Upcoming Presentations

Abstract: While there is extensive research on how individuals form beliefs about their own abilities and traits, as well as how displayed confidence shapes social and labor market outcomes, little is known about how people decide what level of confidence to communicate to others. We address this gap by designing and running lab experiments to study how individuals form self-presentation strategies when sharing their confidence about ego-relevant outcomes. Participants first privately state their confidence about the outcomes and then choose a level of confidence to share with the rest of the participants, while being incentivized to report truthfully at both stages. We find a bias toward the middle: individuals adjust the confidence they share with other participants to avoid appearing too confident or too unconfident, and they under-report it significantly more often for ego-relevant than for ego-irrelevant outcomes to avoid seeming arrogant. This strategic self-presentation leads to shared confidence that is less informative than private confidence. High performers under-report relatively more, and low performers over-report relatively more, reducing the variation in shared confidence across ability levels and making it harder to infer true ability or trait from shared confidence. In addition, publicly shared confidence aligns less closely with actual performance and underlying traits than private confidence.

Abstract: This study examines the impact of institutional quality on economic growth in upper-middle-income African countries. To this end, panel data spanning from 2002 to 2021 for these countries were used, and the growth equation was estimated using fixed effect, random effect, and Generalized Least Squares (GLS) estimation techniques. The findings of the study indicate that measures of institutional quality, such as voice and accountability, control of corruption, and political stability, have a significant and positive effect on economic growth. Conversely, foreign aid has a significant negative effect, suggesting that in the context of poor institutional quality, foreign aid does not yield the expected economic growth. Therefore, the study recommends that countries should focus on improving institutional quality to enhance economic outcomes.

Abstract: This paper investigates how demand composition between goods and services affects monetary policy transmission. I document two empirical regularities regarding the service sector: (1) high-income households have a higher expenditure share in services than low-income households, and (2) prices of services adjust less frequently than prices of goods. Motivated by these facts, I build a two-sector heterogeneous-agent New-Keynesian model with non-homothetic preferences to study monetary policy transmission and calibrate it to match key moments of consumption, income, and wealth for the U.S. economy. I find that a contractionary monetary policy shock has more substantial effects in the service sector than in the goods sector. Credit-constrained households suffer more from the shock than non-constrained households. Furthermore, I look at the impact of structural transformation- the shift of economic activity towards the services sector- on monetary policy transmission. I show that this shift made consumption and output more responsive to changes in the policy rate and monetary policy more costly in terms of welfare.

Abstract: The 1965–66 anti-communist purge in Indonesia, resulting in an estimated 500,000 to one million deaths, had profound social and economic repercussions. This paper examines its impact on demographic transition in Java by exploiting regional variation in Communist Party vote share from the 1955 election. Utilizing the 2010 population census and a two‐way fixed‐effects event‐study design, we document a delayed, approximately ten‐year after the genocide in the number of births in PKI stronghold municipalities. We show that this decline is driven predominantly by reduced marriage rates, which may operate through discriminatory government policies that limited economic opportunities for Communist Party descendants. Although cohort replacement and lower out‐migration in these areas partially mitigate the number of births drop, the overall effect remains sizable. We further demonstrate that local political contestation, specifically between Communist Party and Islamist parties, mediated these outcomes. Our findings highlight how large‐scale political violence can disrupt family formation and alter population dynamics, with long‐term implications for labor supply and economic development in post‐conflict societies.