Upcoming Presentations

Abstract: Extreme heat threatens the labour supply and earnings of daily-wage workers in developing countries, where physically demanding outdoor work is common. We examine these effects among workers employed under India’s National Rural Employment Guar- antee Scheme (NREGS), one of the largest public employment programs globally. We combine administrative data on attendance and assessed wages with a discrete choice experiment to elicit worker’s preferences over alternative heat adaptation measures. A one-degree increase in mean wet-bulb temperature over the preceding ten days raises absence by 3.0 percent of its mean; absence is 6.7 percent higher in the hottest than in the coolest quartile of accumulated heat. Effects on assessed wages are weaker, although the probability of receiving the scheme’s full daily wage declines with increase in temperature during the hottest months. In the choice experiment, workers require compensation equivalent to 2.8 percent of the daily wage to accept a one-hour later start but are willing to forgo 5.8 percent for a 10 percent reduction in the work target, preferring reduced work requirements to changes in work hours.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: Spain's 2023 housing law made rent ceilings binding in 140 Catalan municipalities on 16 March 2024. Using the deposit registry of every lease signed in the region, with the tenant's national-ID type as a measure of foreign status, I estimate a regression discontinuity in time at that date. Registrations fall by nearly half, and the fall persists only for professional landlords once the anticipation window and Easter are excluded. Pooling ordinary and seasonal leases, the foreign-tenant share does not move for any type of landlord. Within the contracts the cap covers it falls by 7.3 pp for legal-entity landlords and 6.9 pp for corporate landlords, a fth of the pre-reform level, while the probability of a seasonal let, outside the cap, rises by 13 to 16 pp. The oset is unequal across neighbourhoods: where the foreign-born come from poor origins the share falls in the pooled market too; elsewhere the ordinary-lease decline is recovered in seasonal contracts.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: As trading has transitioned to electronic platforms, both traders and exchanges have invested in technologies that reduce trading latency. Yet little is known about how exchange processing latency affects market quality or whether its effects differ across market participants. Using message data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), we examine these  effects and their distribution between liquidity providers and liquidity takers. To address endogeneity, we exploit cross-commodity processing congestion arising from the shared  order-processing system as an instrument for exchange latency, whereby message traffic from other agricultural commodities delays the processing of a given order but is otherwise unrelated to its  market quality.  We find that lower exchange latency primarily benefits liquidity providers by increasing market-making revenues while reducing adverse selection costs, but can increase the immediate trading costs borne by liquidity takers. Our findings also reveal a congestion-based externality across commodity markets and highlight the importance of processing capacity and queue dynamics in exchange design.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series

Abstract: This paper develops a Schumpeterian growth model in which consumer data are used as the R&D input for quality improvements, and consumers balance the economic benefits of selling their consumption data against privacy concerns. In the market equilibrium, a higher degree of privacy concerns reduces the supply of consumer data, hindering innovation and thereby slowing down growth. This finding is consistent with our cross-country empirical evidence using Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA), which accounts for model uncertainty and shows that privacy concerns are robustly negatively correlated with regional digital development. Furthermore, our model shows that if the degree of privacy concerns exceeds a certain threshold, the decentralized equilibrium features socially excessive innovation, suggesting that data use should be more strictly regulated or taxed. In contrast, if the degree of privacy concerns is lower than this threshold value, innovation in the decentralized equilibrium is below the socially efficient level, and policies that promote or subsidize data use become socially desirable. These findings highlight the role of privacy concerns in shaping data availability and innovation outcomes and help us understand cross-country differences in data regulation policies.

*This session is part of Job Market Seminar Series