International research seminars «General equilibrium and optimality in monopolistic competition theory»
Venue: 47, pr. Rimskogo-Korsakova, St. Petersburg (building of the bank "Saint Petersburg", conference-hall).
Dates: 2012.12.25 - 2012.12.27.
John Morrow (London School of Economics), Ching-Yang Lin (International University of Japan) and Swati Dhingra (London School of Economics) are coming to our Center of Market Studies and Spatial Economics with academic visit from the December, 25th to the December, 27th.
Research Statement of Prof. Morrow: Development Economics, International Trade, Political Economy. More detailed information can be found out on his personal web-page: http://www.johnmorrow.info/index.php
Research Statement of Prof. Lin: Monetary Economics, Financial Economics and Computational Economics. More detailed information can be found out on his personal web-page: http://ideas.repec.org/f/pli703.html
Research Statement of Prof. Dhingra: International Trade, Industrial Development More detailed information can be found out on her personal web-page: http://www.sdhingra.com/index.php
Program:
 J.Morrow |
On December 25, 2012, 16:00-18:00.
Public Research Seminar.
John Morrow (London School of Economics). "Productivity As If Space Mattered: An Application to Factor Markets Across China".
Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. In particular, labor demand is contingent on local wages and availability of skills. This paper develops a model to explain firm input demand across regions. Firms locate across regions with distinct labor markets and produce using imperfectly substitutable worker types. Estimating structural model parameters is simple and relies on a two stage OLS procedure. The first stage estimates local market conditions using firm employment and regional data, while the second incorporates regional costs into production function estimation. The method is applied to Chinese manufacturing, population census and geographic data to estimate local market costs and production technologies. Accounting for regional factor markets yields three main findings. First, labor markets which provide cost advantages explain substantial differences in firm productivity. Second, regions which have lower optimal hiring costs attract more firms per capita. Third, firm survival is twice as responsive to TFP once local markets are accounted for.
 C.Y.Lin |
On December 26, 2012, 16:00-18:00.
Public Research Seminar.
Ching-Yang Lin (International University of Japan). "How Income and Bequest Taxes Affect Income Inequality? The Role of Parental Transfers".
This paper investigates how income and bequest taxes affect income inequality through the channel of parental transfers. We consider parents' decisions on intergenerational transfers by providing education, and by leaving bequests. This feature highlights the effects of taxation on human capital investment: An increase in income tax rate or a decrease in bequest tax rate compress the risk premium of human capital returns, which in turn causes parents invest less on children's education. As a consequence, a smaller portion of population attain the college education, inducing a higher dispersion of human capital and its return (income). By conducting several numerical experiments, we find that the model prediction is quantitively supported by our empirical examination which utilizes the panel data of 20 OECD countries over 1980-2008.
 S.Dhingra |
On December 27, 2012, 12:00-14:00.
Public Research Seminar.
Swati Dhingra (London School of Economics). "Trading Away Wide Brands for Cheap Brands".
Firms face competing needs to expand product variety and reduce production costs. Access to larger markets enables innovation to reduce costs. Although firm scale increases, foreign competition reduces markups. Firms' ability to recapture lost markups depends on the interplay between within-firm competition and across-firm competition. Narrowing product variety eases within-firm competition but lowers market share. I provide a theory detailing the impact of trade policy on product and process innovation. Unbundling innovation provides new insights into welfare gains and innovation policy. Product innovation increases welfare beyond standard gains from trade. The relative returns to innovation policy change with trade liberalization.
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