Abstract: The adoption of essential agricultural technologies and services, for example, agriculture insurance remains limited in developing countries. Recent literature in development economics has highlighted the potentially pivotal role of social learning in technology adoption. A farmer learns about a new technology by observing other farmers within her network who have first adopted the technology. This learning would then significantly affect her adoption decision. To improve farmers’ uptake of agriculture insurance, this paper focuses on investigating the long-term direct and spillover effects of subsidies on crop insurance adoption in Vietnam. We have conducted randomized controlled trials with members of 44 Village Savings and Loan Associations – a form of autonomous microcredit groups – established by ethnic minority women in Lai Chau province of Vietnam. We found the spillover effect from the full subsidized farmers to other farmers in their network. We also found that having an additional friend who purchases crop insurance in a farmer’s network increased her uptake by 12.3% point. The mechanisms of the spillover effect might come from social learning, social pressure of network friends, and changes in the perceived probability of disasters.

Abstract: TBD.

Abstract: Regulation is a major driver of housing supply, yet often not easily observed. Using only apartment prices and building heights, we estimate frontier costs, defined as housing production costs absent regulation. Identification uses conditions on the support of supply and demand shocks without recourse to instrumental variables. In an application to Israeli residential construction, we find on average 43% of housing price ascribable to regulation, but with substantial dispersion, and with higher rates in areas that are higher priced, denser, and closer to city centers. We also find economies of scale in frontier costs at low building heights. This estimation takes into account measurement error, which includes random unobserved structural quality. When allowing structural quality to vary with amenities (locational quality), and assuming weak complementarity (the return in price on structural quality is nondecreasing in amenities) among buildings within 1km, we bound mean regulation from below by 19% of prices.

Abstract: Throughout the course of human history, conflict has been a prevalent feature since the very beginning of our existence. In this research, we adopt a positive approach on this subject by employing game theory to elucidate the underlying causes of open conflict.  Through our framework, we are able to explain certain aspects of conflict theory that have not yet been adequately explained in existing literature.

Abstract: The gender gap in rural development has received attention from researchers and practitioners. However, there is a lack of discourse on the intersection among women's managerial rights, farm investment, and household welfare. Using a nationally representative survey in Zambia and doubly robust estimator, we show that land tenure has a more significant impact on tree planting for women decision makers. Moreover, our result shows that households led by women are more likely to benefit from soil and land management in male-dominant societies. In conclusion, policies aimed at empowering women and increasing their bargaining power within households are necessary in developing countries to address gender inequality.

Abstract: The aviation industry had been continuously growing in the last century, surviving from several major shocks, which highlights the resilience of the aviation system. It seems, however, that the aviation industry has not learned its lessons from these earlier experiences, culminating into the devastating impact on the industry by the COVID-19, with unprecedented global declines in passenger volume and airline revenue. Pending the available vaccines, governments implemented non-pharmaceutical measures to control local epidemic in early stages. It was shown that air transportation played an important role in spreading the COVID-19; as a consequence, flight bans were executed by countries and regions against the first waves of the pandemic. For instance, the greatest disconnection of the worldwide air transport since the World War II occurred in April 2020, when passenger traffic was reduced by 94% compared to 2019, and total operating revenues for the industry were down by 62% in 2020. These last three years with the pandemic have highlighted the vulnerability of our aviation system and the society as a whole. Accordingly, it is instrumental to better understand the mechanisms and ramifications of COVID-19 for preparing towards future external disruptions. In this seminar, I will discuss the interactions between the pandemic and aviation at the world level. Our data-driven analysis is divided into three stages based on the major periods of COVID-19, namely, January-May 2020, June 2020-December 2021, and the endemic recovery from 2022. The policy and managerial implications for post-recovery period and Japanese aviation industry will be examined, and the recommendations for future research work will be provided.

Abstract: With unique datasets, this paper studies the effects of dockless bike sharing on house prices. We find that in neighborhoods relatively far from subway stations, house prices increase with the usage intensity of shared bikes. This indicates a positive value of bike sharing as a complement to the subway network. Meanwhile, shared bike usage intensity also has a negative impact on house prices. The negative effect is mitigated for luxury neighborhoods and neighborhoods near City Management Teams, suggesting that the negative effect is related to bike misplacement. Since the breakout of COVID-19, both the positive and negative price impacts have become more evident. This is consistent with the fact that the user base of shared bikes, which allow for social distancing in an open space, has increased during the pandemic. This may enhance people’s confidence in the long survival of the bike sharing industry.

Abstract: Why do post-colonial states engage in population resettlement in their frontier territories? In this paper, we shift away from the motivations for resettlement by advancing a cost-centric theory for resettlement. We contend that states may use the resettlement policy because they inherit the infrastructural capital to do so from settlers of former colonial powers seeking to consolidate their frontiers. We test the observable implications of the theory using a unique geo-coded archival dataset and in Manchuria, a northeastern border region of China. We find that areas that received more Japanese settlers during the colonial period (1931-45) are associated with greater proximity to Chinese settlers in the post-colonial era (1945-). We also show that, contrary to existing findings on settlement and growth, Japanese settlements led to slower economic development. By focusing on cost our paper expands our understanding of resettlement policies and uncovers an alternative relationship between settlement and economic development.

Abstract: Previous literature on inflation rate target zone, based on the exchange rate target zone models that developed in the 1990s, shows that the adoption of an inflation target zone may have different effects. When the boundaries of the target zone are known with certainty, they have a stabilizing effect on the inflation rate moving within the band. The reason is that the more the inflation rate moves towards the edges of the band, the more a stabilizing  intervention by the monetary authorities is expected, so as to bring it back inside the fluctuation area. The opposite, however, happens when such margins are not known with certainty. In that case, for example, the more inflation increases, the more it is expected to increase, thereby creating a destabilizing, rather than stabilizing effect. The present paper investigates the conditions that have to be satisfied for the defense of the margins to be credible. In this model it turns out that credibility is provided by the availability of the “fundamental” control variable that can be operated by the monetary authorities in order to control for inflation, namely the nominal interest rate. Only when the central bank is expected to be able and willing to increase the interest rate as much as it is necessary to keep the inflation rate in check (in spite of the social costs this may imply), will the target zone be credible, thereby producing the desired stabilizing effects.

Abstract: This paper introduces origin of goods in household welfare to estimate consumer gains from trade liberalization. We use a unique dataset of household expenditure on goods by origin in Cambodia and show that rich households are more likely than poor households to consume import goods. We estimate tariff pass-through rates across origins and find that trade liberalization reduces a price for import goods more than for domestically produced goods, with little influence on home-produced goods. The first-order impacts of tariff reduction between 2004 and 2019 show a larger welfare gain for richer households; households at the 80-90 income percentile gain more than those at the 0-10 percentile by 40%. We calculate alternative welfare measures with varying assumptions on origins and demonstrate that disaggregating origins can significantly magnify a gap in the welfare impacts between rich and poor.