UCLouvain Economics Seminar

The UCLouvain Economics Seminars is jointly organized by CORE and IRES.

Organizers: Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

On Thursday, 12:45 - 14:00

Doyens 22 - 1, Place des Doyens, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve

Programme for the academic year 2019 - 2020

September 2019

October 2019

3 Yair Antler (Tel Aviv University)
Multilevel Marketing: Pyramid-Shaped Schemes or Exploitative Scams

Abstract

Motivated by the growing discussion on the legitimacy of multilevel marketing schemes and their resemblance to pyramid scams, we compare the two phenomena based on their underlying compensation structures. We identify the conditions on the tendency of agents to spread information by word of mouth, under which a principal can design a pyramid scam to exploit a network of agents whose beliefs are coarse. We find that a pyramid scam is sustainable only if its underlying reward scheme compensates each participant based on at least two levels of recruitment, i.e., the people he recruits and the people they recruit.

10 Luca Fornaro (CREI)
Monetary Union and Financial Integration

Abstract

It is often argued that forming a monetary union increases financial integration and leads to a more efficient allocation of capital across member countries. To investigate this claim, this paper provides a model connecting monetary policy and international capital flows. The key feature of the model is that monetary policy affects the value of collateral that can be repossessed by creditors in case of default. Once a country has accumulated a large stock of external debt, it is optimal for the government to depreciate the exchange rate to expropriate foreign investors. Anticipating this, under flexible exchange rates international investors impose tight borrowing limits on foreign debtors. In a monetary union this source of exchange rate risk is absent, because national governments do not control monetary policy. Forming a monetary union thus increases financial integration by boosting borrowing capacity toward foreign investors. This process, however, does not necessarily lead to higher welfare. Higher financial integration may increase welfare by fostering capital flows from capital-abundant to capital-scarce countries. But a high degree of financial integration may also make episodes of inefficient capital flights out of capital-scarce countries possible.

17 Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt ( Frankfurt School of Finance and Management)
Salience Effects in Portfolio Selection
This seminar will take place at More 57 instead of Doyens 22.

Abstract

Portfolio under-diversification is one of the most pervasive phenomena in household finance. We show that salience theory of choice under risk synthesizes seemingly disparate explanations for under diversification that have been established in the literature: skewness preferences and correlation misperception. On the one hand, we study under-diversification with symmetric assets and find that salience theory can rationalize experimental evidence on naive diversification. On the other hand, we derive predictions on the role of correlation for portfolio selection with skewed assets, which allow us to distinguish between our salience-based explanation of under-diversification and naive decision rules such as the 1/N-heuristic. We plan to test our novel predictions in a lab experiment.

31 Jacques Crémer (Toulouse School of Economics)
Migration Between Platforms

Abstract

We study incumbency advantage in platform industries, where the utility of participating in a platform is increasing in the mass of users participating in that platform. Individuals receive stochastic opportunities to migrate from an incumbent to a new (entrant) platform, which they can accept or wait until the next opportunity arises. Individuals have an incentive to delay migration until enough other users have migrated, which provides a micro-foundation for incumbency advantage. When users obtain more frequent migration opportunities, the cost of delaying migration is reduced, so incumbency advantage increases. Migration technologies that allow for large groups of individuals to migrate in a short period of time (i.e., coordination) are also associated with higher incumbency advantage. There always exists some capacity constraint by the entrant which increases the cost of delaying migration and thereby reduces incumbency advantage. Multi-homing reduces incumbency advantage but does not eliminate it. When individuals have heterogeneous preferences for the two platforms, there can be welfare losses due to excessive segregation of individuals across the platforms.

Link to the paper

November 2019

7 Mark Weder (Aarhus University)
Do We Really Know that Monetary Policy was Destabilizing in the 1970s?

Abstract

The paper re-examines whether the Federal Reserve's monetary policy was a source of instability during the Great Inflation by estimating a sticky-price model with positive trend inflation, commodity price shocks and sluggish real wages. Our estimation provides empirical evidence for substantial wage-rigidity and finds that the Federal Reserve responded aggressively to inflation but negligibly to the output gap. In the presence of non-trivial real imperfections and well-identified commodity price-shocks, U.S. data prefers a determinate version of the New Keynesian model: monetary policy-induced indeterminacy and sunspots were not causes of macroeconomic instability during the pre-Volcker era.

14 Julia Cagé (Sciences-Po)

21 Philippe Mongin (HEC) Cancelled
Rawls's Difference Principle and maximin rule of allocation: a new analysis

Abstract

If Rawls's A Theory of Justice has achieved fame among economists, this is largely due to his Di erence Principle, which says that inequalities of resources should be to the benefit of the less fortunate, or more operationally, that allocations of resources should be ranked by the maximin criterion. After noticing that the technical debate over the Difference Principle has remained stuck at the level of the decision theory and welfare theory of the 1970's, the paper reconstructs it in a more thorough way. It aims at extending the Rawlsian maximin to the case where the resources accruing to each individual are uncertain to society, and for this purpose, resorts to two main technical tools, i.e., the min-of-means representation of decision theory and the ex ante versus ex post distinction of welfare theory. The paper axiomatically characterize the ex ante and ex post forms of the Rawlsian maximin and compares them in terms of egalitarian criteria. It nally expresses preference for a compromise egalitarian theory that mixes the two forms.

28 Juan Carluccio (Banque de France)

December 2019

5 Philippe Weil (ULB)

12 Anastasios Karantounias (Fed Atlanta)

February 2020

6 Martin Peitz (University of Mannheim)

13 Alex Armand (University of Navarra)

20 Gabriella Conti (University College London)

27 Austin Wright (University of Chicago)

March 2020

5 Anandi Mani (Oxford University)

12 Day Manoli (University of Texas Austin)

19 Mine Senses (John's Hopkins)

26 Marc Klemp (Univerity of Copenhagen)

April 2020

2 Dylan Glover (INSEAD)

23 Andrea Guariso (Trinity College)

30 Daniel Yi Xu (Duke University)

May 2020

7 Oriol Carbonell Nicolau (Rutgers University)

14 Elena Esposito (DEEP-HEC)

June 2020

4 Michèle Belot / Philip Kircher (EUI)

11 Marie-Louise Leroux (UQAM)

Archives 2018 -2019

Employment Effects of Payroll Tax SubsidiesThursday October 4, 2018
Valerie Lechene (University College London)
A structural analysis of the decline of home cooked food

Thursday October 11, 2018
Régis Renault (Cergy-Pontoise)
Search Direction: Position Externalities and Position Bias

Thursday October 18, 2018
Gianmarco Ottaviano (LSE/Bologna)
Appropriability of Intellectual Assets and the Organization of Global Supply Chains

Thursday November 8, 2018
Mike Elsby (Uiversity of Edinburgh)
Male joblessness in the United States

Thursday November 15, 2018
Antonio Rosato (Cambridge University)
Projection of Private Values in Auctions

Thurday November 22
Nuno Coimbra (PSE)
Financial Cycles with Heterogeneous Intermediaries

Thursday, November 29, 2018
Maarten Bosker (University of Rotterdam)
Shock propagation in global supply chains. Evidence from the US-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement

Thursday, December 6, 2018
Michal Kobielarz (KULeuven)
Unstable Monetary Unions – The Role of Expectations and Past Experience

Thurday, December 13, 2018
Seminar on immigration with L. Minale, H. Rapopport and M. Burzynski

2019

Thursday February 7, 2019
Sascha Becker (Warwick)
Effects of Catholic Censorship during the Counter-Reformation

Thursday Febraury14, 2019
Matteo Cervellati (Bologna)
Sovereign Polities and Pre-Industrial Development: Theory and Evidence for Europe 1000-1850

Thurday February 21, 2019
Botond Kőszegi (Central European University)
An Attention-Based Theory of Mental Accounting

Thursday February28, 2019
Sandy Tubeuf (UCLouvain, IRSS)
(In)-equality of opportunity in the allocation of R&D resources for rare diseases

Thursday March 7, 2019
Matthias Doepke (Northwestern)
Employment Protection, Investment in Job-Specific Skills, and Inequality Trends in the United States and Europe

Tuesday March 12, 2019
John Roemer (Yale University)
How we cooperate: A theory of Kantian optimization

Thurdsay March14, 2019
Regina Riphahn Erlangen (Nürnberg)
Employment Effects of Payroll Tax Subsidies

Thursday March 21, 2019
Gianluca Orefice (CEPII)
Immigration and Worker-Firm matching

Thurday March 28, 2019
Ferdinand Vieider (Ghent University)
Environmental Factors Shape Risk Preferences

Thursday April 4, 2019
James Fenske (Warwick)
Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India

Thursday April 11, 2019
Chiara Farronato (Harvard Business School)
Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing

Thursday May 2, 2019
Alessandro Sommacal (University of Verona)
Flat tax reforms in Italy through the lens of an heterogenous agents OLG model

Thursday May 9, 2019
Day Manoli (University of Texas) !! CANCELLED !!

Thursday May16, 2019
Pietro Biroli (University of Zurich)
Genetics and Health Insurance: How Genes and Insurance Status Affect Smoking Decisions after Health Shocks

Thursday May 23, 2019
Sydney Ludvigson (New York University)
How the Wealth Was Won: Factor Shares as Market Fundamentals

Archives 2017-2018

Thursday September 21, 2017
Peter Dolton (University of Sussex)
The Optimal Length of the Working Day : Evidence from Hawthorne Experiments

Thursday September 28, 2017
Olivier Charlot (University of Cergy)
Taxation of Temporary Jobs: Good Intentions with Bad Outcomes

Thursday October 5, 2017
Catherine Guikinger (Namur University)
Buy as you Need Nutrition and Food Storage Imperfections

Thursday October 19, 2017 - CANCELLED
Katja Kaufmann (University of Mannheim)
Gender Peer effects, non-Cognitive Skills and Marriage Outcomes: Evidence from single-sex schools in the UK

Thursday October 25, 2017
Luis Cabral (New York University)
Standing on the Shoulders of Dwarfs: Dominant Firms and Innovation Incentives

Thursday November 2, 2017
Felix Kübler (University of Zurich)
Self-justified Equilibria in Dynamic Economies with Heterogenous Agent

Thursday, November 9, 2017
Bilal Zia (World Bank)
Learning Business Practices from Peers: Experimental Evidence from Small-Scale Retailers in Jakarta

Thursday, November 16, 2017
Paul Heidhues (University of Dusseldorf)
Unrealistic Expectations and Misguided Learning

Thursday, November 23, 2017
Cheti Nicoletti (University of York)
Do Parental Investment React to Changes in Child's Skills and Health

Thursday, November 30, 2017
Alain Venditti (Aix Marseille, School of Economics)
On Sunspot Fluctuations in Infinite-Horizon Models: A General Analysis

Thursday, December 7, 2017
Heiner Schumacher (KU Leuven)
Equilibrium Contracts and Boundedly Rational Expectations

Thursday, December 14, 2017
Ariell Reshef (PSE)
Techies, Trade and Skill-Biased Productivity: Firm Level Evidence from France

Thursday, February 1, 2018
V. Filipe Martins da Rocha (Université Dauphine)
Self-enforcing Debt Limits and Costly Default in General Equilibrium

Thursday, February 8, 2018
Heiko Karle (University of Frankfurt)
Competition and Information Quality in the Market for News

Thursday, February 15, 2018
Sebastian Krautheim (University of Passau)
The International Organization of Production in the Regulatory Vacuum

Thursday, February 22, 2018
Harris Dellas (University of Bern)
Fiscal Policy with an Informal Sector

Thursday, March 1, 2018
Simon Cornée (University of Rennes)
A Theory of Social Finance

Thursday, March 8, 2018
Grégory Jolivet (University of Bristol)
A Structural Analysis of Health and Labour Market Trajectories

Thursday, March 15, 2018
Ingela Alger (Toulouse School of Economics)
Uninvadable social behaviors and preferences in group- structured populations

Thursday, March 22, 2018
Stefano Gnocchi (Bank of Canada)
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity Meets the Zero Lower Bound

Thursday, March 29, 2018
Manolis Galenianos (Royal Holloway)
Referral Networks and Inequality

Thursday April 19, 2018
Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné (HEC Montréal)
Measuring Innovation and Innovativeness: A data mining approach

Thursday, April 26, 2018
Simone Bertoli (FERDI)
Migration and co-residence choices: evidence from Mexico

Thursday, May 3, 2018
Hippolyte d'Albis (PSE)
Immigration and Fiscal Balance: Evidence from Western European Countries

Thursday May 17, 2018
Stefania Albanesi (University of Pittsburgh)
Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women's Employment

Friday June 15, 2018
Melanie Meng Xue (Northwestern University)
High-Value Work and the Rise of the Women: The Cotton Revolution and Gender Equality in China

Archives 2016-2017

Thursday, September 22, 2016 - 12.45
Pedro Teles (Universidade Catolica Portuguesa)
More on the Taxation of Capital

Thursday, September 29, 2016
Valérie Smeets (Aarhus University)
Multi-product firms, import competition and the evolution of firm-product technical efficiencies

Thursday, October 6, 2016
Albert Marcet (CSIC), ICREA, UAB, MOVE, Barcelona GSE & CEPR)
Stock Price Booms and Expected Capital Gains?

Thursday, October 13, 2016
Nuno Palma (European University Institute and University of Groningen)
The existence and persistence of liquidity effects: evidence from a large-scale historical natural experiment

Thursday, October 20, 2016
Sandra McNally (University of Surrey)
Entry Through the Narrow Door: The Costs of Just Failing High Stakes Exams

Thursday, November 3, 2016
Karen Macours (PSE, Paris)
Schooling, Learning, and Earnings: Long-term Effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Nicaragua

Thursday, November 10, 2016
Shankha Chakraborty (University of Oregon)
Age-Specific Effects of Mortality Shocks and Economic Development

Thursday, November 17, 2016
Fabian Herweg (University of Bayreuth)
Optimal Cost Overruns: Procurement Auctions with Renegotiationv

Thursday, November 24, 2016
Paolo Giordani (LUISS "Guido Carli" University)
Market Frictions in Entrepreneurial Innovation:Theory and Evidence

Thursday, December 1, 2016
Fabrice Collard (University of Bern)
Public Debt as Private Liquidity: Optimal Policy

Thursday, December 8, 2016 - Cancelled
John Earle (Central European University)
Does Higher Productivity Dispersion Imply Greater Misallocation? A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

Thursday, December 15, 2016
Andreas Moxnes (University of Oslo, CEPR & NBER)
Better, Faster, Stronger : Global Innovation and Trade Liberalization

Thursday, February 2, 2017
Piero Gottardi (European University Institute)
A Theory of Repurchase Agreements, Collateral Re-use, and Repo Intermediation

Thursday, February 9, 2017
Pierre Cahuc (Ecole Polytechnique et directeur du laboratoire de macroéconomie du CREST (INSEE))
Short-time Work and Employment in the Great Recession in France

Thursday, February 16, 2017
Kalina Manova (Oxford University)
Managing trade: evidence from China and the US

Thursday, February 23, 2017
Antonio Cabrales (University College London)
What You Know... Can't Hurt You? A Field Experiment on Relative Performance Feedback in Higher Education

Thursday, March 2, 2017
Takeshi Murooka (University of Munich)
The Timing of Choice-Enhancing Policies

Thursday, March 9, 2017
Pedro Vicente (Nova Lisbon)
Introducing Mobile Money in Rural Mozambique: Evidence from a Field Experiment

Thursday, March 16, 2017
Céline Poilly (Aix-Marseille University)
Do Misperceptions about Demand Matter ? Theory and Evidence

Thursday, March 23, 2017
Jose I. Silva (Girona University)
Local labor market effects of public employment

Thursday, March 30, 2017
Arnaud Costinot (MIT)
The More We Die, The More We Sell? A Simple Test of the Home-Market Effect

Thursday, April 20, 2017
Jérôme Pouyet (PSE)
Vertical Mergers in Platform Markets

Thursday, April 27, 2017
Alessandro Tarozzi (U. Pompeu Fabra)
Evaluation of Alternative Strategies to Increase Demand for and Responses to Information on Arsenic-contaminated Tubewell Water in Bangladesh

Thursday, May 4, 2017
David Neumark (University of California Irvine)
Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment

Thursday, May, 11, 2017
Gerard Llobet (CEMFI Madrid)
The Inverse Cournot Effect in Royalty Negotiations with Complementary Patents

Thursday, May 18, 2017
Juan J. Dolaldo (European University Institute)
From Dual to Unified Employment Protection : Transition and Steady State

Thursday, June 15, 2017
Murat Iyigun (University of Colorado - Boulder)
Why Wait? A Century of Education, Marriage Timing and Gender Roles