Seminars
Seminars
Seminars in Economics of Innovation and Knowledge Ljubica Nedelkoska (Zeppelin University and Harvard University)
"Learning by Problem-solving" (at Dipartimento di Economia "S. Cognetti de Martiis") abstract We analyze the dynamics of learning by problem-solving at the job. We propose that the exposure to challenging job tasks increases skills and therefore work productivity. As a result, job complexity leads to higher wages. We test our hypotheses using a large panel of German…
Seminars in Economics Alessandra Voena (University of Chicago)
"Prenuptial Contracts, Labor Supply and Household Investments" Abstract This paper examines prenuptial contracts that allow couples in Italy to choose, at virtually no cost, how their assets will be divided in case of divorce. Unique administrative data on marriages and divorces from 1995 to 2011 indicate that the majority of newlyweds (67% in 2011) choose…
Seminars in Statistics Li Ma (Duke University)
Adaptive testing of conditional association through recursive mixture modeling In many case-control studies, a central goal is to test for association or dependence between the predictors and the response. Relevant covariates must be conditioned on to avoid false positives and loss in power. Conditioning on covariates is easy in parametric frameworks such as the logistic…
Seminars in Statistics Yongdai Kim (Seoul National University)
Deviance Information Criteria for the frailty model We are concerned with model selection for the frailty model by use of the deviance information criterion (DIC). The DIC is a Bayesian model selection criterion proposed by Spiegelhalter et al. (2002). A difficulty in applying the DIC to the frailty model lies on the unspecified baseline hazard…
Seminars in Economics of Innovation and Knowledge Dirk Czarnitzki (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
"Counterfactual impact evaluation of cohesion policy at the firm level" Abstract The European Cohesion Policy is designed to reduce gaps between developmentlevels of EU regions. Consequently most scholarly research on impacts of Cohesion Policyso far focused on catching-up processes of EU regions. Newly available data, however,allow studying policy effects directly at the recipient level rather…
Seminars in Economics Toan Phan (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
"Toxic Asset Bubble" Abstract We show that toxic (i.e., welfare reducing) asset bubbles can emerge in a standard framework of stochastic rational bubble if there is financial friction. The friction generated by limited liability and non-contingent debt contracts prevents banks from fully internalizing the bubble's risk of collapse. Hence boom-bust episodes involving excessively risky bubbles can emerge in equilibrium. We…
Monday Lunch Seminars Daniele Pennesi
"Asset prices in an ambiguous economy" abstract We price assets with ambiguous returns in a Lucas’ tree economy under general ambiguity sensitive inter-temporal utility. We provide intuitive conditions to guarantee existence and to characterize equilibria. Although we relax ambiguity aversion,portfolio inertia and excess volatility may obtain at the equilibrium, extending the results of Epstein and…
Seminars in Politics and Society Steffen Heinrich (University of Duisburg Essen)
"The employment-pension nexus in Coordinated Market Economies: a Comparative Study of Germany and Japan since 2001" abstract This presentation analyses the implications of the pension reforms for employment relationships and HR policies in the two prime examples of coordinated market economies (CME), Germany and Japan, in the past 10 years. While studies of recent public…
Occasional Seminars PhD researchers’ Forum
classroom 5
Seminars in Economics Kota Saito (Caltech)
"Savage in the Market" Download program Abstract We develop a behavioral axiomatic characterization of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) under risk aversion. Given is an individual agent's behavior in the market: assume a finite collection of asset purchases with corresponding prices. We show that such behavior satisfies a revealed preference axiom if and only if there exists a…
Seminars in Economics Stefano Gagliarducci (Università di Roma Tor Vergata)
"The Labor Market Returns to Political Connections" abstract In this paper we document the labor market returns to being a family member of a politician in office. To this purpose, we link data for 16 years on the universe of politicians in Italy with a 1/91 random sample of private sector employees, based on the…
Monday Lunch Seminars Gerardo Ferrara
"Portfolio Optimization under Model Uncertainty" abstract This study proposes a novel methodology to deal with model uncertainty in forecasting stock returns. My main interest here is to overcome thetendency of Bayesian Model Averaging to give all of the weight to a single model. A potential solution of this problem is to capture thenature of the underlying data…
Seminars in Statistics François Caron (University of Oxford)
A Bayesian nonparametric model for undirected and multi-edges networks In this talk, I will present ongoing work on a Bayesian nonparametric specification for either undirected or multi-edge directed networks, building on the framework of completely random measures. The formulation allows for an unbounded number of nodes in the network, while encouraging a sparse set of…
Seminars in Economics of Innovation and Knowledge Bettina Peters (Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW), Mannheim)
"Estimating Dynamic R&D Demand: An Analysis of Costs and Long-Run Benefits" (at Dipartimento di Economia "S. Cognetti de Martiis")
Monday Lunch Seminars Michela Altieri
"Group Affiliation, Implicit Guarantees and the Cost of Borrowing" abstract This paper investigates the effect of group affiliation on credit spreads of firm’s public debt. We analyse all the firms issuing publicdebt on the US Primary and Secondary market from 1980 until 2006, by comparing business groups and independent firms new issuances. Theresults show that controlled firms…
Seminars in Politics and Society Nicole Scicluna
"Politicization without democratization: The impact of the Eurozone crisis on EU constitutionalism" abstract The paper will demonstrate how the European integration process overburdened EU law in an attempt to overcome political deficiencies, with negative consequences for the Union’s democratic legitimacy. The analysis is framed by the ‘twin crises’ of twenty-first century EU constitutionalism: the defeat…
Seminars in Economics CANCELLED: Georg Weizsacker (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
"An Experiment on Social Mislearning" abstract We investigate theories of social learning in two experiments based on simple arithmetic that isolate errors in inference from those in Bayesian updating. In the first experiment, players move one-person-per-period and observe all predecessors’ actions. Although 75% of participants adhere to BNE in this experiment, they realize less than one-fifth of the payoff gains…
Monday Lunch Seminars Andrei Savochkin
“Mistake Aversion and a Theory of Robust Decision Making” Download the paper Abstract This paper studies the behavioral trait of aversion to making mistakes in the framework of choice under subjective uncertainty, assuming that the probabilities of outcomes are not exogenously specified. The decision procedure that is proposed to capture mistake aversion follows the general…
Occasional Seminars Allievi Program Defense Sessions November 2013
15.00 Matteo Bizzarri, "Analysis of iterative equations for combinatorial optimization" 16.00 Francesca Zanichelli, "Bargaining under incomplete information: a model with exogenous learning"
Seminars in Politics and Society Angela Garcia Calvo
"Upgrading in Spain: an institutional perspective" abstract This paper summarises the main contributions of a book manuscript that aimed to explain the recent rise of Spain’s firms in complex service sectors, and the parallel fall in capital and skill intensive manufacturing sectors through the analysis of the institutional structure that enabled it. I argued that…