores the presence of misperceptions among local firms regarding workers from demographic groups they typically do not consider for employment. The study also identifies significant heterogeneity in the initial attitudes of employers and workers. Notably, the quality of the match between firms and refugee workers has a complementary effect on firms’ demand for refugees and enhances the impact of the internships. Overall, these findings hold significant policy implications for countries seeking to create employment opportunities for forcibly displaced people.
Damian Damianov (University of Durham)
Shared Occupancy and Property Tax Arrears
Shared occupancy arrangements are on the rise in recent years due to affordability constraints in homeownership. This article examines for the first time the property tax compliance behavior of shared dwellings, where homeowners rent out part of their own home to tenants. Using administrative property-level data from Ghana, where homeowners are responsible for tax payments, we reveal that shared dwellings, compared to pure owner-occupied homes, are more likely to be in tax arrears. Their noncompliance is more sensitive to property tax hikes than homeowners, and greatest among those in least affluent geographic areas. The results underscore the financial vulnerability of homeowners who rent out sections of their primary residence to tenants. Due to financial pressures and income constraints, they are less property tax compliant relative to conventional homeowners. We find that these effects are moderated by reciprocity, where compliance levels are higher in shared dwellings located closer to public services and amenities. The findings provide new insights for policymakers on the tax compliance effects arising in shared occupancies.
Damian Clarke (University of Exeter)
Does Increasing Public Spending in Health Improve Health? Lessons from Constitutional Reform in Brazil
Using detailed housing transaction data in the U.S. covering 2010-2019 period, we find that We examine the link between public spending in health and health outcomes by leveraging differential exposure to a health spending reform prompted by Brazil’s 29th Constitutional Amendment, which mandated municipalities to spend at least 15% of their budget on health. We map dynamic effects on health care spending, inputs, access, outputs and outcomes. For municipalities initially spending below the 15% threshold, we find (a) large increases in health spending specifically, driven by administrative spending, infrastructure investment, and human resources; (b) a resulting greater supply of personnel, primary care coverage, and municipal hospitals; and (c) reductions in infant mortality rates, in particular for deaths during the neonatal period. While we find substantial cost increases and lower mortality elasticities compared with previous correlational parameters, benefits still exceed costs provided any VSL greater than US$764 thousand. Our results contribute to the literature by providing one of the first well-identified causal parameters of the relationship between public spending in health and health outcomes, by documenting the links in the chain connecting government health expenditure to health outcomes, and by considering spillovers across space and sectors.
Francisco J. Pino (University of Chile)
Group (Mis)perception and Strategic Behavior in Protests: Evidence from the Women’s March
In economics and political science, there is insufficient consensus regarding the strategic incentives individuals encounter when deciding to participate in protests. Although most theoretical models assume strategic complementarity, recent evidence (Cantoni et al., 2019) suggests the presence of strategic substitutability. In this paper, we study how agents’ reference groups can influence their strategic decision to attend demonstrations and protests. In particular, we study whether strategic incentives with respect to the own group — according to some given dimension — differ from those with respect to the other group. To accomplish this, we conduct a field experiment involving undergraduate students from two universities during the 2023 Women’s March in Chile. We define reference groups in terms of students’ (self-reported) household income. Agents are then randomly assigned to one of six treatments, with information about the intention to participate in the march reported by their own group, the other group, the entire sample, or a combination of these. With these treatments, we assess whether agents present heterogeneous strategic incentives concerning their group and the other. Our results indicate that participation of high-income students is substantially underestimated by the entire sample on average, while the participation of low-income students appears to be more accurately predicted. In addition, students from different socioeconomic backgrounds behave strategically differently. Evidence suggests that both groups of students behave as strategic complements, but in regards to different reference groups: while the higher income group demonstrates complementarities with both the own and other group, the lower income group only behaves as complements with the other group.