Title: Migrant Diversity and Team Performance in a High-Skilled Labour Market

External Seminar

Abstract

From a theoretical point of view, the link between workplace diversity and performance in a high-skilled context is ambiguous. Likewise, empirical research at the firm- or plant- level finds inconclusive, and contest-specific, results. Using a detailed database that covers all matches played by Italian Serie A teams (firms) over a 10 seasons period, our results reveal a substantial, and robust, negative effect of fractionalization on performance, whereas no effect for polarization is found. This article also highlights how the negative effect of fractionalization depends on the nature of the tasks to be completed, the wealth of the teams and the level of workers’ experience. This work reveals some myopia in hiring practices and suggests that firms should take better decisions in choosing the optimal mix of workers.

Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/pazzonamatteo/

Title: TBA

Internal Seminar

Abstract

TBA

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Title: The Power to Protect: Household Bargaining and Female Condom Use

External Seminar

Abstract

Women may face systematically greater bene fits than men from adopting certain technologies. Yet women often hold lower bargaining power, meaning that men's preferences may constrain household adoption when decisions are joint. When low female bargaining power constrains adoption of the first-best technology, introducing a version of the technology that is second-best in terms of cost or effectiveness, but more acceptable to men, may increase adoption and welfare. This paper contributes the first explicit model and test of the trade-offs when introducing a second-best technology in such a setting. We conduct a field experiment introducing female condoms (which are less effective and more expensive than male condoms, but often preferred by men) in an area with high HIV prevalence. We observe an increase in the likelihood that women have sex and fi nd strongest adoption of female condoms among women with lower bargaining power, who were previously having unprotected sex.

Webpage: https://research.vu.nl/en/persons/wendy-janssens

Title: Innovation Diffusion and Physician Networks: Keyhole Surgery for Cancer in the English NHS

External Seminar

Abstract

We examine the effect of a physician network on medical innovation using novel matched patient-physician-hospital panel data. The data include every relevant physician and all patients in the English NHS for 15 years and physicians’ workplace histories for more than 20. The dynamic network arising from physician mobility between hospitals over time allows us to separate unobserved physician and hospital heterogeneity from the effect of the network. We build on standard peer-effects models by adding cumulative peer behaviour and allow for particularly influential physicians (‘key players’), whose identities we estimate. We find positive effects of peer innovation take-up, number of peers, and proximity in the network to both pioneers of the innovation and key players. Counterfactual estimates suggest that early intervention targeting young, connected physicians with early take-up can significantly increase aggregate take-up.

Webpage: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/m.miraldo

Title: Migration and Cultural Change

External Seminar

Abstract

We examine both theoretically and empirically how migration affects cultural change in home and host countries. Our theoretical model integrates various compositional and diffusion mechanisms of migration-based cultural change for which it delivers distinctive testable predictions on the sign and direction of convergence. We then use the World Value Survey for the period 1981-2014 to build time-varying measures of cultural similarity for a large number of country pairs and exploit within country-pair variation over time. Our evidence is inconsistent with the view that immigrants are a threat to the host country’s culture. While migrants do act as vectors of cultural diffusion and bring about cultural convergence, this is mostly to disseminate cultural values and norms from host to home countries (i.e., cultural remittances).

Webpage: https://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/en/rapoport-hillel/

Title: Corporate Acquisitions and Firm-level Uncertainty: Domestic Versus Cross-Border Deals

Internal Seminar

Abstract

This paper studies the impact of corporate acquisitions on the uncertainty faced by acquiring firms. We use data for UK public companies from 2004 to 2017 and employ a matching estimator combined with difference-in-differences to control for the endogenous selection of firms into acquiring status. Acquisitions exert a large and persistent effect on the volatility of stock returns of acquirers and is characterized by a pecking order: domestic takeovers lead to a reduction in the uncertainty faced by the acquirer, while cross-border acquisitions -- particularly those involving target firms in emerging markets -- engender a positive response in acquirers' volatility.

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Title: Too much of a good thing? The dynamics of trust and loyalty

External Seminar

Abstract: TBA

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Title: Temporary visas against smuggling

Internal Seminar

Abstract

We model simultaneously the supply of services by smugglers and the demand from workers in low wage countries. We show that illegal markets for human smuggling and employment needs in host countries can be jointly addressed through carefully designed temporary visa schemes. We study how changes in foreign worker flows depend strongly on the design of the temporary visa schemes. We show how such visas schemes designed to throttle smugglers’ activities can be combined with internal and external controls to reach two targets: limiting the number of foreign workers in the economy and diversifying their skills. We then use information on illegal migrants from Senegal to France and Spain to calibrate the price of temporary visas, which would drive smugglers’ profits to zero on these routes, and the subsequent changes in immigration to France and Spain.

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Stimulating efforts by coarsening information

Internal Seminar

We examine the problem of a principal who wishes to maximize the total effort of two agents competing in a contest. The principal holds private information about which of two agents is in an advantaged position (if any), and can control the coarseness of the disclosed information provided that the true state is contained in the disclosed set. We solve for the optimal disclosure policy under two alternative assumptions. First, in the spirit of the Bayesian persuasion literature, we assume that the principal can commit to a disclosure strategy before learning the true state. Second, we relax the commitment assumption. We show how the solution varies with the size of effort cost and with the relative likelihood of different states.

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Privacy Protection: When Does Hiding in Plain Sight Work?

Internal Seminar

We study a model where a hider aims to prevent a seeker from learning sensitive information about her. The hider can pre-commit to ex ante level of protection for sensitive information. We show that when full protection of sensitive information is not feasible, the hider may optimally choose to hide sensitive information in plain sight, that is, protect it less than non-sensitive information, in hope that the seeker would quickly give up the search for the hider's information because he would think that, had there been anything sensitive to uncover, he would have found it already. The optimal protection level for sensitive information is increasing in the exogenous protection level for non-sensitive information, thus making these two types of protection complementary. In addition, we extend the model by allowing the hider to control the number of seekers. Then open access (infinite number of seekers) is optimal.

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Title TBA

Internal Seminar

Abstract

Title: Returns to Childcare and Capital: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

External Seminar

Abstract: Can providing access to childcare services (i) improve child development, (ii) stimulate the development of female businesses and (iii) improve the returns to capital in female-owned businesses? In order to answer these questions, we implement a field experiment in Uganda where we randomly offer women with children aged 3-5 years (i) access to childcare services (ii) access to capital (a cash grant) (iii) both capital and access to childcare. A fourth group of women remain as the control group. One year after baseline, households with access to childcare have higher household income and child development. Among women who owned a business at baseline, cash grants yield significant returns only when coupled with access to childcare services.

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Title: Optimal Research and Teaching Targets in Academia

External Seminar

Abstract: We develop a parsimonious model of performance management system in academia to study how to set optimal targets on research and teaching. We build on the literature that represents targets as reference points (see, for instance, Koszegi and Rabin (2006)). Heterogeneous academics respond to targets decided by a risk-neutral manager whose objective is to maximize the overall teaching and research output. Complementarity and substitutability between research and teaching, the academics’ productivity, and the department’s composition are crucial determinants in setting the targets optimally and they may lead to diversification or specialization in the production of research and teaching. The effects on academics’ welfare of using targets in academia are also investigated. Several extensions are considered including the possibility of personalized targets and labor mobility.

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Title: Learning and equilibrium in misspecified models

External Seminar

Abstract: We consider learning in games that are misspecified in that players are unable to learn the true probability distribution over outcomes. Under misspecification, Bayes’ rule might not converge to the model that leads to actions with the highest objective payoff among the models subjectively admitted by the player. From an evolutionary perspective, this renders a population of Bayesians vulnerable to invasion. Drawing on the machine learning literature, we show that learning rules that outperform Bayes’ rule suggest a new solution concept for misspecified games: misspecified Nash equilibrium.

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Title: Do the guidelines apply to me? - Patient information and physician agency in prenatal diagnostics

External Seminar

Abstract: Patients with expert knowledge in health care have been found to receive care that is systematically different from care provided to non-expert patients. However, the current literature has been unable to ascertain whether the differences are due to expert patients sending less noisy signals about their preferences or health state than non-experts (statistical discrimination theory) or whether experts use their informational advantage to demand better care than non-expert patients (agency discrimination theory). In this paper, we investigate the extent to which care provided to medically trained mothers is more likely to bypass clinical guidelines intended to ration access to prenatal diagnostic testing (PDT) compared to mothers who are not medically trained. Moreover, we examine whether a change in guidelines affected the differences in care offered to expert and non-expert patients. We use a differences-in-discontinuities design to estimate the difference in the use of prenatal testing between expert and non-expert patients on the margin of a guideline threshold. We measure baseline preferences as the difference above the threshold, where all patients are offered PDT. Controlling for this baseline difference in preferences, we estimate expert overuse as the difference in the differences above and below the threshold. Prior to 2004 the threshold was age based (35 years) and after 2004 risk based (risk >1:300). We use exact matching to compare mothers with similar levels of education and income levels. We use linked Danish administrative data on the use of PDT, patients age, gender, ethnicity education and family income from 51,204 mothers aged 33-37 giving birth from 1996 through 2002 and 23,211 mothers giving birth from 2008 through 2018. We find a 7.4 percentage points overuse difference when the age-based threshold applied. Overall, 70 percent % of the difference in PDT is due to expert overuse. Experts and nonexpert patients have similar test-rates above the threshold, indicating that the differences below the threshold are not driven by differences in preferences. After the risk-based threshold was introduced, the difference in PDT almost disappears. In conclusion, expert mothers circumvent clinical guidelines intended to ration pre-natal diagnostic testing indicating that the difference between experts and non-experts are due to agency discrimination.

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