Online Australasian Seminar in International Economics (OASIS)
Deakin University, James Cook University, Melbourne University, Monash University, University of Auckland
Online Australasian Seminar in International Economics (OASIS)
Deakin University, James Cook University, Melbourne University, Monash University, University of Auckland
Welcome to the OASIS! OASIS is co-organized by A/Professor Reshad Ahsan, Professor Phillip McCalman, Dr. Krisztina Orbán, Dr. Cong S. Pham, Dr. Maria Ptashkina, A/Professor Laura Puzzello, A/Professor Asha Sundaram, Dr. Haiping Zhang, and Professor Sizhong Sun.
This is a seminar series on international economics-related topics for economists based in Australia and New Zealand and invited international speakers from around the world.
The format of the seminar is a 60-minute talk followed by a 15-minute Q&A. Unless otherwise specified, seminars will take place on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month. To convert the AEST or NZST time to your time zone, please click here.
Please email oasis.intlecon@gmail.com to sign up for the OASIS mailing list.
UPCOMING OASIS SEMINAR:
June 10, Time 10:00 AEST (12:00 NZST)
Speaker: Jie Bai (Harvard)
Title: Quality Incentives and Upgrading in Uganda’s Coffee Supply Chain
Abstract:
Quality upgrading to attain premia in world markets is a key development strategy in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Efforts to encourage upgrading have primarily focused on supply-side constraints on producers, with less attention to the demand-side incentives producers face to upgrade. In this paper, we study how these incentives are shaped by the often-long supply chain of domestic intermediaries that link producers in LMICs to world markets. We study these issues in the context of Uganda's coffee industry, collecting transaction-level data on prices and lab-based quality measures from agents along the supply chain from export-gate to farm-gate. We document that the quality premium significantly diminishes as it moves upstream. We build a model featuring two mechanisms that may drive this diminished quality premium upstream: intermediary value extraction and intermediary value addition. Both mechanisms have distributional implications for farmer surplus, but only the former dampens aggregate quality production. To separate the two, we conduct a field experiment offering randomized coffee production contracts that induce quality-specific demand shocks throughout the supply chain, which we use to identify key cost parameters and markups. We then examine the efficiency implications and distributional consequences of these two channels, as well as how they interact to affect quality production and surplus distribution along the chain. Finally, we apply the model to investigate policy counterfactuals designed to promote quality upgrading along supply chains.
PROGRAM - 2026 - Semester 1
June 17, Time 10:00 AEST (12:00 NZST)
Title: Quality Incentives and Upgrading in Uganda’s Coffee Supply Chain
June 10, Time 9:00 AEST (11:00 NZST)
Title: Collective Learning in the Global Semiconductor Industry
May 13, Time 9:00 AEST (11:00 NZST)
Andrés Rodríguez-Clare (UC Berkeley)
Title: Carbon Taxes in the Global Economy: A Quantitative Analysis
April 22, Time 10:00 AEST (12:00 NZST)
Enze Xie (Zhejiang University)
Title: Washing Away the US: Tariff Evasion Under China’s Retaliatory Tariffs
April 8, Time 10:00 AEST (12:00 NZST)
Title: Exclusions for Sale? Tariff Exclusions in the US-China Trade War
March 11, Time 10:00 AEDT (12:00 NZDT)
Alina Mulyukova (Georg-August-University of Göttingen)
Title: Services Liberalization and Product Variety of Manufacturing Firms. Evidence from India
Feburary 25, Time 10:00 AEDT (12:00 NZDT)
Pablo Fajgelbaum (UCLA Economics)
Title: Strategic Trade Infrastructure: Understanding China’s Belt and Road Initiative
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