Nicolaj Thor, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Public vs private provision of government services: connecting theory and empirics Abstract: The goal of this project is to better understand whether and when governments should provide services in-house or contract them out. I will provide new causal evidence on this question and connect my estimates to existing theory on the optimality of public versus private provision. |
Moritz Poll, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Poverty alleviation at high frequency Abstract: I use high-frequency survey data to investigate complementarities within a successful, multi-faceted livelihood program. It bundles small, monthly, unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), with entrepreneurship classes, one-on-one life skills coaching, formation of savings groups, and a big one-off seed capital grant. I conduct a large RCT in Malawi during which I track 1,500 extremely poor, rural households at fortnightly frequency across about 40,000 home visits. I find strong evidence that the livelihood components drive program success: UCTs reduce economic hardship while participants attend trainings. Subsequently, they invest a much higher share of the seed capital grant into their new businesses, than is common in pure cash transfer interventions. Once UCTs cease, households immediately replace them with newly generated income and reinvest that in turn. Meanwhile, the coaching component that aims to reduce the arrival rate of health and livelihood shocks appears to be ineffective: While treated households adopt preventive measures, their shock arrival rates remain identical to the control group and I find no evidence of complementarities with contemporaneous cash transfers. The propensity to resort to severe coping behaviors in response to a shock increases by similar amounts in treatment and control. The program pays for itself in a matter of 27 months, which would have been dramatically over- or underestimated in traditional baseline-endline RCT designs that cannot measure earnings seasonality but that are the norm in program evaluation. Throughout, the high-frequency data enable conclusions about mechanisms that would have otherwise stayed opaque. |
Can Soylu, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Global Networks, Monetary Policy and Trade Abstract: This project develops a New Keynesian Open Economy model with full input-output linkages to analyze the macroeconomic impact of trade distortions in global general equilibrium with incomplete markets. We introduce the NKOE Leontief inverse, a new theoretical object that governs this propagation over time, and show that network linkages make inflation more persistent and output losses larger in response to shocks. |
Bobby Pakzad-Hurson, Economics Assistant Professor Title of Research Project: Wage transparency within and across firms: Experimental evidence from Brazil (joint with Mayara Felix and Ieda Matavelli) Abstract: Transparency policies have been implemented worldwide to promote pay equity. These policies aim to increase workers' knowledge of wages within their firm, which can impact wage negotiations, as well as their knowledge of wages at other firms, which can influence job search decisions. Both channels have the potential to affect pay equity and labor market dynamics. This project experimentally examines the significance of these two channels through a field experiment in Brazil. |
Jonathan Lee, Economics Undergraduate Student Title of Theisis: The Effect of Hospital Price Transparency on Elective Care Utilization Abstract: Market days are the pulse of rural, economic and social life in many parts of the world and millions of people rely for their daily sustenance on weekly markets. They are also a complex coordination problem that determines who participates where and when in market exchange. I identify a natural experiment in Western Kenya in which market schedules over the past century were set quasi-randomly, inducing exogenous variation in markets competing over participants with their neighbors on the same day of the week. I analyze the effect that such scheduling frictions have on market cross-attendance and ultimately on rural economic development. I find that market schedule coordination causally and lastingly affected market attendance, driven by cross-attendance from other villages, as well as present-day population and nighttime luminosity as a proxy for economic activity. |
Alexander Mitchell, Economics Undergraduate Student Title of Thesis Project: Determining The Impacts Of Airline Capacity Allocation On Local Economic Development In Europe Abstract: Following the COVID-19 Pandemic, the airline network expansion doctrine has shifted. Carriers today are flying to under-the-radar destinations, looking to attract passengers through these unique offerings. Airlines and regulators argue that the byproduct of this shifting philosophy is the growth of local industry. We analyze alternative airline scheduling and capacity data alongside economic indicators to determine if this view is backed by statistical merit. |
Moritz Poll, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: The economic consequences of the malaria vaccine Abstract: Malawi accounts for 0.25% of the world population but 2% of malaria deaths and 80% of these deaths afflict children under the age of five. For the first time, we have a vaccine against this disease. Malawi was selected alongside Ghana and Kenya as a pilot site for the new malaria vaccine RTS,S. We leverage Malawi's rich administrative data resources and a large medical trial to expand what we know about barriers to preventive health and broader socio-economic benefits over the life cycle. We are working on merging the treatment assignment from the medical trial into the most recent and all future rounds of the census. |
Olivia Lattus, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: The Effects of Interest Rate Risk Hedging by Non-financial Firms on Monetary Policy Transmission Abstract: TBA |
Elisa Macchi, Economics Assistant Professor Title of Research Project: Hidden Gender Discrimination Abstract: Food insecurity and housing insecurity are interconnected, especially for low-income households. Households earning less than $30,000 a year and spending more than 30% of their income on rent and utility expenses have a median of less than $6 per day left after rental expenses. In comparison, the average Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefit is about $15 per household per day. This project examines the causal effect of increased food insecurity on housing insecurity by looking at how the gradual ending of SNAP Emergency Allotments across states affected eviction filings, rental payments, household consumption patterns, and rental asking prices. |