Economics Seminar Schedule

The Department of Economics Seminar Series covers a wide range of topics in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and economic policy.  Speakers include department faculty and invited scholars from other universities. Seminars are held in 450 Purnell Hall on Fridays from 11:00am-12:30pm, unless noted otherwise.  Seminars are open to the public.

Spring 2024

Prior Semesters

Fall 2023
October 11, Morgan Hardy (NYU Abu Dhabi) – joint with Biden School of Public Policy
October 13, Paul Grieco (Penn State University)
October 20, Chloe East (University of Colorado Denver)
October 27, Michael Clemens (George Mason University)
November 3, Francesco Bianchi (John Hopkins University)
November 10, Parag Mahajan (University of Delaware)
December 1, Shareen Joshi (Georgetown University)
December 8, Belinda Archibong (Barnard)

Spring 2023
March 10, Greg Howard (UIUC) presents “Workhorses of Opportunity”: Regional Universities Increase Local Social Mobility
March 17, Marc Remer (Swarthmore) presents “What’s the Difference? Measuring the Effect of Mergers in the Airline Industry”
April 7, Akshaya Jha (CMU), “Transmission Constraints and Electricity Trade in India”
April 14, Elena Krasnokutskaya (JHU), “Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard in a Dynamic Model of Auto Insurance”
May 12, Boragan Aruoba (Maryland), “Real Rigidities, Firm Dynamics and Monetary Non-Neutrality: The Role of Demand Shocks”

Fall 2022
October 7, Heitor Pellegrina (NYU), “Trade, Technology Adoption, and Inequality in Distorted Economies”
October 14, Matt White (UD), “Deferred Interest Debt and Consumer Overconfidence: Failing to Plan or Planning to Fail?”
November 4, Shan Aman-Rana (UVA), “Screen Now, Save Later? The Trade-Off between Administrative Ordeals and Fraud”
December 2, Eeshani Kandpal (World Bank), “Labeled cash transfers and intrahousehold impacts: Evidence from an ultra-poor setting”

Spring 2022
March 11, Elizabeth Ananat (Barnard), “Effects of the Expanded Child Tax Credit on Employment and Hardship”
March 18, Tom Eisenberg (UD), “The Welfare Effects of Trade Associations”
March 25, Sheila Olmstead (UT-Austin)
April 8, Michael Gelman (UD Finance)
April 15, Ricardo Perez-Truglia (Berkeley), “What’s My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking”
May 6, Parag Mahajan (UD), “Bad Times, Bad Jobs? How Recessions Affect Early Career Trajectories”
May 13, Nathan Miller (Georgetown), “Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences”

Fall 2021
September 17, Desmond Toohey (UD), “On the Efficiency of Progressive Social Insurance and a Novel Test for Posted Wages”
October 8, Jenny Aker (Tufts), “Harvesting the rain: The adoption of environmental technologies in the Sahel”
October 15, Gautam Gowrisankaran (Columbia), “Discharge Fees, Pollution Mitigation, and Productivity: Evidence from Chinese Power Plants”
October 22, Fiona Burlig (Chicago), “Energy, Groundwater, and Crop Choice”
November 10, Raymond Guiteras (NC State), “Demand Estimation with Strategic Complementarities: Sanitation in Bangladesh”
November 12, Jens Schubert (UD), “The Role of Commitment on Effort Provision and Habit Formation: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment”
December 10, Ginger Jin (Maryland), “Platform as a Rule Maker: Evidence from Airbnb’s Cancellation Policies”

Spring 2021
February 19, Jens Schubert (Delaware), “Risk and the WTA-WTP Disparity for Private and Public Goods”
February 26, Sabrin Beg (Delaware), “Improving Public Sector Service Delivery: The Importance of Management”
March 5, Pedro Sant’Anna (Vanderbilt), “Efficient Estimation for Staggered Rollout Designs”
March 19, Kelsey Jack (UCSB), “Poor and rational: Decision-making under scarcity”
March 24, Eric French (Cambridge), “Labor Supply and the Pension Contribution-Benefit Link”
March 26, Zhigang Feng (Nebraska), “Health, Health Insurance, and Inequality”
April 2, Ghazala Mansuri (World Bank), “Decentralizing Corruption: Irrigation Reform in Pakistan”
April 9, Mesay Gebresilasse (Amherst), “Rugged Individualism and Collective (In)action During the COVID-19 Pandemic”
April 23, Mar Reguant (Northwestern), “The Distributional Impacts of Real-Time Pricing”
April 28, Ina Taneva (Edinburgh; joint seminar with APEC), “Information and Higher-Order Reasoning”
May 7, Cathy Kling (Cornell; joint with SMSP and WiCCED), “Towards an Integrated Assessment Model for Nutrient Pollution”
May 14, Ben Handel (Berkeley), “The Social Determinants of Choice Quality: Evidence from Health Insurance in the Netherlands”

Fall 2020
September 18, Doug Miller (Cornell), “Dynamic Treatment Effects for Empirical Microeconomists: Local Projections and Quasi-Experimental Research Designs”
September 25, Bryce Steinberg (Brown), “Human Capital in the Presence of Child Labor”
October 2, Kareem Haggag (CMU), “The Long-Run Effects of School Racial Diversity on Partisan Identity”
October 9, Young Park (Delaware), “Job Choice as an Insurance Mechanism against Wage Uncertainty”
October 23, Belinda Archibong (Barnard; Joint SMSP and Applied Econ Seminar), “Global Governance Institutions Can Mitigate the Effects of Epidemics: Evidence from WHO Epidemic Declarations”
November 6, Wolfram Schlenker (Columbia; joint seminar with SMSP), “Coase, Hotelling and Pigou: The Incidence of a Carbon Tax and CO2 Emissions”
December 4, Sheisha Kulkarni (Virginia), “Don’t Lend So Close to Me: Payday Lending Spillover Effects on Formal Credit”

Spring 2020
February 28, Joe Daniel (Delaware), “Cops & Robbers, Pleas & Trials, Jails & Deterrence, and Guilt & Innocence”
March 6, Nick Papageorge (JHU), “Genetic Endowments, Income Dynamics, and Wealth Accumulation Over the Lifecycle”
May 1, Dilip Mookherjee (BU), “Clientelism and Political Manipulation of Public Services and Votes in West Bengal”

Fall 2019
September 13, Eric Schmidbauer (Central Florida), “Free Product Trials”
October 4, Katie Fitzpatrick (Delaware Biden School), “Health Insurance and High Cost Borrowing: The Effect of Medicaid on Pawn Loans, Payday Loans, and other Non-Bank Financial Products”
October 15, Eric Hanushek (Stanford), “The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance”
October 18, Mike Abito (Wharton), “The Role of Output Reallocation and Investment in Coordinating Externality Markets”
October 22, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham (Yale SOM; Joint IFSA/Econ Seminar; One South Main 120), “Predictably Unequal? The Effects of Machine Learning on Credit Markets”
October 25, Leah Platt Boustan (Princeton), “Streets of Gold: Immigration and the American Dream over Two Centuries”
November 8, Stefania Albanesi (Pitt; Joint IFSA/Econ; CLAYTON HALL), “Predicting Consumer Default: A Deep Learning Approach”
November 15, Matt White (Delaware), “Latent Health Dynamics”