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DTSTART:20070311T020000
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DTSTAMP:20260415T092058
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260428T113000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260428T125000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:The Commoditization of Labor (joint with Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson)
DESCRIPTION:Technical change often simplifies jobs. This increases productivity\, but it also makes work- ers more substitutable—or more “commoditized”. Commoditization of labor drives down worker bargaining power: anyone can do the job\, implying workers are disposable\, which improves the outside option of firms and can lower worker wages. We develop a model that captures both the productivity enhancing and wage depressing effects of commoditizing tech- nical change. Commoditizing technical change involves firms standardizing tasks which im- plies that output is less sensitive to worker quality. Firms benefit because they can more easily fill vacancies for their durable jobs. We show that our model can help explain the divergence between productivity and wages in the service sector\, increasing markdowns despite falling local concentration\, and the decline of the large-firm wage premium.
UID:143304-21892669@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143304
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Economics,Macroeconomics,seminar
LOCATION:North Quad - 4325
CONTACT:
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DTSTAMP:20260420T120228
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260430T130000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260430T143000
SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Learning\, Salience\, and Voting: Evidence from Criminal Politicians in India (with Siddharth George and Sarika Gupta)
DESCRIPTION:We study how voters process information through two experiments around Indian elections. In a large-scale experiment\, we show that providing voters information about candidates’ criminal charges increases votes for clean candidates and reduces votes for criminal politicians\, with larger penalties for candidates facing more and serious charges. A follow-up experiment replicates these results and identifies two mechanisms. First\, information facilitates learning: voters form more accurate beliefs and evaluate criminal candidates less favorably. Second\, using direct measures of voter attention\, we show that information makes criminality more salient\, and increases its weight in voting decisions. Salience effects are larger when information is surprising or highlights contrast\, but do not vary with decision relevance\, consistent with bottom-up attention. Causal forest estimates provide further evidence that learning and salience are both important drivers of changes in voting behavior. We develop a simple model that integrates salience theory into a standard probabilistic voting framework to explain our results.
UID:147858-21902053@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147858
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Development,Economics,Political Economy,seminar
LOCATION:North Quad - 4325
CONTACT:
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