What are the opening hours?

Monday 8am - 12pm 1pm - 5pm Tuesday 8am - 12pm 1pm - 5pm Wednesday 8am - 12pm 1pm - 5pm Thursday 8am - 12pm 1pm - 5pm Friday 8am - 12pm 1pm - 5pm

The University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics

Home
United States
Austin, TX
The University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics

The Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin is nationally recognized for its re

01/02/2015

Happy New Year!

12/08/2014

Today's Seminar - Eric Verhoogen, 12/8/2014

Labor

Eric Verhoogen
Columbia University

Enlisting Employees in Improving Payroll-Tax Compliance: Evidence from Mexico

Abstract: Non-compliance of firms with tax regulations is a major constraint on state capacity in developing countries. We focus on an arguably under-appreciated dimension of non-compliance: under-reporting of wages by formal firms to evade payroll taxes. We develop a simple partial-equilibrium model of endogenous compliance by heterogeneous firms to guide the empirical investigation. We then compare two independent sources of individual-level wage information from Mexico -- firms' wage reports to the Mexican social security agency and workers' responses to a household labor-force survey -- to investigate the extent of wage under-reporting and how it responded to an important change in the social security system. We document that under-reporting by formal firms is extensive, and that compliance is better in larger firms. Using a difference-in-differences strategy based on the 1997 Mexican pension reform, which effectively tied pension benefits more closely to reported wages for younger workers than for older workers, we show that the reform led to a relative decline in under-reporting for younger workers. Within metro area/sector/firm size cells, the decline in under-reporting was greater in cells initially employing a younger workforce on average. The empirical patterns are consistent with our theoretical model and suggest that giving employees incentives and information to improve the accuracy of employer reports can be an effective way to improve payroll-tax compliance.

Monday, December 8, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

12/05/2014

Today's Seminar - Aline Butikofer, 12/5/2014

Labor

Aline Butikofer
Norwegian School of Economics

Long-Term Consequences of Access to Well-child Visits

Abstract: This paper uses the rollout of mother and child health care centers starting in the 1930s to study the long-term consequences of increasing access to well-child visits. These well-child visits included a physical examination and the provision of information about adequate infant nutrition. Our results indicate that access to mother and child health care centers has a positive effect on education and earnings: access to well-child visits in the first year of life increases the completed years of schooling by 0.12--0.18 years and earnings by 1--2 percent. In addition, we analyze potential mechanisms and find that both nutrition and health examinations were important. In particular, we present evidence that men are less obese and suffer less from cardiac events when they had access to mother and child health care centers and that centers, which offered extra health care services affected infants to a larger extend.

Friday, December 5, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

12/05/2014

Today's seminar - Alexander Wolitzky, 12/3/2014

Theory

Alexander Wolitzky
Stanford University

Mechanism Design with Maxmin Agents: Theory and an Application to Bilateral Trade (PDF)

Abstract: This paper studies mechanism design when agents are maxmin expected utility maximizers. The first result gives a general necessary condition for a social choice rule to be implementable. The condition combines an inequality version of the standard envelope characterization of payoffs in quasilinear environments with an approach for relating maxmin agents’ subjective expected utilities to their objective expected utilities under any common prior. The condition is then applied to give an exact characterization of when efficient trade is possible in the bilateral trading problem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983), under the assumption that agents know each other’s expected valuation of the good (which is the information structure that emerges when the agents start with a common prior but are pessimistic about how the other agent might acquire information before participating in the mechanism). Whenever efficient trade is possible, it may be implemented by a relatively simple double auction format.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

12/01/2014

Today's Seminar - Bob Town, 12/1/2014

Industrial Organization

Bob Town
University of Pennsylvania, Wharton

Myopia and Complex Dynamic Incentives: Evidence from Medicare Part D

Abstract: Under the standard benefit package, Medicare Part D drug coverage provides no coverage in a “donut hole" region, which makes the purchase problem dynamic. We specify a dynamic drug purchase model with hyperbolic discounting. We develop a regression discontinuity based test for myopia, using a sample of enrollees who arrived near the coverage gap early in the year and hence who should rationally expect to reach
it. We find that that purchases are at before the gap but that there are fewer and cheaper purchases immediately after reaching the gap, providing evidence of myopia. We structurally estimate the dynamic model using maximum likelihood. We find that, for the full sample of Part D enrollees, behavioral hazard increases enrollee spending by 44%. A counterfactual policy that closed the coverage gap in a revenue-neutral way would require 42% coinsurance.

Monday, December 1, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/24/2014

Today's Seminar - Nese Yildiz, 11/24/2014

Econometrics

Nese Yildiz
University of Rochester

Diagnostic Tests of Selection on Observables Assumption: The Case of WIC

Abstract: Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is a federally funded program that \provides nutritious foods, nutrition education (including breastfeeding promotion and support), and referrals to health and other social services to participants at no charge. WIC serves low-income pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women, and infants and children up to age 5 who are at nutrition risk... Congress appropriated 6:522 billion for WIC in FY 2013." (Source: http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/_les/WIC-Fact-Sheet.pdf, date: 4/24/14, 11:06am.) While the goals of WIC are clear, there does not seem to be a consensus about the effects of WIC. The main source of disagreement is the possibility that the participation into the program may not be random, and whether the controls in a given study do a good job eliminating the effects of this possible non-random selection and, hence, estimate the true effect of WIC participation. In this paper we present diagnostic tests for selection on observables assumption. Our diagnostic tests are based on the presence of a variable W among our controls that has a known bunching point (we normalize this point to be 0; in our example, W will denote number of ci******es smoked during pregnancy, which is constrained to be non-negative), but is otherwise continuously distributed. This set up was first exploited by Caetano(2012) to test exogeneity of smoking during pregnancy (same W variable we are considering) in considering the effect of smoking during pregnancy on baby's birthweight. She found that smoking during pregnancy is indeed endogenous, even in a model that includes a rich set of other controls. Caetano's test, however, cannot be applied to test exogeneity of a discrete covariate, which is the focus of this paper. We demonstrate our diagnostic tests using birth certificate data, which covers more than 80% of all births in the U.S. from 2010 - 2012 and contains a rich, detailed set of parental and pregnancy covariates, to study the impact of the Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) on birth outcomes.

Monday, November 24, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/20/2014

Today's Seminar - Jeff Brown, 11/20/2014

Development

Jeff Brown
University of Illinois

Procrastination, Present-Biased Preferences, and Financial Behaviors

Abstract: We provide new and robust empirical evidence that procrastinators behave differently than non-procrastinators for five important retirement-related financial behaviors. Empirically, we define a procrastinator as an individual who waits until the last day of their health care open enrollment period to make their plan election. Using three separate administrative data sets, we show that procrastinators are: (i) less likely to participate in a supplemental savings plan, (ii) take longer to sign up for 401(k) plans, (iii) contribute less, (iv) are more likely to stick with default portfolio allocations, and (v) are less likely to take the annuity payout option from their DB plan, especially when the plan is framed so as to make the investment features more salient. Further evidence shows that these findings are best explained by procrastination being the outcome of present-biased preferences, consistent with the predictions of leading economic models of procrastination.

Thursday, November 20, 2014 • 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM • BRB 2.136

11/19/2014

Today's Seminar - Andrew Ellis, 11/19/2014

Theory

Andrew Ellis
London School of Economics

Complexity, Correlation, and Choice

Abstract: In many economic situations, a profile of actions rather than a single action determines payoffs. The former case is more complex, as the correlations among outcomes across actions are payoff-relevant. Existing choice-theoretic models do not allow this complexity to affect behavior. To construct such a model, we introduce a framework that explicitly models choice of an action profile. We show that the axiom “Monotonicity” precludes a role for complexity and propose a weakening thereof that accounts for the possibility that the agent perceives correlations incorrectly. When the agent satisfies the other subjective expected utility axioms, the axiom ensures she acts as if she assigns probabilities to all potential correlations between actions and then maximizes expected utility. The model accommodates, and provides insight into the behavioral connection between, phenomena such as correlation neglect, cursed behavior, and home bias. We also identify the behavior that characterizes the events and actions the agent understands and relate it to our representation.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/17/2014

Today's Seminar - Yanqin Fan, 11/17/2014

Econometrics

Yanqin Fan
University of Washington

Partial Identification and Confidence Sets for Functionals of the Joint Distribution of "Potential Outcomes"

Abstract: In this paper, we present a systematic study of partial identification of two general classes of funtionals of the joint distribution of two “potential outcomes” when a bivariate sample from the joint distribution is not available to the econometrician. We establish the identified sets for functionals in both classes under various maintained assumptions and characterize conditions under which our identified sets point identify the true value of the functionals. In addition, we establish sufficient and necessary conditions for the covariate information to tighten the identified sets without the covariate information. Applications include, but not limited to, the evaluation of distributional treatment effects of a binary treatment and pricing options written on two underlying assets when the sample information only contains observations on traded options written on each individual asset. In the former, the class of functionals include the correlation coefficient between the potential outcomes, many inequality measures of the distribution of treatment effects, and median of the distribution of the individual treatment effect. We focus on two commonly used frameworks for evaluating treatment effects: the selection on observables framework and a latent threshold-crossing model and characterize the role of the propensity score in the selection-on-observables framework and the role of endogenous selection in the latent threshold-crossing model. For the selection-on-observables framework, we construct asymptotically valid confidence sets for the true value of the parameter corresponding to a super-modular functional.

Monday, November 17, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/14/2014

Today's Seminar - Daniele Paserman, 11/14/2014

Labor

Daniele Paserman
Boston University

Three-generation Mobility in the United States, 1850-1940: The Role of Maternal and Paternal Grandparents (PDF)

Abstract: This paper estimates intergenerational elasticities across three generations in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We extend the methodology in Olivetti and Paserman (2013) to explore four different channels of intergenerational mobility: between fathers sons and grandsons; fathers, sons and granddaughters; fathers, daughters and grandsons; and fathers, daughters, and granddaughters. We document three main findings. First, there is evidence of a strong second-order autoregressive coefficient for the process of intergenerational transmission of income. Second, the socio-economic status of grandsons is influenced more strongly by paternal grandfathers than by maternal grandfathers. Third, maternal grandfathers are more important for granddaughters than for grandsons, while the opposite is true for paternal grandfathers. We propose two alternative theoretical frameworks that can rationalize these findings.

Friday, November 14, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/12/2014

Today's Seminar - Takuo Sugaya, 11/12/2014

Theory

Takuo Sugaya
Stanford University

The Folk Theorem in Repeated Games with Individual Learning

Abstract: We study repeated games where players observe noisy private signals about the unknown state of the world in every period. We find a sufficient condition under which the folk theorem obtains by ex-post equilibria. Our condition is satisfied for generic signal distributions as long as each player has at least two possible private signals.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

11/11/2014

Today's Seminar - James Cloyne, 11/11/2014

Macroeconomics

James Cloyne
Bank of England

Household Debt and the Dynamic Effects of Tax Changes

Abstract: Using a long span of expenditure survey data and a new narrative measure of exogenous income tax changes for the United Kingdom, we show that households with mortgage debt exhibit large and persistent consumption responses to tax changes. Home-owners without a mortgage, in contrast, do not appear to adjust their expenditure, with responses not statistically different from zero at all horizons. We compare our findings to the predictions of theories of liquidity constraints based on (the composition of) net wealth, providing a novel interpretation for the aggregate effects of tax changes on the real economy.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 • 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM • BRB 1.118

Address

2300 Speedway
Austin, TX
78712

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 12pm
	1pm - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 12pm
	1pm - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 12pm
	1pm - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 12pm
	1pm - 5pm
Friday	8am - 12pm
	1pm - 5pm

Telephone

+15124713211

Website

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/economics/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The University of Texas at Austin - Department of Economics posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Address
Telephone
Opening Hours
Alerts
Contact The University
Claim ownership or report listing

Want your university to be the top-listed University in Austin?

01/02/2015

12/08/2014

12/05/2014

12/05/2014

12/01/2014

11/24/2014

11/20/2014

11/19/2014

11/17/2014

11/14/2014

11/12/2014

11/11/2014

Address

Opening Hours

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share