Past Conferences and Seminars

The Economic Research Center (CIE), invites you to the seminar: "Tracking the Leakage of Development Goods Using iBeacon Technology".

Presented by: Dan Posner

The seminar will take place on February 23th from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm in Santa Teresa´s Seminars Room

The Center for Economic Research (CIE) invites you to the seminar: "A Model of Expenditure Shocks"

Presented by: Daniel Murphy (Darden, UVA).

The seminar will take place on October 31 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. in the Santa Teresa Seminar Room.

Abstract:

We introduce a new quantitative model of household expenditure shocks to rationalize the common anecdote of a low-income and low-liquidity household that uses additional income to save (repay debt) rather than consume. Our model also rationalizes key features of the joint dynamics of household-level consumption and income, including our finding that consumption is volatile yet disconnected from income. The key feature of our model is stochastic consumption thresholds that yield large utility costs if violated. The stochastic thresholds increase the welfare cost of income fluctuations by an order of magnitude.

The Center for Economic Research (CIE) invites you to the seminar:
State Capacity as an Organizational Problem. Evidence from the Growth of the U.S. State Over 100 Years

Presented by: Edoardo Teso (Northwestern University)

The seminar will take place on October 27 from 12:00 to 13:30 p.m. in the Santa Teresa Seminar Room.

Abstract:

We study how the organization of the state evolves over the process of development of a nation, using a new dataset on the internal organization of the U.S. federal bureaucracy over 1817-1905. First, we show a series of facts, describing how the size of the state, its presence across the territory, and its key organizational features evolved over the nineteenth century.
Second, exploiting the staggered expansion of the railroad and telegraph networks across space, we show that the ability of politicians to monitor state agents throughout the territory is an
important driver of these facts: locations with lower transportation and communication costs with Washington DC have more state presence, are delegated more decision power, and have
lower employee turnover. The results suggest that high monitoring costs are associated with small, personalistic state organizations based on networks of trust; technological shocks lowering monitoring costs facilitate the emergence of modern bureaucratic states.

The Economic Research Center (CIE), invites you to the seminar: “Temperature and Maltreatment of Young Children” (with Mary Evans and Jessamyn Schaller)

Presented by: Ludovica Gazze

The seminar will take place on Friday October 20, from 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm in Santa Teresa´s Seminars Room.

Abstract:

We estimate the impacts of temperature on alleged and substantiated child maltreatment among young children using administrative data from state child protective service agencies. Leveraging short-term weather variation, we find increases in maltreatment of young children during hot periods. We rule out that our results are solely due to changes in reporting. Additional analysis identifies neglect as the temperature-sensitive maltreatment type, and we do not find evidence that adaptation via air conditioning mitigates this relationship. Given that climate change will increase exposure to extreme temperatures, our findings speak to additional costs of climate change among the most vulnerable.