23/24 Term 1
- 04/10/23 Bansi Malde (University of Kent): Personalized Information Provision and the Take-Up of Government Benefits: Experimental Evidence from India
- 11/10/23 Zahra Murad (University of Portsmouth): Do Co-leadership Positions Increase Diversity in Leadership? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Personality
- 18/10/23 Andrea Saenz de Viteri (Prague): Populism and Constitutional Reform in Latin America and the Caribbean
- 25/10/23 Michele Battisti (LUISS Rome): Educational Take-off and the Role of Wealth
- 01/11/23 Javier Rivas (University of Bath): Sequential Expert Consultation: On the Optimal Ordering of Product Reviews
- 03/11/23 Roman Fossati (UNICEN, Argentina):Total Factor Productivity: Exploring Firms’ Dynamics and Heterogeneity over the Business Cycle
- 08/11/23 Jo Blanden (University of Surrey):Non-monetary Interventions, Workforce Retention and Hospital Quality: Evidence from the English NHS
- 15/11/23 Felipe Gonzalez (Queen Mary): Mass Policy in Times of Crisis
- 22/11/23 Carlo Reggiani (Seville & University of Manchester): Exclusive Data, Price Manipulation and Market Leadership
- 29/11/23 Tom Potons (University of Sussex):A Spouse and a House are All We Need? Housing Demand, Labor Supply and Divorce over the Lifecycle
- 06/12/23 Nauro Campos (UCL): The Political U: New Evidence on Democracy and Income
- 13/12/23 Matthew Rablen (University of Sheffield): Marketed Tax Avoidance: An Economic Analysis
23/24 Term 2
- 17/01/24 Wolfgang Luhan (Portsmouth): Would I Lie for You? The Impact of Reputational Costs in Prosocial Lying
- 24/01/24 John Morrow (Kings College London): Multi-establishment Firm Structure, Subsidies and Spillovers
- 31/01/24 Carl Singleton (University of Reading): Gambling on Momentum in Contests
- 05/02/24 Stergios Skaperdas (University of California, Irvine): National Identity, Public Goods, and Modern Economic Development
- 07/02/24 Elodie Douarin (University College London): Terrorism and tax morale
- 14/02/24 Xian Gu (Durham University): Interbank Network and Bank Credit Supply
- 21/02/24 Orestis Troumpounis (Padova/Lancaster University): Protests and Police Militarization
- 28/02/24 Patricio Dominguez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile): Crime and Mobility
- 06/03/24 Zhehao Jia (University of Edinburgh): Credit Market Segmentation, Access to Credit, and Corporate Risk-taking: Evidence from Asset-backed Securitisation
- 13/03/24 Yizhaq Minchuk (SCE- Shamoon College of Engineering): The “sports wars”: A contest Theory Approach to Cities Hosting Game
- 20/03/24 EDI Annual Conference 2024
23/24 Term 3
- 17/04/24 Dimitrios Stafylas (University of York): A New Measure for Investors’ Private Information Embedded in the Stock Price
- 24/04/24 Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay (University of Birmingham): Testing Your Beliefs: Theory and Evidence on What Works in Crime Reduction
- 01/05/24 Paul Lohmann (University of Cambridge): Accelerating the Sustainable Food Transition: The Impact of Behaviourally Informed Interventions on Food Choices.
- 15/05/24 Doron Klunover (Shamoon College of Engineering): A Model of Civil Disobedience
- 22/05/24 2024 RCEA International Conference on Economics, Econometrics and Finance
- 03/06/24 Emmanouil Platanakis (University of Bath): Commodity Inflation Risk Premium and Stock Market Returns
List of Abstracts
Bansi Malde (University of Kent)
Personalized Information Provision and the Take-Up of Government Benefits: Experimental Evidence from India
Though almost half of the global population is covered by at least one social protection benefit, there are significant gaps between what people are eligible to receive and what they actually receive. We implemented a cluster Randomized Controlled Trial in a large Indian city during the COVID-19 crisis to study whether and how informational gaps impede the take-up of government benefits. The intervention provided personalized information about government benefits via cell phones to randomly selected households. We document that initially, households on average overestimated entitlements but received less than the actual entitlements. We find that the intervention corrected households’ beliefs about their benefit entitlements, and increased the benefits received. Household wellbeing — as measured through consumption, food insecurity and mental health — also improved. Investigating mechanisms, we show evidence that the intervention empowered beneficiaries to get the entitled aid without paying a bribe.
Zahra Murad (University of Portsmouth)
Do co-leadership positions increase diversity in leadership? Experimental Evidence on Gender and Personality
This study examines the impact of co-leadership as an institutional solution to enhance gender diversity in top leadership roles. We propose that responsibility aversion may contribute to the gender gap in leadership positions and explore how co-leadership affects women’s willingness to take on such roles. Our findings suggest that women are less inclined to be solo decision-makers but are more willing to engage in leadership when responsibilities are co-shared. In solo leadership setups, women experience heightened levels of responsibility, anxiety, blame, and guilt, which are significantly mitigated in co-leadership contexts. Additionally, co-leadership appears to attract individuals with lower scores in dark triad personality traits, suggesting a more empathetic and cooperative leadership style. These results offer valuable insights for organizational decision-makers aiming to increase representative diversity in leadership, suggesting that co-leadership could be an effective strategy for achieving this goal.
Andrea Saenz de Viteri (Prague)
Educational Take-off and the Role of Wealth
While constitutions are supposed to be stable documents entrenching a set of rules of the political game, Latin American and Caribbean constitutional development has been characterized by frequent change and instability. We hypothesize that the Latin American tradition for populist governments and heads of state explains this tradition. Contrary to established parties and interests, populist tend to aim at securing the median vote and be supported by non-encompassing interests. They also depict themselves as outside the regular elite and oppose the regularly conduct of politics. It may therefore be in the particular interest of populists to change the constitution to suit their specific needs. Exploring the frequency and direction of constitutional reforms in 42 Latin America and Caribbean countries, we find evidence indicating that populists are more likely to amend the constitution to concentrate power.
Michele Battisti (LUISS Rome)
Populism and Constitutional Reform in Latin America and the Caribbean
What is the role of a society’s wealth in influencing basic educational choices? Although the theoretical literature provides several possible answers, from an empirical viewpoint the response to this question is not straightforward. Indeed, nowadays, such an issue cannot be typically inspected before starting college, due to the compulsory public education laws in force at lower levels in nearly all countries. We investigate this problem by employing a newly collected and unique municipal level dataset covering Sicilian wealth shares and primary school enrollment in the year 1858, when schools were available in almost each municipality, but with no obligation to attend them. Our identification strategy relies on the historical heritage of seismic events, in shaping mid-19th century land and property distribution. Results of the analysis show that, even in an almost entirely agrarian society, the household wealth plays a role in the choice of human capital accumulation. In addition, we highlight that the wealth effect is only triggered beyond a certain threshold of rent and document long-lasting impacts of initial wealth conditions on a series of institutional and economic outcomes.
Javier Rivas (University of Bath)
Sequential Expert Consultation: On the Optimal Ordering of Product Reviews
A decision maker consults product reviews sequentially on a platform. Reviews are either authentic or fake. Reviewers’ trustworthiness is privately observed by the platform. Each review is costly to read. In each round, the decision maker chooses in a sequentially rational way whether and which review to read. The platform’s ordering rule determines the order of presentation of reviews as a function of trustworthiness levels. The ordering rule influences the informativeness of reviews by affecting reviewers’ incentives. We characterise the optimal ordering rule and show that it is stochastic.
Roman Fossati (UNICEN, Argentina)
Total Factor Productivity: Exploring Firms’ Dynamics and Heterogeneity over the Business Cycle
This paper analyzes plant-level total factor productivity (TFP) for Chilean manufacturing firms over the business cycle. Decomposing the aggregate productivity, net entry contributes to productivity growth on average around 30% and continuing firms around 70%. However, net entry contributes exclusively in the recovery years directly following drops (on average above 50%), while in the remaining growth periods this growth comes exclusively from continuing firms. In contrast, the TFP declines in 1997-1998 and 2002-2004 start with a big negative contribution from continuing firms, while afterwards net entry plays a bigger role. In both cases, the continuing firms’ contribution to TFP growth and decrease comes mainly from within plants restructuring. The net entry’s contribution comes from both entering and exiting without a clear pattern. Further, TFP growth does not spread evenly across sectors, but is an unbalanced process following a mushroom pattern over time (in Harberger´s sense) for all years considered. Overall, the relative importance of the different sectors both in growth and decline periods considerably differs over time, where industries changed from winners to losers regularly.
Jo Blanden (University of Surrey)
Non-monetary Interventions, Workforce Retention and Hospital Quality: Evidence from the English NHS
Excessive turnover reduces the stock of an organization’s human capital. In the public sector, where salary increases are often constrained, managers need to leverage on non-monetary working conditions to retain their employees. We investigate whether workers are responsive to improvements in non-wage aspects of their job by evaluating the impact on nurse retention of a programme that encouraged public hospitals to increase staff retention through data monitoring and improving the non-pecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. Employing rich employee-level administrative data from the universe of English NHS hospitals, and a staggered difference-in-difference design, we find that the programme has improved nursing retention within hospitals, decreased exits from the public hospital sector, and decreased mortality by preventing 11,400 patient deaths within 30 days from hospital admission. Our results indicate that a light-touch intervention can shift management behavior and improve hospital workforce turnover. These findings are important in sectors affected by labor supply shortages, and they are especially policy-relevant in the health care context, where such shortages are acute and have potentially negative effects on patient outcomes.
Carlo Reggiani (Seville & University of Manchester)
Exclusive Data, Price Manipulation and Market Leadership
The rapid development of information systems has allowed many tech companies to gather and analyse vast amounts of individual consumer data, creating detailed consumer profiles. Some of these data is often complemented by the one collected by specialised data broker firms that have started selling consumer profiles to businesses. These granular consumer profiles, combined with powerful computing and algorithms, enable data-rich firms to offer real-time personalised deals. This article proposes a game-theoretical model to examine the issue of exclusive access to consumer data for price discrimination and its impact on competitive strategies and welfare by altering firms’ strategic incentives. We show that exclusive access to a list of consumers can provide incentives for a firm to endogenously assume the price leader’s role, and so to strategically manipulate its rival’s price. Prices and profits, however, are non-monotonic in the share of profiled consumers. For an intermediate share, price leadership entails an equilibrium outcome characterised by supra-competitive prices and low consumer surplus. For a limited share, the incentive to lead is absent, whereas for a large share competition kicks in and the price manipulation mechanism breaks down. These results hold qualitatively in a large number of extensions that include both firms owning data endowments, investing in data gathering or buying them from data brokers, loyal consumers being profiled, and imperfect information about consumers’ preferences.
Tom Potons (University of Sussex)
A Spouse and a House are All We Need? Housing Demand, Labor Supply and Divorce over the Lifecycle
We present a limited commitment framework of household behavior in which households make decisions regarding labor supply, divorce and housing demand over their lifecycle. We identify and estimate our structural model using exogenous variation in female labor supply and divorce rates due to the White v. White reform in England. We study the effect of post-divorce asset division rules and credit market policies on the value of marriage and intra-household behavior. We show the insurance value of marriage is affected by both the presence of limited commitment and borrowing constraints. We also conduct a welfare analysis of sudden house price shocks, where we show that single women might incur most costs of such upticks in house price volatility.
Dimitrios Stafylas (University of York) A New Measure for Investors’ Private Information Embedded in the Stock Price We develop a new measure for investors’ private information (SDPIN) that is embedded in stock prices. Contrary to the existing measures, it considers the trade order size (volume) and the trade frequency; we advocate that private information can also be embedded in the trade volume. We test the validity of our SDPIN measure and study how it relates to the stock price synchronicity, using various proxies for private information. We show that it is more accurate than the existing private information measures, hence, it can help reduce information asymmetries among market players, enhancing market transparency, and increase managers’ awareness of private information, so they can make more optimal decisions.
Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay (University of Birmingham) Testing Your Beliefs: Theory and Evidence on What Works in Crime Reduction Since Becker’s 1968 model, economists have modelled criminal behaviour as a rational choice with both law enforcement and socio-economic factors affecting these choices but debates on what lowers crime continues as many of the determinants of crime can have theoretically ambiguous effects and academic and policy disagreements persist on what really lowers crime. There is a large body that tries to empirically estimate these effects, but disentangling causality is a challenge in this area. Randomised controlled trials (RCT’s) are a way to understand causal impacts but in criminal justice contexts they are ethically challenging and can pose practical problems. A pilot RCT on a youth justice intervention is used to illustrate the opportunities and challenges such trials present.
Emmanouil Platanakis (University of Bath) Commodity Inflation Risk Premium and Stock Market Returns We propose a novel measure of commodity inflation risk premium (cIRP) based on a term structure model of commodity futures. The cIRP, capturing forward-looking information in the futures markets, outperforms well-known characteristics in explaining the cross-section of commodity returns. The associated cIRP factor has the highest Sharpe ratio among the existing factors, and has substantial new information beyond them. Moreover, various aggregations of the individual cIRP predict stock market returns significantly, even after controlling for major economic predictors including the usual inflation measure. The link between commodities and the stock market is stronger than previously thought.
Doron Klunover (Shamoon College of Engineering) A Model of Civil Disobedience A stylized model of civil disobedience is considered, in which individuals from group N may intentionally reduce their contribution to a public good in order to destabilize the government and thus prevent it from passing a reform that harms their group while benefiting individuals from group M. Thus, the non-contribution of group N to the public good itself becomes a public good. It is shown that: (i) under mild conditions, individuals from group N do not reduce their contribution, and (ii) when they do, the behavior of individuals from group M does not compensate for the reduction. The results are consistent with real-world behavior.