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Welcome to the external seminar page of the LEM laboratory (Lille Economie Management - UMR 9221).
The seminar takes place on Tuesdays from 4:30pm to 5:30pm in the Salle du conseil - building SH2 - Cité Scientifique campus in Villeneuve d'Ascq (access: metro M1, stop "Cité Scientifique - Professeur Gabillard"; site map), and online on Zoom.
Organizers: Marie Pierre Dargnies (marie-pierre.dargnie[at]univ-lille.fr), Ekaterina Borisova (ekaterina.borisova[at]univ-lille.fr) and Julien Benistant (julien.benistant[at]univ-lille.fr)
Program for the year 2025-2026
September 30
José De Sousa, University of Paris Panthéon-Assas (Webpage)
Title: Gender Homophily and Feedback in Teams (with P. Madies)
Abstract: We study how feedback affects gender homophily in teams. In a lab experiment, participants endogenously form teams for a real effort task. The salience of individual errors varies across treatments, and one treatment allows partners to send messages after errors occur. We find no gender differences in overall performance, but clear differences in homophily. While men show no homophily, women more often choose female partners, a pattern driven entirely by the highest-performing women. We investigate these results by examining gender differences in beliefs, satisfaction, and fear of negative evaluation.
October 14
Juan de Dios Tena Horrillo, University of Liverpool (Webpage)
Title: Balancing Today and Tomorrow: Determinants and Consequences of Task Allocation in European Football
Abstract: This paper examines how firms allocate tasks between young and senior workers, focusing on elite football as a setting where these decisions are directly observable. Using match-level data from the five largest European leagues between the 2011–12 and 2022–23 seasons, we implement a two-stage empirical strategy that exploits quasi-random variation from calendar-related events. In the first stage, we study the determinants of playing time for young players. We show that their inclusion is discouraged in high-stakes matches, particularly for those without prior experience, but is modestly encouraged by fixture congestion and player absences. In the second stage, we aggregate this exogenous variation to examine the consequences for team performance. The short-run effects are small: fielding inexperienced players slightly worsens results, while experienced players have negligible immediate impact. The long-run effects are more pronounced. Strategic use of experienced players improves subsequent performance, whereas inexperienced players contribute positively mainly when circumstances beyond the club’s control force their inclusion. These findings reveal a structural tension between managers’ short-term incentives and clubs’ long-term interests, and underscore the importance of policies that account for how experience shapes the value of investing in young talent in superstar industries.
November 4
Korhan Koçak, IE University (Webpage)
Title: Sequential Updating
Abstract: On many contentious topics, decision makers’ beliefs fail to converge—or continue to polarize—despite exposure to a high number of signals. They exhibit the backfire effect, holding onto their initial beliefs even more strongly when presented with evidence to the contrary. The first piece of information in a series often acts as an anchor, and thus has an excessively high weight in posteriors. Based on recent findings on working memory, this paper proposes a cognitively less demanding yet ultimately incorrect way to update beliefs that accounts for these deviations from Bayesian Updating. If a signal is informative on multiple dimensions, the order with which beliefs are updated across dimensions leads to different posteriors. The unifying model advanced by this paper shows that polarization is possible under common priors and common signals, and suggests new avenues of research for a better understanding of how information is processed by individuals, as well as how persuasion occurs.
November 25
Jarko Fidrmuc, Zeppelin University (Webpage)
Title: The Motherhood Wage Gap in the EU – A Meta-Analysis
Abstract: We analyze the motherhood wage gap defined as the differences in wages between mothers and childless women, in the European Union. Our meta-analysis synthesizes the results of 20 studies and 710 estimates of the motherhood wage gap across 23 European countries. On average, mothers in the EU earn 4.7% less than childless women. After accounting for a significant negative publication bias, the true effect is only slightly lower (penalty of approximately 3.71%). Additionally, there is high cross-country variation, with Germany showing an exceptionally high motherhood wage gap, whereas mothers in Belgium do not earn significantly less than non-mothers. Meta-regressions indicate that the wage gap is related to mothers’ career breaks after childbirth and employer discrimination against mothers. After controlling for significant control variables, countries in Southern Europe appear to have the lowest wage penalties, or possibly even a wage premium, while Eastern European countries have the biggest penalties.
December 2
Ani Guerdjikova, University of Grenoble Alpes (Webpage)
Title: How Do You Know What I Mean? Implication and Translation
Abstract: When agents entertain distinct perceptions of the word, communication between them will be imprecise. In particular, under differential awareness, an event as described by one agent may find no exact analog in another agent’s subjective understanding. Within this context, it is natural to consider a syntactic model where the agent’s understanding of the world is embodied by a language (i.e., a set of interconnected descriptions of the world). Communication between agents can therefore be understood as a process of translating statements from one language to another. This paper asks how such a translation might arise and how it might be identified by an observer. We show that even if translation between languages is consistent, i.e., preserves logical implications, it need not imply the existence of a joint state-space that embeds the individual models of the two agents. We expose why this failure occurs and provide an axiom that ensures the existence of a joint state spaces which embeds the individual state-spaces.
December 9
Krzysztof Krakowski, King's College London (Webpage)
Title: Settlement Structure and Social Cohesion
Abstract: We study whether the architecture of early human settlements explains variation in social cohesion. Our case study is the colonization of the North German Plain in the 8th century, which brought about two distinct village types: circular villages and linear villages. We argue that circular villages foster social cohesion by increasing equality as well as visibility amongst residents. Using satellite images, we confirm that round villages provide more public goods such as public benches and playgrounds. To trace the differences back in time, we use data from home inscriptions and confirm that residents in more circular villages were historically more likely to inscribe words such as `trust' and `help' on their homes. An instrumental variable strategy---exploiting variation in historic swampiness as a predictor of village linearity---makes a causal relationship plausible. Turning to mechanisms, we find that circular villages foster neighbors' visibility. Equality in resources, by contrast, is not more pronounced in circular villages.
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