Friday 20 May

• Speaker: Professor Delia Furtado, University of Connecticut
• Title: Do Immigrant Inflows Improve Quality of Care in Nursing Homes?
• Time: 11:15am - 12:45pm BST (GMT+1)
• Location: 3 East 2.2

The growing healthcare needs of the baby boom generation are likely to require significant increases in the number or productivity of workers employed in healthcare industries. Professor Delia Furtado explores how immigrants may address staffing shortages given their current over-representation in certain nursing professions, using nursing home data from the Long Term Care Focus project.

Wednesday 3 November 2021

• Speaker: Prof Alexander Krumer, Molde University College
• Title: Fewer teams, more games, larger attendance? Evidence from the structural change in basketball’s EuroLeague

Professor Krumer investigated whether an increased number of games between a reduced number of high-quality teams has a positive effect on stadium attendance.

Wednesday 24 November 2021

• Speaker: Dr Conor Lennon, University of Louisville - College of Business
• Title: Employer Sponsored Health Insurance and Labor Market Outcomes for Gay Men: Evidence from the Advent of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis​

Dr Lennon explored how the cost of providing employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) varies for employers based on the medical expenditures of their employees, a practice known as “experience rating.”

Wednesday 1 December 2021

• Speaker: Oksana Leukhina, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis
• Time: 14:45-15:45 GMT
• Title: Gender Gap (joint work with Gulliaume Vandenbroucke)

We employ the Ben-Porath (1967) human capital model to study the evolution of the gender wage gap over the long run and consider the effect of changing lifecycle profiles of female market hours. In so doing, we find that the implied response in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation accounts for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics.

This finding is consistent with the labour economists’ view that changing selection on unobservables played a critical role in the gender wage gap dynamics. Our contribution is to make explicit and quantify the link between market hours and (unobserved) investment in human capital.

Wednesday 8 December 2021

• Speaker: Guilhem Cassan, University of Namur
• Time: 14:45-15:45 GMT
• Title: Stopping Rule and Sex Selective Abortion: New Measures and World Evidence (joint with Jean Maria Baland and Francois Woitrin)

When parents want a specific number of children of a given gender (boys, in general), they can use two methods: the "stopping rule" and sex selective abortion. In societies in which gender preferences are prevalent, these methods can heavily affect fertility practices.

We propose two novel theory based measures of detection of these practices. Taking the perspective of the child rather than that of the family, these measures are easily implementable, precise, and rely on fewer assumptions than other measures in use.

We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of sex selective abortion in a given society and implement it at the world level.

Wednesday 9 February 2022

• Speaker: Professor Florian Morath, University of Innsbruck
• Title: Do groups fight more? Experimental Evidence on Conflict Initiation
• Time: 14:45 – 15:45

The speaker will discuss their paper (co-authored with Changxia Ke and Sophia Seelos) which investigates whether distributional conflict becomes more likely when groups are involved.

Wednesday 23 February 2022

• Speaker: Professor Torben Klarl, University of Bremen
• Title: Poverty and Sustainable Development during transition around the World
• Time: 14:45 – 15:45

This speaker will discuss their paper which addresses whether countries can escape from poverty in a sustainable way.

Wednesday 2 March 2022

• Speaker: Professor Jackie Wahba, University of Southampton
• Title: Brexit Uncertainty and UK Migration: Should I Go? (Co-authored with Valentina Di Iasio)
• Time: 14:45 – 15:45
• Location: Zoom (contact seminar organisers for the link)

The speaker will discuss their paper which, using the UK referendum in 2016 and the resulting uncertainty in migration policy as a quasi-experimental setting, studies the causal impact of policy uncertainty on migration flows and net migration in the UK, as well as on the attractiveness of other EU countries as destinations.

Wednesday 16 March 2022

• Speaker: Dr Andreea Mitrut, University of Gothenburg
• Title: When Fraud Kills: Hospital-Acquired Infections and Neonatal Health
• Time: 14:45 – 15:45
• Location: Zoom (contact seminar organisers for the link)

This speaker will discuss the effects of a massive medical fraud in hospital wards.

Using public procurement data, they extracted the date when public hospitals started purchasing (allegedly diluted) antiseptics and disinfectants sold by a large pharmaceutical company in Romania.

Their preliminary results suggest significant negative effects on neonatal health outcomes. These results indicate that the main mechanism in place is related to hospital-acquired infections.