Facultad de Economía

Fecha: 07/10/2021, 11:00

Modalidad: Presencial

Presentador: Stanislao Maldonado (URosario)

Autor: Maldonado Stanislao

Prosocial drivers of human motivation have recently attracted the attention of scholars interested in improving civil servant performance in developing countries. Unfortunately, the existing literature is unclear about which drivers are more relevant to motivate public officials in these settings. We implement a field experiment that varies the salience of different dimensions of prosocial motivation to enforce policy compliance among civil servants from a school maintenance program in Peru. In particular, we study the role of altruism, commitment to a mission, and identity in a large-scale intervention to induce civil servants to invest school maintenance funds and report the use of monetary transfers to monitor corruption. We find that commitment to a mission and identity are cost-effective ways to promote policy compliance, whereas altruism does not play a role in this regard. Our results highlight the importance of a better understanding of the role of different sources of prosocial motivation of civil servants in settings where the state lacks institutional mechanisms to enforce compliance.

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Fecha: 28/10/2021, 11:00

Modalidad:

Presentador: Mariano Scapin (University of Bristol)

Autor: Mariano Scapin

We study the relation between CEO industry tournament incentives, measured as the distance between CEO-pay and the highest-paid CEO among similar firms by industry and size, and conditional accounting conservatism. Conditional conservatism imposes a faster recognition of bad news in earnings, vis-à-vis good news. We hypothesize and find that the relation between industry tournaments and conditional conservatism varies substantially with debt contracting. Our evidence shows that firms with lower debt contracting pressures exhibit a negative relation between conservatism and tournament incentives; however, as debt contracting pressures increase, this negative relation disappears. Overall, we provide evidence that debt contracting affects the relation between CEO industry tournaments and financial reporting.

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Fecha: 04/11/2021, 11:00

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Presentador: Maarten Bosker (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Autor: Maarten Bosker

Colombia is the world’s major producer of coca leaves. An important pillar of Colombia’s efforts to curb the production of this illicit crop is to induce farmers to substitute coca for a viable legal alternative. In this paper we identify the extent to which farmers respond to variation in the price of five of the most promising legal alternatives when deciding how much coca to plant – coffee, sugar, palm oil, cocoa, and banana. We do this using a rich, spatially very detailed dataset that contains yearly information on the amount of coca grown in each of 31,000 villages (veredas) in Colombia over the period 2001-2018. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in commodity prices, in combination with detailed information about the soil and climatic suitability of each vereda. We find the strongest, most robust, response of coca farming to price changes of coffee and banana: when prices of these crops go up (down), less (more) coca is found in veredas that are suitable for the production of these two crops. We discuss why we find this effect for these two crops only. Furthermore, we show that our findings are driven by veredas with better (road) access, closer to police stations, and those without good access to Colombia's waterways that are heavily used by coca(ine) traffickers.

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Fecha: 09/11/2021, 09:00

Modalidad:

Presentador: David Zuckerman (Stanford University)

Autor: David Zuckerman

I experimentally investigate third-party preferences for victim compensation and offender punishment when one party has harmed another. If the harm is intentional, third parties not only display an increased demand for punishment, but also an increased demand for compensation. I refer to these additional demands for punishment and compensation as preferences for retributive justice and compensatory justice, respectively. These preferences are positively correlated across individuals, suggesting that the two notions of justice are compatible with one another. However, each appears to speak to distinct concerns: I do not find evidence that either is a substitute for the other. Exploring situational factors that may affect these demands, I find suggestive evidence that the victim's knowledge of offender punishment and the offender's knowledge of victim compensation matter. I then move to a setting where the offender's action only induces a probabilistic harm on the victim. I find that whether the victim is harmed affects demands for compensation and punishment, but not demands for retributive or compensatory justice.

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Fecha: 18/11/2021, 11:00

Modalidad:

Presentador: Moritz Drupp (University of Hamburg)

Autor: Moritz Drupp

We study the variation of global and unilateral carbon pricing recommendations and their determinants. To this end, we provide survey evidence on carbon pricing from more than 400 publication-based experts across 39 countries. We quantify the extent of disagreement among experts but also reveal that a majority of experts can agree on short- and medium-term global carbon prices, and on unilateral carbon prices in almost all countries. Furthermore, our results provide no evidence for free-riding on carbon prices and show that border carbon adjustment facilitates higher carbon prices and can also increase agreement on carbon prices. We analyze how carbon pricing recommendations vary with additional survey data, observable information on experts and key country characteristics.

Fecha: 17/03/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: Micaela Sviatschi

Autor: Micaela Sviatschi

How can territorial control by armed non-governmental actors impact long-term development? This article investigates the economic, social, and political consequences of guerrilla's territorial control in the Salvadoran Civil War. It employs spatial regression discontinuity design and census data to compare areas around and close to the boundary of guerrilla's controlled territories between 1981 and 1991. Results indicate that areas inside and in close proximity to guerrilla-controlled boundaries have significantly less night light density, worse education outcomes, and lower wealth indexes relative to the areas outside in the 2010s. These effects are primarily driven by the erosion of labor markets, lower public goods provision, and higher political discontent and mistrust.

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Fecha: 24/03/2022, 11:00

Modalidad: Virtual

Presentador: José Gallegos

Autor: José Gallegos

A vast literature has documented that US inflation persistence has fallen in recent decades. However, this empirical finding is difficult to explain in monetary models. Using survey data on inflation expectations, I document a positive co-movement between ex-ante average forecast errors and forecast revisions (suggesting forecast sluggishness) from 1968 to 1984, but no co-movement afterwards. I extend the New Keynesian (NK) setting with noisy and dispersed information about the aggregate state, and show that inflation is more persistent in periods of greater forecast sluggishness. My results show that the change in firm forecasting behavior, documented in survey data, explains around 90% of the fall in inflation persistence since the mid 1980s. I also find that the disconnect between inflation and the real side of the economy in recent decades can be explained by the change in information frictions. Contrary to the literature which has emphasized a flattening of the NK Phillips curve in recent data, I do not find any evidence of the change in the structural slope of the Phillips curve once I control for the change in information frictions.

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