2024 Speakers
Department of Economics and Hobby School of Public Affairs
Political Economy Speaker Series
Raquel Fernandez, PhD., Silver Professor of Economics, New York University.
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Location: Bates 213
Paper title: Parental Leave: Economic Incentives and Cultural Change
Abstract: The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second “daddy month,” i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. This policy increased men’s parental leave uptake and decreased women’s, thereby increasing men’s share. To understand how various factors contributed to these outcomes, we develop and estimate a quantitative model of the household in which preferences towards parental leave respond to peer behavior.We distinguish households by the education of the parents and ask the model to match key features of the parental leave distribution before and after the reform by gender and household type (the parents’ education). We find that changed incentives and, especially, changed social norms played an important role in generating these outcomes whereas changed wage parameters, including the future wage penalty associated with different lengths of parental leave uptake, were minor contributors. We then use our
model to evaluate three counterfactual policies designed to increase men’s share of parental leave and conclude that giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave or only paying for the length of time equally taken by each parent would both dramatically increase men’s share whereas decreasing childcare costs has almost no effect.
Hobby School of Public Affairs
Center for Public Policy Speaker Series
Time: 11:00am
Location: Bates Law, Heritage Room
Paper title: The Gender Digital Divide and Gender Gaps in Collective Action.
Paper Authors: Tiffany D. Barnes, Emily Rains, Jakana Thomas, and Jingwen Wu
Paper abstract: Existing research finds both that women are less likely to protest than men and cellphone access increases protest participation. Yet, no work asks whether gulfs in mobile ownership between men and women can, in part, explain protest turnout gaps. Our research examines this relationship, showing that the growing gender digital divide in cellphone ownership exacerbates the participation gap. Using survey data from 37 African countries, we show that women protest significantly less than men where they own relatively fewer cellphones. We probe one mechanism underpinning this relationship demonstrating that women who do not own cellphones face a political information disadvantage that limits their engagement. Further, we demonstrate that the gender digital divide also produces gender disparities in other, less costly forms of political engagement. Our study suggests unequal cellphone access further entrenches women’s position on the political margins.
Hobby School of Public Affairs
Center for Public Policy Speaker Series
Juan Dubra, PhD., Professor of Economics, Universidad de Montevideo.
Date: Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Time: 4:00pm
Location: Bates Law, 213
Paper title: Incentives and Burnout: Dynamic Compensation Design With Effort Cost Spillover
Abstract: Employee burnout has long plagued firms and salespeople are particularly susceptible. The prevalence of burnout indicates that work-related effort is not only costly in the present but has carryover effects into the future. The single-period principal-agent model commonly used to study sales force compensation design cannot fully account for this, as it effectively treats periods as independent. We incorporate ‘effort cost spillovers’ in a dynamic, two-period principal-agent model, with the salesperson’s effort cost in the second period increasing in both her second-period and first-period efforts. We use this model to explore optimal compensation design and to consider the connection between incentives and burnout. If the firm and salesperson are forward-looking, we find that the firm can achieve its first-best outcome by committing to a contract for both periods in advance. Without commitment, the first-best remains achievable when effort spillovers are sufficiently small. Surprisingly, when the first-best is not achievable, the firm’s equilibrium strategy may be to induce the salesperson to burn out in the first period (working so hard that she rejects any second-period contract that the firm would offer). This holds even when the salesperson cannot be replaced in the second period and the first-best outcome requires her to work in both periods.
About the Speaker: Juan Dubra, PhD, is a Visiting Professor and New York University, and serves as Professor and Research at the Faculty of Business Sciences and Economics at the Universidad de Montevideo, Uruguay. Dubra received his Ph.D. in Economics from New York University. His areas of specialization include Decision Theory, Game Theory, Applied Game Theory, and Auctions. He has worked as a consultant and researcher on several projects, including notable works for the United Nations, Competition Defense, and for Microsoft, Miami Headquarters.
Department of Economics and Hobby School of Public Affairs
Political Economy Speaker Series
Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Time: 4:00-5:15pm
Location: Teaching Unit 2 Building Room 211 (TU2 211)
Paper title: Dynamics of Risky Agreements
Paper abstract: We investigate efficiency properties of agreements with the following features: (i)selfenforcing—any agent can walk away from the agreement at any moment; (ii) dynamic—payouts occur stochastically while the agreement is in force; (iii) risky—one agent is more favored by the agreement but the favored agent is unknown ex-ante. These features appear in international economic agreements, entrepreneurial ventures, and research partnerships. Such arrangements have formal or informal mechanisms to resolve disputes that may be more favorable to one agent, but who is favored is learned only as disputes arise. For example, over time the United States perceived they were unfairly treated in dispute rulings at the World Trade Organization (WTO), hence disabled the system they helped create. To model risky agreements we assume each agent has access to a (risky) Poisson bandit arm. An agent’s risky arm is either good—with a high payout rate, or bad—with a low payout rate, but the type of arm is unknown to both agents. Only one agent has a good arm, so the arms are negatively correlated, and good news is not conclusive. We interpret having the good risky arm as being favored by the agreement. The agreement is in force if both agents are pulling their respective risky arms, and an agent can quit any time. If one agent quits, then the agreement is dead and both agents receive the safe payoff. Agents will enter the agreement if sufficiently optimistic that they are favored, and will exit when sufficiently convinced they are not favored. We show that the duration of such agreements is generically inefficient—can last too long, or end too quickly. Increasing “vagueness” reduces the speed of learning and extends agreement duration. This implies that precedent can lead agreements to end sooner than they may have otherwise, because it creates too much certainty in the distribution of future rewards.
About the speaker: Renee Bowen, PhD, is a professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) and the Department of Economics at the University of California San Diego. In 2019 she founded the Center for Commerce and Diplomacy (CCD) at GPS, and served as its Director until 2023. She is an Economic Theory Fellow at the Society for the Advances in Economic Theory, is a Council Member of the Game Theory Society, has published in top economics journals including the American Economic Review, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and is on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review: Insights, Journal of Economic Literature and the Review of International Organizations. Her professional memberships include the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Pacific Council on International Relations. She has held positions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institution, the World Bank, J.P. Morgan Securities, the Inter-American Development Bank, and is currently a member of the California Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors, where she chaired the Workforce Development Subcommittee. She holds a PhD in Economics from Georgetown University, and a BSc in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her recent research examines the design of global multilateral institutions and polarization of beliefs in societies.
Department of Economics and Hobby School of Public Affairs
Political Economy Speaker Series
Sergio Montero, PhD., Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Rochester.
Date: Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Time: 4:00-5:15pm
Location: Teaching Unit 2 Building Room 211 (TU2 211)
Paper title: How Do Gender Quotas Impact Electoral Accountability?
Abstract: Gender quotas have been crucial for improving the political representation of women around the world. Yet their consequences for electoral accountability remain relatively unexplored. We develop a dynamic empirical model of accountability in which gender quotas impose probabilistic term limits on male incumbents. We structurally estimate the model using a novel dataset that captures constituent evaluations of elected city councillors in Mumbai, India, where reserved-seat quotas are assigned by lot. Although this random assignment causally identifies gender differences in politician performance, it is difficult using reduced-form methods alone to disentangle potential mechanisms and to assess whether the quota system itself distorts incentives. We rely on our estimated model to quantify, through counterfactual experiments, differential discipline and selection effects due to gender quotas. We also examine the extent to which voters and parties discriminate against women, whether discrimination is expressive or based on perceived differences in politician quality, and how this interacts with gender quotas. Our results highlight voter welfare implications of gender quotas, separate from other normative descriptive considerations, with the aim of illuminating tradeoffs for institutional design.
About the speaker: PhD, Caltech, 2016. Sergio Montero’s research straddles political economy, comparative politics, and political methodology. Broadly, he seeks to understand how strategic behavior by political elites shapes the performance and stability of democratic institutions. Methodologically, his work relies on structural estimation, which blends formal theory and empirical analysis. His research has been published in leading political science and economics journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and American Economic Review. He teaches courses on the political economy of public policy and quantitative research methods.