BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//UM//UM*Events//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Detroit TZURL:http://tzurl.org/zoneinfo/America/Detroit X-LIC-LOCATION:America/Detroit BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT DTSTART:20070311T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=3;BYDAY=2SU END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0400 TZOFFSETTO:-0500 TZNAME:EST DTSTART:20071104T020000 RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYMONTH=11;BYDAY=1SU END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260311T090412 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260311T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260311T160000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:(Artificial) Intelligence saturation and the future of work DESCRIPTION:Macroeconomic models typically treat AI as just another form of capital and predict a slowly evolving world\, while computer science scaling laws applied to the whole economy predict explosive growth and the potential for a singularity-like event. Both views gloss over the asymmetric reality that intelligence capital or AI scales at computer-science speeds\, whereas physical capital and labor do not. What’s missing is a unified\, parameter-driven framework that can nest assumptions from both economics and computer science to generate meaningful predictions of AI’s wage and output impacts. Here we use a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function framework that separates physical and intelligence sectors. Whereas physical capabilities let us affect the world\, intelligence capabilities let us do this as well: The two are complementary. Given complementarity between the two sectors\, the marginal returns to intelligence saturate\, no matter how fast AI scales. Because the price of AI capital is falling much faster than that of physical capital\, intelligence tasks are automated first\, pushing human labor toward the physical sector. The impact of automation on wages is theoretically ambiguous and can be non-monotonic in the degree of automation. A necessary condition for automation to decrease wages is that the share of employment in the intelligence sector decreases\; this condition is not sufficient because automation can raise output enough to offset negative reallocation effects. In our baseline simulation\, wages increase and then decrease with automation. Our interactive tool shows how parameter changes shift that trajectory. Wage decreases are steeper at high levels of automation when the outputs of the physical and intelligence sectors are more substitutable. After full automation\, more AI and more physical capital increase wages\, a classic prediction from standard production functions in capital and labor. Yet\, when intelligence and physical are complementary\, the marginal wage impact of AI capital saturates as AI grows large. More broadly\, the model offers a structured way to map contrasting intuitions from economics and computer science into a shared parameter space\, enabling clearer policy discussions and guiding empirical work to identify which growth and wage trajectories are plausible. UID:143691-21893653@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143691 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260206T110245 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260312T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260312T115000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Estimation in linear models with clustered data (joint work with Mikkel Solvsten and Baiyun Jing) DESCRIPTION:We study linear regression models with clustered data\, high-dimensional controls\, and a complicated structure of exclusion restrictions. We propose a correctly centered internal IV estimator that accommodates a variety of exclusion restrictions and permits within-cluster dependence. The estimator has a simple leave-out interpretation and remains computationally tractable. We derive a central limit theorem for its quadratic form and propose a robust variance estimator. We also develop inference methods that remain valid under weak identification. Our framework extends classical dynamic panel methods to more general clustered settings. An empirical application of a large-scale fiscal intervention in rural Kenya with spatial interference illustrates the approach. UID:143681-21893640@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143681 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260226T160621 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260312T150000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260312T170000 SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:PPE Lecture Series: Rajiv Sethi (Barnard College\, Columbia University) DESCRIPTION:Title:\n\"The Interpretation of Signals\"\n\nAbstract: \nWe live in a sea of signals. Words and phrases\, emoticons and emojis\, pronouns in bios\, tattoos and piercings\, skin color and eye shape\, flags and insignia\, diplomas and certificates\, standardized test scores\, and prices in markets — these are all carriers of information demanding attention and interpretation. We attach meanings to these messages\, and they shape our actions in ways large and small. This lecture is motivated by the conviction that something useful can be said about economic and social life if one examines signals — despite their bewildering variety and complexity — from a unified perspective\, with a focus on statistical inference and strategic incentives.\n\nRajiv Sethi is a Professor of Economics at Barnard College\, Columbia University and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a 2025-26 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. Rajiv was a 2020-21 Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute\, and a 2008-09 Richard B. Fisher Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Sethi has served on the editorial boards of several journals\, including the American Economic Review\, and is a founding associate editor of Collective Intelligence.\n\n His current research deals with information and beliefs.\n\nIn collaboration with Brendan O’Flaherty\, he has examined the manner in which stereotypes affect interactions among strangers\, especially in relation to crime and the criminal justice system. These include interactions between victims and offenders\, officers and suspects\, prosecutors and witnesses\, and judges and defendants. Their book\, Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes\, Crime\, and the Pursuit of Justice was published by Harvard University Press in 2019.\n\nWith Muhamet Yildiz\, he has explored communication among individuals who consider each other to have valuable information\, but also believe that others are biased to different degrees in the manner in which they process information. In deciding where to seek information\, therefore\, people face a trade-off between sources that are well-informed (in the sense of having precise information about the world) and those that are well-understood (in the sense of having transparent biases). In previous work they have examined public disagreement and private information flows\, and in current work are exploring the implications of correlated biases within social groups.\n\nRajiv is a contributor to CORE (Curriculum Open-Access Resources for Economics)\, an initiative aimed at the production of high-quality resources for the teaching of economics\, distributed free of charge worldwide under a Creative Commons license. UID:138635-21883526@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/138635 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) - Amphitheater CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260213T100800 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260316T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260316T172000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Public Finance Seminar: Monday\, March 16 DESCRIPTION:-- UID:145438-21897351@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/145438 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260311T085729 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Zoning: Externalities or Misallocation? DESCRIPTION:-- UID:143297-21892652@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143297 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260113T153452 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T130000 SUMMARY:Livestream / Virtual:Hustle\, Learn\, Repeat: Building Entrepreneurial Muscle for Today’s Economy DESCRIPTION:The modern career landscape is constantly changing\, and success depends on taking initiative and learning by doing. Join Rishi Narayan\, ‘03\, MSE’05\, serial entrepreneur\, angel investor\, and co-founder of Underground Printing\, as he shares his side hustle framework\, a hands-on approach to turning ideas into action. In this session\, you’ll learn how side projects can help you build real-world skills\, test ideas quickly\, and develop resilience\, adaptability\, and a proactive mindset while exploring opportunities beyond traditional employment.\n\nTogether\, we’ll learn how to:\n\nTreat side projects as low-risk experiments to develop entrepreneurial skills.\nBuild resilience\, adaptability\, and confidence in uncertain situations.\nGain practical experience through freelancing\, volunteering\, or other nontraditional projects.\nEstablish habits for continuous learning and proactive career growth. UID:143858-21894130@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143858 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Off Campus Location CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260311T091103 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Natural Language Equilibrium II DESCRIPTION:“Natural Language Equilibrium I” studies the effect of a commonly understood language on signaling game equilibria under the convention that off-path statements are interpreted as true unless they can be seen as a rational attempt to deceive. With this convention it was shown that\, generically\, only stable equilibrium outcomes of the setting with language can arise. Here\, we strengthen the convention by also requiring that any statement must be interpreted as true according to its literal meaning unless doing so would make it profitable to use the statement deceptively. This strengthening refines equilibria even in pure communication games. UID:143377-21892965@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143377 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260302T101306 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260317T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Enlightenment Under Autocracy: The Origins of Liberalism in China DESCRIPTION:This paper studies how ideas emphasizing individual moral agency shape political behavior under autocracy by tracing the rise of Wang Yangming’s School of Mind in late imperial China. Using a new dataset of over 24\,000 historical texts from 1000 to 1900\, we measure regional exposure with two indicators: the frequency of core concepts and the count of associated authors. We also introduce a semantic similarity measure that compares local texts to Wang Yangming’s writings. A difference-in-differences design exploiting the staggered introduction of public lectures shows that exposure rises after a prefecture’s first lecture\, with effects that persist in subsequent cohorts. Prefectures with higher exposure were more likely to produce reformist leaders in the Donglin Movement (1604–1627). Under the Qing (1644–1911)\, public lecturing was curtailed and the intellectual agenda shifted\, so the lecture channel that helped seed Yangming learning in the Ming largely disappears from the record. Using contemporary survey data from 2010\, we nevertheless find that detectable traces remain: residents in historically exposed prefectures express stronger support for the right to discuss public affairs and for limiting government involvement in private affairs. Together\, the results link Yangming learning to reformist mobilization among elites and to long-run variation in attitudes toward political voice and the appropriate scope of government. UID:143569-21893396@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143569 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260309T101849 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260318T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260318T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Understanding Sorting in Modern Housing Markets DESCRIPTION:This paper explores how the changing role of sorting by race in driving neighborhood change. Building on prior research focused on localized incumbent responses to localized changes in the racial composition of nearby neighbors\, we explore how such micro-level sorting behavior may inform understanding of broader neighborhood transitions and heterogeneity across cities. Evidence suggests that local context\, density\, and housing-market conditions generate important heterogeneity across place. UID:143690-21893652@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143690 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260128T082422 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260320T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260320T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Who and How? Adverse Selection and Flexible Moral Hazard (by Henrique Castro-Pires\, Deniz Kattwinkel\, and Jan Knoepfle) DESCRIPTION:We characterize incentive compatible mechanisms in environments with hidden types and flexible hidden actions. Our approach introduces extended recommendation schedules that specify prescribed actions also off-path\, after misreports. This approach yields a tractable and complete characterization of incentive compatibility\, which includes a generalized integral monotonicity condition capturing the interaction between adverse selection and moral hazard. We demonstrate the usefulness of the characterization across a range of contracting problems. UID:143378-21892966@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143378 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260212T124527 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260323T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260323T180000 SUMMARY:Conference / Symposium:Institutional Global Health Summit DESCRIPTION:You're invited to the Institutional Global Health Summit\, an afternoon showcasing cutting-edge research\, dynamic debate\, and global perspectives on health for all.\n\nHosted by the Center for Global Health Equity\, this event brings together U-M faculty\, staff\, trainees\, students\, and global health leaders to showcase innovations addressing health for all through the dynamic exchange of ideas between local and international contexts.\n\n📅 Monday\, March 23\, 2026 | 1:00-6:00 PM\n📍 Rackham Amphitheatre\, University of Michigan\n🎟 Registration required (limited to members of the University of Michigan and Michigan Medicine community)\n\nEvent Highlights\n🔬 Research Lightning Talks | 1:15-3:05 PM\nFast-paced presentations from CGHE-supported Impact Scholars\, students\, and faculty across career stages \n \n🤖 Debate: The Role of AI in Global Equity | 3:15-4:15 PM\nFarhana Alarakhiya (Chief Data Innovation Officer\, Aga Khan University) and Bilal Butt\, PhD (Professor\, SEAS\; Senior Advisor\, CGHE) examine whether AI advances or undermines health equity\, moderated by Lou Edje\, MD \n \n🌍 Panel: Global Health in Transition | 4:15-5:00 PM\nMembers of CGHE's External Advisory Board share insights on navigating funding landscapes\, building partnerships\, and career pathways \n \n🎨 Poster Reception | 5:00-6:00 PM\nEngage with fellow researchers\, explore innovative projects\, and network with colleagues \n \nView the full program at https://myumi.ch/y15d4 UID:145260-21896960@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/145260 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.) - Auditorium CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260224T092129 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260323T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260323T172000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Taxing Corporate or Shareholder Income DESCRIPTION:As corporate income tax rates have fallen across the world\, other capital taxes become more important. This paper studies the choice between income taxation at the corporate and shareholder level depending on capital market openness. I develop a model of capital markets and sufficient-statistics framework to determine optimal tax reforms. The main result is that when the incidence of the corporate income tax on workers is higher than that of shareholder income taxes\, lowering the former and reducing the latter is typically optimal. In a policy application\, I derive optimal reform directions for corporate and shareholder income taxes for a large and a small economy. UID:145439-21897353@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/145439 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260313T134038 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T120000 SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:\"The Family Office: Wealth Elite and their Family Management\" DESCRIPTION:Join the Stone Center as we host Doron Shiffer-Sebba \, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University\, on Tuesday\, March 24\, as he presents\, \"The Family Office: Wealth Elite and their Family Management.\" \n\nPlease RSVP to save your seat. \n\nAbstract: Today’s richest Americans have amassed fortunes rivaled only by estates like Rockefeller and Carnegie\, with some arguing that the United States has reached a “New Gilded Age”. Accordingly\, scholars have studied the social and legal mechanisms through which individuals accumulate large fortunes. Yet we know little about how elites maintain their economic resources as families\, passing their wealth across generations. Using six months of ethnographic observation at a wealth manager that caters to top 0.1% wealthy families in the United States\, I argue that the legal system\, which focuses on nuclear families but largely ignores extended family ties\, incentivizes using tools\, like trusts and corporations\, that disperse wealth across family members. These tools then augment the role of family members and professionals in elite wealth management. They preserve elite wealth but\, paradoxically\, also limit their control. Dynamics within elite families and between families and professionals have far-reaching consequences for the distribution of elite wealth and subsequent patterns of inequality.\n\nDoron Shiffer-Sebba researches the intersection of extended families and economic inequality. He focuses on 1) elite wealthy families and how they organize their wealth\; 2) the role of extended families in economic inequality in the broader U.S. population\; and 3) developing novel computational methods to analyze how people use their bodies in social interaction. In doing so\, Doron employs a wide array of methodological perspectives -- ethnographic\, quantitative\, and computational. Doron is currently working on an ethnographic book manuscript that exposes the structural forces that keep economic elites wealthy and thus sustaining inequality. Before joining Northwestern's sociology department\, Doron completed his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. UID:146575-21899304@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/146575 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Institute For Social Research - 1430 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260126T103317 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Sticky Discount Rates DESCRIPTION:In standard models\, expected inflation on its own does not affect the real investment decisions of firms\, unless the real cost of capital or investment opportunities also change. We highlight a new mechanism\, which implies that this inflation neutrality breaks down when firms’ discount rates (which determine the nominal marginal product of capital) are sticky with respect to expected inflation. Sticky discount rates generate theoretical predictions that are consistent with stylized empirical facts but distinct from the New Keynesian textbook and other standard models: increases in expected inflation directly raise real investment\; demand shocks generate investment consumption comovement\; and the sensitivity of investment to real interest rates is low. Sticky discount rates imply monetary non-neutrality\, even when all other prices are flexible. In the New Keynesian optimal monetary policy problem\, the central bank steers long-run inflation expectations\, even in response to temporary shocks. UID:143298-21892654@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143298 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260128T081827 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Freemium Model for Information Provision DESCRIPTION:The paper explores a theoretical freemium model for the sale of information\, drawing on mathematical tools used in the study of repeated zero-sum games and Bayesian persuasion. Unlike in standard persuasion models\, the information seller (IS) is not affected by actions taken by the information buyer (IB)\, and is concerned solely with maximizing the revenue from selling information to the IB. Offering some information for free may increase the IB’s willingness to pay for additional information. The information that the IB seeks is modeled as information about the state of the world. Initially\, the IB only knows the prior distribution over possible state. The IS supplies both free and paid information through signals whose state‑dependent distributions determine the IB’s posterior via Bayes’ rule. The IB’s utility is a function of the posterior. An optimal free signal is one that maximizes the IS’s expected revenue from the subsequent paid signal. That revenue is equal to the IB’s expected gain in utility from the posterior induced by the free signal to the one induced by the paid signal. The paper characterizes the optimal free and paid signals and derives a formula for the maximal revenue in terms of the IB’s utility function. It shows that any revenue gain for the IS from providing free information is accompanied by an equally large or larger direct loss to the IB\, implying that free information is never socially beneficial. Whether or not free information can increase the IS’s revenue depends on the form of the IB’s utility function. In the two-state case\, the utility functions that allow such gains are fully characterized. In the general case\, only necessary conditions are obtained. In particular\, if the IB’s utility function is convex\, the IS can never profit from providing free information. This occurs\, for example\, when the IB uses the information to solve a decision problem. By contrast\, when the IB is engaged in strategic interaction with a third party\, the IS may benefit from providing free information. The paper presents a game‑theoretic example illustrating this possibility. UID:143379-21892967@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143379 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260303T163836 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T140000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:SRC Seminar Series Presents: Pricing Job Amenities: A Practitioner's Manual DESCRIPTION:https://umich.zoom.us/s/96736010964\nMeeting ID: 967 3601 0964\nPasscode: 685364\n\nAbstract: This paper presents a simple estimator for pricing job amenities in the presence of unobserved worker ability. First described in Bell (2020) and Bell et al. (2024)\, the approach treats ability as a structured residual that jointly shapes access to both pay and non-pay job attributes. Job choice is assumed to be governed by a single vertical job-quality index\, and\, conditional on this index\, an observed proxy for worker ability serves as an “anti-instrument” for recovering amenity prices. Identification hinges on a conditional independence assumption: if pay\, amenities\, and true ability were observed\, the anti-instrument would be redundant. I demonstrate that this approach generates amenity price estimates in line with experimental evidence from Mas and Pallais (2017)\, illustrating how observational data can replicate gold-standard experimental insights when first-order differences in workers’ offer sets are allowed to translate into better jobs not only in terms of pay\, but also along non-pay dimensions. The talk will also discuss how these ideas shed new light on patterns observed in major survey datasets\, including how the PSID can be used to study the role of job choice primitives in intergenerational economic mobility.\n\nBio: Alex Bell is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. His research\, grounded in labor economics\, focuses on inequality and innovation\, with methodological contributions to the study of compensating differentials. His work has appeared in leading economics journals\, including the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics\, and he received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University. UID:146155-21898601@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/146155 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Institute For Social Research - 1430BD CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260213T081903 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:The impact of TV's rollout on baseball in the US and soccer in England DESCRIPTION:After WW2 the dominant professional sports in the US (baseball) and England (soccer) faced a common shock - the rapid penetration of TV ownership. Both experienced significant declines in attendance and profitability. By 1960\, approximately 300 minor league baseball teams (75%) had folded and the residual teams came under the control of the 16 major league clubs. In England\, however\, none of the 92 professional clubs folded despite facing comparable economic pressures. These differences are attributed to institutional structures - notably the integrated governance of soccer\, compared to the fragmentation of baseball\, and the promotion and relegation system of soccer. The latter offered a mechanism for clubs to control costs and the possibility of a better future. UID:145431-21897340@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/145431 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260323T082306 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T150000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260324T170000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:MICDE State of AI & the Future of Institutions DESCRIPTION:The State of AI & the Future of Institutions event is hosted by the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE). We bring together scholars and institutional leaders to explore the current state and future trajectory of AI\; how it may reshape institutions and how we can be better prepared for its disruptive impact. This event aims to move beyond abstract debate and towards actionable insights and assess how institutions can more actively shape a more resilient and responsible future. We anticipate this event to recur every semester. UID:146034-21898298@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/146034 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Palmer Commons - Forum Hall CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260311T094019 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260325T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260325T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Counting Defiers: A Design-Based Model of a Randomized Experiment Can Reveal Evidence Beyond the Average Effect (with Neil Christy) DESCRIPTION:We estimate the numbers of always takers\, compliers\, defiers\, and never takers in the sample of people in an experiment\, rather than a hypothetical population from which it was drawn\, using structure from the randomization design. Our data include only a binary intervention and outcome. We develop a visualization to show that samples with defiers can sometimes generate the data in more ways than samples without defiers\, yielding a higher design-based likelihood. We propose a maximum likelihood decision rule that can harness this evidence\, which is not captured by standard hypothesis tests\, and we provide optimality conditions. We illustrate the output of our decision rule for all possible data in samples of 50 and 200 with half in intervention\, demonstrating a pattern in when the MLE includes defiers despite a positive average effect. We provide insights into effect heterogeneity in two published experiments with interventions that could plausibly backfire for some people despite statistically significant positive average effects on takeup of desirable health behaviors. In both\, our 95% credible sets include the estimated Frechet bounds\, demonstrating that evidence is weak. Yet\, our MLE includes no defiers in one\; in the other\, the MLE includes a count of defiers equal to the estimated upper Frechet bound\, over 18% of the sample. The MLE can support a monotonicity assumption or a specific alternative as a step toward improving the average effect of future interventions by targeting them away from noncompliers. Our dbmle package\, compatible with Python and Stata\, implements our statistics. UID:143692-21893654@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143692 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260115T122400 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260325T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260325T170000 SUMMARY:Other:Event Launch - Future of Real Estate Competition 2026 DESCRIPTION:In 2026\, the “Office Apocalypse” enters its next chapter—The Great Repurposing. Back for its fourth year\, the Future of Real Estate Competition launches on Wednesday\, March 25\, 2026\, challenging students to tackle this moment in the market with bold ideas and fresh perspectives. Tasked with reimagining an office property as a vibrant residential living space\, teams will draw on their knowledge\, creativity\, and ingenuity to deliver solutions that balance visionary design with real-world feasibility. \n\nDesigned to bridge architectural creativity with real-world financial feasibility\, teams of 3–5 multidisciplinary students will renovate a distressed asset and present their vision to a panel of esteemed industry judges. With $25\,000 in prize money on the line\, this year’s competition promises bold ideas\, thoughtful debate\, and meaningful connections with real estate leaders. \n\nRegister your team below\, and be sure to attend the FORE Competition Launch on March 25.\n\nImportant Dates & Things to Know:\n- Competition Launch: Wednesday\, March 25\, 2026 (virtual)\n- Applications Close: Thursday\, March 26\, 2026\, at 12:00 AM EST\n- Final Pitches: Wednesday\, April 8\, 2026 (in-person at the Ross School of Business)\n- Team Requirements:\n-> Teams of 3–5 University of Michigan students\n-> Undergraduate and graduate students welcome\n-> Your team CAN BE a mix of undergraduate students and graduate students\n-> Each team must include at least one member representing investment\, design & development\n- Prizes: $25\,000 total prize pool — register to win your share!\n\nInterested in participating but don’t yet have a team? No problem\, Weiser’s here to assist! Complete the Interest Form found on the Weiser website\, and the Weiser Center for Real Estate will help connect you with fellow students to ensure you find a team and are ready to compete.\n\nReady to register yourself and your teammates? Complete the Registration Form found on the Weiser website to let the Weiser Center know you’re in and officially join the competition. UID:143961-21894326@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143961 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Off Campus Location - Zoom info to be distributed upon registration CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260320T094815 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260326T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260326T115000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Dynamic Local Average Treatment Effects in Time Series DESCRIPTION:This paper discusses identification\, estimation\, and inference on dynamic local average treatment effects (LATEs) in instrumental variables (IVs) settings. First\, we show that com- pliers—observations whose treatment status is affected by the instrument—can be identified individually in time series data using smoothness assumptions and local comparisons of treat- ment assignments. Second\, we show that this result enables not only better interpretability of IV estimates but also direct testing of the exclusion restriction by comparing outcomes among identified non-compliers across instrument values. Third\, we document pervasive weak identifi- cation in applied work using IVs with time series data by surveying recent publications in leading economics journals. However\, we find that strong identification often holds in large subsamples for which the instrument induces changes in the treatment. Motivated by this\, we introduce a method based on dynamic programming to detect the most strongly-identified subsample and show how to use this subsample to improve estimation and inference. We also develop new identification-robust inference procedures that focus on the most strongly-identified subsample\, offering efficiency gains relative to existing full sample identification-robust inference when iden- tification fails over parts of the sample. Finally\, we apply our results to heteroskedasticity-based identification of monetary policy effects. We find that about 75% of observations are compliers (i.e.\, cases where the variance of the policy shifts up on FOMC announcement days)\, and we fail to reject the exclusion restriction. Estimation using the most strongly-identified subsample helps reconcile conflicting IV and GMM estimates in the literature. UID:143682-21893641@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143682 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260323T103650 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260326T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260326T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Residential Air Purifiers and the Value of Clean Air DESCRIPTION:In this paper\, we show that standard approaches for valuing non-market amenities like clean air through defensive expenditures are methodologically fragile. Estimates are highly sensitive to assumptions about household use of defensive technologies\, and survey data on usage is unreliable. Moreover\, because researchers convert a one-time purchase or willingness-to-pay elicitation into a flow value by dividing by assumed hours of use\, lower assumed usage can mechanically imply higher valuations. To address this fragility\, we develop a revealed- preference approach that estimates the flow value of clean air using high-frequency data on residential air purifier usage in Dhaka\, Bangladesh. Leveraging randomized variation in the marginal cost of operation\, we recover the households’ trade-off between money and clean air without relying on purchase decisions or stated usage intentions. We find that the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for clean air is lower and much more tightly bounded than previous estimates. This low valuation is not driven by traditional market frictions like liquidity constraints or misperceptions about pollution severity and technology effectiveness\, suggesting limits to environmental policies that rely on sustained complementary household action. UID:143573-21893407@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143573 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260313T101736 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260327T100000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260327T112000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Delegated Screening: Evidence from Government-Backed Loans (with Felipe Brugués\, Thi Mai Anh Nguyen\, and Sebastián Vélez) DESCRIPTION:Government guarantees are a ubiquitous policy tool\, leveraging intermediaries' informational advantage to allocate credit\, yet they introduce a fundamental agency conflict: by insulating lenders from losses\, they undermine the incentive to screen and distort product choice towards intermediaries' private benefits. This paper examines the power of dynamic incentives in mitigating both frictions. In the context of a large government-backed credit program in Colombia\, we find evidence that lenders conduct less screening and take on greater risk with government-backed loans than with their traditional products. However\, this tendency is mitigated by a dynamic quota-and-fee mechanism employed by the program. UID:146557-21899268@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/146557 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260304T110525 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260330T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260330T172000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Barriers to Benefits: Unemployment Insurance Take-Up and Labor Market Effects (with Casey McQuillan) DESCRIPTION:Unemployment insurance (UI) take-up is relatively low in the United States. We implement a large-scale field experiment among 50\,000 likely unemployed individuals to study the causes and labor supply implications of incomplete UI take-up. Informational letters increased applications and receipt\, with effects concentrated among low-wage workers. Rejection rates among treated applicants also increased: this suggests that the letters primarily reduced learning costs rather than improved eligibility beliefs. Randomized messages aimed at reducing free-rider stigma induced more applications\, primarily among high-wage job seekers. Although prior work finds that more generous UI slows job finding\, our take-up intervention modestly increased reemployment\, as work-search requirements hastened job finding among recipients but also screened out applicants who were unwilling or unable to verify their search. We develop and estimate a structural job search model calibrated to the reduced form-experimental results to quantify these frictions and show that lower search-compliance costs yield the largest welfare gains for unemployed workers. UID:146130-21898428@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/146130 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260325T005514 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260331T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260331T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Innovation Races: Strategic Complementarities and Global Competition Spillovers DESCRIPTION:The Innovation Race: Experimental Evidence on Advanced Technologies\nWe present a large-scale field experiment test of strategic complementarities in firms’ technology adoption. Our experiment was embedded in a Bank of Italy survey covering around 3\,000 firms. We elicited firms’ beliefs about competitors’ adoption of two advanced technologies: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics. We randomly provided half of the sample with accurate information about adoption rates. Most firms substantially underestimated competitors’ current adoption\, and when provided with information\, they updated their expectations about competitors’ future adoption. The information increased firms’ own intended future adoption of robotics: a 1 pp increase in the share of competitors expected to adopt advanced technologies causes an increase of 0.704 pp in the firm’s own robotics adoption. We do not observe a significant effect on AI adoption\, but we cannot rule out modest effects either. Our findings provide causal evidence on coordination in innovation and illustrate how information frictions shape technology diffusion.\n\nWe present a large-scale field experiment on the geography of strategic complementarities in firms’ AI investment. Our experiment was embedded in the ECB’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE)\, covering around 3\,300 firms across twelve European countries. We elicited firms’ beliefs about the share of domestic and foreign competitors investing in AI\, and randomly provided half of the sample with accurate information about both groups. Firms substantially underestimated competitors’ current AI investment\, especially for foreign competitors\, and updated both domestic and foreign beliefs in response to the information treatment. The information also increased firms’ own expected AI investment rate. Using a 2SLS framework\, we find that a 1 pp increase in the expected share of domestic competitors investing in AI raises the firm’s own expected AI investment rate by 0.567 pp\, while the corresponding effect of foreign competitors is close to zero and statistically insignificant. Our findings provide causal evidence that information frictions shape the diffusion of innovation and that strate- gic complementarities in AI investment are much stronger at the domestic than at the foreign level. UID:143299-21892655@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143299 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260320T100903 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260331T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260331T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Misspecification-Averse Estimation DESCRIPTION:We study optimal estimation when the likelihood may be misspecified. Building on tools from the theory of decision-making under uncertainty\, we analyze a class of axiomatically grounded optimality criteria which nests several existing misspecification-robust objectives. Within this class\, we introduce the constrained multiplier criterion\, which allows for flexible misspecification attitudes. We prove a local asymptotic minimax theorem for this criterion\, extending a classical efficiency bound to a limit experiment which incorporates both misspecification concerns and moment constraints. We characterize asymptotically optimal estimators as Bayes decision rules under a flat prior and an exponentially tilted likelihood that incorporates the moment constraints\, and show that feasible plug-in analogs are asymptotically optimal. UID:143380-21892968@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143380 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260325T005057 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260401T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260401T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:A Dynamic Evaluation of Parental Marriage and Children’s Skill Development DESCRIPTION:Children who grow up in two-parent households score 0.2-0.4 standard deviations higher on covariate-adjusted cognitive skill measures than children in single-parent households. This paper analyzes the extent to which these differences reflect causal effects of marriage versus selection. We develop a dynamic Roy model that allows for selection into and out of marriage\, with cognitive skill evolving according to a dynamic latent factor model. A long panel of marriage decisions permits identification of unobserved heterogeneity jointly affecting both marriage and skill development. Model estimates indicate that marriage improves skill development. A decomposition analysis suggests that differences in the technology of skill formation between the married and single states explains 30% of the skill difference between children growing up in two-parent and one-parent households while income differences explain 16%. UID:143695-21893656@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143695 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260330T081853 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Resource Allocation\, Technology Adoption\, and Productivity: A Quantitative Analysis with Panel Farm-Level Data (with Duc Nguyen) DESCRIPTION:We examine how resource allocation across production units shapes technology adoption and productivity growth\, combining a unique panel dataset of the universe of Canadian farms spanning 1986 to 2006 with a quantitative model of heterogeneous producers. The period features the advent and rapid di!usion of a major new seeding technique\, zero tillage\, whose use expanded from zero percent of cultivated land in 1986 to 60 percent by 2006. We document substantial technology adoption\, land consolidation\, and productivity growth\, facilitated by an economic environment characterized by relatively high allocative e”ciency\, whereby more productive farms operate at a larger scale. Empirically\, we find that adopting zero-tillage raises farm-level productivity substantially. Through quantitative analysis\, we estimate that zero-tillage adoption accounts for roughly 30 percent of the near doubling of agricultural productivity over the period and 45–70 percent of the observed structural transformation. We show that high allocative e”ciency was crucial for the widespread adoption of technology\, which would have nearly disappeared with correlated distortions commonly documented in developing countries. We also show that technological progress can be a powerful driver of catch-up growth in developing economies with low correlated distortions. UID:143300-21892656@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143300 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260128T091728 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Auctions as Experiments (with Ryota Iijima\, Yuhta Ishii\, and Nicholas Wu) DESCRIPTION:We study a seller who does not know the distribution of buyers’ values\, but can learn from observing their bids in an auction. Which auction formats provide better information about the value distribution? We show that among a large class of standard auctions (e.g.\, kth-price\, all-pay)\, the first-price auction is (Lehmann) most informative. Thus\, while all these auction formats yield the same expected static revenue\, the first-price auction is preferred by a seller who can use today’s bid observations to optimize revenue tomorrow. UID:143382-21892969@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143382 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260326T142505 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T140000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:SRC Seminar Series Presents: Inherited Inequality and Obligation Within Families DESCRIPTION:Abstract\nInheritances represent a major channel of economic transmission across generations\, shaping both inequality between families and disparities within them. Yet much research on stratification treats families as unified actors that collectively pass resources to the next generation\, overlooking how parents actually allocate resources among their children. Using family fixed‑effects models and data from the Health and Retirement Study\, we examine how inter vivos transfers and bequests are distributed within families. We find that children who receive more financial support during their parents’ lifetimes are also more likely to receive a bequest and a larger one. Rather than compensating for earlier imbalances\, bequests appear to amplify existing inequalities among siblings. These findings highlight key mechanisms in the reproduction of advantage and offer insights for policies seeking to reduce wealth inequality across generations. \n\nBiography\nAdriana Reyes is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Cornell University. Her research examines family demography and health disparities across the life course\, with a focus on how family ties serve as social capital and how they reinforce inequalities across race and class. Her work explores the ways intergenerational relationships\, living arrangements\, and caregiving expectations shape individuals’ social and economic well‑being. Professor Reyes’ current projects investigate racial and ethnic differences in intergenerational family relations\, the financial and health implications of household composition\, and evolving attitudes toward caregiving. UID:147102-21900380@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147102 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Institute For Social Research - 1430BD CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260213T081432 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260407T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Transport Infrastructure and Agriculture Productivity: Evidence from the Antebellum United States DESCRIPTION:This paper investigates the relationship between transport infrastructure and agricultural productivity in the Antebellum United States (1840–1860). Leveraging a novel dataset of county-pair transport costs\, we utilize time-\, region-\, and direction-specific freight rates and newly digitized road network to understand how declining transit costs reshaped the agrarian landscape and agricultural production. These data allow for a rigorous evaluation of what we can call an antebellum \"place-based\" transport policies and their heterogeneous effects on antebellum regions. We use minimum spanning tree approach to construct a plausibly exogenous transportation network which is used to assess the causal impact of transportation infrastructure on antebellum agriculture.\n \nOur first set of findings reveal that the impact of canal construction was not uniform\, showing considerable variation across different geographic regions. Notably\, in the Middle Atlantic\, the introduction of canals catalyzed a significant reallocation of resources away from wheat production\, signalling a shift in comparative advantage. While canals laid the groundwork\, railroads exerted the most transformative influence during the 1850s. In the final decade preceding the Civil War\, the expansion of the rail network drove a broad reallocation away from traditional grain production\, as improved connectivity facilitated deeper market integration and specialization. By accounting for the nuances of freight directionality and regional specificity\, this study provides new evidence on how infrastructure-led cost reductions altered land use and productivity patterns in the nineteenth-century U.S. economy. UID:143570-21893403@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143570 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260330T081439 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260408T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260408T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Understanding Criminal Record Penalties in the Labor Market DESCRIPTION:This paper studies the earnings and employment penalties associated with criminal records using linked data on criminal justice interactions\, state laws on formal labor market restrictions\, and wages and employment. We estimate fixed effects models that decompose earnings into a worker's portable earnings potential and firm pay premia\, both of which are allowed to shift after a worker acquires a record. We find that sorting into lower-paying firms explains a small share of the record penalty. Legal record restrictions are not concentrated in higher-paying jobs\, meaning that sorting away from them contributes little to the earnings gap. Conditional on earnings potential\, however\, workers with a record are substantially less likely to be employed. The results suggest that criminal record penalties operate primarily by reducing employment and lowering earnings potential at every firm rather than increasing sorting into lower-paying jobs\, although the bulk of the gaps can be attributed to differences that existed prior to acquiring a record. UID:143696-21893658@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143696 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260330T111931 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T120000 SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:“Power\, Purpose and the Color of Wealth: An Economic Vision that Centers People and the Environments in Which We Live” DESCRIPTION:Join the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics as we host Darrick Hamilton​\, University and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School. Darrick will present\, “Power\, Purpose and the Color of Wealth: An Economic Vision that Centers People and the Environments in Which We Live.”\n\nAbstract: “This talk will set the stage with a brief presentation of the Color of Wealth series\, an exploration of wealth and economic well-being across seven metropolitan areas: Baltimore\, Boston\, Chicago\, Los Angeles\, Miami\, Tulsa\, Washington DC. disaggregated by race and ancestry.\n\nWith this backdrop\, the talk will explore the manner in which asymmetries in power and economic agency\, especially by race and other identity groupings\, link to political economic structures and more macro economic deprivations that plague our economy. Ultimately\, this talk will explore the concepts of purpose\, power\, paradigm and solidarity with a purpose of defining and determining an alternative economic vision for a human rights economy as the point and mechanism for a well-functioning economy and multiracial democracy.”\n\nDarrick Hamilton is the University Professor and Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School\, where he also founded and directs the Institute on Race\, Power & Political Economy. He additionally serves as Chief Economist at the AFL-CIO. Widely regarded as one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals\, Professor Hamilton reimagines how an economy should work—identifying bold opportunities to invest in our human capacity and fostering collaborations that advance economic inclusion\, social equity\, and civic engagement in the United States and around the world.\n\nA pioneer in the economics subfield of identity group stratification\, Professor Hamilton’s research has been featured in The New York Times\, Mother Jones\, Bloomberg Businessweek\, and The Wall Street Journal. He has developed and advised on transformative policy proposals—such as baby bonds\, guaranteed income\, and a federal job guarantee—that have inspired legislation and shifted billions of dollars toward building a fair and inclusive economy.\n\nIn 2025\, Professor Hamilton was named the Katherine Hampson Bessell Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and was recognized as a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation in its 2020 inaugural class. He has advised national and global leaders on economic policy\, including the U.S. Joint Economic Committee and the Senate Banking Committee and also serves on the board of directors of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).\n\nBorn and raised in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood\, Professor Hamilton earned his bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.\n\nPlease RSVP to save your seat. UID:147203-21900522@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147203 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Institute For Social Research - 6050 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260401T090119 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T115000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Improved Inference for Nonparametric Regression (joint with G.Cavaliere\, M. Nielsen\, and E. Zanelli) DESCRIPTION:Nonparametric regression estimators\, including those employed in regression-discontinuity designs (RDD)\, are central to the economist’s toolbox. Their application\, however\, is complicated by the presence of asymptotic bias\, which undermines coverage accuracy of conventional confidence intervals. Extant solutions to the problem include debiasing methods\, such as the widely applied robust bias-corrected (RBC) confidence interval of Calonico et al. (2014\, 2018). We show that this interval is equivalent to a prepivoted interval based on an invalid residualbased bootstrap method. Specifically\, prepivoting performs an implicit bias correction while adjusting the nonparametric regression estimator’s standard error to account for the additional uncertainty introduced by debiasing. This idea can also be applied to other bootstrap schemes\, leading to new implicit bias corrections and corresponding standard error adjustments. We propose a prepivoted interval based on a bootstrap that generates observations from nonparametric regression estimates at each regressor value and show how it can be implemented as an RBCtype interval without the need for resampling. Importantly\, we show that the new interval is shorter than the existing RBC interval. For example\, with the Epanechnikov kernel\, the length is reduced by 17%\, while maintaining accurate coverage probability. This result holds irrespectively of: (a) the evaluation point being in the interior or on the boundary\; (b) the use of a ‘small’ or ‘large’ bandwidths\; (c) the distribution of the regressor and the error term. UID:143683-21893642@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143683 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260327T172407 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260409T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:The Drafted Nation: Economic and Political Legacies of Conscription (with Siddharth George and Kewei Zhang) DESCRIPTION:This paper provides the first comprehensive evidence on the multifaceted legacy of military conscription across the world. We construct a new global database of conscription policy reforms linked to hundreds of census and survey data sources. Exploiting cohort-based eligibility cutoffs\, we compare individuals just eligible for service to those just exempt. On average\, conscription increases men's adult socioeconomic status\, driven by higher university attainment\, greater geographic mobility\, and the transferability of military-acquired skills. Effects are largest where the opportunity cost of service is low and reintegration into civilian life is strong. Economic gains extend to households: women who marry conscription-eligible men experience higher living standards\, and their children exhibit lower mortality\, despite no direct effects on women's own education or employment. Conscription also fosters interethnic marriage\, national-language use\, and patriotic attachment\, but simultaneously increases xenophobia and gender conservatism\, revealing a tradeoff between national integration and tolerance. Effects vary widely across countries depending on political institutions\, development\, diversity\, and conscription design. Economic and sociopolitical effects are positively correlated\, suggesting that nation-building is strongest where conscription delivers greater economic returns. UID:143575-21893411@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143575 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260408T122831 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260410T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260410T130000 SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:CSEAS Friday Lecture Series | Incentivizing Lending to Women Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Vietnam DESCRIPTION:Please note: This lecture will be held in person and virtually on Zoom. The webinar is free and open to the public\, but registration is required. Once you've registered\, joining information will be sent to your email. Register for the Zoom webinar at: https://myumi.ch/9p7D9\n\n In collaboration with a leading Vietnamese commercial bank\, we evaluate the impact of two types of incentives to loan officers for the recruitment of women-owned or -led small- and medium-sized enterprises (WSMEs) as new borrowing clients. The average loan size in this segment is about $20\,000 USD (5x GDP per capita). 50 bank branches employing 550 lending staff are randomly assigned to one of the following treatments: (1) a monthly multi-category contest\; (2) a piece-rate incentive per loan\; or (3) control. The multi-category contest is inclusive in that it rewards not just the very top performing agents\, but also top performers among new agents (“rookies”) and most improved performers. We find that\, overall\, both interventions cause an increase in WSME lending\, particularly in later periods\, at largely similar magnitudes. In terms of spillovers\, there may be moderate negative impacts on non-WSME lending early in the treatment period\, but over time there is a significant\, positive spillover on non-WSME lending. Our results have the potential to inform policies to promote (W)SME lending through optimizing loan officer incentives. More broadly\, they provide some of the first experimental evidence from a high-stakes\, real-world setting on whether competitive or piece rate incentives better improve the performance of high-skill workers completing uncertain tasks.\n\nMarkus Taussig’s research and teaching focus on international business and strategy\, with a focus on emerging economies—especially those in Southeast Asia. More specifically\, he studies how firm performance and behavior is influenced by weak market institutions. He also has extensive experience and expertise in the global private equity and manufacturing (especially apparel) industries and in survey design and implementation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs).\n\n*Accommodation: If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you\, please contact us at cseas@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.* UID:142986-21891908@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/142986 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Weiser Hall - Room 110 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260203T093715 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260414T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260414T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Lock-in and productive innovations: implications for firm-to-firm innovation pass-through DESCRIPTION:Firms innovate to improve efficiency and reduce their costs of production (productive innovations) and to increase customer dependency by reducing the substitutability of their products (lock-in innovations). In this paper\, I quantitatively study the macroeconomic implications of lock-in innovations for aggregate productivity and market power. I develop a theoretical framework that allows firms to invest in lock-in innovations by reducing product substitutability\, while also nesting standard macroeconomic models of productive innovations. A key prediction of the model is that productive innovations by suppliers increase customer firms’ sales by lowering input costs\, while lock-in innovations decrease customer firms' sales by allowing suppliers to charge higher prices for products that are harder to substitute. I use this theoretical insight to identify the nature of innovation in the data and calibrate the model to the U.S. economy. Informed by the observed changes in the response of customer firms' sales to their suppliers' innovations\, I find that the incidence of lock-in innovations among high-markup firms has increased significantly in the post-2000 period. Moreover\, had the incidence of lock-in innovations remained at pre-2000 levels\, observed aggregate productivity would have been 3% higher\, median markups would have stayed at pre-2000 levels\, and markup dispersion would have been 9% lower. UID:143302-21892657@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143302 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260406T101914 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260414T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260414T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Screening Frontiers DESCRIPTION:A principal screens an agent with an arbitrary set of allocations X. The agent’s preferences over allocations are comonotonic. A subset of allocations X ‹ Ď X is a surplus-elasticity frontier if (i) any other allocation has a demand curve that is pointwise lower and less elastic than some allocation in X ‹ and (ii) the allocations in X ‹ can be ordered in terms of their demand curves such that a higher demand curve is more inelastic. We show that any surplus-elasticity frontier is an optimal menu. Moreover\, if the incremental demand curves along the frontier are also ordered by their elasticities\, then the frontier is optimal even among stochastic mechanisms. The result is agnostic to type distributions and redistributive welfare weights—the same frontier remains optimal for a broad class of objectives. As applications\, we show how these results immediately yield new insights into optimal bundling\, optimal taxation\, sequential screening\, selling information\, and regulating a data-rich monopolist. UID:143383-21892971@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143383 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260330T123922 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260415T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260415T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Same Crime\, Different Time: Disparities in Judicial Outcomes for DWI Offenders DESCRIPTION:We examine disparities in judicial outcomes among people charged with Driving While Intoxicated (DWI)\, a setting in which legal guilt is objectively determined by breath alcohol content (BrAC). Focusing on first-time offenders with no aggravating circumstances and BrAC above the legal threshold\, we find that race\, gender\, and financial resources strongly predict the likelihood of incarceration and case dismissal. Defendants with greater socioeconomic advantage are more likely to access rehabilitative alternatives and avoid criminal records. We discuss how these outcome differences may reflect not only disparities in options offered by the court\, but also in defendants’ choices among them. UID:143697-21893659@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143697 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260413T084227 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Digital Financial Services and Women’s Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania\, joint with Rachel Heath DESCRIPTION:Can increasing women's use of digital financial services raise their empowerment? We test this hypothesis using a randomized control trial with 152 female microfinance groups in Tanzania\, where treated groups were randomly switched from cash to mobile money loan repayment. This exogenous increase in women's use of mobile money leads women to expand their use for other types of transactions\, including business payments and saving. Women's control over their finances increases and they are more empowered within the household. Over time\, women's businesses become more profitable. These findings highlight the benefits of shifting payments to digital for women. UID:147663-21901480@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147663 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260408T091609 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260416T160000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Land Conservation and the Clean Energy Transition:Evidence from U.S. Wind and Solar Development DESCRIPTION:We study the interactions between land conservation policy and renewable energy development using over a decade of U.S. wind and solar grid interconnection applications linked to fine-grained geospatial data. A model of competitive site selection shows that the welfare implications of land use protections depend on the correlation between conservation value and private development potential. When this correlation is weak\, targeted restrictions can steer projects away from ecologically sensitive areas without meaningfully raising technology deployment costs. Estimating a sequential model of site entry and project advancement\, we find that wetlands protections and conservation easements significantly deter development. Correlations between measures of engineering profitability and measures of conservation value are near zero\, implying that the landscape is amenable to well-targeted conservation policy. However\, our estimates of the ‘soft costs’ imposed by the existing patchwork of restrictions appear substantial. Ongoing counterfactual analysis aims to quantify these compliance burdens and assess how alternative land use regimes could reshape the spatial allocation of renewable energy development. UID:143457-21893203@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143457 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260403T100021 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260417T100000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260417T112000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Going for Broker? Intermediation in Health Insurance Markets DESCRIPTION:This paper studies how insurance brokers affect product choices\, premiums\, and welfare in the employer-sponsored insurance market. We compile a novel database of contracting relationships among employers\, brokers\, and insurers in New York State. Exploiting variations in commission schedules\, we document two market distortions: First\, brokers exhibit traditional agency frictions\, steering employers towards more financially lucrative products. Second\, commission levels affect ex-ante insurer-broker networks and\, in turn\, insurers' competitive pressure\, leading to anti-competitive distortions. We develop and estimate a structural model of employer insurance demand\, insurer pricing\, and formation of broker-insurer contracting networks. We use the model to study a commission-cap counterfactual. A one-percentage-point cap reduces broker-induced steering and raises employer surplus by 3\%\, but the resulting reduction in insurer competition lowers surplus by over 6\%\, yielding a net decline of about 3\%. We also explore the impacts of fiduciary duties and network regulations for insurance brokers. UID:147379-21900941@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/147379 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260409T092232 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260417T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260417T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Incentive Compatibility and Belief Restrictions (with A. Penta) DESCRIPTION:We study a framework for robust mechanism design with multiple agents that accommodates various degrees of robustness with respect to agents' beliefs\, and encompasses both the belief-free and Bayesian robustness criteria. For general \emph{belief restrictions}\, we characterize the set of incentive compatible direct transfer mechanisms in general environments with interdependent values. Based on a \emph{first-order approach}\, we obtain a design principle to attain incentive compatibility via `belief-based' terms. In environments that satisfy a property of \emph{generalized independence}\, our results imply a \emph{robust} version of \emph{revenue equivalence}. Extending the notion of correlated information\, we introduce a notion of \emph{comovement} between types and beliefs\, defined based on a moment condition. Under comovement\, we characterize the full set of `belief-based' terms. Based on this\, we show that from Bayesian settings the following result extends to this fairly mild restriction on beliefs: any allocation rule can be implemented\, even in environments without single-crossing or monotonicity. However\, full rent extraction need not follow. Information rents typically remain\, and they decrease monotonically as the robustness requirement is weakened. UID:143384-21892974@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143384 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260413T143431 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260420T160000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260420T172000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:WHY DOESN’T THE UNITED STATES HAVE NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE? THE POLITICAL ROLE OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION DESCRIPTION:This study examines how the American Medical Association (AMA) helped shape the development of the U.S. health insurance system in the critical period after World War II. Working with the political public relations firm Campaigns\, Inc.\, the AMA launched a nationwide campaign to weaken support for National Health Insurance by framing it as “socialized medicine\,” while simultaneously enrolling people in private health insurance plans to shift demand away from a public alternative. Drawing on newly assembled archival data\, we find that greater exposure to the campaign explains about 20% of the rise in private health insurance enrollment and a comparable decline in public support for a national program. The campaign also appears to have influenced policymaking through coordinated messaging\, resolutions passed by civic organizations\, congressional rhetoric\, and political donations. These findings suggest that the rise of private health insurance in the United States was not solely due to macroeconomic forces or collective bargaining\; rather it was also enabled by a strategic\, interest group-financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy. UID:145436-21897345@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/145436 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260112T100344 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T103000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T115000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Joint Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics and ISR-Zwerdling Seminar in Labor Economics: Tuesday\, April 21 DESCRIPTION:-- UID:143698-21893660@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143698 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Institute For Social Research - 1430 AC CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260413T092642 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T113000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T125000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Why Are Some Recoveries Weak and Others Strong? DESCRIPTION:Why were the recoveries from the 1990-1\, 2001\, and 2007-9 recessions weak relative to other postwar recessions? Leveraging heterogeneous exposure to the national business cycle across U.S. States\, we estimate the trajectory of more exposed U.S. States relative to less exposed U.S. States. For the 1990-1\, 2001\, and 2007-9 recessions we estimate that more exposed States experienced a stronger boom-bust cycle and for the other postwar recessions we estimate a deeper V-shaped recession in more exposed States. Our estimates support theories that these recessions are caused by different shocks. In a quantitative model matched to our cross-sectional estimates\, boom-bust cycles persistently depress the natural rate of interest R∗ in the recovery\, whereas R∗ is elevated following V-shaped recessions UID:143303-21892658@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143303 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260407T090413 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T130000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T142000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Digital Ecosystems and Data Regulation DESCRIPTION:This paper develops a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with multiple single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem can use data from one product to improve the quality of its other products. We use the framework to study three regulatory policies aimed at leveling the playing field. Restricting the ecosystem’s cross-product data usage\, or forcing it to share data with single-product firms\, benefits those firms and induces them to innovate more. However\, these policies also dampen the ecosystem’s incentive to collect data and innovate\, potentially raising prices. Consumers are better off only when single-product firms are sufficiently good at innovating. Facilitating data exchange between single-product firms via a data cooperative can backfire and harm them\, because it induces the ecosystem to price more aggressively. For both the data-sharing and data-cooperative policies\, there exist data-compensation schemes such that consumers are better off compared to no regulation. UID:143387-21892976@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143387 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260109T093947 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260421T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Economic History: Sebastian Sotelo DESCRIPTION:-- UID:143571-21893404@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/143571 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20251218T085055 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260422T120000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260422T130000 SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:The Regulatory\, Property\, and Human Rights-Based Strategies for Protecting American Waterways DESCRIPTION:Erin Ryan\, Associate Dean for Environmental Programs and Elizabeth C. & Clyde W. Atkinson Professor\, Florida State University College of Law\n\nThis analysis introduces a framework of three different strategies for protecting American waterways—the conventional regulatory approach\, an alternative property-based approach\, and a newer human rights-based approach—and reviews how the dynamic among them will be impacted by recent Supreme Court decisions impacting environmental law. The rights of nature movement has emerged as a human rights-based approach to environmental protection\, the public trust doctrine offers a public property-based approach\, and the Clean Water Act epitomizes the more traditional regulatory approach. \n\nIn recent years\, however\, the Court issued a series of decisions that have unwound nearly a half-century of accepted regulatory practice\, limiting the reach of the Clean Water Act as a tool for protecting waterways in Sackett v. EPA\, weakening the reach of the Clean Air Act in West Virginia v. EPA\, and weakening environmental agencies more generally in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. These cases will exact a cost for wise environmental governance under all three models reviewed here. UID:142887-21891766@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/142887 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:Jeffries Hall - 1020 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTAMP:20260413T082805 DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20260422T143000 DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20260422T155000 SUMMARY:Workshop / Seminar:Development as Skills and Altruism DESCRIPTION:This paper emphasizes the central role of skill and altruism in development\, defined as an increase in social welfare. In the basic model\, skills expand the set of feasible payoffs\, while altruism guides the decision maker’s choice. Greater skills need not increase social welfare\, because such expansions combine a positive frontier effect with an ambiguous substitution effect\, potentially toward actions that are privately attractive but socially harmful. This ambiguous effect of skills on development is referred to as the “lottery of the technology” and disappears when altruism is high enough to ensure that new opportunities created by skills are used only when they raise social welfare. Extensions of the model show that 1) endogenous technological change makes altruism even more influential in the long run 2) the effect of stronger institutions is subject to a “lottery of alignment of interests” between policymakers’ private gains and social welfare\, unless policymakers’ altruism is high enough to ensure the good use of institutional power\, making institutions a lever of altruism rather than a substitute and 3) allowing altruism to be group-specific shows that only universal altruism guarantees the effective use of skill improvements. This framework speaks to many contemporary and historical events and leads to the conclusion that ensuring long-term development requires both the selection of altruistic leaders and a population shift in the distribution of altruism. UID:144125-21894695@events.umich.edu URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/144125 CLASS:PUBLIC STATUS:CONFIRMED CATEGORIES:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4300 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT 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 LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT 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:Economics LOCATION:North Quad - 4325 CONTACT: END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR