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: This thesis investigates the impact of hospital price transparency legislation on elective care utilization, examining varying responses across insurance types and levels of hospital market concentration. Leveraging heterogeneity in price transparency compliance across hospitals in New Jersey, the analysis explores the factors that may induce compliance or non-compliance; as well as how price transparency, interacting with payer incentives and market structure, may lead to different elective care utilization outcomes. |
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: Over the past 30 years, non-financial firms exponentially increased their use of financial derivative instruments to hedge interest rate risk. Around half of publicly-traded non-financial firms hedge interest rate risk with financial instruments such as swaps,collars, and caps. My paper documents characteristics of hedging firms, investigates whether monetary policy transmission affects hedging and non-hedging firms differently, and discusses the network effects of heterogeneous hedging. I investigate the role of interest rate derivatives in corporate decisions regarding investment and output after a change in monetary policy. I leverage data at the individual firm level, controlling for the standard firm-level attributes. I provide a brand new dataset to the literature that I gather with a large language model (LLM) from 10-K and 10-Q statements reported to the SEC. To my knowledge, I also provide the first set of population-level descriptive statistics about U.S. non-financial firms’ interest rate risk hedging behaviors and characteristics. |
Elisa Macchi, Economics Assistant Professor Title of Research Project: Hidden Gender Discrimination Abstract: We assess how gender stereotypes and systemic constraints affect female hiring in male-dominated sectors (2.8% female workers) in Uganda. In a field experiment, employers, who perceive women as more trustworthy and self-report an unmet demand for female workers, can select from randomly gender-assigned profiles of trainees to hire on probation. We measure hiring gaps under business-as-usual and two randomly-assigned monitoring regimes. In the business-as-usual arm, we observe a relatively mild (10.3 p.p.) hiring gap against women, not driven by ability beliefs, which narrows with employer self-reported worker-gender-mix preferences and disappears in the top quintile. Among employers receiving support to monitor worker behavior, the gender gap is significantly larger (16.7 p.p.; twice as large for diversity-oriented employers). Thus, monitoring support reveals latent bias by lowering the value of trustworthy workers. Among employers assigned support for monitoring workers' safety but not behavior, there is no significant gender gap (1.7 p.p.), suggesting that women’s trust advantage can counteract bias only when harassment concerns are addressed. Systemic hiring constraints can both expose and conceal gender bias. Interventions to ease these constraints may unintentionally disadvantage women. |