Lightning Round for PhD Students on the 2021-22 Academic Job Market
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 7, 2022 12:15 PM - 2:15 PM (EST)
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Chairs:
Noam Yuchtman, London School of Economics - David Y. Yang, Harvard University
- Martin Beraja, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Causal Inference for Spatial Treatments
Abstract
Many events and policies (treatments), such as opening of businesses, building of hospitals, and sources of pollution, occur at specific spatial locations, with researchers interested in their effects on nearby individuals or businesses (outcome units). However, the existing treatment effects literature primarily considers treatments that could experimentally be assigned directly at the level of the outcome units, potentially with spillover effects. I approach the spatial treatment setting from a similar experimental perspective: What ideal experiment would we design to estimate the causal effects of spatial treatments? This perspective motivates a comparison between individuals near realized treatment locations and individuals near counterfactual (unrealized) candidate locations, which is distinct from current empirical practice. I derive standard errors based on this design-based perspective that are straightforward to compute irrespective of spatial correlations in outcomes. Furthermore, I propose machine learning methods to find counterfactual candidate locations and show how to apply the proposed methods on observational data. I study the causal effects of grocery stores on foot traffic to nearby businesses during COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies. I find a substantial positive effect at a very short distance. Correctly accounting for possible effect “interference” between grocery stores located close to one another is of first order importance when calculating standard errors in this application.Simple Actions, Complex Habits: Lessons from Hospital Hand Hygiene
Abstract
How should organizations incentivize routine behaviors? In this paper, I use a cue-based model of habit formation to describe hand hygiene behavior in hospitals and suggest implications for intervention to change behavior. Hand hygiene is the best way to prevent healthcare-associated infections which affect millions of patients and cost billions of dollars each year. However, many studies find that healthcare workers comply with hand hygiene guidelines less than half of the time. Leveraging a unique dataset that tracks compliance behavior of 13,606 workers in 123M hand hygiene opportunities, I document patterns of behavior consistent with a cue-based theory of habit. High compliers benefit from automatic hand washing and are buffered from the negative impacts of cognitive load. However, habits are broken when high compliers are taken out of their normal routines. The findings have implications for how hospitals should design, target, and implement hand hygiene interventions.The Global Race for Talent: Brain Drain, Knowledge Transfer and Economic Growth
Abstract
How does inventors' migration affect talent allocation, knowledge diffusion, and productivity growth across countries? To answer this question, I use a novel micro-level dataset of migrant inventors from patent data, and I trace the network of migrants' co-inventors in the countries of origin and destination. I focus on the US-EU corridor, where a fourth of US patents are produced by immigrants, of whom 27% come from the EU. I document four new empirical results. (i) Gross migration flows are asymmetric, creating brain drain (net emigration) from the EU to the US. (ii) Migrants increase their patenting by 42% after migration. (iii) Migrants continue working with inventors at origin after moving, although less frequently. (iv) Migrants' productivity gains spill over to their collaborators at origin, who increase patenting by 15% when a co-inventor emigrates. To assess the implications of these results for the economy's innovative capacity and policy, I develop a novel two-country model of innovation-based endogenous growth. Inventors are born with heterogeneous talent, which increases endogenously over time by interacting and learning from others. In addition, they produce innovations and solve forward-looking, dynamic problems of migrating abroad or returning to the home country. Inventors who move abroad interact with individuals at both origin and destination, creating a network that diffuses knowledge within and across countries. I calibrate the model to match the empirical results, and I study the impact of innovation and migration policy. A 10 percentage-point decrease in the tax rate for foreigners and return migrants in the EU eliminates the brain drain in the short run but reduces knowledge spillovers in the long run. On net, after 25 years, EU innovation increases by 9%, but US innovation declines by 6%, which reduces technology diffusion to the EU. The former effect dominates in the short run, increasing EU productivity growth by 5% in the first 25 years. However, the latter effect dominates in the long run, reducing EU productivity growth by 6% in the new long-run equilibrium. On the migration policy side, doubling the size of the US H1B visa program increases productivity by 9% in the US and the EU in the long-run, because it sorts inventors to where they are most productive and can learn most, increasing knowledge spillovers to other countries.Building Loyalty through Personal Connections: Evidence from the Spanish Empire
Abstract
The personal loyalties of high-ranking officials can help overcome or exacerbate agency problems. The Spanish Empire promoted links between colonial officials and their superiors in Spain and discouraged social ties between them and local elites. I use superiors’ entries and exits as within-official shocks to connections to estimate their effect on promotions and performance. I find that connected ministers were more likely to be promoted and raised more revenue. On the other hand, ministers with more links to local elites collected less revenue. These patterns are explained by personal connections, defined as sustained in-person interactions during their early careers. I also validate the connections measure by showing that they predict active friendships.Charismatic Leaders and Nation Building: Atatürk's Role in the Turkish Revolution
Abstract
This paper investigates the role of individual leaders in constructing a national identity. I study the activities and legacy of Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk”, the founder of modern Turkey. I create a novel historical database containing information on the locations and dates of Atatürk’s propaganda visits to over a quarter of Turkish cities between 1923 and 1938. Using variation over time and across space, and information on incidental visits to districts lying along Atatürk’s road, I find that Atatürk’s visits caused an increase of 7 percent in the use of first names in “Pure Turkish”, the new language introduced by the state as part of its homogenizing endeavor. I argue that this measure indicates a successful diffusion of the new national identity locally. The effect is persistent, growing in magnitude up until fifteen years after the visit before disappearing. Two main channels can explain this pattern of propagation. First, the visits provided the ground for institutional reforms, as they led to the formation of local branches of Atatürk’s party. Second, the effect is stronger in districts with more nationalistic associations, higher literacy rates and where Atatürk met with local elites, suggesting that co-optation of the elite is a key driver of the effect. My findings provide new evidence on the ability of an individual leader to construct a national identity, by rallying the elite and by fostering institution building, which in turn contribute to influencing people more broadly.Does Directed Innovation Mitigate Climate Damage? Evidence from US Agriculture
Abstract
This paper studies how innovation reacts to climate change and shapes its economic impacts, focusing on US agriculture. We show in a model that directed innovation can either mitigate or exacerbate climate change's economic damage depending on whether new technology is on average a substitute for or complement to favorable climatic conditions. To empirically investigate the technological response to climate change, we combine data on the geography of agricultural production, shifting temperature distributions, and crop-specific temperature tolerance to estimate crop-specific exposure to damaging extreme temperatures; we then use a database of crop-specific biotechnology releases and patent grants to measure technology development. We first find that innovation has re-directed toward crops with increasing extreme-temperature exposure and show that this effect is driven by types of agricultural technology most related to environmental adaptation. We next find that US counties' exposure to climate-induced innovation significantly dampens the local economic damage from extreme temperatures, and estimate that directed innovation has offset 20% of the agricultural sector's climate damage since 1960 and could offset 15% of projected damage in 2100. These findings highlight the vital importance, but incomplete effectiveness, of endogenous technological change as a systemic adaptive response to climate change.The Heterogeneous Effects of Social Media Content on Racial Attitudes
Abstract
Social media content has the potential to either bring people together or push them apart. I formalize a model that predicts an inverted-U relationship between the content's persuasiveness and its distance from the reader's existing beliefs. Using online survey experiments, I expose U.S. adults with varying racial beliefs to social media content supporting racial justice. Racial moderates are persuaded and become more progressive after the exposure to moderately progressive content. The same content has little effect on racial progressives and conservatives, and extremely progressive content generates a backlash for racial conservatives. Racial conservatives and moderates rate more progressive content as less informative, less reliable and more objectionable. These findings provide causal evidence that racial justice content can be persuasive and highlight the importance of tailoring content in persuasion.Narratives of Blame
Abstract
This paper introduces the concept of narratives into a model of political competition to explain stylised facts related to populism, and provides a measure of such narratives to empirically analyse the theory. I define narratives as subjective models that map observable signals (for instance, wages) into estimates of unobservable latent variables (for instance, intelligence) that voters care about. Narratives differ in the informational content they ascribe to signals: narratives of agency posit that signals are very informative about latent variables of interest, while narratives of blame posit the opposite. In order to make sense of their social as well as economic standing, some voters source narratives from parties. Parties compete for votes by offering policies as well as narratives, whereby they are populists if they offer narratives of blame. The model can explain several regularities, including why, if there is a single populist party, it is more likely to be economically right rather than left, and under which conditions this party become more redistributive in the long run. To test the model's predictions, I use textual analysis tools to classify speeches made in the UK House of Commons as either being migrant-blaming or migrant-affirming, which generates a measure of narratives of blame across political parties at a high frequency. Using this measure, I empirically validate several of the model's main predictions.Schools, Language, and Nations: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in France
Abstract
This paper studies nation-building. We explore the role of state-sponsored education in the adoption of a common language and the formation of a national identity in a fragmented society. At the time of the French Revolution, only ten percent of the population spoke the French language in France. We digitize a novel municipality-level dataset on spoken languages to document the process of homogenization in the nineteenth century. Using a regression discontinuity design, we demonstrate that state-sponsored education brought about the homogenization of language. Then, we study the geographical origins of the French language and the heterogeneous effects of schools. We find that elites were an important driver of homogenization. Finally, we document a persistent impact of nation-building on national identity and preferences for political centralization, with increased participation in the Resistance during World War II and votes against the 1969 referendum on regionalization.JEL Classifications
- A1 - General Economics