Calendar

Liquidity Regulation, Bail-ins and Bailouts

Abstract: A major regulatory innovation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis was the introduction of liquidity requirements for banks in the Basel framework. While the philosophy of such requirements is intuitive, policymakers received little guidance from academia on a number of specific questions such as the measure of the liquidity buffer, its possible decomposition into multiple tiers (as is done for capital requirements), the treatment of interbank exposures or of the securitization of legacy assets, or the recognition of central-bank-eligible assets as part of the buffer. More fundamentally, the consistency between liquidity and solvency regulations has been under-researched. Accordingly, the introduction of layers of “bail-inable” liabilities to complement the Basel III framework occurred without conceptual framework for thinking about liquidity and solvency regulation. The paper develops such a framework, integrates the asset and liability sides into an overall design of prudential regulation and assesses the regulatory reform.

Thanks to their presence on Monday evening, October 15, at the Solvay Alumni Congress in Tours et Taxis in Brussels, we are very pleased to announce a seminar session by 2016 Nobel laureates Oliver Hart (Harvard University) and Bengt Holmstrom (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on October 15 from 10:00 am to noon in room R42.5.503.  This event is open to SBS-EM Faculty, post-docs, doctoral students and MA1 students. Attendance requires however registration, at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/special-lecture-by-nobel-laureates-oliver-hart-and-bengt-holmstrom-tickets-1654353215 

Essays on Reference-Dependent Preferences

The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms

Abstract : The fall of labor’s share of GDP in the United States and many other countries in recent decades is well documented but its causes remain uncertain. Existing empirical assessments of trends in labor’s share typically have relied on industry or macro data, obscuring heterogeneity among firms. In this paper, we analyze micro panel data from the U.S. Economic Census since 1982 and international sources and document empirical patterns to assess a new interpretation of the fall in the labor share based on the rise of “superstar firms.” If globalization or technological changes advantage the most productive firms in each industry, product market concentration will rise as industries become increasingly dominated by superstar firms with high profits and a low share of labor in firm value-added and sales. As the importance of superstar firms increases, the aggregate labor share will tend to fall. Our hypothesis offers several testable predictions: industry sales will increasingly concentrate in a small number of firms; industries where concentration rises most will have the largest declines in the labor share; the fall in the labor share will be driven largely by between-firm reallocation rather than (primarily) a fall in the unweighted mean labor share within firms; the between-firm reallocation component of the fall in the labor share will be greatest in the sectors with the largest increases in market concentration; and finally, such patterns will be observed not only in U.S. firms, but also internationally. We find support for all of these predictions.

Location: NBB - Auditorium of the National Bank of Belgium (Room A1)
Contact: nbbfirmanalysis.seminar@nbb.be
Please reply by email to nbbfirmanalysis.seminar@nbb.be if you wish to participate or if you want to have an appointment with the speaker. Please include name and car plate number for access the NBB Parking Warmoesberg 41.

A Pigouvian Approach to Congestion in Matching Markets

Abstract : Recruiting agents, or "programs," costly screen "applicants" in matching processes, and congestion in a market increases with the number of applicants to be screened. To combat this externality that applicants impose on programs, application costs can be used as a Pigouvian tax. Higher costs reduce congestion by discouraging applicants from applying to certain programs; however, they may harm match quality. In a multiple-elicitation experiment conducted in a real-life matching market, we implement variants of the Gale-Shapley Deferred-Acceptance mechanism with di erent application costs. Our experimental and structural estimates show that a (low) application cost effectively reduces congestion without harming match quality.

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Guilt, Esteem and Motivational Investments

Abstract : In this paper we address the question what are the determinants of a firm’s investment in the loyalty and motivation of its employees? We develop a simple principal-agent model where the standard optimal contract is to offer a bonus that trades off incentive provision vs rent extraction. We allow the principal to undertake two types of investments - one that reduces the marginal cost of effort of the agent and the other that increases the on-the-job satisfaction. We characterize the relationship between these investments and the level of the bonus. We also characterize how varying the outside option of the agent affects these

Migration, human capital and selection patterns of university scholars in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1088-1685)

Abstract : Medieval universities are one of the most original creations of the Western Civilization. In universities, students were educated by a plurality of masters, and schools were open to students and scholars from all parts of Europe. In this paper, we map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. We build a database of thousands of scholars from university sources. Quality of scholars is measured by their publications as recorded in Worldcat. We show that better scholars were willing to cover larger distances (positive selection) and were more sensitive to the quality of the university and the size of its city (positive sorting). These selection and sorting patterns governed concentration of upper-tail human capital across Europe, which was likely instrumental in enhancing knowledge creation and promoting the later rise of the West.

Gaussian processes with inequality constraints

Abstract : We consider a Gaussian process subjected to inequality constraints (for instance boundedness, monotonicity or convexity). These types of inequality constraints correspond to additional information on the Gaussian process realization, that are regularly available in applications. We explain how to simulate from the conditional distribution of a constrained Gaussian process, given observed values.
We also introduce a maximum likelihood estimator taking the constraints into account. We obtain its asymptotic properties and compare it to the usual maximum likelihood estimator, that does not take the constraints into account.

Based on paper 1 - paper 2

Principal volatility components: A robust approach.

In this paper, we analyse the recent principal volatility components analysis procedure. The procedure overcomes several difficulties in modelling and forecasting the
conditional covariance matrix in large dimensions arising from the curse of dimensionality. We show that outliers have a devastating effect on the construction of the principal volatility components and on the forecast of the conditional covariance matrix and consequently in economic and financial applications based on this forecast. We propose a robust procedure and analyse its finite sample properties by means of Monte Carlo experiments and also illustrate it using empirical data. The robust procedure outperforms the classical method in simulated and empirical data.

Does immigration affect Muslim behaviour? Experimental evidence comparing Lebanese immigrants and Lebanese natives

Abstract : This paper aims to investigate whether religion or social environment influences the distinct behaviour exhibited by Muslim immigrants in Western destination countries, especially towards the poor and women. We test this by conducting a prisoner's dilemma and a dictator game with the Lebanese population in Australia (destination country) and the Lebanese population in Lebanon (native country). In both countries, we compare Lebanese Muslims to Lebanese Christians to best estimate the marginal effect of being Muslim. Lebanese Christians serve as the most suitable counterfactual to Lebanese Muslims as both religious communities are comparable in all aspects but religion. We are able to remove the effects of the economic institutions of country of ancestry and hold constant all other factors such as ethnolinguistic groupings and culture. We find that in Lebanon, Muslims and Christians behave in a similar fashion, while in Australia, when compared to Christians, Muslims display more pro-social behaviour towards the poor and that this effect is stronger when the poor recipient is female. We suspect that differing levels of religiosity and social capital between these two religious groups in Australia may explain these findings.

Vacancy chains

Abstract
Replacement hiring—recruitment that seeks to replace positions vacated by workers who quit—plays a central role in establishment dynamics. We document this phenomenon using rich microdata on U.S.  establishments, which frequently report no net change in their employment, often for years at a time, despite facing substantial gross turnover in the form of quits. Motivated by this, we devise a novel theory of the interaction of firm dynamics with on-the-job search, and study its analytical implications. To generate the extent of replacement hiring suggested by the data, we then extend the model to  incorporate a putty-clay production structure among establishments. Replacement hiring induces a novel positive feedback channel through which an initial rise in vacancy posting induces still more vacancy posting to replace employees who are poached. This vacancy chain in turn induces volatile responses of vacancies, and thereby unemployment, to cyclical shocks.

Functional data: Depth and outliers.

Abstract : The integrated data depth became quite popular for functional data analysis. Depth-based method for outliers detection will be presented in th electure. In particular, we shall focus on different kinds of outlyingness and their detection using integrated type functional depth.

"What for Nike shoes if there is no home ..."
Do Remittances Affect Housing Prices in an Emerging Economy? A Study Case for Colombia

Remittances amounts on average as two thirds of the FDI inflows of emerging economies. Literature on development and remittances coincides on the fact that when remittances are used as an investment, this investment generally materializes as housing. This work in progress proposes to fill a gap in the literature on remittances and development by studying what is the relation between remittances and housing prices at the aggregate level. This is done by regressing remittances against housing prices and housing approvals taking the Colombian economy as a case of study. The conclusions from the empirical analysis, suggest that remittances seem to increase the relative supply of housing which in turn reduces housing prices.

I3H Seminar

Georges Siotis, UC3M

Market definition in the pharmaceutical industry: a case of drugs hopping antitrust markets

Opening the Floodgates: Immigration and Structural Change
This paper investigates the impact of a large shock to labor supply on industry growth and structural change. The EU enlargement of 2004 and 2007 lead to an unprecedented migration wave to Norway. The country received the largest number of migrants relative to country size, compared to all other developed countries, over the ensuing decade. We develop a simple factor-proportions theory and sufficient statistic approach that can be used to identify the aggregate impact of a labor supply shock across occupations on industry growth. Using detailed data on industry performance, immigration by occupation and occupational characteristics, we introduce a new instrument that exploits the fact that language barriers in the Norwegian labor market are significant for foreign workers and that they vary across occupations and source countries. Our results point to migration leading to large adjustments in industry size, and in particular to sectors of the economy that are intensive in the use of immigrant occupations.

Electoral Systems and Inequalities in Government Interventions

Abstract : This paper revisits the economic effects of constitutions. We propose a model of governmental resource allocation under political competition and contrast majoritarian and proportional representation systems. We derive predictions regarding the relationship between local --sub-district-- level characteristics and inequality in government intervention. Looking at a local level and introducing heterogeneity allows us to uncover a novel sprinkling effect of electoral competition. This effect can incentivize politicians to allocate resources more equally under multi-district majoritarian elections than under proportional representation. We identify conditions under which this effect more-than-offsets the incentive to target swing districts identified in the literature. Finally, we explore implications for the size of government and the trade-off between targeted transfers and global public goods.

Central Bank Communication and the Yield Curve
(co-authored with Matteo Leombroni, Gyuri Venter and Paul Whelan)

on Monday, November 19th from 16:30 until 18:00
The seminar will be held in the Auditorium of the National Bank of Belgium (Room A1),
Entrance: rue Montagne aux Herbes potagères 61, Brussels.

We hope that you will circulate this invitation to your colleagues.

Please reply by email to nbbmacro.seminar@nbb.be if you wish to participate to this seminar or if you want to have an appointment with the speaker. Due to security measures it is necessary that you register before Friday November 16th at noon. Without registration, you will not be allowed in the seminar room.
In case you want to access the NBB Parking (rue Montagne aux Herbes potagères 41), please also provide us with your name and the license plate of your car.

Efficient multivariate entropy estimation and independence testing

Efficient multivariate entropy estimation via k-nearest neighbour distances

 Nonparametric independence testing via mutual information
Abstract : Many statistical procedures, including goodness-of-fit tests and methods for independent component analysis, rely critically on the estimation of the entropy of a distribution. In this talk I will first describe new entropy estimators that are efficient and achieve the local asymptotic minimax lower bound with respect to squared error loss. These estimators are constructed as weighted averages of the estimators originally proposed by Kozachenko and Leonenko (1987), based on the k-nearest neighbour distances of a sample of n independent and identically distributed random vectors in d dimensions. A careful choice of weights enables us to obtain an efficient estimator for arbitrary d, given sufficient smoothness, while the original unweighted estimator is typically only efficient for d up to 3.

The next part of the talk will be to use our entropy estimators to propose a test of independence of two multivariate random vectors, given a sample from the underlying population. Our approach, which we call MINT, is based on the estimation of mutual information, which we may decompose into joint and marginal entropies. The proposed critical values, which may be obtained from simulation in the case where an approximation to one marginal is available or resampling otherwise, facilitate size guarantees, and we provide local power analyses, uniformly over classes of densities whose mutual information satisfies a lower bound. Our ideas may be extended to provide a new goodness-of-fit tests of normal linear models based on assessing the independence of our vector of covariates and an appropriately-defined notion of an error vector.

A Theory of Firm-Level Production Networks

Abstract : This paper develops a theory of firm-level production networks, with firm-specific relationships, endogenous bankruptcies, and market power. Firms in each industry have access to a production technology that uses relationship-specific intermediate inputs produced by their “customized” suppliers, with prices determined via pairwise bargaining between suppliers and customers. Operating the customized technology, however, requires fixed costs. Hence, negative shocks can result in a cascade of firm failures in the economy. We establish the existence of an equilibrium and provide comparative static results on how prices, firm failures, and macroeconomic aggregates respond to changes in parameters. We then study how the interplay between firm-level linkages and firm failures shape the propagation of shocks over the economy’s production network. Our theoretical results indicate that understanding network-originated aggregate fluctuations may require moving beyond models of sectoral linkages and focusing on how firm-level interactions can lead to chains of failures.

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The seminar will take place on Thursday, November 22nd from 16:30 until 18:00 in the Auditorium of the National Bank of Belgium (Room A1), entrance: rue Montagne aux Herbes potagères 61, Brussels. 

Please reply by email to nbbmacro.seminar@nbb.be if you wish to participate to this seminar or if you want
to have an appointment with the speaker. Due to security measures it is necessary that you register
before Tuesday evening November 20th. Without registration, you will not be allowed in the seminar room.
In case you want to access the NBB Parking (rue Montagne aux Herbes potagères 41), please also provide
us with your name and the license plate of your car. 

Does national health insurance improve children’s health? National and regional evidence from Ghana
Abstract : This paper assesses whether health insurance is successful in improving health among children. More specifically, it assesses whether a same health insurance legislation has differentiated impacts depending on the way it is implemented locally.
I analyze the case of Ghana’s national health insurance scheme that has been introduced in 2003. Using a multiple cluster indicator survey from 2011 and a propensity score matching approach, I show, first, that even though health insurance is free for children, around half of them are not insured, with the probability of enrollment being significantly affected by many observable characteristics. Second, national averages indicate that health care utilization increases and health outcomes improve for insured children. However, the gains are not shared equally across regions, with almost half of them presenting no improvement in health outcomes. More specifically, my study finds that the impact of the health insurance is concentrated among the rural household in regions with the better quality of public health care.
This paper sheds a new light on the mixed results of the literature on the effect of health insurance on health outcomes. More generally, assessing the impact of a national policy should not only be based on national averages and one should consider that both supply and demand considerations will impact the effectiveness of such a policy. Furthermore, policy implications in the case of Ghana are that enrollment of children should be fostered by providing information campaigns and subsidizing indirect costs for the poorest households and finally, interventions and monitoring should be targeted to improve the quality of public health. 

I3h seminar
Denis Lacombe, Director General of the European Organisaion for Reseach and Treatment of Cancer
Topic: Precision oncology: how to structure the continuum of clinical research into health care for rationale access to anti-cancer treatment

Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers

Abstract : We exploit a unique historical setting to study the long-run effects of forced migration on invest- ment in education. After World War II, the Polish borders were redrawn, resulting in large-scale migration. Poles were forced to move from the Kresy territories in the East (taken over by the USSR) and were resettled mostly to the newly acquired Western Territories, from which Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in education, Poles with a family history of forced mi- gration are significantly more educated today. Descendants of forced migrants have on average one extra year of schooling, driven by a higher propensity to finish secondary or higher education. This result holds when we restrict ancestral locations to a subsample around the former Kresy border and include fixed effects for the destination of migrants. As Kresy migrants were of the same ethnicity and religion as other Poles, we bypass confounding factors of other cases of forced migration. We show that labor market competition with natives and selection of migrants are also unlikely to drive our results. Survey evidence suggests that forced migration led to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in a mobile asset – human capital. The effects persist over three generations.

Trade and Labor Market Institutions: A Tale of Two Trade Liberalizations

Abstract : In this paper I study how labor market institutions at the time of a trade reform determine the post-reform dynamics of unemployment. I first document that for a large group of developing countries (1) unemployment increases on average following a trade reform, (2) there are significant cross-country differences in unemployment response, and (3) cross-country variation in the labor market institutions in place at the time of the reform can account for the observed unemployment changes. I interpret this evidence through the lens of a model of international trade, featuring heterogeneous firms, endogenous industry dynamics, search and matching frictions in the labor market and duality between formal and informal employment. I estimate the model to match the pre-liberalization firm dynamics in Colombia and Mexico, two countries that differed by the labor regulations in place at the time of trade liberalization, and I characterize numerically the full transition path towards the new steady state. I show that the dynamic response of unemployment to a reduction in trade costs is non-linear across different combinations of labor market institutions in place at the time of the reform. Consistent with the cross-country evidence, the response is stronger and more persistent when the firing costs are lower and the statutory minimum wage and unemployment benefits are larger. On average, these three institutions together account for up to 58 percent of the increase in unemployment in the case of Mexico, and up to 32 percent in the case of Colombia.

I3h Seminar
Maya Hites, Hopital Erasme
The multiple challenges of antimicrobial resistance: Learnings from a dramatic case of Klebsiella pneumoniae infection

Market Supply

Identification-Robust Nonparametric Inference in a Linear IV Model
Abstract : For a linear IV regression, we propose two new inference procedures on parameters of endogenous variables that are easy to implement and robust to any identification pattern. Our tests do not rely on a linear first-stage equation, they are powerful irrespective of the particular form of the link between instruments and endogenous variables, and they account for heteroskedasticity of unknown form. Building on Bierens (1982), we first propose an Integrated Conditional Moment
(ICM) type statistic constructed by using the value of the coefficient under the null hypothesis. The ICM procedure tests at the same time the value of the coefficient and the specification of the model. We then rely the conditionality principle used by Moreira (2003) to condition on a set of ICM statistics that inform on identification strength. Our two procedures control size irrespective of identification strength and have non-trivial power under weak identification. They are competitive with existing procedures in simulations and applications. 

 The Impact of an Earthquake in Haiti on Returns to Schooling
Abstract: In 2010, Haiti was struck by a 7.0Mw earthquake. The natural disaster was a negative shock to physical capital, and close to the epicenter a negative shock to both human and physical capital. Individuals who were strongly exposed to the earthquake experienced a decrease of their individual monetary returns to education. The value of education is particularly shock-sensitive for internal migrants, males, and recent labor entrees. The results may provide insights to rationalize the limited educational attainment in Haiti despite sizable potential economic returns. The earthquake was an exogenous shock which gives rise to a natural experiment. The analysis applies a Mincerian equation in a difference-in-difference framework, employing individual-level repeated cross section data from before and after the earthquake.

I3h seminarBob Blasdel, Research Director for Vesale Pharma
Topic: Scientific, regulatory, and economic challenges facing the implementation of phage therapy and the Belgian model.

Aggregation and Fundamentalness in DSGE, VAR and Dynamic Factor Models 

Abstract. I argue that in DSGE, VAR and Dynamic Factor Models, the number of shocks is crucial. I show that if that number is not correctly specified, or if measurement error are present, the resulting estimated shocks can be corrupted, e.g. mixing demand and supply structural shocks. In DSGE models the number of shocks is determined by the underlying economic theory. In VAR models the number of shocks is determined by the number of variables included. In Dynamic Factor Models consistent data-based criteria are available to determine the number of shocks. I argue that the latter should be taken as a benchmark in the analysis of macroeconomic time series.

The Mass Privatization Program of the German Treuhandanstalt: New Evidence from Administrative Data
The Treuhand privatization agency became the defining actor of Germany’s reunification. As probably the largest industrial holding in history, its mission was to restructure and privatize the state-owned enterprises of the former German Democratic Republic. The mass privatization program represents an experiment of unparalleled scale for the study of bureaucracies, politics and markets. The new dataset comprises of the whole universe of firms over space and time. New stylised facts of the privatization process are unveiled.

Betting on the Wrong Horse: Lobbying on TPP and the 2016 U.S. presidential election with Michael Blanga-Gubbay
Recent trade agreements have moved beyond tariff reductions, encompassing provisions and obligations related to non-tariff issues. These aspects are often seen as the reflection of interest groups, able to manipulate and extract additional rents from the ratification of these agreements. We provide causal empirical evidence that corporate lobbying on trade agreements matters for corporate profits. We use the historical shock to U.S. trade policy - the non-ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We find that stock prices of companies that lobbied in favor of the agreement underperformed following the election. Lobbying firms displayed multiple consecutive days of negative returns, compared to the market benchmark that remained positive over the same period. Analayzing the cumulative impact of the shock, we show that this negative effect was persistent. Finally, on the intensive margin, we find a strong and positive relationship between the amount spent in lobbying and the cumulative losses of lobbying firms. Our results are robust to controlling for the general political leaning of companies and by restricting our analysis to firms that self-select into lobbying on other trade-related issues.

9:30-11:00: Introducing future, 1st year and 2nd year PhD students
[Long break to interact with the presenters]

11:30-12:30: PhD students in the middle of their thesis (3*20 min presentations).

[Lunch]

14:00-15:15: Gérard Roland, UC Berkeley

The Deep Historical Roots of Modern Culture: A Comparative Perspective.
Abstract: This paper presents evidence showing that since antiquity there have been two opposed types of institutional systems: one resembling central planning and present in ancient China, ancient Egypt, the Inca Empire and other territorial states, and another one with strong market institutions, protection of property rights present mostly in city-states not just in the Mediterranean but throughout the world. Evidence is presented that these institutional differences dating back to the antiquity, and shaped by special geographical conditions, can be seen to be at the root of the two cultural systems in today’s world: individualism and collectivism. These cultural differences have effects on economic performance and institutions in today’s world.

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15:45-17:00
Being on the market (presenters to be confirmed, one PhD and one post-doc)
After the market: Roberto Venturini and Lorenzo Trimarchi (quasi-confirmed).

17:00-23:59: Drinks!

Peaks over thresholds modeling with multivariate generalized Pareto distributions.

Abstract: Modeling univariate extreme events such as floods and stock crashes is often done using the peaks over thresholds method, that is, by fitting a generalized Pareto distribution to all observations that exceed some high threshold. However, many applications in extreme value theory are inherently multivariate, and one is interested in characterizing the degree of tail dependence between the components of a multivariate vector. The multivariate generalized Pareto distribution arises as the limit of a suitably normalized vector conditioned upon at least one component of that vector being extreme. We discuss a construction device which allows us to develop new parametric tail dependence models. A censored likelihood estimation procedure is proposed together with a threshold selection procedure and several goodness-of-fit diagnostics. These methods are illustrated in an application aimed at calculating the Fraction of Attributable Risk, a measure often used by climate scientists to quantify the human impact on climate change.

Thesis defense
Three Essays on Functional Time Series and Factor Analysis

We are happy to announce the 8th Annual Christmas Meeting of Belgian Economists. 

Keynote Speakers:

Sigrid Suetens (Tilburg University)
Frank Smets (ECB)

Location: University of Antwerp, Hof van Liere (Tassiszaal en Dürerzaal), Prinsstraat 13, 2000 Antwerp

The complete programme, together with the registration page can be found here:

Programme

Registration (registration is free of charge, but please do register)

As in the previous years, the idea is to have a relaxed day of presentations and exchanges. The University of Antwerp will kindly provide lunch, tea/coffee and a reception in the evening. Unfortunately we do not have extra funds for travel, so we rely on the fact that most Belgian economists come back around this time to Belgium.

Looking forward to seeing you all in December @UAntwerp,

Sunčica, Jan, Michèle, Frederic, Bram and Gonzague

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Joint with NBB, KULeuven, UA, UCL, UGent, ULB, ULg, UMons, UNamur, USaint-Louis, Vlerick and VUB
Tom Bollerslev, Duke University
Realized Semi Covariances: Looking for Signs of Direction Inside the Covariance Matrix

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The Spatial Distribution of Amenities in Africa
Abstract: In most developing countries, there is a large gap in average consumption per capita between urban and rural areas. One possible explanation of this gap is that higher consumption levels of urban areas are offset by lower non-monetary amenities. This paper draws on new high-resolution evidence to document how non-monetary amenities vary across space within 20 Sub-Saharan African countries. We focus on measures of public goods, crime and pollution. We find that in almost all countries, and for almost all measures, the quality of these amenities is non-decreasing in population density. Measures of life satisfaction and self-reported happiness are also higher in urban areas. In addition, net internal migration flows are directed toward denser areas in all countries. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that rural-urban consumption gaps in the developing world are explained by better amenities in rural areas.

Voting in Corporations
Abstract: I introduce a model of shareholder voting. I describe and provide characterizations of three families of shareholder voting rules: ratio rules, difference rules, and share majority rules. The characterizations rely on two key axioms: merger consistency, which requires consistency in voting outcomes following stock-for-stock mergers, and reallocation invariance, which requires the shareholder voting rule to be immune to certain manipulative techniques used by shareholders to hide their ownership. The paper also extends May’s theorem. 
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Nonparametric regression for locally stationary functional data
Abstract: We address the problem of nonparametric regression of a real random variable on a non-stationary time series of functional data.
We focus on the estimation of the regression function using a kernel approach. We introduce an estimator of the regression operator which takes into account the non-stationary behavior of the data generating process.
The mean square error and the almost sure convergence of the proposed estimator are derived. Also, a central limit theorem on the regression estimator is established.
Asymptotic results are established with convergence rates, whereas the asymptotic constants are explicitly calculated by assuming that the covariate is local stationary and strong mixing functional process.
The theoretical results are illustrated by means of simulation studies.

Deterrence with Imperfect Attribution
 Abstract: Motivated by recent developments in cyberwarfare, we study deterrence in a world where attacks cannot be perfectly attributed to attackers. In the model, each of n attackers may attack the defender. The defender observes an imperfect signal that probabilistically attributes the attack. The defender may retaliate against one or more attackers, and wants to retaliate against the guilty attacker only. We uncover an endogenous strategic complementarity among the attackers: if one attacker becomes more aggressive, that attacker becomes more “suspect” and the other attackers become less suspect, which leads the other attackers to become more aggressive as well. Improving the defender’s ability to detect attacks or identify the source of attacks can hinder deterrence and lead to more attacks, but simultaneously improving both detection and identification—in that some attacks which previously went undetected are now both detected and unambiguously attributed—always reduces attacks. Deterrence is improved if the defender can commit to a retaliatory strategy in advance, but the defender should not always commit to retaliate more after every signal.
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Landed Elites and Education Provision in England: Evidence from School Boards, 1871-1899.

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Quality Heterogeneity and Misallocation: The Welfare Benefits of Raising your Standards.

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Experience Markets: An Application to Outsourcing and Hiring

Do standards improve the quality of traded products?

Supermodular correspondences and comparing multi-prior beliefs

Fire Seasonality Identification withMultimodality Tests

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Enter Seminar
Investment in Female Human Capital and Marital Gains

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Accounting for Heterogeneity
Abstract : 10 years ago, Chari, Kehoe and MaGrattan (2007) proposed a framework to guide business cycle research. They measured the importance of distortions ("wedges") between macroeconomic data and what was implied by a benchmark neoclassical growth model and used these wedges to evaluate models of the business cycle. In this paper, we extend CKM to allow for distortions at the micro level and use this framework to understand and measure the importance of heterogeneity over the business cycle. 
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Engel’s Law in the Global Economy: Demand-Induced Patterns of Structural Change, Innovation, and Trade

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Joint with NBB, KULeuven, UA, UCL, UGent, ULB, ULg, UMons, UNamur, USaint-Louis, Vlerick, VUB
William Goetzmann, Yale University
Bubbles and Crashes: Perception vs. Reality
Abstract: Market bubbles fascinate us despite being extremely rare. While many fear a crash after a boom, what goes up does not often come down. On the other hand, stock markets are more likely to recover after an extreme market decline. These patterns contradict common perceptions. My analysis with my coauthors of 25 years of survey data show that investors irrationally overestimate the probability of a market crash. Individual investors are particularly susceptible to priming by news of unrelated rare events.
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Slackness Regimes and the Phillips Curve in a Frictional Economy

Essays on Environmental Policy: Design and Evaluation

How we cooperate: A theory of Kantian optimization
(in press, Yale University Press)

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Dharma in General Equilibrium: Caste and Occupational Choice in India

Joint with ULB, KULeuven, UCLouvain and NBB
Juan F. Rubio Ramirez, Emory University, FRB Atlanta
Inference in Bayeasian Proxy-SVARs
 
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Communication as Gift-Exchange

Appendix

Depth for curve data and applications

Duration of Control and Corporate Culture

Disentangling Global Value Chains

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Procrustes Metrics on Covariance Operators and Optimal Transportation of Gaussian Processes

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The Protectionist Alliance: Trade Unions, Firms, and the Backlash to Globalization

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Joint with NBB, UMons, KULeuven, UCL, UGent, ULB, UA, UHasselt and ULg
Romain Duval, IMF
IMF World Economic Outlook – Chapter 2– The rise of corporate market power and its macroeconomic implications
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Due to security measures, we emphasize the need for you to register by email to
nbbfirmanalysis.seminar@nbb.be before Monday 5 at 4:00 pm if you plan to attend the seminar.
Without registration, you will not be allowed in the seminar room.
You will receive a nominative badge at the entrance. We recommend that you arrive at least
10 minutes before the start of the seminar. 

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Auctions with Unknown Capacities: Understanding Competition among Renewables
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Party Politics and Privatizations

Joint with NBB, KULeuven, UA, UCL, UGent, ULB, ULg, UMons, UNamur, USaint-Louis, Vlerick, VUB
Bernard Dumas, INSEAD
The Stock Market in an Inflation-Targeting Economy

Stochastic Revealed Preferences with Measurement Error

Statistical properties of second-order tensor decompositions

The Returns to Education in the Context of a Natural Disaster : Evidence from the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti

Aggregate Fluctuations in Adaptive Production Networks

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Forward Marriage Contracts

The political economy of decentralization : why do local institutions matter ?

Can Big Data increase our knowledge of local rental markets? Estimating the cost of density with rents
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Auxiliary information empirical processes and their bootstrap

Fête des parcours
Enseigner le développement durable à la SBSEM
Program
Registrations are closed ! 

Technological Change, Organizational Capacity and Rural Conflict: Land Occupations in Brazil
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May 20 : Revealed Preference theory and behavioral economics
May 21 : Welfare measurement
Program

Payoff Implications of Incentive Contracting
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May 20 : Revealed Preference theory and behavioral economics
May 21 : Welfare measurement
Program

Joint with ULB, KULeuven, UCL, NBB, UA, UGent, ULg, UMons, UNamur, USaint-Louis, Vlerick and VUB
 Sydney Ludvigson, New York University and NBER
How the Wealth Was Won: Factors Shares as Market Fundamentals
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Security, Disaster Management or Schooling? Consequences of the Mexican War on Drugs

A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents
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Come Together: Firm Boundaries and Delegation 

Long-term and Intergenerational Effects of Education: Evidence from School Construction in Indonesia
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Essays on Intertemporal Household Behavior

Auto Loan Intermediation

Sound at Last ? Assessing a Decade of Financial Regulation
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The Hellinger Correlation
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Testing independence for multivariate time series via the auto-distance correlation matrix
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12:30-13:30 : Welcome new RM and PhD students
14:00 : Internal workshop about research at ECARES

Intellectual Property and the Organization of Global Supply Chains
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Ethics, Markets and Organizations

The "New" Economics of Trade Agreements: From Trade Liberalization to Regulatory Convergence?
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The Future of Financial Intermediation
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Asymmetric least squares techniques for extreme risk estimation 
Paper 1
Paper 2
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Registration and info : real.time.conference.2019@gmail.com before September 30.

ENTER Seminar
Political Competition with Endogenous Turnout: participation, abstention, and voter mobilization
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Registration and info : real.time.conference.2019@gmail.com before September 30.

Valuing the Global Mortality Consequences of Climate Change Accounting for Adaptation Costs and Benefits
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Ballots instead of Bullets ? The effect of the Voting Rights Act on political violence 
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Accounting for Assortativeness in the US Household Earnings Distribution 
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Testing uniformity on the hypersphere via projections
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Tariff Passthrough at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy
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When Transaction Costs Restore Efficiency: Coalition Formation with Costly Binding Agreements
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(Bad) Reputation in Relational Contracting
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Joint with NBB, KUL, UA, UCL, UGhent, UHasselt, ULB, ULg and UMons
The Impact of Family Policies on the Dynamics of Gender Inequality
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Due to security measures, we emphasize the need for you to register by email to nbbfirmanalysis.seminar@nbb.be before Tuesday, November 5 at 4:00 pm if you plan to attend the seminar. Without registration, you will not be allowed in the seminar room.

You will receive a nominative badge at the entrance. We recommend that you arrive at least 10 minutes before the start of the seminar. Please include name and car plate number for access the NBB Parking Warmoesberg 41.

Quasi Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Inference of Large Approximate Dynamic Factor Models via the EM algorithm
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ENTER Seminar
Trade in Intermediate and Optimal Trade Policy
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Mood Effect in the Field and in the Mind
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It Takes Money to Make MPs : New Evidence from 150 Years of British Campaign Spending
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Exchange Design and Efficiency
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Weighted Poincaré inequalities, concentration inequalities and tail bounds related to the behavior of the Stein kernel in dimension one.
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Infrastructure and Global Value Chain Position: Evidence from China

A new year, a new you? A two-selves model of within-individual variation in food purchases 
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Demand-driven Growth
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Keynote speakers:
David Hémous, University of Zurich
David Autor, MIT
Richard Blundell, University College London

Poor Substitutes? Counterfactual Methods in IO and Trade Compared 
Room R42.2.110

ENTER Seminar
Network Dependence and Inference 
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Capital Accumulation and Structural Transformation
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The Stopping Rule and Mortality: World Evidence
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Ethics, markets andorganizations

Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception    
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Family Outcomes and Health Insurance: Evidence from the Medicaid Expansion 
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Money and banking in a New Keynesian model 
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Presentations by our babies, teens and young adults.

Payments, credit and asset prices 
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The economic cost of air pollution: Evidence from Europe

Multivariate Rank-based Distribution-free Nonparametric Testing using Measure Transportation

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more info and registration

Augmented Medicine -The way Artificial Intelligence is reshaping clinical practice 
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Conflicts of interest, ethical rules, and competition    
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Global Giants and Local Stars: How Changes in Brand Ownership Affect Competition

Room R42.2.110

Brands in Motion: How Frictions Shape Multinational Production 

Room R42.2.113

Brands in Motion: How Frictions Shape Multinational Production 

Room R42.2.113