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Conferencias y seminarios pasados

07
Feb
11:30
Seminario CIE

New York University

"Should We Ban E-cigarettes? Theory and Evidence."

Electronic cigarettes are one of the most controversial new products of the past decade, due to uncertainty about their health e ects and whether they are primarily a quit aid or a gateway drug for traditional combustible cigarettes. We show that demographics with stronger latent demand for e-cigarettes had steady relative declines in cigarette consumption over 2004-2018 that did not change as e-cigarettes were introduced, suggesting that e-cigarettes had negligible e ects on cigarette consumption. We formalize this intuition in a shift-share econometric strategy that con rms that e-cigarettes are neither complements nor substitutes on average; our con dence intervals rule out that e-cigarettes a ected the 2004-2018 aggregate smoking decline by more than 10 percent in either direction. We carry out a new expert survey to aggregate the state of knowledge about the health e ects of e-cigarettes. There is material disagreement; the average expert believes that e-cigarettes impose externalities and \internalities" (harms to users that they do not correctly perceive) that are 48 and 115 percent as large as those of combustible cigarettes, respectively. We embed these empirical ndings in a behavioral welfare analysis with Monte Carlo simulations to account for uncertainty. Successfully banning e-cigarettes increases expected social welfare, although it decreases welfare in more than 40 percent of parameter draws.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
13
Dic
12:00
Seminario CIE: Joel Sobel

UC San Diego

"Lying and Deception in Games." 

This article proposes de nitions of lying, deception, and damage in strategic settings. Lying depends on the existence of accepted meanings for messages, but does not require a model of how the audience responds to messages. Deception does require a model of how the audience interprets messages, but does not directly refer to consequences. Damage requires consideration of the consequences of messages. Lies need not be deceptive. Deception does not require lying. Lying and deception are compatible with equilibrium. I give conditions under which deception must be damaging.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
06
Dic
12:00
Seminario CIE: Emir Kamenica

University of Chicago

"Information Hierarchies."

If Anne knows more than Bob about the state of the world, she may or may not know what Bob thinks, but it is always possible that she does. In other words, if the distribution of Anne’s first-order belief is a mean-preserving spread of the distribution of Bob’s first-order belief, we can construct signals for Anne and Bob that induce these distributions of beliefs and provide Anne with full information about Bob’s belief. We establish that with more agents, the analogous result does not hold. It might be that Anne knows more than Bob and Charles, who in turn both know more than David, yet what they know about the state precludes the possibility that Anne knows what Bob and Charles think and that everyone knows what David thinks. More generally, we define an information hierarchy as a partially ordered set and ask whether higher elements having more information about the state always makes the hierarchy compatible with higher elements knowing the beliefs of lower elements. We show that the answer is affirmative if and only if the graph of the hierarchy is a forest. We discuss applications of this result to rationalizing a decision maker’s reaction to unknown sources of information and to information design in hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical organizations.

 

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
29
Nov
12:00
Seminario CIE: Asen Kochov

University of Rochester

"Repeated Games with Endogenous Discounting."

In a symmetric repeated game with standard preferences, there are no gains from intertemporal trade. In fact, under a suitable normalization of utility, the payoff set in the repeated game is identical to that in the stage game. We show that this conclusion may no longer be true if preferences are recursive and stationary, but not time separable. If so, the players’ rates of time preference are no longer fixed, but may vary endogenously, depending on what transpires in the course of the game. This creates opportunities for intertemporal trade, giving rise to new and interesting dynamics. For example, the efficient and symmetric outcome of a repeated prisoner’s dilemma may be to take turns defecting, even though the efficient and symmetric outcome of the stage game is to cooperate. A folk theorem shows that such dynamics can be sustained in equilibrium if the players are sufficiently patient.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
22
Nov
12:00
Seminario CIE: Tatyana Mayskaya

HSE University

"Privacy Protection: When Does Hiding in Plain Sight Work?" 

We study a model where an individual (celebrity) aims to prevent another individual (journalist) from learning sensitive information about her. The celebrity can pre-commit to an ex-ante level of protection for sensitive information. We show that when full protection is not feasible, such selective protection is complementary to general protection for all nonsensitive information. In particular, when general protection is weak, lax selective protection is optimal. The celebrity may choose to hide sensitive information in plain sight hoping that the journalist would quickly give up the search thinking that, had there been anything sensitive to uncover, he would have found it already.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
15
Nov
12:00
Seminario CIE: Yu Awaya

University of Rochester

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
06
Nov
12:00
Seminario CIE: Diego Ufbal

Bocconi University

"The effects of working while in school: Evidence from Uruguayan lotteries."

Shall we encourage students to work while in school? We provide evidence by leveraging a one-year work-study program that randomizes job offers among students in Uruguay. Using social security data matched to over 120,000 applicants, we estimate an increase of 9% in earnings and of 2 percentage points in enrollment over the four post-program years for treated youth. Survey data indicate that enrolled participants reduce study time, but this does not translate into lower grades. Students mainly substitute leisure and household chores with work. A decomposition exercise suggests that work experience is the main mechanism behind the increase in earnings.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
29
Oct
12:00
Seminario CIE: Joon Y. Park

Indiana University

"Econometric Analysis of Functional Dynamics in the Presence of Persistence."

We introduce an autoregressive model for functional time series with unit roots.The autoregressive operator can be consistently estimated, but its convergence rate and limit distribution are di erent in di erent subspaces. In the unit root subspace, the convergence rate is fast and given by T, while the limit distribution is nonstandard and represented as functions of Brownian motions. Outside the unit root subspace, however, the p limit distribution is Gaussian, although the convergence rate varies and is given by T or a slower rate. The predictor based on the estimated autoregressive operator has a normal limit distribution with a reduced rate of convergence. We also provide the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition, which identi es the permanent and transitory components of functional time series with unit roots, representing persistent stochastic trends and stationary cyclical movements, respectively. Using our methodology and theory, we analyze the time series of yield curves and study the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
25
Oct
12:00
Seminario CIE: Christopher Taber

University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Skill Prices, Occupations, and Changes in the Wage Structure for Low Skilled Men."

This paper studies the effect of the change in occupational structure on wages for low skilled men. We develop a model of occupational choice in which workers have multi-dimensional skills that are exploited differently across different occupations. We allow for a rich specification of technological change which has heterogenous effects on different occupations and different parts of the skill distribution. We estimate the model combining four datasets: (1) O*NET, to measure skill intensity across occupations, (2) NLSY79, to identify life-cycle supply effects, (3) CPS (ORG), to estimate the evolution of skill prices and occupations over time, and (4) NLSY97 to see how the gain to specific skills has changed. We find that while changes in the occupational structure have affected wages of low skilled workers, the effect is not dramatic. First, the wages in traditional blue collar occupations have not fallen substantially relative to other occupations-a fact that we can not reconcile with a competitive model. Second, our decompositions show that changes in occupations explain only a small part of the patterns in wage levels over our time period. Price changes within occupation are far more important. Third, while we see an increase in the payoff to interpersonal skills, manual skills still remain the most important skill type for low educated males.

 

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa
18
Oct
12:00
Seminario CIE: Evan Riehl

Cornell University

"Isolating Peer Effects in the Returns to College Selectivity."

This paper asks how a student’s classmates affect her returns to college. We exploit a “tracking” admission system at a selective Colombian university that led to large differences in mean classmate ability for students in the same programs. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that students in higher-ability classes were more likely to fail courses and drop out, and had lower earnings one decade later. Testable predictions from a human capital model with peer externalities show that individuals learned less in more able classrooms. Our findings suggest that exposure to higher-ability college peers can harm an individual’s career trajectory.

Sala de Seminarios, Santa Teresa