CESR Events

Thursday, April 3, 2025
9am – 10am US/Pacific Time
Zoom Invite

Bio: Elsje van Bergen (on Google Scholar) is Associate Professor in biological psychology at the VU Amsterdam (the Netherlands), where she leads her lab in educational genetics. This academic year, she is based at the University of Oslo (Norway) as a Visiting Professor. Her lab’s interdisciplinary research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of individual differences in learning, particularly the interplay between genetic and environmental factors on skills such as reading and math. She has received numerous international awards and prestigious grants, including an ERC.

The CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series will resume Monday, January 27, 2025 and conclude Monday, May 5, 2025.

Mondays
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Monday, April 7
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: This paper extends Schuh (2018) by demonstrating that daily micro transactions in the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (DCPC) contain reliable estimates of consumption and income that cover high percentages of U.S. data, forecast them well in real time, and match payday effects as well as pay cycle borrowing from other transactions data. Annual estimates of a benchmark PIH model of consumption using DCPC data match the literature well, rejecting the model due to excess sensitivity. Novel daily estimates of the MPC from expected income are qualitatively similar but an order of magnitude smaller, most likely due to the lower frequency of daily income. Relative to other transactions data, the DCPC is: 1) more representative; 2) publicly available; 3) continuous measurement; and 4) flexible real-time implementation.

Bio: Dr. Scott Schuh is an Associate Professor of Economics at West Virginia University, specializing in macroeconomics and monetary economics. Before joining WVU in 2018, he spent 26 years with the Federal Reserve, including as the founding Director of the Consumer Payments Research Center. He also served as a staff economist for President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers and taught at Boston University, Boston College, and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Schuh’s research focuses on macroeconomics, household finance, banking, payments, FinTech, productivity, housing, and more. He has co-authored two books and published over 40 scholarly articles.

Monday, April 14
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: This randomized experiment on a social media platform in Pakistan measures the impact of two treatments that use ex-ante moderation to control misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic compared to standard ex-post moderation. One treatment never posts misinformation, while the other rebuts it. We also disseminate official information about the pandemic on the platform. The treatments reduce daily users by 19%. This reduces exposure to official information by 29% more than exposure to misinformation. A conceptual framework posits that this can be explained by the fact that, in this setting, official information is more trusted and disseminated than misinformation.

Bio: Sarojini Hirshleifer is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UC Riverside and an affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (UC Berkeley).  Her research spans the fields of development, labor and behavioral economics.  She focuses on understanding and alleviating constraints to higher productivity and better decision-making using field experiments and lab-based techniques.

Monday, April 21
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: We provide the first experimental evidence on how using more information about job applicants’ soft skills in firms’ hiring decisions affects both firm and workseeker outcomes. Partnering with the largest recruitment agency in South Africa, we randomize the criteria used to shortlist job applicants for job listings at partner firms. We test whether including measures of soft skills in candidate ranking leads to better firm-worker matches, more inclusive hiring, and improved labor market trajectories for workseekers.

Bio: Kate Orkin is an Associate Professor in Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and an affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)(Development and Labour programmes), Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), the Institute of Labour Economics (IZA), and the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE).

Wednesday, April 23
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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*Cohosted with Economics

Monday, April 28
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: We estimate the labor and health effects of the menopause transition for U.S. women. Using data from the NLSYW and the SWAN and applying an event study methodology which exploits the individual-level variation in the time of menopause, we find that women undergoing this transition have a lower probability of employment of almost 20 percentage points, and a higher probability of working part-time if they remain employed. We do not find significant impacts on their monthly earnings or hourly wage. Regarding health, we find that menopause increases the probability of having osteoporosis and bone fractures but does not have a significant impact on the probability of being diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol. We also find that the probability of taking hormones to treat symptoms increases throughout the menopause transition, as expected. However, such increase in hormonal take-up is concentrated among white and highly educated women, which highlights the unequal access to treatment—and probably different menopause experiences—associated with traditional markers of socioeconomic status.

Bio:  Fernanda Marquez-Padilla is Assistant Professor of Economics at El Colegio de Mexico.  She is an applied microeconomist and her work mainly focuses on the intersection of development and health economics.  Her research explores the effects of policies on health, development, and wellbeing, and she has also worked on the socio-economic determinants of health.  In some of her other work she has also studied newborn health and determinants of birth outcomes, fertility, patient behaviour, and youth obesity.  Prior to joining El Colegio de Mexico, she was an assistant professor of economics at CIDE.  She received a PhD in Economics from Princeton University

Monday, May 5
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract:  A wide body of scholarship has explored America’s worsening housing crisis and implicated onerous land use regulations in driving rising home prices. This research largely ignores an important step in the development process: land acquisition. In doing so, it misses an important and understudied additional tool local governments wield in fostering or fighting housing development, hoarding publicly owned land. This paper marshals an array of data on public land ownership across more than one hundred jurisdictions in Massachusetts to explore how much public land local governments control, and the extent to which publicly owned land is used to develop or obstruct housing. We find that local governments own a striking amount of land, and that much of it is vacant—even in metropolitan areas with extraordinarily high land values. If local governments in Greater Boston developed housing at 15 units per acre on five percent of the vacant, publicly owned land, it could produce more than 85,000 homes. We reveal that the failure of local governments to convert much of their vacant land into housing is rooted in homevoter and anti-growth sentiments; in some communities, governments purchase land to block new housing.

Bio: Katherine Levine Einstein is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Boston University and Associate Director at the Initiative on Cities. She studies local politics and policy, housing politics, and American public policy. She is one of the authors of Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and numerous peer-reviewed articles.

Monday, May 12
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Most people throughout the world pray to prevent and treat many common illnesses.  A belief in the effectiveness of prayer as a health input may influence science-based health behavior and health outcomes.  This study examines the reliance on prayer to protect against COVID-19 in the United States.  In data from the pandemic, a majority of US adults believe that prayer is effective against COVID and indicate praying for this purpose.  I develop a simple model of health production that includes prayer as a health input.  I test the predictions of this model using the 2021 vaccine rollout within a difference-in-difference framework.  Consistent with the model, vaccine access reduces the frequency of prayer.  Results are heterogeneous by religiosity and religious denomination, with the strongest effects among non-atheists who are weakly religious.   Findings suggest that policies to communicate complementarities between prayer and science-based behaviors may be effective.

Monday, May 19
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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