PhD Programs – Page 3

Feedback rating to decrease bribery: Evidence from the Kyrgyz Republic

Research by Francesco Amodio ’10 (Economics) and co-authors at The World Bank and Barcelona GSE

Francesco Amodio ’10 (Economics) co-authored this article for VoxDev with Barcelona GSE Research Professor Giacomo De Giorgi along with World Bank economists Jieun Choi and Aminur Rahman. In the article, the team gives an overview of a field experiment they conducted and theoretical model they developed that describes the interaction between firms and inspectors.

“In collaboration with the World Bank Group and the State Tax Service of the Kyrgyz Republic, we designed an incentive scheme for tax inspectors that rewards them based on the anonymous evaluation submitted by inspected firms. In theory, this should increase the bargaining power of firms in their relationship with tax officials, and decrease the bribe size. However, if firms pay bribes instead of taxes, bribes can increase on the extensive margin, and tax revenues could decrease.”

They found that anonymous rating of inspectors can decrease bribes and increase tax revenues as long as it takes into account market structure considerations.

Read the full article and find links to the research on VoxDev

Francesco Amodio is a graduate of the Barcelona GSE Master’s Program in Economics and the GPEFM PhD Program (UPF and Barcelona GSE). He is currently Assistant Professor of Economics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Follow him on Twitter or visit his website

The causal impact of cesarean sections on neonatal health

Post by Ana Costa Ramón ’14 and Ana Rodríguez-González ’14 (Economics Program). Both are PhD candidates of GPEFM (UPF and Barcelona GSE).

Update 17.07.2019: The authors received the second place Student Paper Prize for this research at the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) 2019 Congress in Basel, Switzerland!

Update 29.01.2019: This research has been nominated for the “Vanguardia de la Ciencia” awards promoted by La Vanguardia newspaper and the Catalunya-La Pedrera Foundation!

In recent decades there has been an increasing concern about the rise of cesarean section births. Among OECD countries in 2013, on average more than 1 out of 4 births involved a c-section (OECD, 2013), being one of the most commonly performed surgeries. Cesarean sections, performed when needed and under standard quality measures, save lives. However, unnecessary c-sections not only impose significant costs for the health system but can also negatively impact infant health. Previous literature has found cesarean sections to be associated with several adverse health outcomes for the newborn (Grivell & Dodd, 2011) and with worse later infant health(Keag, Norman, & Stock, 2018). However, most of the studies that came to these conclusions compared mothers who gave birth vaginally with those that had a cesarean section, and this may produce biased results: mothers who give birth by c-section are likely to have different characteristics from those who have vaginal births, and this may influence the health outcomes of the child and the mother after delivery.

In a recent paper, published in the Journal of Health Economics (Costa-Ramón, Rodríguez-González, Serra-Burriel, & Campillo-Artero, 2018), we contribute to fill this gap by providing causal evidence of the impact of avoidable cesarean birth on neonatal health. To do so, we exploit variation in the probability of having a c-section that is unrelated to maternal characteristics: variation by time of day.

In particular, using data from four public hospitals in Spain, we first document that the probability of having an unplanned c-section is higher in the early hours of the night (from 11 pm to 4 am) and that this is not driven by different characteristics of mothers giving birth during these times. Figure 1 shows the c-section rate at different times of day in our sample. We can observe that the distribution of unscheduled c-sections by time of birth is not uniform. Births that take place between 11 pm and 4 am are around 6 percentage points more likely to be by cesarean.

Csections

Notes: The figure represents the proportion of unplanned c-sections by time of day over the sample of unplanned c-sections and vaginal births. Sample is restricted to single births, unscheduled c-sections and vaginal births (excluding breech vaginal babies).

We argue that, given the medical shift structure in public hospitals and the larger time-cost of surveillance implied by vaginal deliveries, doctors’ incentives to perform c-sections in ambiguous cases may be higher during these times. In fact, we are not the first to document peaks in the unplanned c-section rate during the early night. Previous studies interpret this variation as evidence that convenience and doctors’ demand for leisure influence timing and mode of delivery (Brown, 1996; Fraser et al., 1987; Hueston, McClaflin, & Claire, 1996; Spetz, Smith, & Ennis, 2001).

We take advantage of this exogenous variation and use time of day as an instrument for the probability of having an unplanned c-section. This allows us to compare mothers that give birth in the same hospital and have similar observable characteristics, differing only in the time of delivery. Our results suggest that these non-medically indicated c-sections lead to a significant worsening of Apgar scores of approximately one standard deviation, but we do not find effects on more extreme outcomes such as needing reanimation, being admitted to the ICU or on neonatal death. This is an important finding, given that previous studies in the medical literature documented an association between c-sections and an increased risk of serious respiratory morbidity and subsequent admission to neonatal ICU (Grivell & Dodd, 2011). Their findings are consistent with the results of our OLS estimation, suggesting that former analysis might have been capturing the underlying health status of newborns who need a medically necessary cesarean.

A few words on the publication process and media coverage

Given that it was a health-oriented paper, we decided to target a top field journal in health economics. We were very lucky and all the publication process went very fast and smoothly. We had to revise the paper once and get additional data in order to be able to address some of the reviewers’ comments.

When it was published, with the help of UPF’s communication unit we sent a press release and our paper got attention from the Spanish media. We knew that it was a controversial topic (especially from the doctors’ perspective) so we chose our words carefully, but still we got some slightly sensationalist headlines. We learnt the lesson: you have to choose a catchy punchline yourself, or they will pick their own (and you won’t always like it).

Overall, it has been an intense and fruitful experience!

References:

Brown, H. S. (1996). Physician demand for leisure: Implications for cesarean section rates. Journal of Health Economics, 15(2), 233–242. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-6296(95)00039-9

Costa-Ramón, A. M., Rodríguez-González, A., Serra-Burriel, M., & Campillo-Artero, C. (2018). It’s about time: Cesarean sections and neonatal health. Journal of Health Economics, 59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhealeco.2018.03.004

Fraser, W., Usher, R. H., McLean, F. H., Bossenberry, C., Thomson, M. E., Kramer, M. S., … Power, H. (1987). Temporal variation in rates of cesarean section for dystocia: Does “convenience” play a role? American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 156(2), 300–304. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0002-9378(87)90272-9

Grivell, R. M., & Dodd, J. M. (2011). Short- and long-term outcomes of cesarean section. Expert Review of Obsetrics and Gynecology, 6(2), 205–216.

Hueston, W. J., McClaflin, R. R., & Claire, E. (1996). {V}ariations in cesarean delivery for fetal distress. The Journal of Family Practice, 43(5), 461–467.

Keag, O. E., Norman, J. E., & Stock, S. J. (2018). Long-term risks and benefits associated with cesarean delivery for mother, baby, and subsequent pregnancies: Systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS Medicine, 15(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002494

OECD. (2013). Health at a Glance 2013: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing.

Spetz, J., Smith, M. W., & Ennis, S. F. (2001). Physician Incentives and the Timing of Cesarean Sections: Evidence from California Physician Incentives and the Timing of Cesarean Sections Evidence From California. Source: Medical Care MEDICAL CARE, 39(6), 536–550. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005650-200106000-00003

The Implications of Declining Firm-Level Uncertainty for Consumption Variety and Cities (Unicredit & Universities Job Market Best Paper Award)

alumni

Editor’s note: In this post, Federica Daniele (Economics ’13 and PhD candidate at UPF-GPEFM) shares a summary of her paper, “The Implications of Declining Firm-Level Uncertainty for Consumption Variety and Cities,” which has won the 2017 UniCredit & Universities Economics Job Market Best Paper Award. She also offers some advice to aspiring PhD students in the Barcelona GSE Master’s programs.

Paper summary

There is something alarming about the direction in which firm dynamics have been changing over the course of the last decades. Today it’s much rarer to encounter firms that undergo large up/downsizings than it used to be in the past: in other words, firms have become more tied to their rank in the firm size distribution. This has been of concern for many economists, who see this happening jointly with a slowdown in aggregate productivity growth and competitiveness. Being aware that the question on the drivers behind this trend and its consequences was still open to debate, coupled with an interest for entrepreneurship, is what pushed me to dive into this topic to better our understanding of the issue in my paper, “The Implications of Declining Firm-Level Uncertainty for Consumption Variety and Cities.”

An explanation for the decline in business dynamism consistent with the data is that technological change has caused the degree of idiosyncratic uncertainty that firms routinely face about their chances to grow to go down. This implies that today most of the return from starting a firm is determined by its initial (in)success as opposed to luck in the development of the business over its life-cycle. Based on evidence drawn from data on the universe of German establishments, in the paper I argue that a reduction in firm-level uncertainty is consistent with lower incentives for potential entrepreneurs to start a new business. My paper offers a new insight into the literature on the role of uncertainty for economic activity: some degree of uncertainty is beneficial, because – by unlocking the opportunity for a given firm to grow large out of fortuitous events (such as a favourable demand turn) – it encourages entrepreneurship. In this sense, my paper provides a defence of the classical argument by Frank Knight according to which risk-taking is a characterising feature of entrepreneurship.

A deficit in the growth rate of the stock of establishments triggered by a decline in firm-level uncertainty is cause of concern for multiple reasons. In my paper, I investigate the importance of two dimensions: first of all, the fact that consumers get to consume a less wide variety of goods than otherwise; and secondly, the fact that, being the loss in entrepreneurship larger in big cities, fewer consumers find appealing to move to large cities than otherwise, thus diminishing the extent of positive spillovers due to higher urban density. Another outcome of interest would have been, for example, the process of innovation within an industry.

All in all, the contribution of this paper consists of assessing both empirically and theoretically novel long-run consequences on economic activity of declining firm-level uncertainty.

Advice for future PhD students

I think Barcelona GSE masters students who are considering going the PhD / academic career route should be strategic. There is no harm in taking one year to do some exploratory work, working as RA, for example, for some good professor, if that buys the time to figure out what kind of research best matches your interests, in which institution you would feel better fulfilled, or whether academia suits you at all.

In the end, if you choose to pursue the academic route, you will have most certainly achieved a better match with the institution/supervisor, and spared a lot of time later on during the course of the PhD, which you can instead dedicate to producing research of good quality.

But even if you decide that academia is not for you, the value of the investment will still be positive, as experimenting early during one’s working career is much less costly than doing it later.

Five lessons from a one-week meeting with 18 Nobel Laureates

By Fernando Fernández (Economics ’13, GPEFM)

Photo credit: Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

By Fernando Fernández (Economics ’13, GPEFM) ^[1]

“Just when we thought we had all the answers, all the questions changed.” Mario Benedetti

That was my reaction when the 6th Lindau Meeting in Economic Sciences concluded. This meeting occurs every two years and gathers several Nobel Laureates and young economists (graduate students and assistant professors) from around the world. This meeting is certainly the most inspiring academic event I have ever attended.

The meeting took place in the beautiful town of Lindau, next to Lake Constance, in southern Germany between August 22nd and August 27th. During these days, we attended lectures from 18 Nobel laureates in Economics on a wide range of topics: bounded rationality, investment management, pension design, monetary policy, labor markets, morality and markets, political systems, innovation, and econometrics. I will not attempt to summarize these great lectures but all of them were recorded and are available on this link.

I would rather focus these lines on the interactions that occurred outside the “classroom”. Every day the program included lectures, lunch, seminar presentation panel discussions, and dinner.

The first lecture was given by Daniel McFadden ^[2], and besides the content, something really caught my attention. In the first row of the room (it was actually a theater) you could see the other Nobel Laureates. All were carefully listening to the speaker! They seemed like young students paying attention to an important professor. So the first lesson from this meeting was that we, as researchers, should actively embrace our academic curiosity.

Over lunch, I had the first opportunity to talk to a Nobel Laureate. I was sitting with some friends I just met and were talking about each others’ research. At some point, Bengt Holmstrom asked: “Would you mind if I join you?” We welcomed him, and seconds later he started asking us about our research interests. He soon realized that all of us were doing empirical work and said: “I am the only theorist in this table!”

He listened to all of us, asked some questions (some of them were hard to answer) and even gave us some advice. I was able to confirm that these brilliant economists have a special talent to listen to others, even if they are PhD students struggling with their papers. He was very generous with his time and recommended us to work hard but only on topics that we really cared about. He also advised us not to focus on publishing papers but instead on gaining respect from our peers through our work.

Hours later, I had the chance to sit on the table with Eric Maskin for dinner. He told us about the day he received the call from Stockholm and found out he won the Nobel prize. Then, we talked about US politics, big data, increasing co-authorship in economic journals, and other current issues in academia. As you can imagine, when you are sitting next to a Nobel Laureate you get the feeling that you can ask him any question. Well, these questions (some of them unrelated to economics) arrived and Maskin, very modestly, said : “I know very little about this particular topic, so I cannot have an informed opinion. In fact, you should know that one wins the Nobel prize, not because you know everything, but because you specialize in certain specific topics”. His reaction really impressed me but he was right. He could not be an expert in every topic and he acknowledged it. How many times do we feel the need to have an opinion on everything? The second lesson from this meeting is that we must always acknowledge our limitations and be humble enough to don’t give uninformed opinions.

One of the big questions most PhD students have is the following: where do great ideas come from? Tirole, Hart and Holmstrom provided some light on this issue and their advice was the third lesson. Tirole said two great sources of ideas were talking to people around you (his office was next to Hart’s) and to people outside the academia (practitioners, policy makers and business men). He encouraged us to talk to practitioners because they are facing the real problems we must address, that they have many important questions that remained unanswered and deserve our attention. Holmstrom said that the idea of his well-known model of career concerns (one of the reasons he was awarded with the Nobel prize) came when he has working in a plant in Finland, and had some problems with his manager. He then went to do his PhD and wrote a model to explain the behavior of this manager. In addition, he recommended us to become experts in the literature of our field of interest, not to follow it but to depart from it. After this, Hart said that working with Holmstrom and Tirole was a great way to find ideas. He also suggested us that when doing theoretical work, we should keep models as simple as possible.

James Heckman’s lecture was about the identification problem in econometrics. He was the most enthusiastic person I have ever seen giving an econometrics lecture. And this enthusiasm was quite contagious. Even though he was talking about highly technical and complex conditions for a new interpretation of Instrumental Variable (IV) estimates, I was surprisingly able to follow his lecture and understand the contribution he was making. Or, at least that’s the impression I had. That same day, we had a Bavarian dinner at night, with traditional music, food, and of course, beer. This was the last night of the event and the time to say good-bye to other fellow economists.

The coolest table at the Bavarian dinner

After some drinks, I decided to walk back to my hotel, located around 50-minutes away from the place we had dinner. On my way, I ran into Heckman, who seemed a bit confused. He had been walking with other young economists and then he was not sure where to go. I approached him and we realized we had to walk in the same direction. This was quite a unique and unexpected opportunity to talk about his lecture. So I started with my questions and he replied to all of them with great patience and enthusiasm. I could confirmed I had actually understood his lecture. Then, we started talking about the rapid increase in data availability and how big data should influence econometrics. He also told me good stories about his last trip to Barcelona and Peru. Eventually, we arrived at the hotel and said good-bye. This great conversation was the fourth lesson: we should remain enthusiastic even after years of dealing (doing research or teaching) with the same subject.

The fifth lesson is that these people seem very happy doing their jobs. Yes, I know, they are Nobel Laureates, they have already accomplished important professional goals. But it is still surprising how much they enjoy doing research. During lunch time or dinner, when we were able to talk to them more informally, people would usually ask: Which are the questions we should tackle? What fields are relevant now? Most Nobel Laureates seemed to share the view that the relevant questions are the ones you really care about. And if they actually work according to this view, it is not that hard to understand why they look like if they were having fun all the time.

When I was heading to this meeting, I had a lot of questions in my mind and thought the meeting would be an ideal place to get answers. During the meeting, some of my questions were being answered but later I realized that getting answers was not so important. Once the meeting was over, I realized all the lessons I took from it were unexpected. I had misunderstood the purpose of this meeting. I should have not come to the meeting looking for answers. I should have come looking for questions. These highly talented economists are Nobel Laureates precisely because they are extremely good at raising questions. Questions that open new streams of work. Questions that people had overlooked but that deserve careful thinking and attention. Now, two months after the meeting, I realize that all the questions raised by these Nobel Laureates are the reason why this event was so inspiring. Because in research that’s what keeps us working: Questions!

^[1] I am thankful to the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship (through the PODER network) for sponsoring my participation in the meeting.

^[2]Before McFadden’s lecture, there was a keynote address by Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank.

Advice for new master’s students from Marc de la Barrera ’17

Marc de la Barrera ’17 shares some advice from his recent experience as a student in the Barcelona GSE Economics Program.

At the welcome event for new students on September 26, alum Marc de la Barrera ’17 shared some advice from his recent experience as a student in the Barcelona GSE Economics Program.

alumni speech — Marc de la Barrera (Economics ’17, GPEFM)

Here is the text of his speech (see if you can spot all the references to a certain television series…)

Dear BGSE students, staff, professors and friends,

I am very happy to be here giving this speech, remembering myself just one year ago sitting in your place. By that time I was an engineer starting an Economics Master, both amused but nervous for digging in a new field. “You know nothing, Marc Barrera”, I keept saying to myself. One year later, at least I can say I know something.

In the Economics Master, I learnt to play with macroeconomic models, how to gather valuable information from data, and to understand how we take decisions. Also that asking the right question is almost as important as finding the answer. I remember me having troubles understanding the “risk free rate” concept. How is it possible that you get a return on your money for sure? Then someone told me that America always pays its debts. Well, they assume they do, I don’t know if now they are so confident with its new administration. Those in data science will learn that information is power, while these of you taking political economy classes will argue that power is power. For competition ones… well, competition is lack of power. And no matter which master you are enrolled in, you are going to meet, John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, Companion of the Order of the Bath, Fellow of the British Academy and father of modern economics.

I hope you are enjoying your time here, nice weather, meeting new people every day, no pressure… But summer will not last forever. Soon you will realize that winter is coming, and with them, exams. And remember that when exams come and problem sets appear, the lone student dies but the pack survives. Everyone has its studying style, but I deeply encourage you form teams and work altogether. You are here, hence you are all very intelligent, I have no doubt about that, but there is a problem… Your professors more. You will need to merge several minds to solve one problem. You have different backgrounds, someone will be very strong in formal math, others might excel at economic intuition, and others will know coding. These three aspects, and many others, are needed to succed all the masters at BGSE.

But it is not only what I learnt that made last year special, it was the experiences I lived and more importantly, the people I meet. I want to make use of this privilaged attention I have, to encourage BGSE to do more activities outside the academic environment, at the same time that I congratulate them for the ones they are currently performing. Butifarrada, football tournamen, sky trip, fideuà… Go to as many events as you can, if not all. Defying all economic laws, this events provide one thing that economists belief do not exist: “free lunch” (just ignore the tuition fees).

Then the people. You will get in touch with many people from many nationalities, such opportunity must be taken. But is not only the cultural exchange what matters. Feelings, frienship will arise. Some cuples will form with probability one. Networking to get opportunities, information or new jobs is fine, but spending time with people you like and appreciate, is better.

>And finally the faculty. Their level is extraordinary, make the most of them. Not only during the class, they are here to help and guide you. I might have abused of their kindness last year, but every professor and staff member I asked to see, whether for a technical doubt regarding the notes, to more fundamental and vital questions like “should I do a PhD”, received me and helped me as much as they could. Luckily you don’t have to send a raven, although we have more pidgeons here, an e-mail should work. The objective of the faculty is to make the most of you, so let them help.

Whether you stay in Bellaterra at UAB or in the Citadel Campus at UPF, it is time to go beyond the wall. After the master the research frontier will be near, and some of you, like me, will opt to go further, to the unexplored. Those who opt for a professional career, maybe we will make it to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Congratulations for being admitted to your program. This year will be a great year: you will learn economics, meet people, and discover cultures. I hope that the first weeks have been pleasant, and get ready to work hard, because as bodybuilders say, “no pain, no gain”.

Original post and more from Marc de la Barrera on his personal blog. Connect with Marc on Twitter and LinkedIn

Videos from welcome events for the Class of 2018:

International Asset Allocations and Capital Flows: The Benchmark Effect

By Tomas Williams (Economics ’12, GPEFM ’17), Assistant Professor of International Finance at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Tomas Williams (Economics ’12, GPEFM ’17) is Assistant Professor of International Finance at George Washington University in Washington, DC. His paper, “International Asset Allocations and Capital Flows: The Benchmark Effect” (with Claudio Raddatz, Central Bank of Chile and Sergio Schmukler, World Bank Research Group) is forthcoming at the Journal of International Economics.

International Asset Allocations and Capital Flows: The Benchmark Effect

As financial intermediaries such as open-end funds with benchmark tracking grow in importance around the world, the issue of which countries belong to relevant international benchmark indexes (such as the MSCI Emerging Markets) has generated significant attention in the financial world (Financial Times, 2015). The reason is that the inclusion/exclusion of countries from widely followed benchmarks has implications for the allocation of capital across countries. As institutional investors become more passive, they follow benchmark indexes more closely. These benchmark indexes change over time, as index providers reclassify countries, implying that investment funds have to re-allocate their portfolio among the countries they target. The capital flows generated by these portfolio re-allocations are important since worldwide open-end funds that follow a few well-known stock and bond market indexes manage around 37 trillion U.S. dollars in assets (ICI, 2016). These changes in benchmark indexes can produce unexpected effects in international capital flows, linked to how financial markets work, not necessarily to economic fundamentals.

One clear example of these counterintuitive reallocations happened when MCSI announced in 2009 that it would upgrade Israel from emerging to developed market status, moving it from the MSCI Emerging Markets (EM) Index to the World Index. When the upgrade became effective in May 2010, Israel faced equity capital outflows of around 2 billion dollars despite its better status (Figure 1 below, click image to enlarge). The reason is that Israel became a smaller fish in a bigger pond. Israel’s weight in the MSCI EM Index decreased from 3.17 to 0, while it increased from 0 to 0.37 in the MSCI World Index. Israeli stocks in the MSCI index fell almost 4 percent in the week of the announcement and significantly underperformed the stocks not included in the index. The week prior to the effective date (when index funds rebalanced their portfolio) there was a 4.2 percent drop in the MSCI Israel Index, versus a 1.5 fall in the Israeli stocks outside the index.

Figure 1. Direct Benchmark Effect: Aggregate Flows — This figure shows aggregate data on flows in Israel around the time of large benchmark weight changes. Figure 1 shows data for portfolio equity liability flows and portfolio debt liability flows for Israel quarterly between 2007 and 2011. Figure 2 shows the cumulative flows from frontier markets passive funds around the upgrade of Qatar and United Arab Emirates to the MSCI Emerging Markets.

The effects of index reclassifications go beyond the countries and asset classes being specifically targeted. Spillovers could occur to other countries that share a certain benchmark with countries affected by reclassifications. A clear example of this is the upgrade in June 2013 of Qatar and United Arab Emirates (UAE) from the MSCI Frontier Markets (FM) Index to the MSCI EM Index. Together, these two countries were around 40 percent of the MSCI FM Index before the reclassification. When this reclassification took place, funds tracking closely the MSCI FM Index had to sell securities from these two countries and use the money to invest in the rest of the countries in the MSCI FM Index. This resulted in significant capital inflows and stock market price increases in countries such as Nigeria, Kuwait, and Pakistan (Figure 2, click image to enlarge).

Figure 2. Cumulative Flows from Frontier Passive Funds

These movements in financial markets have led to speculations and market movements related to potential new reclassifications. One recent and prominent example is that of China. For the past two years, MSCI delayed numerous times the introduction of China A-shares as a part of the MSCI Emerging Markets. Finally, in June 2017, they confirmed the inclusion of only a fraction of these stocks, creating capital inflows into the Chinese stock markets, and increases in stock prices (Financial Times, 2017). Chinese sovereign bonds may see similar capital inflows if J.P. Morgan, Citibank and Barclays decide to add China into their flagship bond indexes (CNBC, 2017).

In a recent study (Raddatz et al., 2017), we systematically document these benchmark effects, showing the various channels through which prominent international equity and bond market indexes affect asset allocations, capital flows, and asset prices across countries. Benchmarks have statistically and economically significant effects on the allocations and capital flows of mutual funds across countries. For example, a 1 percent increase in a country’s benchmark weight results on average in a 0.7 percent increase in the weight of that country for the typical mutual fund that follows that benchmark. These benchmark effects on the mutual fund portfolios are relevant even after controlling for time-varying industry allocations and country-specific or fundamental factors. Exogenous events that modify benchmark indexes affect benchmark weights. Furthermore, asset prices move both during the announcement and effective dates of the benchmark changes in response to the capital movements.

Academics, financial institutions, and policy makers have already started paying attention to the potential effects of benchmarks on capital flows and asset prices, as well as on herding, momentum, and risk taking (BIS, 2014; Arslanalp and Tsuda, 2015; IMF, 2015, Shek et al., 2015; Vayanos and Woolley, 2016). More work in this area would be welcomed as passive investing continues expanding.

References

Arslanalp, S., Tsuda, T., 2015. Emerging Market Portfolio Flows: The Role of Benchmark-Driven Investors. IMF Working Paper 15/263, December.

BIS, 2014. International Banking and Financial Market Developments. BIS Quarterly Review.

CNBC, 2017. Chinese Stocks got their Global Stamp of Approval, and now Bonds may be next.

Financial Times, 2015. Emerging Market Investors Dominated by Indices. August 4.

Financial Times, 2017. China Stocks Set for $500bn Inflows after MSCI Move. June 21.

ICI, 2016. Investment Company Institute: Annual Factbook.

IMF, 2015. Global Financial Stability Report.

MSCI, 2016. Potential Impact on the MSCI Indexes in the Event of the United Kingdom’s Exit from the European Union (“Brexit”). June.

Raddatz, C., Schmukler, S., Williams, T., 2017. International Asset Allocations and Capital Flows: The Benchmark Effect. Working Papers 2017-XX, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.

Shek, J., Shim, I., Shin H.S., 2015. Investor Redemptions and Fund Manager Sales of Emerging Market Bonds: How Are They Related? BIS Working Paper 509.

Vayanos, D., Woolley, P., 2016. Curse of the Benchmarks. LSE Discussion Paper 747.

Wall Street Journal, 2014. Colombia Wins Investors’ Favor – And That’s the Problem. August 13.

About Tomas Williams

From his website:

I am an Assistant Professor of International Finance at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. My main fields of research are International Finance, Financial Economics and Empirical Banking. I have a special interest on financial intermediaries and how they affect international capital flows and economic activity. More specifically, I have been working on how the use of well-known benchmark indexes by financial intermediaries affects both financial markets and real economic activity.

More personally, I grew up in Buenos Aires, and studied economics at Universidad del CEMA. Afterwards, I moved to Barcelona and completed the Master’s Degree in Economics and Finance (Economics Program) at Barcelona GSE. Later on, I received my Ph.D. in Economics and Finance from Universitat Pompeu Fabra. I also spent one year as a visiting doctoral student in the Financial Markets Group (FMG) at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Connect with Tomas on Twitter

Alumni Voices: micro-foundations, mid-life crises, and more

Links to Barcelona GSE alumni voices around the web

Alumni Voices

Alumni Voices is a roundup of links to recent analysis, research, and commentary by Barcelona GSE graduates that we’ve spotted around the web.

Alumni Voices – April 2015

Want us to add your work to the next roundup? Send us the link!

Bundling, information and two-sided platform competition – Job Market Paper

The following job market paper summary was contributed by Keke Sun (IDEA). Keke is a job market candidate at UAB. Her research interests include Industrial Organization, Venture Capital Markets and Innovation.

Two-sided markets are economic platforms that connect two interdependent groups of users together and enable certain interactions between these two groups of users. The main characteristic of two-sided markets is the indirect network externalities, meaning that one group user’s benefits of joining one platform depends on the number of users of the other group on the same platform. My job market paper studies the impact of pure bundling and the level of consumer information on two-sided platform competition.

The Story

This paper is motivated by the casual observations from the smartphone operating system industry. The operating system (OS) platform connects consumer and application developers, the major competitors are Android by Google and iOS by Apple. Apple also has its amazing in-house handset, iPhone, it bundles the handset with the OS platform.

ios

The Main Results

The leverage theory has established that, in standard one-sided market, if a firm can commit to pure bundling, when consumers have homogeneous valuation of the bundling product, pure bundling reduces equilibrium profits for all firms. Therefore, bundling is usually adopted to deter entry or lead to foreclosure (see Whinston (1990) and Carlton and Waldman (2002) ). However, in a two-sided market, if a platform could commit to aggressive pricing on one side and gain a larger market share. Hence, it becomes more valuable to the users on the other side. I show that, in the presence of asymmetric network externalities, when consumers have homogeneous valuation of the bundling handset, bundling may emerge as a profitable strategy when platforms engage in “divide-and-conquer” strategy: subsidizing the low externality side (consumers) for participation and making profits on the high-externality side (developers). That is, when the benefits of attracting one extra consumer are very strong, committing to aggressive pricing can be profitable without inducing the exit of the rival.

This paper also studies the impact of the level of consumer information on platform competition and the emergence of the bundling decision. Most literature on two-sided markets assumes that all agents have full information about prices and others’ preferences; therefore, can perfectly predict others’ participation decision (see Rochet and Tirole (2003), Caillaud and Jullien (2003), and Armstrong (2006) etc.). Following Hagiu and Halaburda (2014), I use the setting of a hybrid scenario in which some consumers are informed about developer subscription prices and hold responsive expectations about developer participation, while the remaining consumers are uninformed and hold passive expectations. This setting should be a good fit of a situation where information may be less than perfect for some users on different sides of the platform. For instance, some consumers don’t know how much Apple or Google charges the developers for listing applications. Information intensifies price competition with or without bundling. Bundling is more effective in stimulating consumer demand the larger proportion of informed consumers, but bundling is less likely to emerge as the fraction of informed consumers increases.

Strategy and Policy Implications

From a strategy perspective, this paper shows that both platforms have incentives to affect consumers’ knowledge regarding developer subscription prices. Without bundling, both platforms have incentives to withhold the information because consumer information intensifies price competition on both sides. However, when bundling does occur, the two platforms may have different attitudes towards consumer information. The bundling platform prefers a high level of consumer information because bundling is more effective to stimulate consumer demand. The competing platform wishes to withhold the information as it gets worse off as the level of consumer information increases. This paper also shows that when the network externalities are strong, it is more profitable for the platforms to be more aggressive.

From a public policy perspective, this paper provides recommendations concern bundling and information disclosure. Due to the existence of (positive) network externalities, consumer surplus increases with the number of developers on the same platform. Bundling does not only affect consumer subscription prices, but also affects the perceived quality of platforms as it affects developer participation. It has shown that pure bundling improves consumer welfare mainly because it offers a lower subscription price and more application variety to the majority of consumers. For the same reason, even when bundling implements second-degree price discrimination, bundling still improves consumer welfare. Also, information disclosure unambiguously improves consumer surplus by lowering subscription prices on both sides of the platform and improving developer participation. Thus, information disclosure should be encouraged or mandated for consumer’s sake.

Paper abstract and download available on Keke’s website

The Mission: Human Capital and the Persistence of Fortune – Job Market Paper

Job market paper Felipe Valencia ’15 (GPEFM – UPF and Barcelona GSE)

The following job market paper summary was contributed by Felipe Valencia (GPEFM – UPF and Barcelona GSE).

**Update: This paper has now been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and featured in the The Washington Post!**

The importance of history in economic development is well-established (Nunn 2009; Spolaore and Wacziarg 2013), but less is known about the specific channels of transmission which drive this persistence in outcomes. Dell (2010) stresses the negative effect of the mita in Latin America, and Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) document the adverse impact of African slavery through decreased trust. But did other colonial arrangements lead to positive outcomes in the long run?

I address this question in my Job Market Paper by analyzing the long-term economic consequences of European missionary activity in South America. I focus on missions founded by the Jesuit Order in the Guarani lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in modern-day Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. This case is unique in that Jesuits were expelled from the Americas in 1767 –following European “Great Power” politics— precluding any continuation effect. While religious conversion was the official aim of the missions, they also increased human capital formation by schooling children and training adults in various crafts. My research question is whether such a one-off historical human capital intervention can have long-lasting effects.

The author at the site of one of the Jesuit missions on Guarani lands in South America.

Setup

To disentangle the national institutional effects from the human capital shock the missions supplied, I use within country variation in missionary activity in three different countries:

fig1_valencia — Note: The map shows the exact location of the Guarani Jesuit Missions (black crosses) with district level boundaries for Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.

The area under consideration was populated by a single semi-nomadic indigenous tribe, so I can abstract from the direct effects of different pre-colonial tribes (Maloney and Valencia 2012; Michalopoulos and Papaioannou, 2013). The Guarani area also has similar geographic and weather characteristics, though I control for these variables in the estimation.

Key Findings

Using municipal level data for five states (Corrientes and Misiones in Argentina, Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, and Itapúa and Misiones in Paraguay), I find substantial positive effects of Jesuit missions on human capital and income, 250 years after the missionaries were expelled. In municipalities where Jesuits carried out their apostolic efforts, median years of schooling and literacy levels remain higher by 10-15%. These differences in educational attainment have also translated into higher modern per capita incomes of nearly 10%. I then analyze potential cultural mechanisms that can drive the results. To do so I conduct a household survey and lab-in-the-field experiments in Southern Paraguay. I find that respondents in missionary areas have higher non-cognitive abilities and exhibit more pro-social behavior.

Endogeneity

Even though I use country and state-fixed effects as well as weather and geographic controls, Jesuit missionaries might have chosen favorable locations beyond such observable factors. Hence the positive effects might be due to this initial choice and not to the missionary treatment per se.

To address the potential endogeneity of missionary placement, I conduct two empirical tests. The first one is a placebo that looks at missions that were initially founded by the Jesuits but were abandoned early on (before 1659). I can thereby compare places that were initially picked by missionaries with those that actually received the missionary treatment. I find no effect for such “placebo” missions, which suggests that what mattered in the long run is what the missionaries did and not where they first settled.

Second, I conduct a comparison with the neighboring Guarani Franciscan Missions. The comparison is relevant as both orders wanted to convert souls to Christianity, but Jesuits emphasized education and technical training in their conversion. Contrary to the Jesuit case, I find no positive long-term impact on either education or income for Franciscan Guarani Missions. This suggests that the income differences I estimate are likely to be driven by the human capital gains the Jesuits provided.

In addition, I employ an IV strategy, where I use as instruments the distance from early exploration routes and distance to Asuncion. Distance from the exploration routes of Mendoza (1535-1537) and Cabeza de Vaca (1541-1542) serves as a proxy for the isolation of the Jesuit missions (in the spirit of Duranton et al. 2014). Asuncion, in turn, served as a base for missionary exploration during the foundational period, but became less relevant for Rio Grande do Sul after the Treaty of Madrid (1750) transferred this territory to Portuguese hands. For this reason and to avoid the direct capital –and Spanish Empire—effects, I use this variable only for the Brazilian subsample of my data (as in Becker and Woessmann 2009; Dittmar 2011). The first-stage results are strongly significant throughout (with F-statistics well above 10), and the second-stage coefficients for literacy and income retain their sign and significance –appearing slightly larger—in the IV specifications.

Extensions and Mechanisms

To complete the empirical analysis, I examine cultural outcomes and specific mechanisms that can sustain the transmission of human capital from the missionary period to the present. I find that respondents in missionary areas possess superior non-cognitive abilities, as proxied by higher “Locus of Control” scores (Heckman et al., 2006). Using standard experiments from the behavioral literature, I find that respondents in missionary areas exhibit greater altruism, more positive reciprocity, less risk seeking and more honest behavior. I use priming techniques to further investigate whether these effects are the result of greater religiosity –which appears not to be the case.

In terms of mechanisms, my results indicate that municipalities closer to historic missions have changed the sectoral composition of employment, moving away from agriculture and towards manufacturing and services (consistent with Botticini and Eckstein, 2012). In particular, I document that these places still produce more handicrafts such as embroidery, a skill introduced by the Jesuits. People closer to former Jesuit missions also seem to participate more in the labor force and work more hours, consistent with Weber (1978). I also find that indigenous knowledge —of traditional medicine and myths—was transmitted more from generation to generation in the Jesuit areas. Unsurprisingly, given their acquired skills, I find that indigenous inhabitants from missionary areas were differentially assimilated into colonial and modern societies. Additional robustness tests suggest that the results are not driven by migration, urbanization or tourism.

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Breakfast seminars: food for thought

By Marlène Rump ’15, current student in the International Trade, Finance and Development master program at Barcelona GSE. Marlène is on Twitter @marleneleila.

On Wednesday, October 22, we didn’t have classes, so we decided to explore one of the numerous events on the GSE calendar. For some brain and other food, the breakfast seminar on Labour, Public and Development Economics sounded just right.

The presentations scheduled were held by two of UPF’s PhD students who are in their last year. This means they are finalizing their “job market paper”, which refers to the paper they will use as a demonstration of their skills and interests when they apply for positions.

One important purpose of the seminar is giving the students an opportunity to practice presenting and defending their work, as well as receiving improvement suggestions from fellow PhD students and professors.

Backlash: The Unintended Effects of Language Prohibition in US Schools after World War I

Vicky Fouka started the seminar with her paper on language prohibition in the US Schools after World War I. She compared two states, similar in most social aspects, one of which banned the teaching of German from the primary schools for a few years and the other, her control state, which didn’t.

The prohibition, which was implemented by the authorities in early 1920s, originated from a German-hatred which was widespread in the United States after World War I. What was promoted as an integration measure had the exact opposing effects: Vicky finds that the Germans living in the state with language prohibition deepened their cultural segregation. In comparison with the control state, they were more likely to marry a German spouse and give their first child a very German sounding name.

Editor’s note: Vicky Fouka is a graduate of the Barcelona GSE Master in Economics. See more of her research on her website.

Cultural Capital in the Labor Market: Evidence from Two Trade Liberalization Episodes

The second presentation was also about the assimilation of immigrants, however Tetyana Surovtseva conducted her analysis with modern day data. Her assumption was that if the host country of immigrants increased trade with their country of origin, these immigrants had an advantage on the labor market in trade related sectors. Her hypothesis was that if the host country of immigrants increased trade with their country of origin, these immigrants had an advantage on the labor market in trade related sectors. Her underlying premise is that immigrants have a certain “cultural capital”, other than language, which is valuable for corporations involved in trade with their country of origin.

Tetyana examined the labor market demand for Chinese and Mexican immigrants in the US after a punctual improvement of trade agreements. Her findings suggest that labor market returns to the immigrant cultural capital increase as a result of trade with the country of origin.

Editor’s note: Tetyana is also a Barcelona GSE Economics alum. More about her work is available on her job market page.

Attend some seminars! Especially if you’re thinking of doing a PhD.

For both presentations there were numerous questions which gave additional insight especially on the methods of research. We also learned that most PhD students start their final thesis three years before the end of their program.

After this experience, I can highly recommend attending the seminars. You learn about interesting economic questions and see a specific application of your econometrics classes and this in only one hour. In addition, for those who are envisaging doing a PhD, the presentations give a genuine insight of the type of research you could be conducting.