Myles Ellis, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Polarization and the Rise of the Copycats Abstract: The legislation introduced in U.S. statehouses is increasingly influenced by lobbying groups, which draft “model bills” that lawmakers can adapt and introduce in their respective states. Model bills allow for rapid dissemination of specific political agendas, but their broader impact on the political landscape – especially with respect to polarization – is not well understood. By building a novel dataset of state representatives from 2010 to 2024, this project will investigate whether model bills promote bipartisan cooperation or contribute to increased polarization within state legislatures through leveraging an efficient text similarity algorithm. |
Jiayue Zhang, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Credit Constraint and Green Energy Adoption: Evidence from Small Firms in Kenya Abstract: The adoption of green technology in developing countries is essential for sustainable development. However, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for green technology remains low in this context. Traditional WTP assessments do not adequately capture the complexities of credit-based purchases, where payments are distributed over time and agents are time-inconsistent and credit-constrained. This study outlines a novel theoretical framework to evaluate WTP for credit-based purchases of portable solar lamps in Kenya. Utilizing the Bayesian Adaptive Choice Experiment (BACE), this study evaluates small business owners' WTP for credit-based purchases of solar lamps by varying down payment and repayment amounts. Exploiting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that offers owners a traditional subsidy on the down payment or a proposed tailored subsidy where an equivalent amount of subsidy is applied on the down payment or the repayment, this study examines the impact on small business owners' adoption and business performances. |
Andres Mena, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: High Wage Collective Bargaining Units: The Effect of Unions on the Wage Structure Abstract: This study estimates the causal impact of collective bargaining units (CBUs) on wage-setting in Argentina, using data on the universe of formal employer-employee relationships. Leveraging a "movers design," where firms switch between CBUs, we analyze effects on wages, employment, and pay dispersion. NLP techniques applied to over 1,200 CBU contracts generate covariates that capture heterogeneity in treatment effects, clarifying unions' role in shaping wage structures. |
Matthew Schaelling, Economics PhD candidate Steven Lee, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Content Relatability and Test Score Disparities: Evidence from Texas Abstract: We test whether differential interest in topics impacts standardized test performance in reading comprehension exams from Texas. Using time-use data, survey data, and natural language processing to construct a race- and gender-based measures of “relatability” to exam passages, we find that a one standard deviation increase in relatability predicts a 1.7pp increase in passage performance, an effect equivalent to a 0.05 SD test score improvement. Our preliminary results suggest equalizing relatability reduces Black-white and Hispanic-white score gaps by 4% in our setting. |
Jesse Bruhn, Economics Assistant Professor Title of Research Project: Information Frictions, Career Choice, And Long-run Well-being. Abstract: Early life occupational experiences are strongly related to long-run economic success. This project aims to better understand why young adults wind up on certain career paths, with a particular focus on the role of information. Are young adults misinformed about the distribution of long-run outcomes associated with different careers? Does this misinformation shape their career choices and, ultimately, their own long run well-being? To answer these questions, we propose to run a large scale field experiment. Our goal is to field a conjoint-style “hypothetical choice” survey designed to illicit the revealed preferences military applicants have for different military occupations (as in e.g. Wiswall and Zafar, 2015; Bruhn et al., 2023). Within the context of this survey, we propose to randomly divide applicants into various treatment arms and a control group, with the key difference being that the treatment arms will receive extra information about important occupational features like long-run expected earnings, benefits, and job satisfaction. |
Bo-Yeon Jang, Economics Assistant Professor Title of Research Project: Climate Model Uncertainty and Global Economic Damages Abstract: Climate change impacts are subject to various sources of uncertainty. This project evaluates the contribution of model uncertainty, which should decrease with advances to climate science, against internal variability, which reflects the chaos inherent to climatic processes and is considered irreducible. Combining the findings with a framework of reductions in scenario uncertainty, it aims to explore the implications of the three sources of uncertainty for optimal adaptation policy. |
Moritz Poll, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Micro-enterprise saturation: Critical mass or overcrowding? 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. |
Israel Eruchimovitch, Economics PhD candidate Julia Chahine, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Gender Bias, Stopping Rules, and the Demographic Transition Abstract: We investigate how gender bias—parents' preference for children of a particular gender—shaped fertility decisions during the demographic transition. Specifically, we develop a model in which families with a bias toward boys sequentially decide whether to have additional children. The model generates three testable predictions: (1) gender bias increases overall fertility; (2) it raises the proportion of boys and their representation among the youngest children; and (3) for a given level of bias, the current proportion of boys in a family reduces the likelihood of having another child. To evaluate these predictions, we construct a detailed family-level panel dataset from repeated census records in Minden, Germany, spanning 1880 to 1900. Our ultimate goal is to demonstrate that varying degrees of preference for male children may have significantly influenced the onset and timing of the demographic transition. |
Daniele Goffi, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Fare Game: Imperfect Competition in Transportation and Local Economic Development Abstract: This project studies how competition in the transportation sector shapes the distribution of economic activity between tradable and non-tradable sectors. I develop a static model where an oligopoly of airlines sets route fares, and consumers’ choices of residence and consumption shape local production patterns. Firsty, I derive theoretical predictions using US data. Then, I test these predictions globally by leveraging a regulation-driven discontinuity in long-haul flights. The analysis explores how a reduction in effective distance, driven by increased transportation competition, alters the composition of employment across sectors and human capital accumulation at the local level. |
Elisa Macchi, Economics PhD candidate Title of Research Project: Hidden Gender Discrimination Abstract: TBA |