Seminars
Seminars
Seminars in Economics Francesco Squintani (University of Warwick)
"Information Revelation and Pandering in Elections" Abstract Does electoral competition induce office motivated candidates to commit to policies that reflect their information? Or do candidates hide their information, and pander to the electorate's beliefs? We find that efficient information aggregation is precluded, but candidates' platforms may be informative: Equilibrium policy can at best be based…
Monday Lunch Seminars Sarah Grace See (Collegio Carlo Alberto)
"Parental Inputs, Formal Care, and Child Outcomes" Abstract Child outcomes are believed to be a result of cumulative inputs from both within and outside the family. Taking the theory of skill formation (Carneiro and Heckman, 2003) and the model of child outcome production function (Todd and Wolpin, 2003), earlier endowments especially those of high quality…
Seminars in Statistics Frédéric Lavancier (Université de Nantes)
Determinantal point process models and statistical inference In this talk, I will demonstrate that Determinantal point processes (DPPs) provide useful models for the description of repulsive spatial point processes. Such data are usually modeled by Gibbs point processes, where the likelihood and moment expressions are intractable and simulations are time consuming. I will recall the…
Seminars in Economics of Innovation and Knowledge Rosina Moreno Serrano (Universitat de Barcelona)
"Relatedness and external linkages for Europe’s regional innovation" (at Dipartimento di Economia "S. Cognetti de Martiis")
Monday Lunch Seminars Irina Stefanescu (FED Board)
"Cost Saving and the Freezing of Corporate Pension Plans" Abstract The decision to freeze corporate defined benefit (DB) plans is related to variation in prospective cost saving, and freezing DB plans reduces total corporate compensation costs. Firms that freeze have at least 50% higher 10-year expected DB accruals than matched non-freeze firms. Comparing counterfactual DB…
Monday Lunch Seminars Mascia Bedendo (Audencia School of Management)
"Reputational Shocks and the Information Content of Credit Ratings" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) ABSTRACT In the last two decades Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) have faced extensive criticism for their rating practices and business models. We examine to what extent a number of significant reputational shocks suffered by CRAs (i.e. the Enron/WorldCom scandals, the subprime…
Monday Lunch Seminars Sander Heinsalu (University of Queensland)
"Spence meets Holmstrom: Luck and repetition in signalling" Abstract This paper studies repeated costly signalling when luck matters for the outcome. Benefit is obtained from the belief of the market, not directly from the effort or the signal. Nonstationary environments are allowed.In the unique equilibrium in which effort is linear in type, the more the…
Monday Lunch Seminars Amedeo Piolatto (University of Barcelona)
"Online booking and information: competition and welfare consequences of review aggregators" Abstract Online review aggregators (e.g., Yelp or ClubKviar) provide detailed information about experience goods, such as restaurants and hotels. This study fosters our understanding of how such aggregators modify competition, profits and welfare. Using a spokes model ofhorizontal competition, I show that review aggregators enhance total welfare mainly by making valuable information…
Monday Lunch Seminars Arthur Van Soest (Tilburg University)
"House Price Expectations" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) Abstract Utilizing new survey data collected between 2009 and 2014, this paper analyzes American home owners' subjective expectations on future values of their own house. We explore the relationship between house price expectations, local economic conditions, and households' individual characteristics. We examine the heterogeneity in expectations based…
Seminars in Statistics Mingyuan Zhou (University of Texas at Austin)
The Poisson gamma belief network A key issue in deep learning is to define an appropriate network structure, including both the depth of the network and the width of each hidden layer, which may be naturally addressed with completely random measures. We propose the Poisson gamma belief network (PGBN), which factorizes each of its layers…
Occasional Seminars Allievi Program Defense Sessions
10.30 Noemi Oggero"Liquidity Constraints and Human Capital Accumulation. Evidence from Italian households" 11.30 Elisa Rubbo"Communication and Persuasion" 13.30 Gianluca De Tommaso"Scaling limits for output dynamics in economies with Poisson-Dirichlet innovations" 14.30 Matteo Sordello"Diffusion approximation for cluster dynamics in a generalized gamma population model" 15.30 Cecilia Balocchi"A Bayesian approach to role inference in high resolution social…
Monday Lunch Seminars Ben Cowan (Washington State University)
"The Effects of Merit-Based Financial Aid on Drinking in College" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday)
Monday Lunch Seminars Claudio Campanale (University of Alicante)
"Luxury goods in heterogeneous agents economies" Abstract Most macroeconomic models are based on the assumption of a single homogeneous consumption good. In the present paper we consider a model with two goods: A basic good and a luxury good. We then apply this assumption to a standard general equilibrium heterogeneous agent model. We find a substantial reduction in precautionary…
Monday Lunch Seminars Giovanni Mastrobuoni (University of Essex)
"Harsh or Humane? Prison Detention Conditions and Recidivism" ABSTRACT We use quasi-random variation in the fraction of time served in the Italian"open-cell prison'' of Bollate to estimate the effect of rehabilitation efforts on recidivism. We deal with the endogeneity of rehabilitation assignments by focusing on those sources of variability in the length of exposure…
Monday Lunch Seminars Luca Flabbi (Georgetown University)
"Simultaneous Search in the Labor and Marriage Markets with Endogenous Schooling Decisions" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) Abstract Labor market decisions are not taken in isolation when individuals areengaged in stable relationships. There now exist a number of estimatedmodels of household search able to address and estimate the impact of thesedecision processes. However, in these…
Monday Lunch Seminars Mark Machina (University of California, San Diego)
"Analytics of Ambiguity Aversion" (Note: the seminar is on Wednesday)
Monday Lunch Seminars Paola Profeta (Bocconi University)
“From Family Culture to Welfare State Design”
Seminars in Economics of Innovation and Knowledge Pier Paolo Saviotti (INRA GAEL, Université Pierre Mendès-France)
"Education, income distribution and economic development" (at Dipartimento di Economia "S. Cognetti de Martiis")
Seminars in Economics Sandro Shelegia (University of Vienna)
"Consumer Search with Observational Learning"