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Regular version of the site

Programme


Programme: 
 download.

program (PDF, 156 Kb) 


Presenters of the parallel sessions have up to 25 minuties for the presentation, and 5 minutes for general questions. 
The last speaker of each parallel session is the chair of the session. 


Keynote lectures

April 14, 2021 (Wednesday), 17:00-18:15, Moscow time, GMT+3
Jacques-François Thisse (HSE University). “Working from Home: Too Much of a Good Thing?” (with Kristian Behrens and Sergey Kichko)

Abstract. We develop a general equilibrium model with three primary production factors---land, skilled, and unskilled labor---and three sectors---construction, intermediate inputs, and final consumption---to study how different intensities of telecommuting affect the efficiency of firms that embrace home working, as well as its impact on the whole economy. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the effects of increasing working from home (WFH) that go through changes in the production and consumption of buildings: more WFH reduces firms' demands for office space, but increases workers' demand for living space since additional room is required to work from home. We find that more WFH is a mixed blessing: the relationship between telecommuting and productivity or GDP is ∩-shaped, whereas telecommuting raises income inequality. Hence, WFH is not a panacea since an excessive downscaling of workspaces may be damaging to all and exacerbate economic inequality.

 

April 15, 2021 (Thursday), 18:45-20:00, Moscow time, GMT+3
Kiminori Matsuyama (Northwestern University). “When Does Procompetitive Entry Imply Excessive Entry?” (with Philip Ushchev)

Abstract. The Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition is widely used as a building block across many applied general equilibrium fields. Two of its remarkable features are the invariance of the markup rate and the optimality of the free-entry equilibrium. Of course, neither of these two features is robust. Departure from CES makes entry either procompetitive or anticompetitive (i.e., the markup rate either goes down or goes up as more firms enter). Departure from CES also makes entry either excessive or insufficient. But how is the condition for procompetitive vs. anticompetitive entry related to that for excessive vs. insufficient entry? To investigate this question, we extend the Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition model to three classes of homothetic demand systems, which are mutually exclusive except that each of them contains CES as a knife-edge case. In all three classes, we show, among others, that entry is excessive (insufficient) when it is globally procompetitive (anticompetitive) and that, in the presence of the choke price, entry is procompetitive and excessive at least for a sufficiently large market size.

 

April 16, 2021 (Friday), 18:45-20:00, Moscow time, GMT+3
Matthew A. Turner (Brown University). “A Unified Theory of Cities” (with Jacques-François Thisse and Philip Ushchev)

Abstract. How do people arrange themselves when they are free to choose work and residence locations, when commuting is costly, and when increasing returns may affect production? We consider this problem in a framework with discrete locations and households with heterogenous preferences over workplace-residence pairs. We provide a general characterization of equilibrium throughout the parameter space. The introduction of preference heterogeneity into an otherwise conventional urban model fundamentally changes equilibrium behavior. Stronger increasing returns to scale need not concentrate economic activity and lower commuting costs need not disperse it. The qualitative behavior of the model as returns to scale increase accords with changes in the patterns of urbanization observed in the Western world between the pre-industrial period and the present.