Libros

Por razones de fuerza mayor, este seminario ha sido suspendido. La presentación de la profesora Escobar será re-programada para el próximo semestre.

Resumen 

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. In particular, using artificial regions (i.e., grids of 5050 km), we document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are concentrated in the proximity of historical ethnic borders. To mitigate concerns due to non-random assignment and potential mismeasurement of historical ethnic borders, we follow an instrumental variable approach that exploits variations in potential ethnic borders generated by a plausibly exogenous ethno-spatial partition of Africa. We find that grid-cells with historical ethnic borders have 30 percentage points higher probability to experience conflict events and 13 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. Our results hold across different types of conflict and are robust to accounting for country and ethnicity fixed-effects, a large set of geographical confounders, other sources of conflict, and variations in cell-sizes. Additionally, we find that geographical characteristics that are complementary to border demarcation mitigate the effects of historical borders on contemporary conflict, suggesting that tangibility, observability and immutability of ethnic borders may prevent conflict. Further, we find that population pressure and competition for resources (in particular conflict over land) exacerbate conflict at the proximity of the historical ethnic borders. Finally, we also document that cultural proximity across the borders as well as similarity in economic subsistence increase the probability of conflict at the borders.

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Resumen 

This paper studies the role of the patterns of production and international trade on the higher business cycle volatility of emerging economies. We study a multi-sector small open economy in which firms produce and trade commodities and manufactures. We estimate the model to match key cross-sectional differences across countries: emerging economies run trade surpluses in commodities and trade deficits in manufactures, while sectoral trade flows are balanced in developed economies. We find that these differences amplify the response of emerging economies to fluctuations in commodity prices. We show evidence consistent with these findings using cross-country data.

Para mayor información sobre David Kohn, acceda aquí.

  Resumen 

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we explore the causal effect of gender-identity norms on female teenagers' engagement in risky behaviors relative to males in the US. To do so, we exploit idiosyncratic variation across adjacent grades within schools in the proportion of high-school peers' mothers who think that important skills for both boys and girls to possess are traditionally masculine ones, such as to think for him or herself or work hard, as opposed to traditionally feminine ones, namely to be well-behaved, popular or help others. We find that a higher proportion of mothers who believe that independent thinking and working hard matter for either gender reduces the gender gap in risky behaviors, traditionally more prevalent among males, both in the short and medium run. We also find evidence of convergence in the labor market in early adulthood. Short- and medium-run results are driven by a reduction in males' engagement in risky behaviors; long-run results are driven by females' higher annual earnings and lower welfare dependency.

Para mayor información sobre Ana Sanz de Galdeano, acceda aquí.

Resumen

In this talk we introduce a learning process for games with continuous action sets. The procedure is payoff-based and thus requires no sophistication from players and no knowledge of the game. We show that despite such limited information, players will converge to Nash in large classes of games (possibly with a continuum of equilibria). In particular, convergence to stable Nash equilibrium is guaranteed in all games with strategic complements as well as in concave games. Time permitting, we will also discuss convergence results for locally ordinal potential games and games with isolated equilibria.

Resumen

We consider a signaling model in which firms not only observe the worker's costly signal, but may also acquire information. The worker's productivity depends on his type (innate skills) as well as his quality (the match between the worker and the firm). A good-type worker is more likely to be a better fit for a firm, but it will not be necessarily so. While the worker's quality is initially unknown to both the worker and the firm, the type is private information, and can be communicated through the choice of a costly action, e.g. the education level. The firm might complement this information by performing a test to learn the match between the worker and the firm. We model the firm's information acquisition problem using the rational inattention approach. That is, we allow the firm to choose any information structure with no restriction on a particular signal distribution, and with a cost proportional to the entropy between prior and posterior beliefs. In equilibrium, the firm will prefer more informative signals when beliefs are intermediate. More importantly, beliefs are determined by the costly action chosen by the worker through signaling. We characterize the set of Perfect Bayesian Equillibria that satisfy the divinity criterion (D1). We show that workers fully disclose their type up to intermediate beliefs about quality. In particular, the LCSE is the only equilibrium when the expected match between the firm and the worker is low, even for the good-type. In that case, most of the information acquisition is left to the firm. Tests will be more sofisticated when beliefs about the worker-firm match are pessimistic. Thus bad-type workers will be dissuaded from mimicking good-type education level in order to avoid a more precise test. The opposite happens when the expected fit is high even for the bad type. When beliefs are sufficiently optimistic, firms relax their standards. This is more beneficial for the bad-type worker who prefers to shroud information and pool with the good-type worker. Pooling is then the only equilibrium. Finally, when bad-type workers have low expected fit, and good-type ones have high expected fit, the equilibrium is semipooling. The good type partially signals its type, while the bad-type worker randomizing between no education and signaling.