Semester Two 23/24

Monday 15th January, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Friday 16th February, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Monday 19th February, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Friday 23rd February, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Friday 15th March, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Monday 18th March, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title: TBC

Monday 22nd March March, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title TBC

Monday 25th March, 11:30 - 13:00 GMT

Paper title TBC

Monday 22nd April, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Tuesday 30th April, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: Measuring and Estimating Retail Productivity

Wednesday 1st May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Friday 10th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Monday 13th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Tuesday 14th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Monday 20th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: TBC

Wednesday 22nd May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: From Design to Disclosure

Co-authors: S. Nageeb Ali and Andreas Kleiner

This paper studies voluntary disclosure in sender-receiver games in which the sender discloses evidence to a receiver who then offers an allocation and transfers. Our framework encompasses monopoly pricing, bargaining over policies, and insurance markets. In this setting, we characterize the full set of equilibrium payoffs. Our main result establishes that any payoff profile that can be achieved through information design can also be supported in an equilibrium of the disclosure game. Hence, in the contracting environments that we study, our analysis offers a microfoundation for information design and suggests that the gap between information design and disclosure is negligible.

Monday 27th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: Why firms lay off workers instead of cutting wages: evidence from linked survey-administrative data

Thursday 30th May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: Assortative Matching and Human Capital Investment

I develop a dynamic model of sorting between workers and firms in which it is possible to endogenously invest in the worker's general human capital. The capability of a worker-firm pair to produce both tradeable output and further human capital may depend non-parametrically on both the worker's current human capital and firm type. Supermodularity of the technology with respect to the types does not suffice for strict positive assortative matching (PAM) in the competitive equilibrium; much stronger assumptions must be imposed. If high-productivity firms are better at training and production is concave in human capital, then PAM is not guaranteed even if production is supermodular in the types. In particular, with enough concavity, the importance of getting low-skilled workers paired with the best firms may outweigh the effects of supermodularity. With simple examples, it is shown that randomisation in the matching process may be an endogenous outcome, even in the absence of search or informational frictions. I prove that under weaker conditions, it is sometimes possible to determine whether the correlation between worker and firm type will be positive or negative, without any knowledge of the distribution of types. Furthermore, I prove that under some conditions, workers sort in a manner such that the highest skilled workers see their wages increase at the fastest rate, giving firms a highly active role in the dispersion of wages and inequality over the life cycle.

Friday 31st May, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: Superstar Teams

Recent studies attribute the rise in wage inequality primarily to widening pay disparities between rather than within firms. I develop a novel theory to quantitatively explain this fact. The theory has three core features: production takes place in teams; workers are heterogeneous in talent and are specialized in specific tasks; and labor markets are frictional. Specialization endogenously generates coworker complementarity: talented workers gain more from more talented colleagues. This creates an incentive for assortative matching, fostering dispersion in average wages across firms, but search frictions prevent perfect sorting in equilibrium. Using administrative panel data for Germany, I measure complementarities, validate key mechanisms, and estimate the model. I argue that specialization has intensified since the mid-1980s, and show that coworker complementarities and talent sorting have strengthened concurrently, aligned with the theory’s predictions. According to model exercises, this explains a significant share of the observed increase in the between-firm share of wage inequality, and it contributed to elevated firm-level productivity dispersion. Rising complementarities also worsened aggregate productivity losses from coworker mismatch, but endogenously increased sorting partly mitigated this effect ​.

Monday 3rd June, 11:30 - 13:00 BST

Paper title: Aggregating Strategic Information

We examine institutions for eliciting information from multiple sources, when each source's private signal contains no information about the signals of others. As a result, information cannot be elicited via cross-checking methods. Nonetheless, institutions which use senders' joint information can improve on those which elicit information independently. Taking a mechanism design approach, we show that when senders' bias is relatively low, the optimal receiver optimal mechanism coincides with the optimal sender allocation. Thus it can be implemented by a representative, or `spokesperson', mode of communication. However, when bias is large, the optimal mechanism requires ex post surplus-burning and involves non-monotonicity—in this case, access to a committed mediator is necessary for achieving optimality. Finally, we illustrate a simple implementation method as the number of senders increases.