Past meeting 2024 April - 2025 March
The 162nd meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, July 19, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Only in-person at the Lecture Hall on the second floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus. http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Presenter Jyunichiro Ishida, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
Title: "Optimal Feedback Dynamics Against Free-Riding in Collective Experimentation" (with Chia-Hui Chen, Hulya Eraslan and Takuro Yamashita)
Abstract: We consider a dynamic model in which a principal decides what information to release about a product of unknown quality (e.g., a vaccine) to incentivize agents to experiment with the product. Assuming that the agents are long-lived and forward-looking, their incentive to wait and see other agents' experiences poses a significant obstacle to social learning. We show that the optimal feedback mechanism to mitigate information free-riding takes a strikingly simple form: the principal recommends adoption as long as she observes no bad news, but only with some probability; once she does not recommend at some point, she stays silent forever after that. Our analysis suggests the optimality of premature termination, which in turn implies that: (i) false positives (termination in the good state) are more acceptable than false negatives (continuation in the bad state); (ii) overly cautious mechanisms that are biased toward termination can be welfare-enhancing.
The 161st meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, June 21, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Yusuke Narita, Yale University.
Title: "Democracy and Growth in the 21st Century"
Abstract: We find that democracy has negative impacts on GDP growth and night-time light intensity growth in 2001-2022. This finding emerges
from descriptive and five different instrumental variable strategies.
Democracy causes slower growth through lower investment and trade growth, which is consistent with the widespread concern that many
electoral democracies become more populist and protectionist in this century.
The 160th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, May 17, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Masaki Nakabayashi, Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo.
Title: "Bridges and Profits: A Historical Urban Economics of Tokugawa Japan (coauthored with Yu Mandai) "
Abstract: Existing major cities in advanced economies were built in early modern times. Revitalization of city centers thus pursues a restoration of pedestrian flows before motorization. An analysis of early modern cities should help predict the effects of such revitalization. This paper studies the return on lease of houses in the City of Osaka, Japan, in early modern times, focusing on bridges that were corners of pedestrian flows. Through our archival work and analysis of the firsthand documents of the largest landlord, Mitsui, we find that rents were associated with property types and that the closer to a bridge a property was, the higher its profit rate was. Properties exposed to a greater flow of pedestrians delivered higher profits.
The 159th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, April 19, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Only in-person at Conference Room , 6th floor, Osaka School of International Public Policy Building, Toyonaka Campus. http://www.osipp.osaka-u.ac.jp/en/about-osipp/where-we-are/
Presenter Gwen-Jiro Clochard, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
Title: "Toward an Understanding of Discrimination: The Case of Parsing Multiple Sources"
Abstract: When multiple forces potentially underlie discriminatory behavior it is difficult to parse the sources of discrimination, rendering proposed policy solutions as speculative. This study advances an empirical approach to parse two specific channels of discrimination: customer side and manager side bias. To showcase our general idea, we combine proprietary data and several publicly available data sets to identify channels of discrimination within the Major League Baseball draft. In doing so, we show that customer preferences are importantly linked to the players drafted at the top end of the draft–players who are most likely to receive immediate public attention and end up playing for the club. Alternatively, we find manager homophily in the latter parts of the draft, when players who receive little attention and have a scant chance to ever play with the club are drafted. The opportunity cost of expressing such preferences is considerable foregone success of the club. Our results have general implications for future work measuring discrimination and how to tackle the multiple channel problem.