The 166th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, January 17, 2025 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 Takuma Kamada, Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.
Title: "From Pill to Poverty: an Abuse-deterrent Opioid Policy and the Emergence of High-poverty Neighborhoods"
Abstract:
The opioid crisis has had adverse public health effects, with the White population disproportionately affected in the initial phase. In 2010, OxyContin, one of the most abused prescription opioids, was reformulated to curb its abuse. This study demonstrates that the OxyContin reformulation contributes to the emergence of high-poverty neighborhoods. It argues that the reformulation leads opioid users to shift from prescription opioids to heroin, drawing them into crime-conducive neighborhoods where heroin is available. The findings reveal that years following the reformulation, White, but not minority, high-poverty neighborhoods emerge more in counties with initially high opioid dispensing rates relative to counties with low dispensing rates. The effects of the reformulation on high-poverty neighborhoods are greater in neighborhoods with initially high housing vacancies. Within high-vacancy areas in high-opioid counties, the availability of heroin increases post-reformulation. The reformulation induces short-distance migration among poor Whites, while it has negligible effects on poverty measures among non-migrant Whites. Taken together, the post-reformulation rise in White high-poverty neighborhoods is likely due to the migration of impoverished White people into high-vacancy neighborhoods where heroin is available, rather than White people becoming poor within their existing communities.
The 165th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, December 20, 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Norikazu Takami, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo.
Title: "The Role of the Cowles Commission and RAND Corporation in Transforming Mathematical Economics in the Mid-twentieth Century"
Abstract:
This essay narrates the history of mid-twentieth-century economics, based on recent literature. This literature has shown that a small group of scholars, linked through the network of the Cowles Commission and the RAND Corporation, accomplished the mathematical transformation of economics by creating new fields, such as econometrics, game theory, and general competitive equilibrium. The essay also mentions the studies that connect the invention of the IS-LM model and the Solow economic growth model to the work of these scholars. The conclusion points to a historiographical shift visible in this literature: placing more emphasis on collectives and preferring objective evidence to textual interpretation.
The 164th meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, November 15 , 2024 13:30 to 15:00
Place Held online
Presenter Takaaki Takahashi, Center for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tokyo.
Title: "The effects of the increase in tourists on the varieties of goods and services provided"
Abstract:
This study explores the effects of the increase in tourists on the varieties of goods and services provided in a home economy.
The increase may enlarge the range of varieties consumed by tourists and reduce that by local residents.
We obtain a general condition for this variety-shifting effect occurring and derive some welfare implications.
In addition, we examine whether the effect emerges in the models with two specific types of preference, the model with the CES utility function and that with the quasi-linear utility function cum quadratic subutility.
The 163rd meeting jointly organized with International Public Policy Seminar
Date Friday, October 18, 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 Hirokazu Ishise, Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University.
Title: "Gauge Size of the Border: the Effect of Railroad Connection on International Trade"
Abstract:
I study the contribution of rail connections to international trade using a gravity regression. To deal with the potential endogeneity problem of the cross-border rail connections, I use an instrument; whether a pair of neighboring countries use the same rail gauges. The rail gauge is historically determined. One factor is the construction costs determined by the geographic conditions. Another factor is the former political boundaries when railroads were constructed. Even after controlling for these observable characteristics, whether a pair of countries use the same gauge strongly predicts the cross-border rail connection. Having some rail connections would increase trade value by about 2.7 times larger. The coefficient without dealing with the endogeneity problem is approximately the same or slightly smaller than the coefficient estimated with the instrument depending on the specifications.
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.