Seminarios de Negocios 2022

El propósito del seminario es convertirse en el lugar donde presentar nuevas investigaciones, así como también, en un foro para aumentar el conocimiento mutuo entre los miembros del profesorado. 

                  Tel.: 5169 7301


Martes 6 de diciembre 

Donald Davis | Columbia University

"Labor Market Polarization and the Great Urban Divergence"

Abstract
Labor market polarization is among the most important features in recent decades of advanced country labor markets. Yet key spatial aspects of this phenomenon remain under-explored. We develop four key facts that document the universality of polarization, a city-size difference in the shock magnitudes, a skew in the types of middle-paid jobs lost, and the role of polarization in the great urban divergence. Existing theories cannot account for these facts. Hence we develop a parsimonious theoretical account that does so by integrating elements from the literatures on labor market polarization and systems of cities with heterogeneous labor in spatial equilibrium.

Joint work with Eric Mengus and Tomasz Michalski.

Bio
Donald Davis is the Ragnar Nurkse Professor of Economics at Columbia University. His work ranges over international trade, economic geography, and regional and urban economics. He has served on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics. He is a past president of the Urban Economics Association. He was an Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University. He is currently visiting HEC Paris.


Viernes 18 de noviembre

Andy Brownback | University of Arkansas

"College Summer School: Educational Benefits and Enrollment Preferences"

We experimentally examine whether a policy targeting college summer school enrollment can accelerate degree progress and completion. We randomly assign summer scholarships to community college students and find a large impact on degree acceleration, increasing graduation within one year of the intervention by 32% and transfers to four-year colleges by 58%. We elicit preferences for the scholarships and find substantial treatment effects on enrollment, graduation, and transfer among students with a preference against summer school. These results suggest that many more students could benefit from summer school than the minority who currently enroll.

Andy Brownback is an associate professor of economics at the University of Arkansas specializing in behavioral and experimental economics. He uses laboratory, field, and online experiments to study questions about education and public policy. ​


Viernes 14 de octubre 

Julio Elías | University of CEMA (UCEMA)

"Is the price right? The role of morals, ideology, and tradeoff thinking in explaining reactions to price surges"

Price surges often generate social disapproval and calls for regulation, such as price controls, but these interventions may cause economic inefficiencies and shortages. To study how individuals perceive and reason about sudden price increases for different products under different policy regimes, we conduct a survey experiment with Canadian and U.S. residents. We find that prices are not seen just as signals of scarcity; they cause widespread opposition and strong, polarized moral reactions. However, acceptance of unregulated prices is higher when potential economic tradeoffs between unregulated and controlled prices are salient. The salience of tradeoffs also reduces the polarization of moral judgments between supporters and opponents of unregulated pricing. Text analysis of the responses to open-ended questions supports the interpretation of our findings, and a donation experiment shows consistence between stated and revealed preferences. The results suggest that awareness of the causes and potential consequences of price increases may induce less extreme views about the role of market institutions in governing the economy.

*Jointly written with Nicola Lacetera (University of Toronto) and Mario Macis (Johns Hopkins University)

Julio J. Elías
Ph.D. in Economics, University of Chicago.
Professor in the Department of Economics and Business School of the University of CEMA (UCEMA). He is also Executive Director of the UChicago/UCEMA Joint Initiative for Latin American Experimental Economics (JILAEE), Director of the MA program in Economics at UCEMA and a Research Associate of the Center of Excellence on Human Capital and Economic Growth and Development of the State University of New York at Buffalo.
His research focuses on health economics, economic development, the economics of education and labor economics. His current research uses experimental economics to understand the economics of controversial transactions.


Jueves 29 de septiembre

Anna Dreber | Stockholm School of Economics

"(Predicting) Replication Outcomes"

Which results can we “trust”? What share of results replicate in different literatures in the experimental social sciences? I will discuss several recent large replication projects in mainly psychology and economics, where my coauthors and I have redone experiments published in high impact journals with new and larger samples to see whether the main result replicates. I will also discuss our studies with prediction markets and forecasting surveys where researchers attempt to predict these replication outcomes as well as new outcomes. While the replications are mainly based on experiments, there are reasons to believe that the problems are worse in non-experimental work. I will also discuss ways to increase the reliability of scientific results.

Anna Dreber is the Johan Björkman Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research is mainly in meta-science and behavioral economics and focuses on replications and predicting replication outcomes in economics and psychology, but also explores topics such as hormones and economic decision making. Anna is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, an editor at the Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics and an associate editor at the Journal of Political Economy.


Viernes 9 de septiembre

Javier Marenco | Universidad de Buenos Aires

"Técnicas de programación lineal entera para problemas derivados de la explotación de yacimientos no convencionales de hidrocarburos"

Un yacimiento petrolífero es una acumulación natural de hidrocarburos en el subsuelo. Uno de los tipos de yacimientos no convencionales más explorados está dado por las reservas de gas natural y petróleo almacenados en rocas sedimentarias llamadas pelitas (yacimientos de shale gas y shale oil, respectivamente). En las últimas décadas se han descubierto enormes reservas de este tipo en Estados Unidos, Canadá, China y Argentina. La planificación de la explotación de un yacimiento no convencional implica resolver diversos problemas de optimización combinatoria. Se debe determinar dónde realizar las perforaciones y qué tipo de explotación realizar en cada una con el objetivo de maximizar la producción, minimizar los costos y el impacto ambiental, y determinar en qué orden realizar las perforaciones en función de la infraestructura disponible y de los objetivos de producción. Finalmente, el trabajo de perforación implica movimientos de equipos y construcción de ductos, con los desafíos logísticos que estas actividades implican. Veremos algunos de estos problemas y comentaremos cómo se pueden aplicar técnicas basadas en programación lineal entera para resolverlos en la práctica.

Javier Marenco es licenciado y doctor en Ciencias de la Computación (UBA). Es profesor en la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales de la Universidad de Buenos AIres y en la Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, y consultor en aplicaciones de investigación operativa. Sus temas de investigación incluyen tópicos de programación lineal entera, combinatoria poliedral y aplicaciones de investigación operativa.


Jueves 1 de septiembre

Muriel Niederle | Stanford University

"Trickle-Down Effects of Affirmative Action: A Case Study in France"

The introduction of a quota in the French chess Club Championship in 1990, an activity many players engage in next to playing in individual tournaments, provides a quite unique environment to study its effects on three levels. We find that women selected by the quota improve their performance. We show large spillover and trickle-down effects: There are more and better qualified women. International comparisons confirm that the results are unique to France and that there are no substantial adverse effects on French male players. We discuss the properties of this quota and how to implement it in other environments.

Muriel Niederle is the Pauline K. Levin-Robert L. Levin and Pauline C. Levin-Abraham Levin Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Economics Department at Stanford University. After a Math degree from the University of Vienna, she received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2002. Niederle’s areas of specialization are Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Gender and Market Design. She is currently a Member of the Editorial Committee of the Annual Review of Economics and an Associate Editor of ACM: Transactions on Economics and Computation.

Jueves 25 de agosto

David Lagakos | London School of Economics and Political Science

"Aggregate and Distributional Effects of "Free" Secondary Schooling in the Developing World"

This paper analyzes the aggregate and distributional effects of publicly funded secondary schooling in the developing world. To do so, we build a general equilibrium model of human capital accumulation by overlapping generations of heterogeneous households. Households face borrowing constraints that can lead to misallocation of talent of high-ability children from low-income households in equilibrium. We estimate the model to match a randomized controlled trial that provided scholarships for free secondary education to a random set of low-income, high-ability children in Ghana. We then simulate the effects of scaling up to a nationwide policy of taxpayer-financed secondary schooling in general equilibrium. The model predicts modest gains in GDP and welfare from free schooling, and in particular less than from policies focused on improving school quality costing the same amount. We conclude that free secondary school policies are largely redistributive in nature, and that low secondary school enrollment rates in the developing world may be largely an efficient response to low education quality and high opportunity cost of attending secondary school.

Joint work with Junichi Fujimoto and Mitch VanVuren.

David Lagakos conducts research in the fields of macroeconomics and development economics, focusing on the determinants of sectoral productivity levels, human capital accumulation, structural transformation, and cross-country differences in labor market outcomes, among other topics. His research has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and other prominent academic journals. He currently serves as an editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics and a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics. Since 2016 he has worked as the lead academic for the International Growth Centre in Ghana. Lagakos is a research affiliate at the NBER and is a co-organizer of the annual NBER conferences on Economic Growth and Macroeconomics Across Time and Space. He received his PhD in 2008 from UCLA and his BA in 2001 from the University of Rochester.

Jueves 11 de agosto

Jeffrey Wugler | NYU Stern School of Business

"Policy Uncertainty and Green Investment"

Government subsidies are a common way to stimulate corporate investment in green technology. We find that uncertainty about the flow of such subsidies, however, deters the desired investment in the context of Chinese subsidies for environmental R&D. In particular, transient weather changes cause exogenous variation in Air Quality Index (AQI) readings that are used by the government to allocate subsidies across cities.This weather-induced variation in subsidy allocations is associated with lower green R&D investment, patenting, and research staff employment. Green-tech suppliers and high-tech firms respond relatively more to this subsidy policy uncertainty. Our findings suggest that the framing of the policy objective as improving observed air quality, rather than reducing underlying emissions, leads to inefficiently variable and less-effective subsidies; in doing so, the findings also imply how to stabilize and improve the effectiveness of subsidy allocations.

Jeffrey WurglerHe received his B.A.S. degree in Economics and Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Stanford University in 1994 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University in 1999.

Martes 5 de julio

Ricardo Estrada | CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina

"Oportunidades a la vista: Externalidades de escuelas de alto rendimiento en Perú"


Abstract
Este estudio analiza cómo la admisión de un estudiante a un sistema de colegios públicos de alto rendimiento en Perú cambia los resultados educativos de estudiantes más jóvenes que acuden a la misma escuela de origen que el estudiante en cuestión. Utilizando un diseño de regresión discontinua para la identificación de un efecto causal, el análisis muestra que la admisión de un estudiante a un colegio de alto rendimiento aumenta la probabilidad de que, posteriormente, alumnos más jóvenes de la misma escuela postulen y sean admitidos al mismo sistema de colegios de alto rendimiento. El efecto se concentra en los estudiantes de familias de menor estatus socioeconómico (ESE), medido por la educación de la madre, lo cual sugiere que la difusión de información tiene un rol crucial para explicar los resultados. Asimismo, se encuentra evidencia sugestiva de un ligero efecto positivo en el logro académico de los postulantes potenciales, y no se encuentra ningún efecto negativo en los aprendizajes de los estudiantes que no son elegibles para postular a este sistema de colegios. Los hallazgos de este trabajo muestran que las escuelas selectivas pueden tener efectos que van más allá de sus propios estudiantes e indican que la disponibilidad de modelos a seguir puede ser un mecanismo eficaz para aumentar la demanda de educación de alta calidad por parte de estudiantes de alto rendimiento de menor ESE.

Ricardo Estrada es economista principal en el Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina. Antes de unirse a CAF era un Max Weber Fellow en el Instituto Universitario Europeo. Ha sido consultor para organismos internacionales como el Banco Mundial, el Fondo Internacional de Desarrollo Agrícola de las Naciones Unidas y el Population Council. En México, colaboró en el think tank CIDAC y, en el sector privado, en INSAD y Hill and Knowlton.
Ricardo es Ph.D. en Economía por la Paris School of Economics y egresado de la Maestría en Política Pública de la Universidad de Chicago.


Jueves 23 de junio

Gustavo Fajardo | CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina

"Family Rules: Nepotism in the Mexican Judiciary"


Abstract
We show that bureaucrats can exploit discretion in hiring decisions to engage in forms of favoritism that hinder organizational performance. We do this in the context of the Mexican federal judiciary. The arrival of a judge at a circuit results in the hiring of 0.05 relatives to key staff positions within the following year on average, a figure which is probably a lower bound of the overall effect. Moreover, we find that the appointment of relatives of judges to a court’s staff leads to a reduction in the court’s productivity, which indicates that such hires are motivated by rent-seeking rather than by efficiency purposes. Importantly for personnel policy, nepotistic hires are concentrated among judges who have been sanctioned for administrative offenses, those assigned to courts located in their state of birth, and those in higher-ranking positions.

Bio
Gustavo Fajardo es economista principal de la Dirección de Investigaciones Socioeconómicas, Vicepresidencia de Conocimiento, CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina. Ph.D. en Economía en el Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros – CEMFI (España). Sus intereses de investigación se centran en las áreas de economía, política, capacidades estatales y desarrollo económico.


Lunes 6 de junio

Thomas Fujiwara | Princeton University

"Party Nominations and Female Electoral Performance: Evidence from Germany"

What accounts for differences in electoral success between male and female candidates? We exploit features of the German mixed electoral system and a decomposition strategy to study the contribution of parties systematically nominating female candidates to run in districts where the party is less popular, and distinguish it from voter behavior (e.g., discrimination). Using a panel of all electoral districts in eleven federal elections (1983—2021), we document that the relative under-performance of female candidates nominated by the two largest parties can be explained by this systematic nomination behavior that adversely affects female candidates. Moreover, parties’ nominations strategies can explain most of the variation in gender gaps in electoral performance across parties and election years. We do not find evidence that bias among voters systematically contributes to candidate gender differences in vote shares. Our findings thus suggest that efforts to address female under-representation that focus on party gatekeepers may be more effective than those addressing voter behavior.

Joint work with Hanno Hilbig and Pia Raffler.

Thomas Fujiwara is an Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research is in political economy, with a substantive focus on developing countries. His work addresses questions related to representation both in elections and in the workplace. In particular, he has investigated how political participation shapes public policy and the determinants of voter behavior and the role of gender norms in driving female participation in the workplace. He received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2011.


Jueves 17 de abril

Ana Vukadin | HEC Paris

"Store artification and retail performance."

A recent retail strategy, store artification consists of introducing artistic stimuli into store atmospherics. Such linkage to art and creativity promises to create a highly stimulating shopping environment for customers while adding value to store offering, thus maximizing retail performance. To assess the impact of store artification on retail performance, we conducted a field experiment testing the ‘presence vs. absence of artworks’ store artification modality in retail stores in Paris, France. Results indicate store artification increases store perceived differentiation, perceived value of the offering, customer satisfaction, and enhances store and product image. However, store artification does not affect store commercial performance, raising the issue of its profitability for the retailer and adequate implementation modalities. Further, this research suggests the relevance of the store artification strategy regarding store marketing performance for non- luxury retailers and as a tactical, store-level tool.

Ana Vukadin, Ph.D. from ESCP Europe/Paris 1 Sorbonne University, is an experiential marketing and retailing researcher. She is interested in innovative value creation strategies at the store-level using atmospheric and sensorial tools, in a profitability maximization approach. She has focused on the hybridization strategy of including art into retail places, her research being published in the Journal of Marketing Management and the Journal of Product and Brand Management. Additionally, she is interested in experiential marketing strategies within the food retail and hospitality sectors, specifically the articulation of product-level sensory qualities and store-level sensorial packaging, with recent research published in AIMS Agriculture and Food.


Jueves 17 de marzo

David Jonas Schröder | Copenhagen Business School

"Pagos, ESG y Cortoplacismo"

The increasing focus on firm sustainability has led to criticisms of excessive shareholder payouts by corporations. Policymakers view rising levels of repurchases and dividends as signs of business unsustainability and short-termism. But, the evidence offered, on the association between social responsibility and payout policy is limited thus far. Hence, in this study, I assess this relationship based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data from two prominent rating agencies – namely Asset4 and Bloomberg – and data from the Euro Stoxx 600 firms from 2002 to 2020. Using fixed-effect regressions, I find that socially responsible firms (as measured by high ESG ratings) pay out significantly less to their shareholders. I further show that the negative relationship between ESG and shareholder payouts is more pronounced for firms with higher levels of investment opportunities, asset specificity, or those with more conservative capital structures. These results suggest that excessive corporate payouts may be related to short-termism in the EU.

David trabaja como becario de doctorado en el Centro de Gobierno Corporativo de la Copenhagen Business School. Tiene un máster en Finanzas y Gestión Estratégica por la CBS.
La investigación de David se centra en el gobierno corporativo. Utilizando modelos econométricos sobre informes anuales y estados financieros de empresas que cotizan en bolsa, investiga la relación entre la identidad de la propiedad y los resultados económicos, sociales y medioambientales.

Miércoles 9 de marzo 

Claudio Ferraz | University of British Columbia

“When Democracy Refuses to Die: Evaluating a Training Program for New Politicians."

Abstract 
Not available.

Claudio Ferraz is a Professor of Economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia. He is also a part-time professor at the Department of Economics of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). He currently serves as Scientific Director of J-PAL Latin America & Caribbean and as co-director of the Political Economy Network of LACEA and RIDGE. Claudio is an honorary member of LACEA, fellow of the Econometric Society and currently an Associate Editor of Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Development Economics. His academic research focuses on economic development, political economy, and public economics. In particular he studies governance and accountability in developing countries and consequences for politics and public service delivery.