Past Seminars
Sponsored by the Christian A. Johnson Lecture Series
2023-24
Spring ’24
March 12
Workforce Trends
Hunter Morancy
Maine Bureau of Labor Statistics
*** 4:30-6pm, Diamond 122 ***
April 12
“The Two Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind”
Melissa Kearney
University of Maryland
***3:30pm, SSWAC Parker Reed ***
April 15
“Artificial Intelligence and Auction Design”
Martino Banchio
Google Research
*** 2-3:30pm seminar, Diamond 145***
Fall ’23
October 17
“Contemporary Challenges to Monetary Policy”
Vaishali Garga (Boston Fed) & Brent Bundick (Kansas City Fed)
*** Ostrove Auditorium, 4pm***
October 19
“The Macroeconomics of Clean Energy Subsidies”
Greg Casey
Williams College
October 30
“Navigation Pain: Personalization and Drip Pricing in Two-Sided Digital Markets”
Aaron Kaye
University of Michigan
2022-2023 Seminars
Fall ’22
Thursday, September 29th
“An Empirical Analysis of Informationally-Restricted Dynamic Auctions of Used Cars”
Harry J. Paarsch
University of Central Florida, School of Business
Thursday, October 6th
“Optimal Platform Pricing when Consumers Have Real Options”
Alexander Rodivilov
Steven’s Institute of Technology, NJ
Thursday, November 17th
“Name-based Racial Discrimination in Hiring”
Martin Abel
Bowdoin College, ME
Spring ’23
Thursday, April 20th
“The US-China Trade War and Relocation of Global Value Chains to Mexico”
Hale Utar
Grinnell College
Thursday, April 27th
“What Drives Trends in Employment and Hours Worked per Worker? A Cross Country Analysis”
Brendan Epstein
UMass Lowell
2021-2022 Seminars
Fall ’21
Wednesday, October 27th
“Alma Mater Matters: College Quality, Talent and Development”
Todd Schoellman
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Wednesday, November 3rd
“Retail Mergers and Acquisitions and Food Prices: Evidence From California”
Ricky Volpe
Cal Poly
Thursday, November 11th (will be in Diamond 141)
“Trade Shocks and Growth: The Impact of the Quartz Crisis in Switzerland”
Tate Twinam
College of William & Mary
Thursday, November 12th (Lecture – 7pm Ostrove)
“The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale”
John List
The University of Chicago
Monday, November 29th
“Testing for Collusion in Procurement Auctions”
Bean Zhao
The University of Alabama
Spring ’22
Thursday, March 31st
“Work From Home Before and After the COVID Outbreak”
Adam Blandin
Virginia Commonwealth University
Thursday, April 21st
Topic TBA
Leticia Arroyo Abad
City University of New York – Queens College
2019-2020 Seminars
Spring ’20
Thursday, March 12, 2020, (Diamond 141)
“Women’s Job Opportunities and Marriage Quality”
Jagori Chatterjee
Furman University
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Title TBA
Alexander Rodivilov
Stevens Institute of Technology
Thursday, April 9, 2020
Title TBA
Leticia Arroyo Abad
City University of New York, Queens College
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Title TBA
Ben Griffey
University of Albany, SUNY
Fall ’19
Friday, September 13, 2019
Title TBA
Kyle Herkenhoff
University of Minnesota
Thursday, October 10, 2019
“Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs, Opioid Abuse, and Crime”
Brady Horn
University of New Mexico
Friday, November 1, 2019 (3 pm)
“On the Quantity and Quality of Girls: Fertility, Parental Investments, and Mortality”
S Anukriti
Boston College
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Title TBA
Brian Beach
Vanderbilt University
Monday, November 18, 2019 (sometime 1-3:30 in ALCM 205)
Topic TBA
Brian Baisa
Amherst College
Tuesday, December 10, 2019, (12:00-1:15pm)
Loss Aversion and Property Tax Avoidance
Peter Jones ’13
UC Berkeley
2018-2019 Seminars
Spring ’19
Friday, May 3, 2019
“Assessing the Direct and Spillover Effects of Shocks to Refugee Remittances”
Sarah Walker
University of New South Wales
Friday, April 26, 2019
“Skill Mismatch Unemployment”
Erin L. Wolcott
Middlebury College
Friday, April 19, 2019
“Manager Gender and the Effect of Performance Feedback on Effort and Attitude”
Martin Abel
Middlebury College
Wednesday, April 10, 2019
“Cooperation, reciprocity, and efficiency in polygynous pastoralist households”
Jessica Hoel
Colorado College
Monday, April 8, 2019
“Auction Mechanisms and Treasury Revenue: Evidence from the Chinese Experiment”
Dakshina De Silva
Lancaster University Management School
Thursday, February 21, 2019
“Labor Market Flows and Development”
Kevin Donovan
Yale School of Management
Fall ’18
Thursday, December 6, 2018
“Minimum Wage Indexation As Equilibrium Selection in an Expectations-Driven Liquidity Trap”
Andy Glover
University of Texas, Austin
Thursday, November 8, 2018
“Poole Rules: Implementing Monetary Policy Using Multiple Instruments”
Stephen D. Morris
Bowdoin College
Thursday, November 1, 2018
“Labor Market Concentration, Earnings Inequality, and Earnings Mobility”
Kevin Rinz
U.S. Census Bureau
Thursday, October 25, 2018
“Gender Differences in Executive Departure”
Rachel Landsman
University of Pittsburgh
Monday, October 8, 2018
“Subcontracting Requirements and the Cost of Government Procurement”
Benjamin Rosa
Virginia Tech
2017-2018 Seminars
Spring ’18
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
“The Impact of Summer Employment for Low-Income Youth: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines”
Emily Beam
University of Vermont
Fall ’17
Friday, November 17, 2017
“Refugee Admissions and Public Safety: Are Refugee Settlement Areas More Prone to Crime?”
Cynthia Bansak
St. Lawrence University
Monday, November 6, 2017
“Rents and Welfare in the Second Industrial Revolution: Evidence from New York City”
Rowena Gray
University of California, Merced
Friday, October 27, 2017
“Forest Loss, Malaria, and Children’s Health and Education Outcomes in Nigeria”
Julia Berazneva
Middlebury College
Thursday, October 19, 2017
“Implementing Faustmann-Marshall-Pressler: Stochastic Dynamic Programming in Space”
Harry Paarsch
University of Central Florida
Monday, October 2, 2017
Topic TBD
Alan Zebedee
Clarkson University
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
“Social Insurance and Efficient Occupational Mobility”
Pedro Silos
Temple University
2016-2017 Seminars
Spring ’17
April 21, 2017
“Sequential Second-Price Auctions with Budget-Constrained Bidders”
Gagan Ghosh
California State University Fullerton
April 13, 2017
To be determined
Dayanand Manoli
University of Texas at Austin
April 5, 2017
“What Impedes Efficient Adoption of Products? Evidence from Randomized Sales Offers for Fuel-Efficient Cookstoves in Uganda”
Andrew Simons
Fordham University
March 30, 2017
“Small and Large Firms Over the Business Cycle”
Neil Mehrotra
Brown University
Federal Reserve Board of Minneapolis
March 9, 2017
“Notching for free: Do cyclists reveal the value of time?”
Casey Wichman
Resources for the Future
March 2, 2017
“Paying farmers to reduce phosphorus runoff into Lake Erie: How to do it cost effectively”
Scott Swinton
Michigan State University
Paper 1 Paper 2
Fall ’16
“Pollution, Mortality Risk, and the Distribution of Income”
Nicholas Muller
Middlebury College
November 3, 2016
“What’s Yours is Mine, and What’s Mine is Mine: Bargaining Power and Income Concealing Between Spouses in India”
Carolina Castilla
Colgate University
October 25, 2016
“Selecting (In) and Crowding Out: Experimental Evidence of the Power of Religious Authority in Afghanistan”
Sera Linardi
University of Pittsburgh
October 21, 2016
“Financing Imperial Russian Growth: New Evidence from Corporate Balance Sheets”
Amanda Gregg
Middlebury College
October 13, 2016
“Ranking Asymmetric Auctions with Several Bidders”
René Kirkegaard
University of Guelph
September 29, 2016
“The Disability Option: Labor Market Dynamics with Health and Economic Risks”
Amanda Michaud
Indiana University
2015-2016 Seminars
Spring ’16
May 5, 2016
“Family Background, Academic Ability, and College Decisions in the 20th Century U.S.”
Chris Herrington
Virginia Commonwealth University
April 20, 2016
“Do Disasters Affect Growth? Five Macro Model-Based Insights on the Empirical Debate”
Lint Barrage
Brown University
March 29, 2016
“Management and Shocks to Worker Productivity: Evidence from Air Pollution Exposure”
Namrata Kala
Harvard University and MIT
March 16, 2016
“Rational and Heuristic-Driven Trading Panics in an Experimental Asset Market”
Chad Kendall
University of Southern California
March 10, 2016
“Using Administrative Tax Data to Estimate Work Participation and Earnings Elasticities of Married Couples”
Patricia Tong
Office of Tax Analysis, US Treasury
February 16, 2016
To be determined
Eric Rosengren
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
Fall ’15
November 4, 2015
“Bidding and Drilling Under Uncertainty”
Jimmy Roberts
Duke University
October 28, 2015 (Todger Anderson Inaugural Lecture)
Todger Anderson Inaugural Lecture
Leonard Wolk
Colby College
October 22, 2015
To be determined
Julio Garin
University of Georgia
October 15, 2015
“Nuclear Shutdown, Coal Power Generation, and Infant Health: Evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1980s”
Edson Severnini
Carnegie Mellon University
October 2, 2015 (at 12:00pm in Diamond 221, joint with Sociology)
“The Spontaneous Emergence of Conventions: An Experimental Study of Cultural Evolution”
Damon Centola
University of Pennsylvania
September 24, 2015
“Risk and Ambiguity in an Experimental Market Featuring a Long-Lived Asset”
John Griffin (’95)
Fordham University
September 14, 2015
“Simulating a Homogenous Product Merger: A Case Study on Model Fit and Performance”
Dan Greenfield (’02)
Federal Trade Commission
2014-2015 Seminars
Spring ’15
April 21, 2015
“Increasing Demand for HIV Prevention Interventions: Evidence from Two RCTs”
Harsha Thirumurthy
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
March 17, 2015
“Tax Compliance and Fiscal Externalities: Evidence from U.S. Diesel Taxation”
Justin Marion
University of California, Santa Cruz
March 16, 2015
“Rounding the Corners of the Policy Trilemma”
Michael Klein
The Fletcher School
Tufts University
March 9, 2015
Commodity Futures
Jon Koplik
Fall ’14
December 4, 2014
“Short Trading Cycles: The Case of Kidney Exchange”
Ivan Balbuzanov (’09)
University of California, Berkeley
November 19, 2014
“Organized Crimes Against Nature: Elephants in South Africa”
Adrian Lopes
Bates College
November 14, 2014 (Presentation)
Job Prospects in International Policy and Development
Benjamin Wood
International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
November 6, 2014 (Panel Discussion)
William R. and Linda K. Cotter Debate Series
A Conversation on Unconventional Oil and Gas
Erin Mansur
Tuck School of Business
Dartmouth College
November 3, 2014
“Signals, Similarity and Seeds: Social Learning in the Presence of Imperfect Information and Heterogeneity”
Emilia Tjernström (’06)
University of California, Davis
October 29, 2014
“Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks: 1100-1800”
Mark Koyama
George Mason University
October 15, 2014 (Presentation)
“What in the World is Natural Resource Economics? Application to Fisheries Problems”
Sunny Jardine
School of Marine Science and Policy
University of Delaware
October 9, 2014
“The Returns to Higher Education and Effect of Student Loan Scheme Design”
Ian Walker
Lancaster University
October 2, 2014
“Reputation, Compliance and Judicial Decision Making”
Giri Parameswaran
Haverford College
September 25, 2014
“The Composition of Exports and Human Capital Acquisition”
Will Olney
Williams College
September 24, 2014
“Affirmative Action and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment”
Brent Hickman
University of Chicago
2013-2014 Seminars
Spring ’14
April 17, 2014
“Yardstick Competition and Property Tax Limit Overrides: Revisiting Massachusetts’ Proposition 2 1/2”
Jon Rork
Reed College
April 10, 2014
“Greening India’s Growth: Costs, Valuations, and Trade-Offs”
Muthukumara Mani
World Bank
April 2, 2014
“China at a Crossroads—Reform and Rebalance, or else…?”
Markus Rodlauer
International Monetary Fund
March 19, 2014 (Presentation)
Yoram Bauman
The World’s First and Only Stand-Up Economist
March 19, 2014 (Panel Discussion)
“Managing the Risks from a Changing Climate: Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies”
Yoram Bauman, Dylan Voorhees, Jennifer Kierstead, Tom Tietenberg
Fall ’13
November 17, 2013 (Film Premier)
Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
Q&A to follow with Producer/Director/Writer Jim Bruce
October 25, 2013
“Auctions for Charity”
Jeff Carpenter
Middlebury College
October 16, 2013
“Governance after the Glorious Revolution”
Dan Bogart
University of California–Irvine
October 10, 2013
“Community Forests, Carbon Sequestration and REDD+: Some Evidence from Ethiopia”
Randy Bluffstone
Portland State University
October 4, 2013
“Risk Taking, Tax Evasion and Labor Supply”
Denvil Duncan
Indiana University School of Public & Environmental Affairs
September 18, 2013
“Private Provision of Public Goods: Evidence from the Effect of Environmental Groups on Water Quality”
Laura Grant
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
2012-2013 Seminars
Spring ’13
April 23, 2013 (Lecture)
“The Clock Auction Design and Bidder Strategy: What has Worked and What Hasn’t”
Allan Ingraham (Colby ’96)
Navigant Economics
April 15, 2013 (Economics Bicentennial Lecture)
“The Gender Gap: Going, Going…….But not Gone”
Francine Blau
Cornell University
March 18, 2013 (Lecture)
“Accounting for Nature: Incorporating the Value of Ecosystem Services into Decision Making”
Steve Polasky
University of Minnesota
March 15, 2013
“More Schooling and More Learning: Effects of a 3-Year Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Nicaragua After 10 Years”
John Maluccio
Middlebury College
March 11, 2013 (Presentation)
“The Economics of Immigration”
Madeline Zavodny
Agnes Scott College
March 6, 2013
“Tradable Permits to Manage Environmental Externalities With Time Lags and Uncertainty”
Yusuke Kuwayama
Resources for the Future
February 28, 2013
“Transfer Pricing by Multinational Firms: New Evidence from Foreign Firm Ownerships”
Anca Cristea
University of Oregon
Fall ’12
October 18, 2012
“Hui: A Case Study of a Sequential Double Auction of Capital”
Harry Paarsch
University of Melbourne
2011-2012 Seminars
Spring ’12
April 12, 2012
“Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict”
Masami Imai
Wesleyan University
March 8, 2012
“The Long Arm of Colonialism? Landownership and Institutions in Early Independent Peru”
Leticia Arroyo Abad
Middlebury College
Fall ’11
November 30, 2011
“Taxation and the Extraction of Exhaustible Resources: Evidence from California Oil Production”
Nirupama Rao
New York University
October 27, 2011
“Does Happiness Matter? The Effect of Teacher Job Satisfaction on Productivity”
Lauren Calimeris (Colby ’03)
Metropolitan State College of Denver
October 19, 2011
“Child Ability, Parental Investments and Child Nutrition in Ecuador”
Emilie Bagby
Mathematica Policy Research
2010-2011 Seminars
Spring ’11
March 17, 2011
“Intermediaries in Corruption: An Experiment”
Danila Serra
Florida State University
February 21, 2011
“Media Proliferation and Electoral Outcomes with Quasi-Rational Voters”
Daniel Stone
Oregon State University
February 8, 2011
“Building Vintage and Electricity Use: Old Homes Use Less Electricity in Hot Weather”
Howard Chong
University of California-Berkeley
February 1, 2011
“Radical and Ethnic Disparities in Federal Sentencing: A Quantile Regression Approach”
Beth Freeborn
University of Virginia
Fall ’10
December 1, 2010
“Recommendations and Demand for Digital Music”
Peter Newberry (Colby ’03)
University of Wisconsin
November 17, 2010
“Choosing Where to Teach: The Effect of Teacher Quality on the Charter Versus Public School Decision”
Lauren Calimeris (Colby ’03)
University of Colorado
November 3, 2010
“Explaining Health and Life Satisfaction in East and West Germany Post-Reunification”
Jackie Smith Zweig (Colby ’04)
University of Southern California
October 6, 2010
“Effects of an Advertising Campaign to Boost Energy Efficiency”
Laura Malaguzzi Valeri
Colby College
September 23, 2010
“Induced Development in Risky Locations: Fire Suppression and Land Use in the American West”
Sheila M. Olmstead
Resources for the Future
2009-2010 Seminars
Spring ’10
April 23, 2010
“Does Access to Equity Finance Limit Innovative Activity? New Evidence from Europe”
Jamie Brown
College of Business, Iowa State University
April 2, 2010
“How Low Will You Go? The Depth of Negative Equity and Mortgage Default Decisions”
Jane Dokko
Federal Reserve Board of Governors
February 2010
“Identifying the Role of Risk Shocks in the Business Cycle using Stock Price Data”
Sami Alpanda
Amherst College