Authors – Page 2 – Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP)

Rethinking Financial Regulation for the 21st Century

March 11, 2021March 19, 2022International Economic Policy, International Finance, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events

Wednesday, March 24, 2021
12:30pm – 2:00pm
via WebEx

This event was joint with GW Law Business and Finance Law program and featured Professor Emeritus Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. and discussant Professor Erik Gerding.

The financial crisis of 2007-09 and the pandemic crisis of 2020 showed that global financial markets are dangerously unstable. Those markets are dominated by “too-big-to-fail” universal banks – commercial banks that engage in capital markets activities – and large shadow banks, such as private equity firms, securities broker-dealers, and hedge funds. Governments and central banks rescued financial markets in 2008 and 2020 with enormous bailouts and unconventional monetary policies. Those policy measures produced soaring global debt levels, aggressive risk-taking by investors, heavily indebted sovereigns, and bloated central bank balance sheets. In addition, large technology companies are seeking to enter the banking business, a development that could transform the banking industry and extend government bailouts for banks across our commercial economy. The seminar discussed regulatory policies that would return our financial system to a structure that is much more stable and far less dependent on government bailouts.

This webinar was moderated by Dr. Sunil Sharma, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, with introductory remarks made by IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh and Director of the Business and Finance Law Program at the George Washington University Law School Jeremiah Pam. This event was co-sponsored by the GW Law School’s Business and Finance Law Program and the Institute for International Economic Policy at GWU.

About the speaker:
Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr. joined the GWU faculty in 1986, after 11 years in private law practice. Prior to joining GW Law’s faculty, he was a partner in the Washington, DC, office of Jones Day. During his 34 years as a member of the faculty, Professor Wilmarth taught courses in banking law, contracts, corporations, professional responsibility, and American constitutional history. He served as Executive Director of the Center for Law, Economics & Finance from 2011 to 2014.
Professor Wilmarth is the author of Taming the Megabanks: Why We Need a New Glass-Steagall Act (Oxford University Press, 2020), and co-editor of The Panic of 2008: Causes, Consequences, and Implications for Reform (Edward Elgar, 2010). He has published more than 40 law review articles and book chapters in the fields of financial regulation and American constitutional history. In 2005, the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers awarded him its prize for the best law review article published in the field of consumer financial services law during the previous year.
Professor Wilmarth has testified before committees of the US Congress, the California legislature, and the DC Council on financial regulatory issues. In 2010, he was a consultant to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the body established by Congress to report on the causes of the financial crisis of 2007-09. During 2008-2009, he served as Chair of the Section on Financial Institutions and Consumer Financial Services of the Association of American Law Schools, after serving as the Section’s Chair-Elect and Annual Program Chair during 2007-2008. Professor Wilmarth is a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Banking Regulation, published by Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. He is also a member of the advisory board of the American Antitrust Institute.

About the discussant:
Erik Gerding is a Professor at the University of Colorado Law School. His research interests include securities, banking law, the regulation of financial markets, products, and institutions, payment systems, and corporate governance. His research also focuses on the application of technology to financial regulation, including analyzing the use of technologies in governing financial markets. Professor Girding’s book Law, Bubbles, and Financial Regulation (2014) examines the interaction of asset price bubbles and financial regulation. Prior to joining academia, Professor Gerding practiced law in the New York and Washington D.C. offices of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP. His practice at the firm included representing clients in the financial services and technology industries in an array of financial transactions and regulatory matters.

About the moderators:
Sunil Sharma is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF- Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, he was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, Dr. Sharma was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Cornell University, a M.A. from the Delhi School of Economics, and a B.A. (Honors) from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University. His current interests include rethinking capitalism and democracy, systemic hazards, complex systems, the international financial architecture, and the institutional structure and design of financial regulation.

Jay Shambaugh is Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Co- Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Jeremiah Pam is the Director of the Business and Finance Law Program at George Washington University Law School. He has extensive work experience in international affairs and international crises, including six years practicing in international finance and sovereign debt restructuring at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in New York, followed by government service as a financial diplomat and strategist with the Treasury Department in Baghdad and Washington, and with the State Department in Kabul. Mr. Pam teaches courses on financial stability, international crises, and economic and technological innovation. He also served for four years as a U.S. Air Force officer prior to law school. Mr. Pam received a JD from Columbia, an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Political Science from Columbia, and an AB from Harvard.

More From This Series

Growth Elasticity of Multidimensional Poverty in India Between 2005/06 and 2015/16

February 25, 2021March 19, 2022Development Economics, India, James Foster, Past Events

Monday, March 8, 2021
10:00am – 11:15am
via WebEx

Post-reform India has generated high economic growth, yet progress in income poverty and many other key development outcomes has remained modest. This paper seeks to explore how inclusive has Indian economic growth been in terms of reducing multidimensional poverty between 2005-06 and 2015-16, employing a constellation of elasticity and semi-elasticity measures – each capturing different forms and components of inclusivity. We assess multidimensional poverty by the well-known Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI). A growth elasticity measure captures the percentage change (relative) in a target variable due to a one percent economic growth; whereas, a growth semi-elasticity measure captures the absolute change in a target variable due to a one percent economic growth. Our estimates show that, nationally, a one percent annual economic growth during the study period is associated with 0.0027 units (absolute) or 1.34 percent (relative) annual reduction in the MPI. Our estimates of horizontal inclusiveness, assessed by the change in state MPIs associated with a one percent of national economic growth, show a wide variation across states. For instance, for every one percent national economic growth, the MPI in Bihar falls only by 0.96 percent, but the MPI in Kerala falls by 3.79 percent. Our analyses and application in the paper demonstrate the efficacy of these tools for measuring inclusiveness of economic growth in terms of reducing multidimensional poverty as well as inform policy.

Co-sponsors:
Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI)
UNDP Human Development Report Office

About the Presenter:

Dr. Suman Seth is an associate professor at the Leeds University Business School. He joined the business school in 2015. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He obtained a PhD degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in the USA. After his PhD, he served as a Research Office and as a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank.

About the Discussant:

Ajay Chhibber is Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC.

He was the Chief Economic Advisor, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He was earlier the first Director General (Minister of State) , Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India – affiliated institute of the Ministry of Finance – where he completed a major study on India’s Public Sector Enterprises.

He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. At the World Bank he served as Country Director in Turkey and Vietnam and Division Chief for Indonesia and the Pacific and Lead Economist, West Africa Department. He was also Director of the 1997 World Development Report on the Role of the State. He also worked in the World Bank’s Research Department, as Advisor to the Chief Economist of the World Bank and at the Public Economics Division.

He has a Ph. D from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He also has attended advanced management programs at the Harvard Business School, Harvard University and INSEAD, France. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi. He has published widely including 5 books in development economics, and is a contributor (columnist) to several newspapers.

He is now writing a book on “India: A Reset for the 21st Century” under contract with Harper-Collins.

About the Moderators:

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), a research centre within the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. Dr Alkire works on a new approach to measuring poverty and well-being that goes beyond the traditional focus on income and growth. This multidimensional approach to measurement includes social goals, such as health, education, nutrition, standard of living and other valuable aspects of life. She devised a new method for measuring multidimensional poverty with her colleague James Foster (OPHI Research Associate and Professor of Economics at George Washington University) that has advantages over other poverty measures and has been adopted by the Mexican Government, the Bhutanese Government in their ‘Gross National Happiness Index’ and the United Nations Development Programme. Dr Alkire has been called upon to provide input and advice to several initiatives seeking to take a broader approach to well-being rather than just economic growth, for example, the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress (instigated by President Sarkozy); the United Nations Human Development Programme Human Development Report Office; the European Commission; and the UK’s Department for International Development.

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).

About the Event Series

The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at George Washington University and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report office (UNDP HDRO), are pleased to host a special seminar series on the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (global MPI). Goal 1 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions. The global MPI 2020 offers a tool to make progress towards this goal.

Produced in partnership with the UNDP HDRO, the global MPI 2020 compares acute multidimensional poverty for 107 countries in developing regions and provides a detailed image of who is poor and how they are poor. It offers both a global headline and a fine-grained analysis covering 1,279 sub-national regions, and important disaggregation such as children, and people living in urban or rural areas, together with the indicator deprivations of each group. Bringing together the academic and policy spheres, this series of seminars will highlight topics such as sensitivity analyses, overlapping deprivations, changes over time (poverty trends), and inequality using the global data. The sessions will also include work that applies the global MPI methodology, the Alkire Foster method, to innovative measures.

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EST. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

More From This Series

Inequality among the Multidimensionally Poor in over 100 countries

February 25, 2021March 19, 2022James Foster, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

Monday, March 1, 2021
10:00am – 11:15am
via WebEx

Inequality among the poor matters because it matters that the poorest poor are not left behind. Leaving them behind is very often the case, as they are at the crossroads of marginalized groups and it is very difficult for policies -even at sub-national levels- to actually and effectively reach them. In this paper we examine inequality within over 100 countries among the multidimensionally poor, as measured by the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (G-MPI). We compare two approaches proposed so far for incorporating inequality into the measurement of multidimensional poverty. One is the ‘assimilated approach’, by which the poverty measure incorporates sensitivity to inequality among the poor, as it is the case of the MGamma class of poverty measures proposed by Alkire and Foster (2016, 2019); this uses a relative inequality measure. The other is the ‘complementary approach’, by which the poverty measure is complemented alongside the variance of deprivation scores among the poor, an absolute inequality measure.

We find that country rankings by absolute vs. relative inequality among the poor differ quite substantially, which suggests that the selection of one or the other type of inequality matters when only that aspect of poverty is evaluated. However, the country ranking by the G-MPI, which considers poverty incidence and intensity, is highly robust to the incorporation of inequality into measurement of poverty, either using the MGamma2 measure or complementing the G-MPI with the variance among the poor. In other words: bad things seem to go together. Countries with a higher proportion of their population in multidimensional poverty tend to have higher average poverty intensity, and such higher average intensity tends to be more unequally distributed among the poor. This does not mean that it does not matter to know and measure inequality among the poor. A high inequality among the poor signals the need to develop different kinds of policies according to different poverty intensities. Our understanding is that it is the distribution of the deprivation scores alongside the dimensional decomposition what can be more illuminating for designing effective policies to leave no-one behind.

About the speakers:

Maria Emma Santos is an Assistant Professor at Dept. of Economics at Universidad Nacional del Sur and a CONICET Research Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales del Sur, Bahia Blanca, Argentina. She is also a Research Associate to the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Humano (CEDH) of Universidad de San Andres in Argentina, and to the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, at the University of Oxford, UK. Together with Sabina Alkire, she developed the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index, published in the Human Development Report since 2010. She works on measurement and analysis of multidimensional poverty.

Heriberto Tapia has been a senior member of the writing-research team at the Human Development Report Office (HDRO) since 2014. Previously, he served in the Executive Office of UNDP (2012-2014) and in the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean (1998-2005). He has worked as a consultant to the IMF, UNDP and ECLAC. Furthermore, he has been a lecturer at Columbia University (New York), University of Chile (Santiago) and University Diego Portales (Santiago). Heriberto holds a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University, and a Master’s degree in economics and a Commercial Engineering degree from the University of Chile.

Hector Moreno is a Research Officer at OPHI. He supports OPHI’s outreach team in building, updating and statistically assessing national multidimensional poverty indices (MPIs) in Asian and Latin-American countries. Previously, he served as Research Coordinator for the Human Development Research Office at the UNDP Mexico, and as Under Director of Poverty Methodologies for the Mexican government at CONEVAL. He has also been a consultant for private, public and international institutions. He has taught multiple courses in Statistics at Sciences Po Paris in France and a variety of courses in Economics at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico. He has refereed the Journal of Economic Inequality (Elsevier), the Politicas Públicas Journal (Tec de Monterrey) and the Review of Economics and Statistics (MIT). He holds a PhD in Economics (Paris School of Economics).

Sabina Alkire directs the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). She is the Associate Professor of Development Studies in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, welfare economics, the capability approach, the measurement of freedoms and human development. From 2015–16, Sabina was Oliver T Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at George Washington University. Previously, she worked at the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard University, the Human Security Commission, and the World Bank’s Poverty and Culture Learning and Research Initiative. She holds a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford.

This event and seminar series was jointly organized with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office.

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China’s Outward Investments: State Capitalism or Capital Flight?

February 19, 2021March 19, 2022International Finance, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events

Friday, March 5, 2021
9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
via Webex

Download Professor Rithmire's Slides

The Institute for International Economic Policy was pleased to invite you to the 13th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations. The conference took place as a virtual series. The conference was co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research.

In this event, Professor Meg Rithmire discussed the nature of China’s outward investments. Deborah Brautigam (JHU-SAIS) and Stephen Kaplan (GWU) provided discussant remarks. IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh moderated the discussion.

Global observers are increasingly focused on China’s “state capitalism” and its implications for trading partners and host countries. Disentangling the strategic and commercial motives for Chinese firms abroad is not straightforward, and some of Chinese companies’ global efforts subvert, rather than execute, the Chinese state’s strategic goals. In this talk, based on research on the changing role of the state in China’s economy and the internationalization of Chinese capital over the last decade, I characterize China’s approach to globalization as a series of campaigns and experiments with constant adjustments and focus on the reach and limits of the Chinese party-state.

Meet the Presenter:

Meg Rithmire is F. Warren MacFarlan associate professor in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit. Professor Rithmire holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, and her primary expertise is in the comparative political economy of development with a focus on China and Asia. Her first book, Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), examines the role of land politics, urban governments, and local property rights regimes in the Chinese economic reforms. A new project, for which Meg conducted fieldwork in Asia 2016-2017, investigates the relationship between capital and the state and globalization in Asia. The project focuses on a comparison of China, Malaysia, and Indonesia from the early 1980s to the present. The research has two components; first, examining how governments attempt to discipline business and when those efforts succeed and, second, how business adapts to different methods of state control.

Meet the Discussants:

Stephen B. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics.

A leading expert on China in Africa, Professor Brautigam is the author of Will Africa Feed China? (Oxford University Press, 2015), The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2010; Chinese version published by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press) and Chinese Aid and African Development: Exporting Green Revolution (St. Martin’s Press, 1998). She is also co-editor of Taxation and State-Building: Capacity and Consent(Cambridge University Press, 2008) as well as numerous articles published in academic journals and public affairs media. Professor Brautigam regularly advises international agencies and governments on China-Africa economic engagement.

Jay Shambaugh is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. Professor Shambaugh’s area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. His work includes analysis of the interaction of exchange rate regimes with monetary policy, capital flows, and trade flows as well as studies of international reserves holdings, country balance sheet exchange rate exposure, the cross-country impact of fiscal policy, the crisis in the euro area, and regional growth disparities.
He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings.

Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Shambaugh taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. Shambaugh received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Governing Finance for Sustainable Prosperity

February 11, 2021March 21, 2022International Finance Events, James Foster, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events

Wednesday, February 24, 2021
12:00 pm ET
via Zoom

A Joint Webinar of:

IIEP Rethinking Capitalism and Democracy Series

Thunderbird Finance and Sustainability Series

Finance affects all aspects of our lives, from our economies to social cohesion to the ecological systems that we depend on for our survival. As a result, the implications of how we govern finance are truly fundamental. In the last few years, central banks and financial supervisors have been re assessing the economic and social landscape they face, as well as their broader role in achieving sustainable prosperity. Their responses to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic have increased the urgency for this review of their objectives, instruments, and institutional arrangements. This webinar examines the opportunities and challenges for financial governance, explores emerging new practices among central banks and financial supervisors, and outlines pathways for greater alignment of the governance of finance with the broader sustainability agenda.

Meet the Speakers:

Alexander Barkawi is founder and director of the Council on Economic Policies (CEP) – an economic policy think tank for sustainability focused on fiscal, monetary and trade policy. Prior to creating and building CEP, he was the managing director of SAM Indexes and thus responsible for developing the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices into a key reference point for sustainable investing. Alex is a graduate in economics of the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, where he also earned his doctoral degree. He grew up in Germany and Egypt and today lives in Zurich, Switzerland.

Jay Shambaugh’s area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. His work includes analysis of the interaction of exchange rate regimes with monetary policy, capital flows, and trade flows as well as studies of international reserves holdings, country balance sheet exchange rate exposure, the cross- the country impact of fiscal policy, the crisis in the euro area, and regional growth disparities. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non- Resident Senior Fellow In Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Shambaugh taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the I MF. Shambaugh received his Ph. D. in economics from the University of California at Berkel ey, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Ann Florini is the Clinical Professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University, where she directs programs at the Washington, D.C. campus. She was previously Professor of Public Policy at Singapore Management University founding director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore; and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has spearheaded numerous international initiatives on global governance, energy and climate policy, and cross-sector collaborations including government, civil society, and the private sector. Her many books and articles have addressed governance in China, transparency in governance, transnational civil society networks, and the role of the private sector in public affairs. Dr. Florini received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton University.

Sunil Sharma is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University, Washington DC, USA, and a Senior Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, Zurich, Switzerland. He was Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department from 2015-2018, and the Director of the IMF-Singapore Regional Training Institute (STI) in Singapore from 2006-2015. Before moving to Singapore in 2006, he was Chief of the IMF Institute’s Asian Division in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the IMF in 1992, he was on the Economics faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from Cornell University, and his current interests include rethinking capitalism and democracy, systemic hazards, complex systems, the international financial architecture, and the institutional structure and design of financial regulation.

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Multidimensional Deprivation Index: An Experimental Measure for European Developed Countries

February 3, 2021March 21, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster

Monday February 15th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:15AM EST

WebEx

In 2010 the Human Development Report introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), a measure based on the counting approach of Alkire and Foster (2011)[i]. The MPI is currently being calculated for over 100 developing countries. However, developed countries were not covered, leaving a false impression that there are no multidimensional deprivations in these countries.

With the universality aspect of the Sustainable Development Goals, the need for a measure of overlapping deprivations for developed countries became important. This paper proposes a new experimental composite index, the Multidimensional Deprivation Index (MDI), aiming at filling this gap by exploring and assessing the simultaneous human deprivations in developed countries. It is based on the same counting approach as the MPI. Similarly, all the indicators needed to construct the MDI must come from the same survey. The experimental MDI proposed here is based on 14 indicators and identifies households and individuals that are acutely deprived in 5 dimensions: education, health, material standard of living, environment and housing, and work.

What is the difference between multidimensional poverty and multidimensional deprivations? Multidimensional poverty refers to individuals lacking multiple basic needs such as access to improved drinking water or improved sanitation facilities. This concept is more appropriate for developing countries. On the other hand, we prefer to use the term multidimensional deprivations to refer to individuals suffering deprivations in aspects that are not basic but that can be no less debilitating to the choices of the individuals and families experiencing the deprivations. Even though a household can have access to improved drinking water and improved sanitation facilities, it can still suffer a deprivation if it cannot keep the home adequately warm or if it cannot pay bills on time. This concept is more appropriate for developed countries. Applying the same methodology to developed and developing countries would give the false impression that there are no multidimensional deprivations in developed countries.

[1] Sabina Alkire and James Foster (2011). Counting and Multidimensional Poverty Measurement.” Journal of Public Economics, 95, 476-487.

About the Presenter:

Cecilia Calderón‘s topics of research include multidimensional poverty, with particular interest in analyzing multidimensional poverty in children, the Human Development Index, inequalities in education and income, and gender inequalities.

Before joining the Human Development Report Office at the United Nations Development Programme, Cecilia has worked at the Population Council, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (CEDLAS), Argentina. Cecilia holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in Demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in Economics from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. Her Ph.D. dissertation analyses the relationship between the nutritional status of the mothers and its impact of the growth and development of their children.

About the Moderator:

Pedro Conceição has been Director of the Human Development Report Office and lead author of the Human Development Report since 1 January 2019. Prior to this, Pedro served as Director, Strategic Policy, at the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support (from October 2014), and Chief Economist and Head of the Strategic Advisory Unit at the Regional Bureau for Africa (from 1 December 2009). Before that, he was Director of the Office of Development Studies (ODS) from March 2007 to November 2009, and Deputy Director of ODS, from October 2001 to February 2007. His work on financing for development and on global public goods was published by Oxford University Press in books he co-edited (The New Public Finance: Responding to Global Challenges, 2006; Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization, 2003). He has published on inequality, the economics of innovation and technological change, and development in, amongst other journals, the African Development Review, Review of Development Economics, Eastern Economic Journal, Ecological Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy Studies, Food Policy, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He co-edited several books including: Innovation, Competence Building, and Social Cohesion in Europe- Towards a Learning Society (Edward Elgar, 2002) and Knowledge for Inclusive Development (Quorum Books, 2001). Prior to coming to UNDP, he was an Assistant Professor at the Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, teaching and researching on science, technology and innovation policy. He has degrees in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico and in Economics from the Technical University of Lisbon and a Ph. D. in Public Policy from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied with a Fulbright scholarship.

About the Discussants:

Fanni Kovesdi is a Research Analystat the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), where she is supporting research focused on the global MPI, moderate poverty and wellbeing, and technical work with national governments. Prior to joining OPHI, she has worked on research projects at the University of Oxford, the Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the regional office of Terre des Hommes in Central and South East Europe. Previously, she worked on the “Changes over Time” project which harmonized global MPI data across 80 countries to analyze trends in poverty. She has also supported previous releases of the global MPI through data work and report writing along with leading the ethnicity disaggregation of the measure in 2019. Kovesdi holds a bachelor’s degree in Politics and Sociology from the University of Bristol, and a Master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Oxford. Her primary research interests are in multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, wellbeing, and ethnicity and migration, particularly in the European context.

Mauricio Apablaza is the Research Director at the School of Government at Universidad del Desarrollo. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Previously, he worked as Research Officer and Outreach Coordinator at OPHI, at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom and a Master in Public Policies from the University del Desarrollo (Chile). He has been regional director for civil society organizations and consultant to international businesses and agencies (MEDSTAT/OECD, UNICEF, UNDP, SADC, WORLD BANK). He has led training programs for OPHI in South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Hungary, Brasil, Chile, the Netherlands, Barbados, US, Vietnam, Nicaragua and Thailand, among others. His areas of research include institutions, poverty dynamics, international migration and commerce.

About the Event Series

The seminars are taking place online on Mondays at 10 a.m. EST, with the final seminar on March 8th, 2021. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director Professor James Foster and are open to everyone focused on improving the lived experience of those who are deprived.

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Can the Mafia’s Tentacles Be Severed? The Economic Effects of Removing Corrupt City Councils

January 31, 2021March 7, 20222020, Alessandra Fenizia, Working Papers

December 2020

Alessandra Fenizia and Raffaele Saggio

IIEP working paper 2020-22

Abstract: This paper evaluates the long-run economic impact of the fight against organized crime. It uses rich administrative data from Italy and studies one of the most aggressive policies aimed at combating criminal organizations: the city council dismissal. Under this policy, local administrations believed to be infiltrated by the Mafia are dismissed by the central government and the municipality is then administrated by a team of public servants appointed by the central government for approximately two years. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that this policy fosters economic growth. Specifically, the city council dismissal increases formal employment by 16.9% nine years after the dismissal and this effect appears to be partially driven by the entry of new workers in the formal sector. Treated municipalities also display higher economic dynamism and a surge in industrial real estate prices in the aftermath of the intervention. These effects appear to be mediated by an increase in the quality of local politicians elected after the city council dismissal. We show that these newly elected politicians raise local tax compliance and were able to increase expenditures on roads and infrastructures. Overall, our results imply that there are significant long-run economic benefits associated with targeted law enforcement actions against criminal organizations.

JEL Codes: D73, G38, K42

Key Words: corruption, mafia, organized crime

Candidate Filtering: The Strategic Use of Electoral Fraud in Russia

January 31, 2021March 7, 20222020, Authors, David Szakonyi, Working Papers

November 2020

David Szakonyi (George Washington University)

IIEP working paper 2020-23

Abstract: Incumbents have many tools to tip elections in their favor, yet we know little about how they choose between strategies. By comparing various tactics, this paper argues that electoral malpractice centered on manipulating institutions offers the greatest effectiveness while shielding incumbents from public anger and criminal prosecution. To demonstrate this, I focus on one widespread institutional tactic: preventing candidates from accessing the ballot. First, in survey experiments, Russian voters respond less negatively to institutional manipulations, such as rejecting candidates, than to blatant fraud, such as ballot-box stuffing. Next, using evidence from 25,935 Russian mayoral races, I show that lower societal and implementation costs enable incumbents to strategically reject candidacies from credible challengers and then reduce their electoral vulnerability. In all, the technology behind specific manipulations helps determine when and how incumbents violate electoral integrity.

JEL Codes: D7, H40

Key Words: electoral fraud, authoritarianism, Russia, public opinion

Electoral Manipulation and Regime Support: Survey Evidence from Russia

January 31, 2021March 7, 20222020, David Szakonyi, Working Papers

November 2020

David Szakonyi (George Washington University), Ora John Reuter (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

IIEP working paper 2020-19

Abstract: Does electoral fraud stabilize authoritarian rule or undermine it? The answer to this question rests, in part, on how voters evaluate regime candidates who engage in fraud. Using a survey experiment conducted after the 2016 elections in Russia, we find that voters withdraw their support from ruling party candidates who commit electoral fraud. This effect is especially large among strong supporters of the regime. Core regime supporters are more likely to have ex ante beliefs that elections are free and fair. Revealing that fraud has occurred significantly reduces their propensity to support the regime. These findings illustrate that fraud is costly for autocrats not just because it may ignite protest, but also because it can undermine the regime’s core base of electoral support. Because many of its strongest supporters expect free and fair elections, the regime has strong incentives to conceal or otherwise limit its use of electoral fraud.

JEL Codes: D7, H40

Key Words: electoral fraud; authoritarianism, Russia

Indecent Disclosures: Anti-Corruption Reforms and Political Selection

January 31, 2021March 7, 20222020, Authors, David Szakonyi, Working Papers

November 2020

David Szakonyi (George Washington University)

IIEP working paper 2020-21

Abstract: Cracking down on corruption has become a key tool for politicians to build popular support. But little is known about whether anti-corruption measures actually change political behavior. This paper evaluates the effects of a common reform — financial disclosures — using data on 25,724 elections in Putin-era Russia. I argue that financial disclosures function like a personal audit, generating information for journalists and prosecutors to investigate illicit gains earned inside and outside of government. Exploiting staggered elections, I find that the passage of a disclosures requirement led to roughly 25% fewer incumbents seeking re-election and 10% fewer candidates with suspicious financial histories. Greater media freedom and law enforcement capacity further increase the risk of corruption and tax evasion being exposed, resulting in even fewer candidacies from those criminally exposed. Increasing transparency changes the incentives for serving in elected office, even in settings where other political motives may be at play.

JEL Codes: D7, H40, D73

Key Words: corruption, anti-corruption, Russia, reforms, elections

Test Format and Calculator Use in the Testing of Basic Math Skills for Principles of Economics: Experimental Evidence

January 30, 2021March 7, 20222020, Development Economics, Irene R. Foster, Working Papers

August 2020

Irene R. Foster (George Washington University), Melanie Allwine Fennell (Randolph-Macon College)

IIEP working paper 2020-20

Abstract: Results from an experiment in Fall 2013 of 902 incoming students at this university are reported. In this experiment, after students were given a basic math assessment to ensure they had the necessary math skills to take a principles of economics course, they were randomly allocated to a treatment or control group to test if there was a significant impact of test format, calculator use, and calculator type on students’ scores. The interaction of calculator use/type and test format was also tested. The results from this experiment suggest that each treatment had a significant positive impact on students’ assessment scores, with much variation depending on the type of question asked and the level of performance.

JEL Codes: A22, C23

Key Words: Economic Education, Teaching Economics, Math Assessment, Microeconomics,
Calculator Use, Test Format

Schooling in India’s New Education Policy and Impact of COVID on Learning Outcomes

January 25, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, India, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday February 10th, 2021
9:30 AM-11:00AM EST
via WebEx

We are pleased to share with you the sixth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The sixth event, “Schooling in India’s New Education Policy and Impact of COVID on Learning Outcomes” featured Karthik Muralidharan and Rukmini Banerji. The discussion was moderated by Professor James Foster, with an introduction by Dr. Ajay Chhibber.”

Improving the quality of education is a critical investment for enabling “inclusive growth” in India. It matters both for growth at the aggregate level, and for enabling citizens to broadly participate in this growth process at the individual level. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is the first major overhaul of education policy in nearly 35 years. Karthik discussed the main learnings from two decades of research on school education in India and present key principles for the way ahead.

Rukmini provided her perspective on these issues based on her work on learning outcomes at Pratham since 2005 and will also present findings from the 2020 Annual Survey of Education Results (ASER) the first ever phone based ASER survey. Conducted in September 2020, the sixth month of national school closures, the survey explores provision of and access to distance education mechanisms, materials and activities for children in rural India, and the ways in which children and families are engaging with these remote learning alternatives from their homes.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Rukmini Banerji is the CEO of Pratham Education Foundation. Trained as an economist, Dr. Banerji completed her B.A. at St. Stephen’s College and attended the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Banerji worked as a programme officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago for several years before returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham as part of the leadership team. There, she led the organisation’s research and assessment efforts, which have included the internationally acknowledged Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since 2005, and served as director of the ASER Centre in New Delhi for 10 years.

In 2008, she was the inaugural recipient of the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar Award conferred by the Government of Bihar, India. Over the years, she has represented Pratham and ASER Centre in various national and international forums and is a member of committees both in India and abroad. She writes frequently on education in India and enjoys creating books and stories for children.

Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is a Research Associate of the NBER, and on the Board of Directors of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT where he is co-chair of the education research program. His research spans development, public, and labor economics with a focus on improving the quality of public expenditure – especially in the social sector.

Born and raised in India, Prof. Muralidharan earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University (summa cum laude), an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge University (ranked first), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

About the Moderator:

More From This Series

Moderate internationally comparable MPI

January 15, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday February 1st, 2021

10:00 AM-11:30AM EST

Many of the current poverty measures used to track progress towards the Agenda 2030 fall short of its ambition to “end poverty in all its forms, everywhere”. This talk introduces a new measure of “moderate multidimensional poverty” that complements the current measures of acute poverty, in line with the ambitions outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The new trial index, here called Moderate MPI (MMPI), builds on the basic capabilities included in the global Multidimensional Poverty Index but adjusts the indicators to reflect a meaningful change in the level of ambition anchored in the SDGs. MMPI is intended to provide a complementary measure of poverty globally, but will be most meaningful for middle-income countries and regions where acute poverty is already low and possibly no longer reflects a valid level of ambition for national development.

The main value-added of the new trial MMPI is that it: i) is globally comparable across countries at all income levels, ii) aligns the indicators with the higher standards for development as defined in the Agenda 2030, and iii) allows us to study some aspects of intrahousehold deprivation. The trial MMPI is illustrated empirically using nationally representative household surveys from Thailand, Iraq, Tanzania, Serbia, Guatemala, and Bangladesh. While data constrains remain, the results demonstrate that the MMPI is feasible, has desirable properties as a global poverty index, and allows to unearth thus far hidden aspects in poverty measurement, such as intrahousehold deprivations in education. The talk concluded by discussing the steps needed towards a wider policy relevant use of the index that would support the global development community to find sustainable pathways out of poverty

About the Presenter:

Elina Scheja is currently working as a Lead Economist at the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), where her tasks include economic analysis, multidimensional poverty analytics, and advisory support. Her professional interest focus on evidence of what works for poverty reduction, how poverty can be measured in multiple dimensions, and how to promote sustainable and inclusive economic development that benefit people living in poverty. Prior to her current position, Ms Scheja was based in Rwanda managing Sida’s project portfolio for productive employment, analysing economic development, and engaging in dialogue with partners for sustainable poverty reduction. Ms Scheja has long experience in development cooperation in different roles and organisations, such as the World Bank where she worked with inclusive growth, development effectiveness, and migration. Ms Scheja holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex, Masters in Economics from Helsinki School of Economics, and Masters in Development Studies from Helsinki University, and has research experience from several universities and research institutions

About the Discussant:

Iván González de Alba is a Country Economist at UNDP’s Country Office in Cambodia. Until August 2020, he was the Regional Policy Advisor in Poverty Reduction and Sustainable Development at UNDP’s Regional Hub for Latin America and the Caribbean. Economist and holds a Masters in Public Policy from ITAM (Mexico) as well as a Masters in Economics and a DPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, England. Former OPHI collaborator, also worked for the Mexican government holding different positions at the ministries of tourism, social development and urban development. Social protection in Africa and the regional study on environmental variables into MPIs are among his most recent publications.

Khalid Abu-Ismail is a Senior Economist at UN-ESCWA, ERF Policy Affiliate and formerly UNDP Policy Adviser and Faculty Member of the Economics Department of the Lebanese American University.

Over 50 research papers and UN publications with a focus on poverty, inequality and human development in Arab countries, including: “Arab Vision 2030 Report” (ESCWA, 2015), “Arab Middle Class” (ESCWA, 2014), “Rethinking Economic Growth” (ILO and UNDP, 2012), “Arab Multi-Dimensional Poverty Report” (LAS, OPHI, UNICEF and ESCWA, 2017), “Rethinking Inequality in Arab Countries” (ESCWA and ERF, 2019) and lead author of the forthcoming ESCWA report on “Rethinking Human Development”. He has a D. Phil. in Development Economics from the New School for Social Research in New York.

About the Moderator:

These seminars are organized jointly with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office. They will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director James Foster.

More From This Series

Taking Stock of Climate Change: Earth, Air, Fire and Water

January 15, 2021March 23, 2022Adaption to Climate Change Events, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday, January 27th, 2021
12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. EST
WebEx

View Sir David Hendry’s slides here (PDF)

The climate of planet Earth depends on the energy balance between incoming radiation from the Sun and re-radiation from the planet. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere, like water vapor and carbon dioxide, help regulate whether the planet is a “snowball,” as warm as the Eocene some 55 million years ago, or something in between like our world today. Natural forces, including plate tectonics and volcanism, drove previous climatic upheavals, but today the main driver is humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels. Although life has survived previous climate upheavals, thriving in quite different global temperatures, huge numbers of species went extinct in the transitions. This webinar showed how humanity is altering the climate with impacts on the Earth’s limited available land, atmosphere, and water resources. The webinar used the ancient frames of Earth, Air, Fire and Water as ‘essential ingredients’ of life to explore what is happening, the dangers of precipitating an anthropogenic mass extinction, and actions humanity could take to avoid disaster.

About the Speaker:

Sir David F. Hendry is Co-director of Climate Econometrics and Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford University. He was previously Professor of Economics at Oxford, and of Econometrics at LSE. He has held visiting appointments at the Cowles Foundation, Yale University, University of California at Berkeley and San Diego, Duke University, as well as being Leverhulme Personal Research Professor and ESRC Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he was Chairman of the Economics Department from 2001—2007.

He was Knighted in 2009; is an Honorary Vice-President and past President, Royal Economic Society; Fellow, British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Econometric Society, Academy of Social Sciences, Journal of Econometrics and Econometric Reviews; Founding Fellow, International Association for Applied Econometrics and Honorary Fellow, International Institute of Forecasters; and Foreign Honorary Member, American Economic Association and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received eight Honorary Doctorates, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ESRC, and the Guy Medal in Bronze from the Royal Statistical Society. He founded the Econometrics Journal and has been Econometrics Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and the Economic Journal.

His research interests span econometric methods, theory, modeling, and history; computing; macro-econometrics; climate econometrics; empirical economics; and forecasting. He has published more than 200 papers and 25 books.

Dr Jennifer L. Castle is an Official Fellow in Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford, and an Associate Member of Climate Econometrics, Oxford University. She previously held a British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Her research interests lie in the fields of model selection and forecasting, and with David F. Hendry she has published 2 books including Modelling our Changing World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Forecasting: An Essential Introduction (Yale University Press, 2019, also with Michael P. Clements); a monograph; Climate Econometrics: An Overview (2020), and more than 30 articles. She has 1300+ citations and an h-index of 20, including in Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Time Series, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Forecasting, Econometrics, Econometric Reviews, International Journal of Forecasting, & National Institute Economic Review.

This event was Cosponsored by ASU/Thunderbird School

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Changes over Time in the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index and Other Measures: Towards National Poverty Reports

January 15, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday January 25th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:30AM EST

Paper Description:

This paper provides a highly visual, intuitive yet systematic assessment of trends in the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) over time across 80 countries and five billion people in developing regions. The analysis draws on data from 2000-2019, to document how the MPI, incidence and intensity of poverty has changed in these countries, and what indicators drove that change. Such a systematic review is an essential step towards clarifying the Sustainable Development Goal’s (SDGs) Target 1.2 to halve the proportion of people who are poor in many dimensions, and furthers the call for consistent, high quality, timely, and policy-relevant data on the interlinked deprivations that people living in multidimensional poverty endure.

About the Presenter:

About the Discussants:

Jaya Krishnakumar is a full professor of Econometrics at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is also a Visiting Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore and Madras School of Economics, Chennai, India. Her research interests include panel data econometrics, multivariate models with latent variables and quantitative methods for multi-dimensional well-being analysis. She has publications in leading international econometrics/economics journals for example in Econometric Theory, Journal of Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, Health Economics, and World Development. She has also edited and contributed chapters in books in Econometrics and on the Capability Approach. She is a member of the Advisory Panel for the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, and a Fellow of the Human Development and Capabilities Association. She has also been a member of the academic experts panel for World Bank’s Women, Business and The Law Index 2019, as well as an Advisor for the SDG Action Manager launched by B-Lab along with the UN Global Compact in early 2020.

José Manuel is a Research Associate at OPHI, and co-authored Multidimensional Poverty Measurement and Analysis published by the Oxford University Press. He has over 20 years of research and policy experience in international development, human development, poverty and inequality analysis, horizon scanning and strategic foresight, while working for civil society organizations, governments, and academia.

He has held various research and advisory roles for international agencies (including the World Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, ECLAC, Asian Development Bank), international NGOs (Save the Children, Care, Oxfam and World Vision) and national governments (Colombia, Venezuela, Egypt, Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, Bhutan and Malaysia).

He has been a lecturer and taught various undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the University of Oxford, University of Sussex and University College of London.

About the Moderator:

Link to the Presentation

More From This Series

Multidimensional Poverty in the U.S.

December 5, 2020March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Friday, December 11th, 2020
11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST
WebEx

This event was the tenth webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Facing Inequality” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.

There is no doubt that poverty and wellbeing are multidimensional concepts that go well beyond monetary values. The UN, the World Bank, and dozens of countries around the world have developed their own multidimensional measures of poverty and deprivation to reflect this reality, guide policy, and monitor progress. Could this transformative approach be relevant for the US, whose official monetary poverty measure was developed over 50 years ago? This webinar brought key researchers together to answer this question with the help of the latest research on multidimensional poverty in the US and Europe.

In this event Brian Glassman began with a discussion of his new paper, “The Census Multidimensional Deprivation Index: Revised and Updated,” which analyzes the Multidimensional Deprivation Index, released by the Census Bureau. Shatakshee Dhongde discussed her new paper, “Decade-Long View of Multidimensional Poverty in the United States,” which provides a comprehensive analysis of trends in multidimensional poverty in the United States. Lastly, Sabina Alkire presented her new paper “Chronic Multidimensional Poverty in Europe,” which develops contrasting measures for advanced economies, and applies them to the case of Europe.

This event was co-sponsored by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the Institute for International Economic Policy at GWU.

About the Speakers:

Brian Glassman is an Economist in the Poverty Statistics Branch of the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. Dr. Glassman has a Ph.D. in Economics from Temple University and a Masters in Public Policy from the College of William and Mary, and his areas of interest include urban economics, labor economics, and poverty and income inequality.

Shatakshee Dhongde is an Associate Professor of Economics and a Provost Teaching-Learning Fellow at Georgia Tech. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside. She is also a research affiliate with the Institute of Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research has focused on analyzing economic growth, inequality, poverty and multidimensional deprivation. She was awarded the Nancy and Richard Ruggles Prize for young researchers by the International Association of Review of Income and Wealth (IARIW). Her work has been published in several leading economics journals. Her research on measuring deprivation in the U.S. has been highlighted in national media, including NPR. She is the recipient of multiple teaching awards at Georgia Tech.

About the Discussants:

Sophie Mitra is a professor of economics and founding director of the Research Consortium on Disability at Fordham University in New York City. She has studied the economic impact of disability and mental illness, the effects of social protection programs, multidimensional poverty, the association between disability and poverty, and the definition of disability. Sophie Mitra has held visiting positions at Columbia University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). She received her doctorate in economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

About the Moderator:

Marianne Bitler has a BS in Mathematics from Penn State and a PhD in economics from MIT. She is a professor in the UC Davis Department of Economic and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Bitler’s research focuses on the effects of government safety net programs on disadvantaged groups, economic demography, health economics, public economics, and the economics of education, with a particular focus on food assistance programs. Before coming to UC Davis, she was a professor of economics at UC Irvine. She recently served as the chair of a National Academy of Sciences CNSTAT Panel on Improving Consumer Data for Food and Nutrition Policy Research for the Economic Research Service, USDA and she is a co-editor of the American Journal of Health Economics

About our Partners – OPHI

The Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) is an economic research and policy centre within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. Established in 2007, the centre is led by Sabina Alkire. OPHI aims to build and advance a more systematic methodological and economic framework for reducing multidimensional poverty, grounded in people’s experiences and values. OPHI works towards this through theoretical and applied research on multidimensional poverty, teaching and training activities, and supporting countries designing official national poverty statistics. OPHI’s work is grounded in Amartya Sen’s capability approach, and seeks to advance this approach by creating rigorous yet practical tools that inform policies to reduce poverty.

Each year, with the United Nations Development Programme, OPHI publishes the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), an international measure of acute multidimensional poverty covering over 100 developing countries. As the secretariat of a South-South multidimensional poverty peer network of policy actors and statisticians, OPHI organises side-events at the UN General Assembly and Statistics Commission, and publishes a magazineDimensions featuring policy applications. OPHI also publishes a Working Paper series, an informal Research in Progress series, a Policy and Research Briefings series, a global MPI Methodological Notes series. OPHI and MPPN websites also feature national MPI reports, some special publications such as poverty reports co-authored by OPHI, and a newsletter.

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“Saving Indian Capitalism from its Capitalists” featuring Pranab Bardhan

November 24, 2020March 25, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, India, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday, December 9th, 2020

11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST

This was the fourth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The fourth event, “Saving Indian Capitalism from Its Capitalists” featured Pranab Bardhan, Professor of Economics at University of California-Berkeley, with Jean Dreze of Ranchi University and Michael Walton of the Harvard Kennedy School as discussants. The discussion was moderated by Professor James Foster, with an introduction by Dr. Ajay Chhibber.

There are often conflicts in the interests of capital, between the individual capitalist and the capitalist class as a whole, or between the short-term and long-term interests of capital. In this talk Prof. Bardhan will give examples of this from the Indian debates on labor reform, health policy, policy relating to vocational education, and from the adverse effects of the growing concentration of capital and wealth distribution.

The Indian Government recently enacted a major labor reform that has been widely acclaimed in the business press and by many reform-mongering economists. The attempt to bring some order to the tangled mess that the old labor laws were in is welcome, as is more ‘flexibility’ in labor employment, but as part of a package deal with a reasonable scheme of unemployment benefits for workers; instead the new laws make the already insecure life of workers even more insecure. Capitalists envisioning a longer horizon should be aware that an insecure, disgruntled and unstable labor force is a sure bet for low productivity. Health Policy and Vocational Education also show cases where a more prudent corporate sector would have encouraged serious alternatives; this will be elucidated in the talk.

More broadly, in India the data suggest that corporate concentration and inequality in wealth distribution are galloping, and this is bound to have a negative effect on overall productivity and innovations, which is against the long-term interests of capitalism, even though it may give a boost to short-term earnings of individual capitalists. Compared to some other capitalist countries, India is more of a crony oligarchy that is cozy with the current regime, which is not conducive to a healthy development of capitalism in India. Nor is the rise in inequality that exacerbates demand deficiency, or the brazen dilution of environmental regulations that poisons and uproots community life.

About the Speakers:

Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Graduate School at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University, England. He had been at the faculty of MIT, Indian Statistical Institute and Delhi School of Economics before joining Berkeley. He has been Visiting Professor/Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and London School of Economics. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Siena Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9. He was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011. He got the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.

He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. He was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007.

He is the author of 16 books and editor of 14 other books, and author of more than 150 journal articles including in leading Economics journals (like American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Economic Papers, etc.).

He has also contributed essays to popular outlets like New York Times, Scientific American, Financial Times, Die Zeit, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Project Syndicate, Yale Global Online, Times of India, Economic Times, Business Standard, Bloomberg Quint, Hindustan Times, Ideas for India, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Express, Ananda Bazar Patrika (in Bengali), etc. From 2018 he has started writing a periodic column for a New York-based blog, 3 Quarks Daily.

Jean Dreze studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex and did his Ph.D. at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi. He has taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics, and is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University as well as Honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public policy, with special reference to India. His research interests include rural development, social inequality, elementary education, child nutrition, health care and food security. Jean Drèze is co-author (with Amartya Sen) of Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989) and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Penguin, 2013)”, and also one of the co-authors of the Public Report on Basic Education in India, also known as “PROBE Report”.

Michael Walton is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he has taught since 2004 and is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He also works with the non-profit IMAGO Global Grassroots whose goal is to take established grassroots organizations to the next level, working especially in India, Latin America and the United States. In addition to core teaching in HKS’ MPA in International Development, he leads the signature on-line course on Policy Design and Delivery. Michael was VKRV Rao Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore in 1998 and 1999, and visiting professor at the Delhi School of Economics in 1998. Before academia, Michael worked for 20 years at the World Bank, including on Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Zimbabwe. While there he led two and worked on two other World Development Reports (on Poverty in 1990 and 2000, on Labor in 1995, and Inequality in 2005). Book publications include co-edited volumes on Culture and Public Action, and No Growth without Equity? on Mexico. Current research in India, includes work on Self Help Groups and on scaling up of social enterprises of the Self Employed Women’s Association. Michael is also a dancer. He has a B.A. in Philosophy and Economics and an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University.

This event was sponsored with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

More From This Series

Recovering from Pandemic Recessions

November 13, 2020March 25, 2022COVID-19, James Foster, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference

Friday, November 20, 2020
WebEx

The Institute for International Economic Policy is pleased to invite you to the 13th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations. This year the conference will take place as a virtual series. This conference is co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research.

In this panel event, Dr. John Rogers, Senior Adviser at the Federal Reserve Board, and Michael Song, Professor of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, will share their respective research investigating economic recessions and recoveries during modern health crises and China’s economic experience during the current pandemic.

Examining historical episodes, John Rogers’ latest work finds that during the previous modern health crises, real GDP growth fell by around three percentage points in affected countries relative to unaffected countries in the year of the outbreak. Bounce-back in GDP growth was rapid, but output was still below pre-shock level five years later. Unemployment for less educated workers was higher and exhibited more persistence, and there was significantly greater persistence in female unemployment than male. The negative effects on GDP and unemployment were felt less in countries with larger first-year responses in government spending, especially on health care. Affected countries’ consumption declined, investment dropped sharply, and international trade plummeted. Bounce-back in these expenditure categories is also rapid but not by enough to restore pre-shock trends. These estimates are viewed as a lower bound for the global economic effects of COVID-19.

Zooming in on the effect of the pandemic and lockdown policy on Chinese economy, Michael will first show his estimates on the economic impacts of COVID-19 using high-frequency, city-to-city truck flow data from China. The largest economic impacts are from COVID shocks to Wuhan and Beijing, knocking about three percentage points off the national real income. If all Chinese cities had containment policies that responded to local pandemic severity in the same way as those in Hubei did, China’s first-quarter real income would have been reduced by half. He will then use firm registration records, online sales and job posting data to show the recovery of Chinese economy and its structural patterns.

Meet the Speakers:

John Rogers is a Senior Adviser in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board. He received his BA from the University of Delaware and PhD in economics from the University of Virginia. John was on the economics department faculty at Penn State University, where he rose to Associate Professor in 1996. He began working on the Fed’s multi-country model in the Trade & Financial Studies section, and became section chief in 2003. John is the author of several academic publications in international finance and macroeconomics. He continues to teach those subjects as an adjunct professor in the economics department at Georgetown University. John is the father of five children.

Michael Song is a professor at the Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), an outstanding fellow of the Faculty of Social Science at CUHK, a co-director of CUHK-Tsinghua Joint Research Center for Chinese Economy and a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. His research focuses on Chinese economy and macroeconomics. He published papers on leading academic journals including American Economic Review and Econometrica. His paper “Growing like China” won Sunyefang Economic Science Award and the Best Paper Award for Chinese Young Economists. Before joining CUHK, Prof. Song was an associate professor of economics at Chicago Booth. Prof. Song is also a co-editor of China Economic Review, an associate editor of Econometrica and Journal of European Economic Association and an academic committee member of China’s Economics Foundation.

Meet the Moderator:

Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab’s main fields of research are development and growth, urban economics, labor economics and political economy. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the relationship between population growth and economic growth, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Urban Economics. Finally, he is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Chinese Translation:

乔治华盛顿大学国际经济政策研究所 (The Institute for International Economic Policy) (IIEP) 欢迎您参加中国经济发展和中美经济关系的第十三届年会。今年的研讨会将以用虚拟方式进行。这个活动是全英文的。这次会议是由Sigur亚洲研究中心和乔治华盛顿国际商业教育与研究中心共同主办的。

在这次小组讨论会上，美联储高级顾问Dr. John Rogers 和香港中文大学宋铮(Michael Song) 教授将分享他们各自在有关现代健康危机导致的经济衰退和复苏和中国在Covid-19疫情期间经济走向的研究成果。

Dr. John Rogers 最近的研究发现在先前健康危机期间，疫情爆发当年，被影响的国家的实际国内生产总值相对于未受到影响的国家跌幅达到3%。实际国内生产总值反弹很快，但五年后产量仍然比爆发年前低。受教育程度较低的工人失业率持续偏高，并且表现出更大的持久性；女性失业持久性也明显比男性高。对在疫情第一年提供大量政府资助，尤其医疗方面支出，的国家，实际国内生产总值和失业影响偏小。受到影响的国家消费，投资，和国际贸易都跌幅很大，虽然反弹迅速，但仍然不足以恢复爆发年前的趋势。此研究认为以往健康危机对经济的影响是此次COVID-19 对全球经济影响的下限。

专注于目前Covid-19疫情与隔离政策对中国经济的影响，宋教授的工作指出隔离对经济，包括从人口和货物流动到总产出，都带来剧烈影响。消费支出的大小和结构也有很大的调整。隔离的时间结束以后，制造业恢复迅速，而用电量，零售额和餐饮收入则表现较大跨区域异质性，服务业产出的也受到更大影响。

演讲者：

宋铮 (Michael Song)

宋铮是香港中文大学经济系的教授，社会科学院的杰出学者, 清华大学－香港中文大学中国经济联合研究中心的主任，和清华大学经济管理学院杰出访问教授。他的研究领域为中国经济和宏观经济学。宋教授的论文在顶级学术期刊，包括American Economic Review 和 Econometrica，发表。他的论文 “Growing like China” 获得孙冶方经济学奖和中国青年经济学家优秀论文奖。在加入香港中文大学之前, 宋铮曾任芝加哥大学布斯商学院经济学副教授。他的学术兼职还包括 China Economic Review 联合主编，Econometrica 和 Journal of European Economic Association 副主编, 中国经济学基金会学术委员会委员等。

John Rogers

John Rogers 是美联储国际金融部的高级顾问。他拥有德拉瓦大学 (University of Delaware) 的政治和经济学士学位，以及弗吉尼亚大学 (University of Virginia) 的经济学博士学位。 Dr. Rogers曾在宾夕法尼亚州立大学 (Pennsylvania State University) 经济系任教，并于1996年升任副教授。他在美联储的贸易与金融研究部门研究美联储的多国模型，并于2003年成为该部门负责人。 Dr. Rogers 是诸多国际金融和宏观经济学方面学术出版物的作者。目前Dr. Rogers 在乔治敦大学 (Georgetown University) 经济学系担任兼职教授。他也是五个小孩的爸爸。

Valuing Nature: Whales, Elephants, and the Global Economy

November 12, 2020April 11, 2022Climate Adaptation, Development Economics, Global Governance, International Trade, James Foster, Past Events

Thursday, November 19, 2020
12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.

via WebEx

Economic systems and human well-being depend critically on natural services provided by a huge range of ecosystems. But those ecosystems are being rapidly destroyed by failure to value those services. As the understanding grows that nature provides finite and often irreplaceable inputs into human lives and livelihoods, new methods are emerging to value natural capital and incorporate those valuations into markets and public policy.

In this webinar, IMF economist Ralph Chami builds on his pathbreaking studies on whales, elephants, and other natural service-providers to lay out an accessible valuation framework that decision makers can use to build public-private partnerships, create employment opportunities, and build a nature-friendly and inclusive global economy. ASU-Thunderbird professor Ann Florini will provide discussant remarks.

This webinar was moderated by Dr. Sunil Sharma, Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Institute for International Economic Policy, alongside IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics. This event is co-sponsored by the Thunderbird School of Management at Arizona State University and the Institute for International Economic Policy at GWU.

Meet the Discussants:

Ralph Chami is currently an Assistant Director at the IMF and leads the Western Hemisphere Division of the Institute for Capacity Development (ICD). Previously, he was Assistant Director and Division Chief in the Middle East and Central Asia Department responsible for the Regional Economic Outlook, and then the surveillance and program work on fragile states. His forthcoming book on Macroeconomic Policy in Fragile States, co-edited with Raphael Espinoza and Peter Montiel, will be published by Oxford University Press in January 2021. Before joining the IMF in 1999, he was on the Finance faculty of the Mendoza School of Business, University of Notre Dame, USA. Dr. Chami has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Johns Hopkins University, and his areas of interest include banking regulation and supervision, financial markets, remittances, and climate change.

Ann Florini is Clinical Professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University, where she directs programs at the Washington, D.C. campus. She was previously Professor of Public Policy at Singapore Management University founding director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore; and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She has spearheaded numerous international initiatives on global governance, energy and climate policy, and cross-sector collaborations including government, civil society, and the private sector. Her many books and articles have addressed governance in China, transparency in governance, transnational civil society networks, and the role of the private sector in public affairs. Dr. Florini received her Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton University.

More info can be found here.

More From This Series

International Trade in the Asia-Pacific Region Amidst U.S.-China Tensions

October 28, 2020April 11, 2022International Trade Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events, Research Conference, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events

Tuesday, November 10, 2020
7:00 p.m. – 8:15 p.m. EST
via Zoom

The Institute for International Economic Policy was pleased to invite you to the 13th annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations. The conference took place as a virtual series and was co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the GW Center for International Business Education and Research. This event in the series was co-sponsored and hosted by Elliott School of International Affairs Alumni Programs.

Since 2017, trade disputes between the U.S. and China have spiraled into a full blown economic and trade war. U.S. tariff rates on Chinese imports rose from an average 3.1 percent “Most Favored Nation” rate in 2017 to above 20 percent in 2020, covering essentially all imports including both intermediate and consumer goods. China responded by imposing retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products ranging from soybeans to electrical equipment and autos. This trade war has rippled throughout the region to affect the countries of the Asia-Pacific and beyond.

This online panel discussion featured two prominent GW alumni working in the Asia-Pacific region: Chris Fussner, CCAS BA ’79, founder and president of TransTechnology Worldwide, based in Singapore, and Frank Wong, ESIA BA ’79, president of Scholastic Asia, based in Hong Kong. Prof. Maggie Chen, professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University, moderated the discussion.

Meet the Discussants:

Maggie Chen is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has served as Director of GW’s Institute for International Economic Policy and worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank and a consultant for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Professor Chen’s research areas include multinational firms, international trade, and regional trade agreements. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. She is a co-editor of Economic Inquiry and an associate editor of Economic Modeling.

Chris Fussner is founder and president of TransTechnology Worldwide, based in Singapore, a market leader in the sales and distribution of surface mount technology with offices in 9 countries in Asia and 3 countries in North America. Prior to forming TransTechnology in 1988, Mr. Fussner headed Far East Sales for Amistar Corporation based in Seoul, Korea and Singapore, where he was responsible for Sales and Service for electronics manufacturing industry machines in the Pacific, as well as the Western United States. Mr. Fussner started his international career working with relief and refugee resettlement in West Africa and Malaysia. He holds a B.A. in History and Asian Studies from GW, and a Master of International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management. He previously served on the board of advisors for GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

Frank Wong is President of Scholastic Asia, and based in Hong Kong. Before joining Scholastic Asia as President over 15 years ago, he was Managing Director of PepsiCo’s food business in China and established best practices in sales execution and in-store merchandising. Prior to PepsiCo, Frank Wong spent 5 years with Nabisco, successfully building the company’s international brand identity. Wong also held various marketing positions at Colgate-Palmolive in New York and was co-founder and President of a start-up venture to develop and market special electronic products for the visually impaired around the world. Mr. Wong was born in Hong Kong and speaks fluent Mandarin and Cantonese. In addition to his degree from GW, he holds a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University and did advanced studies at Harvard’s JFK School of Government. He is the recipient of the 2015 Alumni Outstanding Service Award from the GW Alumni Association.

More From This Series

IMF October 2020 World Economic Outlook

October 9, 2020April 11, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, Tara Sinclair

October 28, 2020

11:00 am – 12:30 pm

via WebEx

The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) hosted a virtual discussion of the IMF’s October 2020 World Economic Outlook.

Agenda

11:00 – 11:05 a.m. Welcoming Remarks:
James Foster and Jay Shambaugh, IIEP Co-Directors, George Washington University

11:05 – 11:35 a.m. Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies
Presenter: Malhar Nabar, International Monetary Fund
Discussant: Claudia Sahm, SAHM Consulting

11:35 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Chapter 2: The Great Lockdown: Dissecting the Economic Effects
Presenter: Francesca Caselli, International Monetary Fund
Discussant: Tara Sinclair, George Washington University

12:00 – 12:25 p.m. Chapter 3: Mitigating Climate Change: Growth-and-Distribution-Friendly Strategies
Presenters: Florence Jaumotte , International Monetary Fund
Discussant: Ken Gillingham, Yale University

12:25 – 12:30 p.m. General Q&A and Concluding Remarks

Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

The months after the release of the June 2020 World Economic Outlook (WEO) Update have offered a glimpse of how difficult rekindling economic activity will be while the pandemic surges. During May and June, as many economies tentatively reopened from the Great Lockdown, the global economy started to climb from the depths to which it had plunged in April. But with the pandemic spreading and accelerating in places, many countries slowed reopening, and some are reinstating partial lockdowns. While the swift recovery in China has surprised on the upside, the global economy’s long ascent back to pre-pandemic levels of activity remains prone to setbacks.

Chapter 2: The Great Lockdown: Dissecting the Economic Effects

To contain the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and protect susceptible populations, most countries imposed stringent lockdown measures in the first half of 2020. Meanwhile, economic activity contracted dramatically on a global scale. This chapter aims to dissect the nature of the economic crisis in the first seven months of the pandemic. It finds that the adoption of lockdowns was an important factor in the recession, but voluntary social distancing in response to rising infections also contributed very substantially to the economic contraction. Therefore, although easing lockdowns can lead to a partial recovery, economic activity is likely to remain subdued until health risks abate.

Chapter 3: Mitigating Climate Change: Growth-and-Distributional-Friendly Strategies

Without further action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet is on course to reach temperatures not seen in millions of years, with potentially catastrophic implications. The analysis in this chapter suggests that an initial green investment push combined with steadily rising carbon prices would deliver the needed emission reductions at reasonable transitional global output effects, putting the global economy on a stronger and more sustainable footing over the medium term.

Short and long-run distributional impacts of COVID-19 in Latin America

September 28, 2020March 25, 2022Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, Stephen B. Kaplan

Monday, October 12, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx

“Facing Inequality” is a webinar series hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brings attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. It is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.

This was the eighth event in the facing inequality series. Our distinguished speakers, Nora Lustig and Guido Neidhöfer discussed their paper, “Short and long-run distributional impacts of COVID-19 in Latin America ” (Lustig, Neidhöfer and Tommasi). They simulate the short- and long-term distributional consequences of COVID-19 in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. They show that the short-term impact on income inequality and poverty can be very significant but that additional spending on social assistance has a large offsetting effect in Brazil and Argentina. The effect is much smaller in Colombia and nil in Mexico, where there has been no such expansion. To project the long-term consequences, they estimate the impact of the pandemic on human capital and its intergenerational persistence. Hereby, they use information on school lockdowns, educational mitigation policies, and account for educational losses related to parental job loss. Their findings show that in all four countries the impact is strongly asymmetric and affects particularly the human capital of the most vulnerable. Consequently, educational inequality and inequality of opportunity are expected to increase substantially, in spite of the mitigation policies.

About the Speakers:

Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research focuses on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Her recent publication Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Guido Neidhöfer is an advanced researcher in the Labor Markets and Human Resources department at ZEW Mannheim, Germany, as well as a fellow at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER), visiting scholar at the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS) of the National University of La Plata, and an associated researcher of the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Humano (CEDH) of the Universidad de San Andres in Argentina. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of economic inequality, social mobility, education and migration.

About the Discussants:

Professor Kaplan joined the GWU faculty in the fall of 2010 after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and his Ph.D at Yale University. While at Yale, Kaplan also worked as a researcher for former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Prior to his doctoral studies, Professor Kaplan was a senior economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, writing extensively on developing country economics, global financial market developments, and emerging market crises from 1998 to 2003.

Dr. Michael C. Wolfson received his B.Sc with honours from University of Toronto jointly in mathematics, computer science and economics in 1971, and then a Ph.D. from Cambridge in economics in 1977. He retired as Assistant Chief Statistician, Analysis and Development (which included the Health Statistics program and the central R&D function) at Statistics Canada in 2009. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Modeling in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa for 2010-2017. Prior to joining Statistics Canada, he held increasingly senior positions in the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Department of Finance, the Privy Council Office, the House of Commons, and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office. While a senior public servant, he was also a founding Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program in Population Health (1988-2003). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a member of the recently created Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.

More From This Series

The IMF’s Financial Catch 22: Global Banker or Lender of Last Resort?

September 3, 2020March 7, 20222020, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

August 2020

Stephen B. Kaplan (George Washington University), Sujeong Shim (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

IIEP working paper 2020-18

Abstract: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has dual institutional roles: a steward of international financial stability and a global banker safeguarding the resources of its sovereign shareholders. But, how does the IMF behave when its balance sheet becomes exposed to higher-than-usual credit risk, creating a financial catch-22? We expect the IMF varies its lending behavior, based on the nature of sovereign credit crises. When there is high contagion risk, the IMF aims to preserve global financial stability as a lender of last resort by extending large loans, notwithstanding its balance sheet strains. The IMF employs policy conditionality to hedge its lending risk, but prioritizes alleviating global market turmoil over program compliance. When market contagion is contained, however, the IMF is more likely to act as a traditional banker, suspending programs for non- compliance. Ironically, given its tendency to forgive non-compliance as a lender of last resort, our theoretical framework suggests that the Fund intensifies its moral hazard problem.

We test our theoretical priors by conducting a comparative case study analysis of IMF decision-making over time for two of its largest borrowers: Argentina and Greece. Leveraging volumes of hundred-paged minutes from IMF executive board
meeting archives and extensive field research interviews, we illustrate the lending stances of IMF directors evolve in response to changes in global contagion risk. By examining the IMF’s own institutional agency under high financial risk, this study offers new insights for the study of international political economy and international organizations.

JEL Codes:

Key Words: IMF; lender of last resort; financial crises, institutional financial risk; contagion risk; Argentina; Greece

Epidemics, inequality and poverty in preindustrial and early industrial times

September 3, 2020March 7, 20222020, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

August 2020

Guido Alfani (Bocconi University, Dondena Centre, IGIER, and Stone Center for Research on Socio-Economic Inequaltiy)

IIEP working paper 2020-16

Abstract: *This paper is part of a Symposium organized by Dr. Remi Jedwab of the George Washington University that will appear in the Journal of Economic Literature.* Recent research has explored the distributive consequences of major historical epidemics, and the current crisis triggered by Covid-19 prompts us to look at the past for insights about how pandemics can affect inequalities in income, wealth, and health. The fourteenth-century Black Death, which is usually believed to have led to a significant reduction in economic inequality, has attracted the greatest attention. However, the picture becomes much more complex if other epidemics are considered. This article covers the worst epidemics of preindustrial times, from Justinian’s Plague of 540-41 to the last great European plagues of the seventeenth century, as well as the cholera waves of the nineteenth. It shows how the distributive outcomes of lethal epidemics do not only depend upon mortality rates, but are mediated by a range of factors, chief among them the institutional framework in place at the onset of each crisis. It then explores how past epidemics affected poverty, arguing that highly lethal epidemics could reduce its prevalence through two deeply different mechanisms: redistribution towards the poor, or extermination of the poor. It concludes by recalling the historical connection between the progressive weakening and spacing in time of lethal epidemics and improvements in life expectancy, and by discussing how epidemics affected inequality in health and living standards.

JEL Codes: D31, D63, I14, I30, J11, N30, N33

Key Words: epidemics; inequality; poverty

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and its Lessons for COVID-19

September 3, 2020March 7, 20222020, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

August 2020

Brian Beach (Vanderbilt University and NBER), Karen Clay (Carnegie Mellon University and NBER), Martin Saavedra (Oberlin College)

IIEP working paper 2020-15

Abstract: *This paper is part of a Symposium organized by Dr. Remi Jedwab of the George Washington University that will appear in the Journal of Economic Literature.* This article reviews the global health and economic consequences of the 1918 infuenza pandemic, with a particular focus on topics that have seen a renewed interest because of COVID-19. We begin by providing an overview of key contextual and epidemiological details as well as the data that are available to researchers. We then examine the effects on mortality, fertility, and the economy in the short and medium run. The role of nonpharmaceutical interventions in shaping those outcomes is discussed throughout. We then examine longer-lasting health consequences and their impact on human capital accumulation and socioeconomic status. Throughout the paper we highlight important areas for future work.

JEL Codes: I10, N0, J10, J24

Key Words: Pandemics; 1918 Influenza; COVID-19; epidemics

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

September 3, 2020March 7, 20222020, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

June 2020

Remi Jedwab (George Washington University), Noel D. Johnson (George Mason University), Mark Koyama (George Mason University)

IIEP working paper 2020-14

Abstract: *This paper is part of a Symposium organized by Dr. Remi Jedwab of the George Washington University that will appear in the Journal of Economic Literature.* The Black Death was the largest demographic shock in European history. We review the evidence for the origins, spread, and mortality of the disease. We document that it was a plausibly exogenous shock to the European economy and trace out its aggregate and local impacts in both the short-run and the long-run. The initial effect of the plague was highly disruptive. Wages and per capita income rose. But, in the long-run, this rise was only sustained in some parts of Europe. The other indirect long-run effects of the Black Death are associated with the growth of Europe relative to the rest of the world, especially Asia and the Middle East (the Great Divergence), a shift in the economic geography of Europe towards the Northwest (the Little Divergence), the demise of serfdom in Western Europe, a decline in the authority of religious institutions, and the emergence of stronger states. Finally, avenues for future research are laid out.

JEL Codes: N00, N13, I15, I14, J11, O10, O43

Key Words: Pandemics; Black Death; Institutions; Cities; Urbanization; Malthusian Theory; Demography; Long-Run Growth; Middle Ages; Europe; Asia;

Pandemics, Poverty, and Social Cohesion: Lessons from the Past and Possible Solutions for COVID-19

September 3, 2020March 7, 20222020, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

June 2020

Remi Jedwab (George Washington University), Amjad M. Khan (The World Bank),Richard Damania (The World Bank), Jason Russ (The World Bank), Esha D. Zaveri (The World Bank)

IIEP working paper 2020-13

Abstract: Since COVID-19 broke out, there has been renewed interest in understanding the economic and social dynamics of historical and more recent pandemics and epidemics, from the plagues of Antiquity to modern-day outbreaks like Ebola. These events can have significant impacts on the interplay between poverty and social cohesion, i.e. how different groups in society interact and cooperate to survive and prosper. To that effect, this survey paper provides an overview of how social responses to past pandemics and epidemics were determined by the epidemiological and non-epidemiological characteristics of these outbreaks, with a particular focus on the scapegoating and persecution of minority groups, including migrants. More precisely, we discuss existing theories as well as historical and quantitative studies, and highlight the cases and contexts where pandemics may lead to milder or more severe forms of scapegoating. Finally, we conclude with a summary of priorities for future research on pandemics and social cohesion and discuss the possible effects and policy implications of COVID-19.

JEL Codes: O15, O18, I15, I19, J61, J71

Key Words: COVID-19; Pandemics; Epidemics; Disasters; Social Cohesion; Stigmatization; Minority Persecution; Conflict; Poverty; Migration; Social Capital; Trust

A tale of two wage subsidies: The American and Australian fiscal responses to COVID-19

August 4, 2020March 7, 20222020, Steven Hamilton, Working Papers

July 2020

Steven Hamilton (George Washington University)

IIEP working paper 2020-12

Abstract: Australia suppressed the virus with swift and strong public health measures including stringent border controls. As of July 2020, the virus continues to spread uncontrolled across the US, resulting in the most recorded cases and deaths of any country. Both countries instituted widespread lock-downs and similarly generous fiscal support, yet Australia has experienced a far milder recession, highlighting the critical role of public health measures in protecting the economy. The role of broad cash stimulus necessarily has been more limited than in an ordinary recession, justifying the use of wage subsidies that encourage businesses to retain workers. The Australian wage subsidy, delivered via the tax authority, was better targeted, more generous, more accessible, but slower to deliver liquidity than the American wage subsidy delivered via private banks. The experience highlights the critical need for significant investments in IRS infrastructure to better prepare for future crises.

JEL Codes:

Key Words:

Women at Work in the Pre-Civil War United States: An Analysis of Unreported Family Workers

August 4, 2020March 7, 20222020, Barry Chiswick, Working Papers

June 2020

Barry R. Chiswick (George Washington University) and RaeAnn Halenda Robinson (George Washington University)

IIEP working paper 2020-11

Abstract: Rates of labor force participation in the US in the second half of the nineteenth century among free women were exceedingly (and implausibly) low, about 11 percent. This is due, in part, to social perceptions of working women, cultural and societal expectations of female’s role, and lack of accurate or thorough enumeration by Census officials. This paper develops an augmented free female labor force participation rate for 1860. It is calculated by identifying free women (age 16 and older) who were likely providing informal and unenumerated labor for market production in support of a family business, that is, unreported family workers. These individuals are identified as not having a reported occupation, but are likely to be working on the basis of the self-employment occupation of other relatives in their households. Family workers are classified into three categories: farm, merchant, and craft. The inclusion of this category of workers more than triples the free female labor force participation rate in the 1860 Census, from 16 percent to 56 percent, which is comparable to today’s rate (57 percent in 2018).

JEL Codes: N31, J16, J21, J82

Key Words: Women, Labor Force Participation, Occupational Attainment, Unpaid Workers, Unreported Family Workers, 1860 Census

A Discussion of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2020

July 24, 2020March 25, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday, July 29, 2020
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx

Please join the Institute for International Economic Policy for a virtual discussion of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative’s Global MPI 2020: – Charting pathways out of multidimensional poverty: Achieving the SDGs

Participants:

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics at the George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University and holds a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico). Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in México. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu. Foster regularly teaches introductory and doctoral courses on international development and each spring joins with Professor Basu in presenting an undergraduate course on Game Theory and Strategic Thinking, to which staff and Board members of the World Bank are also invited. Professor Foster is also Research Fellow at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), Department of International Development, Oxford University, and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Working Group, Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, University of Chicago. He also previously served as an Advisory Board Member on the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty.

Ajay Chhibber is Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute of International Economic Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He is Chief Economic Advisor, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). He was earlier the first Director General ( Minister of State) , Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India – affiliated institute of the Ministry of Finance – where he completed a major study on India’s Public Sector Enterprises. He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. At the World Bank he served as Country Director in Turkey and Vietnam and Division Chief for Indonesia and the Pacific and Lead Economist, West Africa Department. He was also Director of the 1997 World Development Report on the Role of the State. He also worked in the World Bank’s Research Department, as Advisor to the Chief Economist of the World Bank and at the Public Economics Division. He has a Ph.D from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He also has attended advanced management programs at the Harvard Business School, Harvard University and INSEAD, France. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi. He has published widely including 5 books in development economics, and is a contributor (columnist) to several newspapers. He is now writing a book on “India: A Reset for the 21st Century” under contract with Harper-Collins.

Monica Pinilla-Roncancio is a Physiotherapist with a Master’s degree in Economics from Universidad del Rosario. She has also a Master’s degree in Health Economics, Policy and Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands. She finished her PhD in Social Policy at the University of Birmingham, UK. From 2016 to 2018 she was as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Universidad de los Andes and currently is an Assistant Professor at the same university. She is the Co-director of Metrics and Policy at OPHI and has been working in OPHI since 2014. She coordinates the work in Latin America, East Asia and some countries in Africa and Middle East. Her main research interest are disability, multidimensional poverty, inequality and health economics.

Frances Stewart was Director of ODID from 1993-2003 and Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at the department between 2003 and 2010. She has a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex. Among many publications, she is coauthor of UNICEF’s influential study, Adjustment with a Human Face (OUP 1987); War and Underdevelopment (OUP 2001); and leading author and editor of Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict: Understanding Group Violence in Multiethnic Societies (Palgrave, 2008). She has directed a number of major research programmes including several financed by the UK Government’s Department for International Development, and others by the Swedish Development Agency and the Carnegie Corporation. An Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, Frances has acted as consultant for early Human Development Reports; she has been President of the Human Development and Capability Association; President of the British and Irish Development Studies Association; Chair of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy and Vice-Chair of the Board of the International Food Policy Research Institute. She received the Leontief prize in 2013 for advancing the frontiers of economic thought from Tufts University. She was given the UNDP’s Mahbub ul Haq award for her lifetime’s achievements in promoting human development in 2009; and named one of fifty outstanding technological leaders for 2003 by Scientific American (Policy Leader in Economic Development Strategies for promoting anti-poverty campaigns to help quell armed conflicts in developing countries).

Ricardo Nogales is a Research Officer at OPHI since May 2018. He holds a BSc. and a MSc. In Economics and a PhD in Econometrics, all from the University of Geneva (Switzerland). Before joining OPHI, he was a Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance of the Universidad Privada Boliviana in Bolivia and a Research Assistant at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Switzerland. He carried on research activities in the field of development economics, poverty reduction and human development with the IDB, UNDP, ILO, World Bank, Oxfam and IDRC. He has been an external consultant for several public organizations in Bolivia, including the Program for Strategic Research, the Central Bank, the Institute for Agricultural Insurance and the Ministry of Economics and Public Finance.

Dean Jolliffe is a Lead Economist in the Development Data Group of the World Bank and member of the LSMS-ISA team. He has extensive experience in the design and implementation of household surveys and is currently managing ongoing LSMS-ISA work in Ethiopia. He has also worked in the South Asia region at the Bank on poverty assessments for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Previously, he was a Research Economist at the Economic Research Service of USDA, an Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education in Prague, and a Post-doctoral Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. Dean holds appointments as a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, and as a Research Affiliate with the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

Are Informal Workers Benefiting from Globalization? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in India

July 15, 2020April 11, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, James Foster, Maggie Chen, Past Events, Seminar

Tuesday, August 4, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx

We were pleased to invite you to the webinar series “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series brings attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.

The seventh event, “Are Informal Workers Benefiting from Globalization? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in India” featured Dr. Nita Rudra of Georgetown University. The discussion focused on the following: Are citizens in the developing world convinced about the benefits of globalization? By leveraging their comparative advantage in low labor costs, economists predict once-poor citizens will be better off with open markets. Yet, surprisingly little rigorous research exists on if and how workers in developing countries actually experience the benefits of increasing trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly in an era of rapidly expanding global supply chains. To answer this question, we focused on the largest cluster of low-wage laborers in developing countries, informal workers, and their experience with FDI. Using observational and experimental methods, we find that both formal and informal workers in India strongly approve of foreign investment. However, the latter are deeply skeptical that the benefits of FDI will ever trickle down to themselves or their future generations. India’s much smaller population of formal workers, by contrast, are confident that they have privileged access to coveted jobs in foreign firms – regardless of skill level- and social mobility prospects will improve. These findings provide new insights on (macro and micro-level) drivers of growing global inequalities, and call for caution amongst scholars, policymakers, the international business community, and all those who anticipate that globalization is lifting all boats.

About the Moderator:

James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).

About the Speaker:

Nita Rudra is a Professor of Government at Georgetown University. Her research interests include: the distributional impacts of trade and financial liberalization as they are mediated by politics and institutions; the influence of international organizations on policies in developing economies; the politics of trade agreements involving developing economies, and the causes and effects of democracy in globalizing developing nations. Her most critical works appear in the British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization and International Studies Quarterly . Her most recent book with Cambridge University Press is entitled: Democracies in Peril: Taxation and Redistribution in Globalizing Economies. Her current projects analyze how and why widespread poverty persists in rapidly globalizing economies, the politics supporting/resisting changes to the informal sector, the anti-globalization backlash, and the politics of trade and trade agreements.

About the Discussants:

Maggie Chen is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has served as Director of GW’s Institute for International Economic Policy and worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank and a consultant for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Professor Chen’s research areas include multinational firms, international trade, and regional trade agreements. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. She is a co-editor of Economic Inquiry and an associate editor of Economic Modeling.

Picture of Deepa Ollapally Deepa Ollapally is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Sigur Center. She also directs the Rising Powers Initiative, a major research program that tracks and analyzes foreign policy debates in aspiring powers of Asia and Eurasia. Dr. Ollapally is currently working on a funded book, Big Power Competition for Influence in the Indian Ocean Region, which assesses the shifting patterns of geopolitical influence by major powers in the region since 2005 and the drivers of these changes. She is the author of five books including Worldviews of Aspiring Powers (Oxford, 2012) and The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008). Her most recent books are two edited volumes, Energy Security in Asia and Eurasia (Routledge, 2017), and Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Dr. Ollapally has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia. Previously, she was Associate Professor at Swarthmore College and has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London and at Columbia University. Dr. Ollapally also held senior positions in the policy world including the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. She is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearances on CNN, BBC, CBS, Diane Rehm Show and Reuters TV. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.

More From This Series

IMF’s Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Economic Outlook (REO)

July 10, 2020March 25, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Economic Governance Events, James Foster, Past Events, Stephen C. Smith

Thursday, July 23, 2020
11:00 am – 12:30 pm EDT
WebEx

Please join the Institute for International Economic Policy for a virtual discussion of the International Monetary Fund’s Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Economic Outlook

Schedule
11:00 – 11:05 a.m. Welcoming Remarks:

James Foster, George Washington University

Jennifer Cooke, IAFS Director, George Washington University

11:05 – 11:35 a.m. Chapter 1: Covid-19: An Unprecedented Threat to Development

Presenter: Andrew Tiffin John, Senior Economist, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Louise Fox, Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings, and on the Advisory Board of the G-7
Inclusive Growth Financing Forum, former USAID Chief Economist and World Bank official

11:40 – 12:05 p.m. Chapter 2: Adapting to Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Presenter: Seung Mo Choi, Senior Economist, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Stephen C. Smith, Chair, Economics Department, and Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University

12:05 – 12:30 p.m. Chapter 3: Digitalization in Sub-Saharan Africa 

Presenters: Preya Sharma, Special Assistant to the Director, African Department, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Esther Chibesa, Head of Treasury and Trade Solutions for SSA, Citigroup; and Michael Mutiga,
Managing Director and Head of Corporate Finance for SSA, Citigroup

12:30 p.m. Concluding Remarks

Summary Chapter: A Cautious Reopening

The outlook for 2020 for sub-Saharan Africa is considerably worse than was anticipated in April and subject to much uncertainty. Economic activity this year is now projected to contract by some 3.2 percent, reflecting a weaker external environment and measures to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. Growth is projected to recover to 3.4 percent in 2021 subject to the continued gradual easing of restrictions that has started in recent weeks and, importantly, if the region avoids the same epidemic dynamics that have played out elsewhere. Africa’s authorities have acted swiftly to support the economy, but these efforts have been constrained by falling revenues and limited fiscal space. Regional policies should remain focused on safeguarding public health, supporting people and businesses hardest hit by the crisis, and facilitating the recovery. The region cannot tackle these challenges alone, and a coordinated effort by all development partners will be key.

Chapter 2: Adapting to Climate Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is especially vulnerable to climate change, as it relies heavily on rain-fed agriculture and has limited resilience and coping mechanisms. On average, climate change could reduce GDP growth by at least 1 percentage point in the month a climate shock occurs. Improving access to finance and insurance, education, health, telecommunications, and physical infrastructure would be most effective in raising resilience. Ensuring food security and raising agricultural productivity in the face of intensifying weather shocks will require targeted social assistance, crop diversification, and improved irrigation. While these measures involve large public spending, they should be prioritized as they will be more cost-effective than frequent disaster relief. Limited fiscal space poses a challenge and means that development partners’ support will be critical.

Chapter 3: Digitalization in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is rapidly becoming digitally connected and closing gaps with the rest of the world. Digital solutions have taken on added importance as countries grapple with the unprecedented fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. While countries have leveraged digital solutions and policy responses, the connectivity gap between sub Saharan Africa and the rest of the world suggests that greater digital readiness could have allowed the region to do even more. Analysis conducted before the pandemic found that a one percentage point increase in internet penetration in the region can raise per capita growth by 0.1–0.4 percentage points. There does not appear to be an impact on overall employment, although the share of service sector jobs increases. Evidence suggests that digitalization can help reduce corruption, improve public sector accountability and efficiency, and support financial development. However, digitalization brings new risks (e.g., cybersecurity, business continuity) and challenges to macro-policy making (e.g., monetary policy transmission, changes to the tax base). As attention turns to policies for the recovery, the pandemic will likely serve to accelerate the digital transformation. Policies to enable and leverage greater connectivity include investing in complementary infrastructure and human capital; developing legislative and regulatory frameworks; and supervisory powers to ensure consumer protection and address risks.

Participants:

Jennifer G. Cooke is director of the Institute for African Studies at The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. The Institute serves as central for research, scholarly discussion, and debate on issues relevant to Africa. She is a professor of practice in international affairs, teaching courses on U.S. Policy Toward Africa and Transnational Security Threats in Africa. Cooke joined George Washington University in August 2018, after 18 years as director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she led research and analysis on political, economic, and security dynamics in Africa. While at CSIS, Cooke directed projects on a wide range of African issues, including on violent extremist organizations in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin, China’s growing role in Africa, democracy and elections in Nigeria, religion and state authority in Africa, “stress-testing” state stability in Africa, Africa’s changing energy landscape, and more. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on U.S.-Africa policy and has provided briefing, commentary, and testimony to the media, US Congress, AFRICOM leadership and the U.S. military. She has traveled widely in Africa and has been an election observer in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, and Nigeria. As a teenager, she lived in Cote d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic. She holds an M.A. in African studies and international economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a B.A. in government, magna cum laude, from Harvard University.

Andrew Tiffin is a senior economist at the IMF, working in the regional studies division of the Fund’s African Department. He is also keenly involved in the effort to incorporate artificial intelligence/machine-learning techniques into the standard analytical toolkit of the Fund. Previously, he has worked on Middle Eastern countries, with a particular interest in refugee issues in Jordan and Lebanon, as well as numerous countries in Europe–he was part of the Italy team during the debt crisis of 2012, and part of the Russia team for the global financial crisis of 2008. Raised in Sydney, Andrew is an Australian national. He received his post-graduate training at Princeton University, where he obtained both a Ph.D. in economics and an M.P.A. in international relations. In addition to his work with the Fund, Andrew has held positions at the Reserve Bank of Australia, and with the Australian Government.

Louise Fox is an experienced development economist who specializes in strategies for employment creation, opportunity expansion, economic empowerment, and poverty reduction. She has advised governments in the developed and developing world, international organizations, and philanthropic and non-profit organizations on problem diagnosis, strategies for results, and outcome measurement. She held full-time positions at USAID (as Chief Economist) and at the World Bank. She is currently affiliated with the African Growth Initiative at the Brookings Institution and the Blum Center for Developing Economies, University of California, Berkeley. She was previously affiliated with the Overseas Development Institute, where she led a major research project. Louise has published in the areas of inclusive growth, structural transformation, youth employment, the political economy of poverty reduction, gender and women’s economic empowerment, employment, labor markets, and labor regulation, pension reform, reform of child welfare systems, social protection, effective public expenditures in the social sectors, and female-headed households and child welfare. Her most recent book was Youth Employment in Sub-Saharan Africa, published by the World Bank in 2014.

Seung Mo Choi is a Senior Economist working on regional surveillance in the IMF’s African Department. He has worked on banking crises, financial market policies, climate change, low-income country issues, and capacity development, including in the IMF’s European Department and in the Institute for Capacity Development. His research has been published in economics and finance journals such as International Economic Review. Prior to joining the IMF, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Washington State University and obtained a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in economics from Seoul National University.

Stephen C. Smith is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. In 2018 he was UNICEF Senior Fellow at the UNICEF Office of Research-Innocenti, Florence, Italy. Smith received his Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University and has been a Fulbright Research Scholar, a Jean Monnet Research Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, a member of the Advisory Council of BRAC USA, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. He has twice served as Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at GWU. Smith is the co-author with Michael Todaro of Economic Development (12th Edition, Pearson, 2014). He is also author of Ending Global Poverty: A Guide to What Works (paperback edition Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and co-editor with Jennifer Brinkerhoff and Hildy Teegen of NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is also author or coauthor of about 45 professional journal articles and many other publications. Smith’s recent research has focused on extreme poverty and strategies and programs to address it; and on the economics of adaptation and resilience to climate change in low-income countries, emphasizing autonomous adaptation by households and communities and its effects, and adaptation financing.

Preya Sharma is a senior economist in the African Department of the IMF where she is Special Assistant to the Director. Her research has focused on structural transformation, the future of work, and digitalization in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as emerging market crises and development. Before joining the IMF she was the Head of Emerging Markets at HM Treasury in the UK. She holds a Masters in Public Administration in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School and a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Esther Chibesa has 20 years of diverse corporate banking experience, serving in various capacities for Citigroup in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia. In her current role, Esther is driven by Africa’s promise, and seeks to realize the opportunities presented at the intersection of technology, regulatory evolution, and inclusive finance. She leads a team in the visioning and execution of a transaction services strategy that addresses the continent’s ongoing financial services transformation. She leads the execution and deployment of innovative treasury & trade finance solutions for multinational corporations, financial institutions and public sector organizations across Sub-Saharan Africa. In her various roles within the organization, she has championed the development of several groundbreaking solutions such as fully integrated tax & fiscal collections systems, receivables digitization solutions, automated mobile money channels and settlement processes, and enhanced, digitized trade and supply chain solutions. She is a past recipient of the prestigious Top 40 Women under 40 (Business Daily Kenya), past member of the Junior Achievement Zambia Board, is an alum of University of Botswana (First Class Honors), and holds an MBA from Heriot Watt Business School, Edinburgh University.

Long-Run Effects of Incentivizing Work After Childbirth

July 6, 2020March 7, 20222020, Development Economics, Elira Kuka, International Trade, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers

May 2020

Elira Kuka (George Washington University, IZA, and NBER) and Na’ama Shenhav (Dartmouth College and NBER)

IIEP working paper 2020-10

Abstract: This paper uses a panel of SSA earnings linked to the CPS to estimate the impact of increasing post-childbirth work incentives on mothers’ long-run career trajectories. We implement a novel research design that exploits variation in the timing of the 1993 reform of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) around a woman’s first birth and in eligibility for the credit. We find that single mothers exposed to the expansion immediately after a first birth (“early-exposed”) have 3 to 4 p.p. higher employment in the 5 years after a first birth than single mothers exposed 3 to 6 years after a first birth (“late-exposed”). Ten to nineteen years after a first birth, early-exposed mothers have the same employment and hours as late-exposed mothers, but have accrued 0.5 to 0.6 more years of work experience and have 6 percent higher earnings. Incorporating long-run effects on EITC benefits and earnings increases the implied marginal value of public funds (MVPF) of the expansion. Our results suggest that there are steep returns to work incentives at childbirth that accumulate over the life-cycle.

JEL Codes: J16, J31, H2

Key Words: child penalty, EITC

Medieval Cities Through the Lens of Urban Economic Theories

July 6, 2020March 7, 20222020, Development Economics, International Trade, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

May 2020

Remi Jedwab (George Washington University), Noel D. Johnson (George Mason University), and Mark Koyama (George Mason University)

IIEP working paper 2020-9

Abstract: We draw on theories and empirical findings from urban economics to explore and explain patterns of city growth in the Middle Ages (c. 800-1500 CE). We discuss how agricultural development and physical geography determined the location and size of cities during the medieval period. We also consider the relative importance of economies of scale, agglomeration, and human capital spillovers in medieval cities and discuss how their growth was limited by disamenities and constraints on mobility. We discuss how medieval cities responded to shocks such as the Black Death and describe how institutions became increasingly important in determining their trajectories. Avenues for future research are also laid out.

JEL Codes: R11; R12; R19; N9; N93; N95

Key Words: Medieval Era; City Growth; Urbanization; Food Surplus Hypothesis; Agglomeration Effects; Labor Mobility; Pandemics; Institutions; Europe; Asia

Imperfect Competition on the Cathedral Floor: Labourers in London 1672 to 1748

June 19, 2020March 25, 2022Barry Chiswick, Bryan Stuart, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, Seminar

Tuesday, June 30, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx

We are pleased to invite you to a new webinar series, “Facing Inequality”, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series will focus on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe. The series will bring attention to aspects of inequality being made increasingly relevant by the current COVID-19 pandemic and associated crises. The series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Faculty Affiliate Trevor Jackson, Assistant Professor of History. The series is co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series, co-organized by Prof. Jackson from the Department of History and Prof. Bryan Stuart from the Department of Economics.

The fourth event, “Imperfect Competition on the Cathedral Floor: Labourers in London 1672-1748” will feature Judy Stephenson and Patrick Wallis. In their paper, they present a new data set for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to explore the operation of the market for unskilled construction workers, the reference occupation for long run urban wage series, at one major building site in London. They find patterns of work distribution and pay which indicate characteristics of imperfect competition, most notably high worker and job flows alongside remarkable nominal wage rigidity, and evidence of an internal labour market alongside a much shorter and more fragile working year than has been previously found. The results suggest that wages, or labour’s share of income, may resist response to changes in productivity and labour supply and demand even in the long run, and highlight that labour markets created inequalities of experience, income and returns to work before modern institutions and firms. Professor Bryan Stuart will be a discussant.

About the Speakers:

Judy Stephenson

Judy Stephenson is a Professor of Construction Economics and Finance, and Economic History; a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy; and a Departmental Tutor and Director of Teaching & Learning at Bartlett CPM. She is an economic historian of early modern London, its construction industry and associated markets. She researches construction, labour markets, institutions, firms, finance and industries in London between about 1600 and 1850 and is known for her work on London and English wages between 1650 and 1800. She has published on contracts and wages, and the boundaries of the firm before 1800.

Patrick Wallis

Patrick Wallis is a Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics. His research explores the economic, social and medical history of Britain and Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. His two main interests are in apprenticeship and human capital and the transformation of healthcare in early modern England. He has recently published two publications, including Access to the Trade: Monopoly and Mobility in European Craft Guilds in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Journal of Social History and Apprenticeship in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press; November 2019).

About the Discussants:

Bryan Stuart is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2017 and joined George Washington University in August 2017. His research interests include labor, public, and urban economics. Recent and current projects examine the effects of recessions on individuals and local areas, the effects of government policies on labor market outcomes, and the determinants and consequences of household location decisions.

Barry Chiswick is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs. He received his Ph.D. in Economics with Distinction from Columbia University and joined George Washington University in 2011. He has held permanent and visiting appointments at UCLA, Columbia University, Stanford University, Princeton University, University of Chicago, City University (New York), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University. From 1973 to 1977, he was Senior Staff Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In addition, he served as chairman of the American Statistical Association Census Advisory Committee and past president of the European Society for Population Economics. He is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and Research in Economics of the Household and is on the editorial boards of four other academic journals. Since 2004, he has been the Program Director for Migration Studies at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany.

More From This Series

IMF April 2020 World Economic Outlook

June 5, 2020March 28, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, International Finance Events, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events, Research Conference

Thursday, June 11, 2020
1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EDT
via Webex

Please join the Institute for International Economic Policy for a virtual discussion of the International Monetary Fund’s April 2020 World Economic Outlook.

Agenda

1:00 – 1:05 p.m.: Welcoming Remarks

James Foster, George Washington University

1:05 – 1:35 p.m.: Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

Presenter: Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Jason Furman, Harvard Kennedy School

1:40 – 2:05 p.m.: Chapter 2: Countering Future Recessions in Advanced Economies: Cyclical Polices in an Era of Low Rates and High Debt

Presenter: Wenjie Chen, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Jay Shambaugh, George Washington University & Hamilton Project

2:05 – 2:30 p.m.: Chapter 3: Dampening Global Financial Shocks in Emerging Markets: Can Macroprudential Regulation Help?

Presenters: Katharina Bergant, International Monetary Fund

Niels-Jakob Hansen, International Monetary Fund

Discussant: Sunil Sharma, George Washington University

2:30 p.m.: Concluding Remarks

Read the full World Economic Outlook here.

Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

The COVID-19 pandemic is inflicting high and rising human costs worldwide, and the necessary protection measures are severely impacting economic activity. As a result of the pandemic, the global economy is projected to contract sharply by –3 percent in 2020, much worse than during the 2008–09 financial crisis. In a baseline scenario–which assumes that the pandemic fades in the second half of 2020 and containment efforts can be gradually unwound—the global economy is projected to grow by 5.8 percent in 2021 as economic activity normalizes, helped by policy support. The risks for even more severe outcomes, however, are substantial. Effective policies are essential to forestall the possibility of worse outcomes, and the necessary measures to reduce contagion and protect lives are an important investment in long-term human and economic health. Because the economic fallout is acute in specific sectors, policymakers will need to implement substantial targeted fiscal, monetary, and financial market measures to support affected households and businesses domestically. And internationally, strong multilateral cooperation is essential to overcome the effects of the pandemic, including to help financially constrained countries facing twin health and funding shocks, and for channeling aid to countries with weak health care systems.

Chapter 2: Countering Future Recessions in Advanced Economies: Cyclical Policies in an Era of Low Rates and High Debt

More than a decade after the global financial crisis, the world is struggling with the health and economic effects of a profound new crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Advanced economies entered this crisis with interest rates at historical lows and public debts, on average, higher than they had been over the past 60 years. They will come out from the crisis with even higher public debts. Drawing on analysis completed before the emergence of the pandemic, this chapter examines policymakers’ options to respond to adverse shocks and build resilience when rates are low and debts high.

Chapter 3: Dampening Global Financial Shocks in Emerging Markets: Can Macroprudential Regulation Help?

As discussed in Chapter 1, the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting emerging markets through an unprecedented mix of domestic and external shocks whose combined effects are very hard to predict. Among these, emerging markets are confronting a sharp tightening in global financial conditions. Against this backdrop, this chapter asks whether, based on historical experience, countries that have adopted a more stringent level of macroprudential regulation—aimed at strengthening financial stability—are better placed to withstand the impact of global financial shocks on domestic macroeconomic conditions.

A Plurilateral “Single Data Area” Is the Solution to Canada’s Data Trilemma

May 25, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

September 2019

Susan A. Aaronson and Patrick Leblond

IIEP working paper 2020-8

Summary: With its relatively small population, Canada faces a challenge in terms of the amount of high-quality data that it can generate to support a successful data-driven economy. As a result, Canada needs to allow data to flow freely across its borders. However, it also has to provide a high-trust data environment if it wants individuals, firms and government to participate actively in such an economy. As such, Canada (and other countries) faces what can be called the data trilemma, whereby it is not possible to have simultaneously data that flows freely across borders, a high-trust data environment and a national data protection regime; one of these three objectives has to give so that only two are effectively possible at the same time.

To resolve the data trilemma, Canada should work with its key economic partners — namely the European Union, Japan and the United States — to develop a single data area that would be managed by an international data standards board. The envisioned single data area would allow for all types of personal and non-personal data to flow freely across borders while ensuring that individuals, consumers, workers, firms and governments are protected from potential harm arising from activities such as the collection, processing, use, storage or purchase/sale of data. If Canada and its economic partners share similar norms and standards for regulating data, then allowing data to flow freely across borders with these countries no longer risks undermining trust, which is crucial to a successful data-driven economy.

America’s uneven approach to AI and its consequences

May 25, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson

April 2020

Susan A. Aaronson

IIEP working paper 2020-7

Introduction Excerpt: The world’s oceans are in trouble. Global warming is causing sea levels to rise and reducing the supply of food in the oceans. The ecological balance of the ocean has been disturbed by invasive species and cholera. Many pesticides and nutrients used in agriculture end up in the coastal waters, resulting in oxygen depletion that kills marine plants and shellfish. Meanwhile the supply of fish is declining due to overfishing. Yet to flourish, humankind requires healthy oceans; the oceans generate half of the oxygen we breathe, and, at any given moment, they contain more than 97% of the world’s water. Oceans provide at least a sixth of the animal protein people eat. Living oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reduce climate change impacts. Many civil society groups (NGOs) are trying to protect this shared resource. As example, OceanMind uses satellite data and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the movements of vessels and compare their activities to historical patterns. The NGO can thus identify damaging behavior such as overfishing

Data Governance, AI, and Trade: Asia as a Case Study

May 25, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

April 2020

IIEP working paper 2020-6

Introduction Excerpt: The arc of history seems to be bending again towards the dynamic nations of Asia (Gordon: 2008). The countries and territories of the Asia Pacific region are both a locus for trade and a source of technology fueled growth. In 2017, Asia recorded the highest growth in merchandise trade volume in 2017 for both exports and imports (WTO: 2018, 32). UNCTAD reports that exports of digitally deliverable services increased substantially across all regions during the period 2005– 2018, with a compound annual growth rate ranging between 6 and 12 per cent (table III.1). Growth was the highest in developing countries, especially in Asia (UNCTAD: 2019, 66).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already a leading source of growth for many Asian countries. The AI market in the Asia Pacific was estimated at around US $450 million in 2017 and is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 46.9% by 2022 (Ghasemi: 2018). Several analysts believe Asia’s AI growth will soon overtake the US (Lee: 2018; Ghasemi: 2018)

Data Is Dangerous: Comparing the Risks That the United States, Canada and Germany See in Data Troves

May 25, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

April 2020

Susan A. Aaronson

IIEP working paper 2020-5

Summary: Citizens of the United States, Canada and Germany know that the online world is simultaneously a wondrous and dangerous place. They have seen details about their activities, education, financial status and beliefs stolen, misused and manipulated. This paper attempts to examine why stores of personal data (data troves) held by private firms became a national security problem in the United States and compares the US response to that of Canada and Germany. Citizens in all three countries rely on many of the same data-driven services and give personal information to many of the same companies. German and Canadian policy makers and scholars have also warned of potential national security spillovers of large data troves. However, the three nations have defined and addressed the problem differently. US policy makers see a problem in the ownership and use of personal data (what and how) instead of in America’s own failure to adequately govern personal data. The United States has not adopted a strong national law for protecting personal data, although national security officials have repeatedly warned of the importance of doing so. Instead, the United States has banned certain apps and adopted investment reviews of foreign firms that want to acquire firms with large troves of personal data. Meanwhile, Canada and Germany see a different national security risk. They find the problem is where and how data is stored and processed. Canadian and German officials are determined to ensure that Canadian and German laws apply to Canadian and German personal and/or government data when it is stored on the cloud (often on US cloud service providers). The case studies illuminate a governance gap: personal data troves held by governments and firms can present a multitude of security risks. However, policy makers have put forward nationalistic solutions that do not reflect the global nature of the risk.

Will Covid-19 Raise Inequality? Evidence from Past Epidemics and Crises

May 22, 2020March 28, 2022Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, Remi Jedwab

Tuesday, May 26, 2020
12:30 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
WebEx

We are pleased to invite you to the second webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy. This virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The second event, “Will Covid-19 Raise Inequality? Evidence from Past Epidemics and Crises”, features Prakash Loungani and Jonathan D. Ostry. Major epidemics in this century, such as SARS and H1N1, have raised income inequality and disproportionately hurt employment prospects of people with low skills and education levels. What impacts will the COVID-19 pandemic have on inequality in the near term? And how will inequality evolve over the longer-term as governments act to mend the disruptions to globalization and unwind the build-up in their public debts? The talk will draw on the authors’ recent work (with Davide Furceri) on the distributional impacts of epidemics and their book on other drivers of inequality such as austerity and financial globalization. Discussants Lucia Rafanelli and Remi Jedwab will provide commentary from the perspectives of political science and economic history, respectively.

About the Speakers:

Prakash Loungani is Assistant Director and Senior Personnel Manager in the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office. He is a co-author of Confronting Inequality: How Societies Can Choose Inclusive Growth (Columbia University Press, 2019). Previously, he headed the Development Macroeconomics Division in the IMF’s Research Department and was co-chair of the IMF’s Jobs and Growth working group from 2011-15. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey School of Business, a member of the Research Program in Forecasting at George Washington Univeristy, and Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, a think-tank based in Rabat, Morocco.

Jonathan D. Ostry is Deputy Director of the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). His recent responsibilities include leading staff teams on capital account management and financial globalization issues; fiscal sustainability issues; and the nexus between income inequality and economic growth. Past positions include leading the division that produces the IMF’s flagship multilateral surveillance publication, the World Economic Outlook. He is the author of a number of books on international macro policy issues and numerous articles in scholarly journals. His most recent books include Taming the Tide of Capital Flows (MIT Press, 2017) and Confronting Inequality (Columbia University Press, 2018).

With James Foster, Lucia Rafanelli, Remi Jedwab, and Trevor Jackson

Co-sponsored by the GW Inequality Series

More From This Series

The Value of Reputation in Trade: Evidence from Alibaba

May 8, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Maggie Chen, Working Papers

March 2020

Maggie X. Chen and Min Wu

IIEP working paper 2020-4

Abstract: We examine the role of an online reputation mechanism in international trade by exploring T-shirt exports on Alibaba. Exploiting rich transaction data and features of search and rating algorithms, we show that exporters displaying a superior reputation perform significantly better than peers with nearly identical true ratings and observables and the value of reputation rises with the level of information friction and the specificity of information. We develop a dynamic reputation model with heterogeneous cross-country information friction to quantify the effect of the reputation mechanism and find a 20-percent increase in aggregate exports fueled by a market reallocation towards superstars.

JEL Codes: F1, D8

Key Words: reputation, information, superstar, and Alibaba

Elliott Experts Weigh in: The Global Economic System in the Age of Coronavirus

May 3, 2020April 11, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events

Thursday, May 7, 2020
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
via Zoom (EDT)

In this edition of the Elliott School’s Experts Weigh In Series, Professor Maggie Chen (George Washington University) discussed the global economic system in the age of coronavirus. Following the best year for stocks since 2019, coronavirus managed to fell the global market faster than during the Great Depression. More Americans have filed for unemployment than ever before and dozens of countries have already sought the assistance of the IMF. Professor Chen will provide an overview of the current state of play and the factors influencing the global economic situation, as well as offer thoughts on what recovery might look like.

Maggie Xiaoyang Chen is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank and a consultant for the World Bank, the International Finance Cooperation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. She has served as Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University and is a co-editor of the Economic Inquiry and an associate editor of the Economic Modelling. Professor Chen’s research areas include multinational firms, international trade, and regional trade agreements. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. Professor Chen received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her B.A. in Economics from Beijing Normal University.

Human Capital Accumulation at Work: Estimates for the World and Implications for Development

March 16, 2020March 7, 20222020, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

February 2020

Remi Jedwab, Asif Islam, Paul Romer, and Robert Samaniego

IIEP working paper 2020-3

Abstract: In this paper, we: (i) study wage-experience profiles and obtain measures of returns to potential work experience using data from about 24 million individuals in 1,084 household surveys and census samples across 145 countries; (ii) show that returns to work experience are strongly correlated with economic development – workers in developed countries appear to accumulate twice more human capital at work than workers in developing countries; and (iii) use a simple accounting framework to find that the contribution of work experience to human capital accumulation and economic development might be as important as the contribution of education itself.

JEL: O11; O12; O15; O47; E24; J11; J31

Keywords: Returns to Work Experience; Returns to Education; Human Capital Accumulation; Economic Development; Labor Markets; Development Accounting

The Financial Center Leverage Cycle: Does it Spread Around the World?

February 20, 2020March 7, 20222020, Global Governance, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Papers

February 2020

Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Leandro Medina, Shiyi Wang

IIEP working paper 2020-2

Abstract: With a novel database, we examine the evolution of capital flows to the periphery since the collapse of the Bretton Woods System in the early 1970s. We decompose capital flows into global, regional, and idiosyncratic factors. In contrast to previous findings, which mostly use data from the 2000s, we find that booms and busts in capital flows are mainly explained by regional factors and not the global factor. We then ask, what drives these regional factors. Is it the leverage cycle in the financial center? What triggers the leverage cycle in the financial center? Is it a change in global investors’ risk appetite? Or, is it a change in the demand for capital in the periphery? We link leverage in the financial center to regional capital flows and the cost of borrowing in international capital markets to answer these questions. Our estimations indicate that regional capital flows are driven by supply shocks. Interestingly, we find that the leverage in the financial center has a time-varying behavior, with a movement away from lending to the emerging periphery in the 1970s to the 1990s towards lending to the advanced periphery in the 2000s.

Keywords: International Borrowing Cycles. Global and Regional Factors. Push and Pull Factors of Capital Flows. Financial Center Leverage Cycles.

JEL Codes: F30, F34, F65

Mismatch in Online Job Search

February 20, 2020March 7, 20222020, Authors, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

February 2020

Tara M. Sinclair and Martha E. Gimbel

IIEP working paper 2020-1

Abstract: Labor market mismatch is an important measure of the health of the economy but is notoriously hard to measure since it requires information on both employer needs and job seeker characteristics. In this paper we use data from a large online job search website which has detailed information on both sides of the labor market. Mismatch is measured as the dissimilarity between the distribution of job seekers across a set of predefined categories and the distribution of job vacancies across the same categories. We produce time series measures of mismatch for the US and a set of English-speaking countries from January of 2014 through December of 2019. We find that title-level mismatch is substantial, with about 33% of the labor force needing to change job titles for the US to have zero mismatch in 2019, but that it declined from 40% in 2014 as the labor market has tightened. Furthermore, over the same time period, the mix of job opportunities has shifted substantially, but in a way that has made the overall distribution of jobs more similar to the distribution of job seekers. We interpret this finding as evidence that mismatch between job seekers and employers eased due to jobs coming back in the slow recovery after the Great Recession.

JEL Codes: E24, J11, J21, J24, J40, J62

Keywords: Job search, vacancies, employment, unemployment

The Positive Effect of Labor Mobility Restrictions on Human Capital Accumulation in China

January 7, 2020March 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, International Trade Events, Past Events, Yao Pan

Tuesday, November 13, 12:30 – 2:00pm
Yao Pan, George Washington University
“The Positive Effect of Labor Mobility Restrictions on Human Capital Accumulation in China”

Sensitivity Analyses in Poverty Measurement: The Case of the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index

January 1, 2020March 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, James Foster, Past Events

Monday January 18th, 2021

10:00 AM-11:15AM EST

Paper Description:

This paper provides an extensive sensitivity analyses of the global multidimensional poverty index (MPI), a counting-based measure of acute poverty covering over 100 developing countries. Empirically, the paper probes the sensitivity of poverty measures and comparisons to modifications in key parameters. Outcomes studied include the adjusted headcount and headcount ratios and their subnational rankings, as well as the exact set of people who are identified as poor. The parameters that are adjusted include the poverty cutoff, weights or deprivation values, and indicators. Multidimensional poverty measures are generated using 10 alternative poverty cutoffs, 231 alternative weighting schemes, and six alternative indicator selections, in addition to the global MPI baseline specifications. The present paper also suggests ‘second-order’ sensitivity analyses to deepen the understanding of the underlying methods by varying poverty cutoffs and indicators simultaneously.

Broadly speaking, the results suggest that parameter choices can make a difference, which is consistent with the fact that often dominance results may not emerge. Specifically, the evidence suggests that fundamentally different parameters may substantially change the performance of the entire poverty measure or even its very nature (e.g., for a union cutoff or extreme weighting schemes). However, the results also suggest little sensitivity of outcomes when changing parameters within plausible ranges. One implication of these results is that sensitivity analyses in poverty measurement have a central role in the initial process fixing the parameters, in which usually numerous stakeholders participate, including policymakers and experts alike. The reason is that an agreement on a range of values is easier to achieve than on one particular number. An important technical insight is that union-based measures are more sensitive than the base-line measure, e.g., with respect to indicator selections.

About the Presenter:

Nicolai Suppa is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Demographic Studies in Barcelona and Research Associate with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in economics from TU Dortmund in Germany, where he also studied economics and sociology. His research interests are best described as applied welfare economics, including multidimensional poverty measurement and analysis, research on subjective well-being, the capability approach, labour economics, and applied econometrics. Nicolai has published articles in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Social Choice & Welfare, Empirical Economics, and the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities. At OPHI he is co-leading the estimation of the global MPI since 2018 and editing the OPHI Working Paper Series.

About the Discussant:

Dr Suman Seth is an associate professor at the Leeds University Business School. He joined the business school in 2015. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) within the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He obtained a PhD degree in Economics from Vanderbilt University in the USA. After his PhD, he served as a Research Office and as a Senior Research Officer at OPHI between 2010 and 2015. He is primarily interested in Development Economics with a particular emphasis on measurement methodologies and policy-oriented applications. Previously, he has served as consultants to the Regional Bureau of Latin America and the Caribbean, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to the Development Research Groups at the World Bank, and to the Asian Development Bank.

About the Moderator:

This event and seminar series was jointly organized with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office. The seminars will be hosted by IIEP Co-Director James Foster.

More Fro This Series

Distinguishing Self-interest from Greed: Ethical Constraints and Economic Efficiency

December 10, 2019March 7, 20222019, Authors, Steve Suranovic, Working Papers

October 2019

Steven Suranovic

IIEP working paper 2019-17

Abstract: This paper demonstrates that economic efficiency is enhanced when market participants adhere to certain ethical constraints. These ethical constraints are implicit in the neoclassical economics models, but are rarely emphasized by the economics discipline in standard texts. Avoidance of this issue has contributed to many misunderstandings including the role that individual self-interest plays in promoting economic success. This paper applies the ethical principles identified here to establish a definition for greedy behavior and to distinguish it from enlightened self-interest, which is the mode of behavior required of homo economicus. The paper offers numerous examples that show that many of the negative impressions people have about economic and business activity arise largely when market participants act greedily and therefore are not conforming to the necessary ethical restrictions on homo economicus.

JEL Codes: A2, B4, P1

Key Words: Ethics, efficiency, greed, homo economicus, self-interest, economics, business ethics

Numerological Preferences, Timing of Births and the Long-term Effect on Schooling

December 9, 2019March 7, 20222019, Cheng Huang, Working Papers

October 2019

Cheng Huang, Xiaojing Ma, Shiying Zhang, Qingguo Zhao

IIEP working paper 2019-16

Abstract: Cultural beliefs may affect demographic behaviors. According to traditional Chinese astrology, babies born on auspicious days will have good luck in their lifetime, whereas those born on inauspicious days will have bad luck. Using administrative data from birth certificates in Guangdong, China, we provide empirical evidence on the short-term effects of such numerological preferences. We find that approximately 3.9% extra births occur on auspicious days and 1.4% of births are avoided on inauspicious days. Additionally, there is a higher male/female sex ratio for births on auspicious days. Since such manipulation of the birthdate is typically performed through scheduled C-sections, C-section births increase significantly on auspicious days. Moreover, we use a second dataset to examine the long-term effect of numerological preferences and find that people born on auspicious days are more likely to attend college.

Keywords: Numerological preferences. Birthdate . Timed births. Chinese astrology

JEL: I21 . Z10 .J13 . D19

Search for Yield in Large International Corporate Bonds: Investor Behavior and Firm Responses

November 25, 2019March 7, 20222019, Authors, Global Governance, Tomas Williams, Working Papers

November 2019

Tomas Williams, Charles W. Calomiris, Mauricio Larrain, Sergio L. Schmukler

IIEP working paper 2019-15

Abstract: Emerging market corporations have significantly increased their borrowing in international markets since 2008. We show that this increase was driven by large denomination bond issuances, most of them with face value of exactly US$500 million. Large issuances are eligible for inclusion in important international market indexes. These bonds appeal to institutional investors because they are more liquid and facilitate targeting market benchmarks. We find that the rewards of issuing index-eligible bonds rose drastically after 2008. Emerging market firms were able to cut their cost of funds by more than 76 basis points by issuing bonds with a face value equal to or greater than US$500 million relative to smaller bonds. Firms contemplating whether to take advantage of this cost saving faced a tradeoff after 2008: they could benefit from the lower yields associated with large, indexeligible bonds, but they paid the potential cost of having to hoard low-yielding cash assets if their investment opportunities were less than US$500 million. Because of the post-2008 “size yield discount,” many companies issued index-eligible bonds, while substantially increasing their cash holdings. We present evidence suggesting that these post-2008 behaviors reflected a search for yield by institutional investors into higher-risk securities. These patterns are not apparent in the issuance of investment grade bonds by firms in developed economies.

JEL Classification Codes: F21, F23, F32, F36, F65, G11, G15, G31

Keywords: benchmark indexes, bond issuance, corporate financing, emerging markets,
institutional investors

Emerging Trade Battlefield with China: Export Competition and Firms’ Coping Strategies

November 20, 2019March 7, 20222019, Global Governance, US-China, Yao Pan

October 2019

Yao Pan, Katariina Nilsson Hakkala

IIEP working paper 2019-14

Abstract: This paper analyzes how intensified Chinese export competition affects the exports and product ranges of Western firms. Using a novel identification strategy that exploits changes in Chinese export policies, we find that Chinese export competition reduces aggregate product level exports of Finland. Firm-level analysis using administrative data further shows that Chinese competition leads to substantial price cuts to retain market shares, especially for homogeneous products. In addition, we also discover that firms respond to the increased level of Chinese export competition by dropping their marginal products. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of export competition with China for developed countries.

Keywords: Trade Flows, Export Competition, Firm-level, Product Mix, China

JEL Classification: F14, F61, L25

Mardi Dungey Memorial Research Conference

November 18, 2019March 28, 2022Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Global Economic Governance Events, International Finance Events, International Trade Events, Past Events, Research Conference, Tara Sinclair

Mardi Dungey Memorial Research Conference
Friday, February 21, 2020
8:00 am – 5:30 pm (Conference)
5:30pm – 7:30 pm (Reception)
Lindner Commons, Suite 602
1957 E St NW
Washington, D.C. 20052

Livestream Link

On behalf of the Institute for International Economic Policy, the Research Program on Forecasting, the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, University of Tasmania, and the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, you are cordially invited to the Mardi Dungey Memorial Research Conference on February 21, 2020. The event is named in honor of Mardi Dungey, Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Tasmania, Adjunct Professor and Program Director, Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, ANU, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Financial Analysis and Policy at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

Agenda

8:00am- 8:45am: Breakfast

8:45am – 9:10am

Introduction, Stephen Smith, Chair, Department of Economics and Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU

Opening Remarks, Tara Sinclair, George Washington University

9:10 – 9:30am: A Panel on Mardi Dungey’s Contributions

Vanessa Smith, University of York

Renee Fry-McKibbin, Australian National University

Warwick McKibbin, Australian National University

Chaired by: Renee Fry-McKibbin, Australian National University

9:30 – 10:30am

Econometrics of Option Pricing with Stochastic Volatility, Eric Renault, University of Warwick

Chaired by: Vance Martin, University of Melbourne

10:30 – 11:00am: Coffee Break

11:00 – 11:45am

Leaning Against the Wind: An Empirical Cost-Benefit Analysis, Gaston Gelos, International Monetary Fund

Chaired by: Tara Sinclair, George Washington University

11:45am – 12:30pm

The Gains from Catch-up for China and the U.S.: An Empirical Framework, Denise Osborn, University of Manchester

Chaired by: Simon van Norden, HEC Montréal, CIREQ & CIRANO

12:30 – 1:30pm: Lunch Break

1:30 – 2:30pm

Measurement of Factor Strength: Theory and Practice, Hashem Pesaran, Cambridge University

Chaired by: Nigel Ray, International Monetary Fund

2:30 – 2:45pm: Coffee Break

2:45 – 3:30pm

Inflation: Expectations, Structural Breaks, and Global Factors, Pierre Siklos, Wilfrid Laurier University

Chaired by: Gerald Dwyer, Clemson University

3:30 – 4:15pm

Multivariate Trend-Cycle-Seasonal Decomposition with Correlated Innovations, Jing Tian, University of Tasmania

Chaired by: Edda Claus, Wilfrid Laurier University

4:15 – 4:30pm: Coffee Break

4:30 – 5:15pm

The Center and the Periphery: Two Hundred Years of International Borrowing Cycles, Graciela Kaminsky, George Washington University

Chaired by: Brenda Gonzalez-Hermosillo, International Monetary Fund

5:15 – 5:30pm: Closing Remarks

Marty Robinson, Australian Treasury

Vladimir Volkov, University of Tasmania

Warwick McKibbin, Australian National University

Chaired by: Renee Fry-McKibbin, Australian National University

5:30 – 7:30pm: Reception

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Digital Trade

October 30, 2019March 28, 2022International Trade Events, Past Events, Research Conference, Susan Aaronson

Thursday, October 31, 2019
12:00 p.m.-1:30 p.m.
Lindner Family Commons, Room 602
1957 E Street NW
Washington, D.C 20052

Data has become the most traded good and/or service across borders. The American economy is increasingly reliant on digital trade. But the US does not yet participate in any explicit binding digital trade agreements. Meanwhile, many countries have adopted policies that inhibit digital trade, including requirements that data be stored locally or restricting services provided by foreign firms. Such policies not only affect U.S. Internet and technology firms, but the users and small businesses that rely on an open digital environment.

There have been lots of panels on digital trade, but this event will provide an opportunity to better understand why data is governed in trade agreements, what are the barriers to digital trade, and how digital trade rules may affect important policy objectives such as internet openness, the gig economy, innovation, and national security.

PANELISTS:
Matthew Reisman
Microsoft
Meredith Broadbent
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
Rachael Stelly
Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA)
Burcu Kilic
Public Citizen

MODERATOR:
Susan Aaronson
Research Professor, GWU and Director, Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP at GWU), the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub, and the Internet Society DC (ISOC-DC). This event is also organized in conjunction with the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA).

Click Here for Live Stream

IMF October 2019 World Economic Outlook

September 1, 2019March 28, 2022Danny M. Leipziger, Global Economic Governance Events, International Finance Events, Past Events, Research Conference

Friday, November 1, 2019
9:30a.m. – 12:15p.m.
Lindner Family Commons (6th Floor)
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW Washington, DC 20052

Schedule of Events

9:00 a.m. – Breakfast and Registration

9:30 a.m. – Opening Remarks
James Foster, Director, Institute for International Economic Policy,
GWU

9:45 a.m. – Chapter 1:Global Prospects and Policies
Presenter: Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti

10:15 a.m. – Coffee Break

10:30 a.m. – Chapter 2: Closer Together or Further Apart? Subnational Regional
Disparities and Adjustment in Advanced Economies

Presenter: Natalija Novta
Discussant: Ryan Nunn

Chapter 2 of the latest World Economic Outlook examines the rise in within-country regional disparities in economic performance across advanced economies. The chapter explores how lagging regions differ from the rest, in terms of demographics, labor market outcomes, sectoral labor productivity and sectoral employment. It also explores how regions adjust to trade and technology shocks, comparing lagging to other regions.

11:15 a.m. – Coffee Break

11:30 a.m. – Chapter 3: Reigniting Growth in Emerging Market and Low-Income
Economies: What Role for Structural Reforms?

Presenter: Cian Ruane
Discussant: Danny Leipziger

The forthcoming IMF World Economic Outlook analytical chapter provides new evidence on the short-to-medium-term effects of reforms, based on a newly constructed database of reforms in domestic and external finance, trade, labor and product markets. The chapter discusses sources of cross-country heterogeneity in reform payoffs, including the role of governance and informality in mediating the gains from reforms, and political economy issues related to reform implementation.

12:15 p.m. – Concluding Remarks

12:30 p.m. – Lunch

Read the full World Economic Outlook here.

Cities of Workers, Children or Seniors? Age Structure and Economic Growth in a Global Cross-Section of Cities

August 31, 2019March 7, 20222019, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Uncategorized

August 2019

Remi Jedwab, Daniel Pereira, and Mark Roberts

IIEP working paper 2019-13

Abstract: A large literature documents the positive influence of a city’s skill structure on its rate of economic growth. By contrast, the effect of a city’s age structure on its economic growth has been a hitherto largely neglected area of research. We hypothesize that cities with more working-age adults are likely to grow faster than cities with more children or seniors and set out the potential channels through which such differential growth may occur. Using data from a variety of historical and contemporary sources, we show that there exists marked variation in the age structure of the world’s largest cities, both across cities and over time. We then study how age structure affects economic growth for a global cross-section of mega-cities. Using various identification strategies, we find that mega-cities with higher dependency ratios – i.e. with more children and/or seniors per working-age adult – grow significantly slower. Such effects are particularly pronounced for cities with high shares of children. This result appears to be mainly driven by the direct negative effects of a higher dependency ratio on the size of the working-age population and the indirect effects on work hours and productivity for working age adults within a city.

JEL: R10; R11; R19; J11; J13; J14; O11; N30

Keywords: Urbanization; Cities; Age Structure; Dependency Ratios; Children; Ageing; Demographic Cycles; Agglomeration Effects; Human Capital; Growth; Development

Divorce among European and Mexican Immigrants in the U.S

August 31, 2019March 7, 20222019, Barry Chiswick, Development Economics, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers

August 2019

Barry Chiswick and Christina Houseworth

IIEP working paper 2019-12

Abstract: This paper analyzes the status of being currently divorced among European and Mexican immigrants in the U.S., among themselves and in comparison to the native born of the same ancestries. The data are for males and females age 18 to 55, who married only once, in the 2010-2014 American Community Surveys.

Among immigrants, better job opportunities, measured by educational attainment, English proficiency and a longer duration in the U.S. are associated with a higher probability of being divorced. Those who married prior to migration and who first married at an older age are less likely to be divorced. Those who live in states with a higher divorce rate are more likely to be divorced. Thus, currently being divorced among immigrants is more likely for those who are better positioned in the labor market, less closely connected to their ethnic origins, and among Mexican immigrants who live in an environment in which divorce is more prevalent.

Key Words: Marriage, Divorce, Minorities, Immigrants, Gender, Human Capital

JEL Codes: J12, J15, J16, J24

12th Annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Relations

August 31, 2019March 28, 2022Chao Wei, Past Events, Research Conference, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events

Friday, November 8th, 2019

Lindner Family Commons, 6th Floor

Elliott School for International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW Washington DC 20052

Schedule of Events

08:15-08:50: Coffee and Registration

08:50-09:00: Welcoming Remarks: James Foster (IIEP Director, GWU)

09:00-09:45: Keynote:

Daniel Xu (Duke University): “Fiscal Policies and Firm Investment in China”

09:45-10:45: The Political Economy of Protests

Moderator: Bruce Dickson (GWU)

David Yang (Harvard University): “Persistent Political Engagement: Social Interactions and the Dynamics of Protest Movements”

Davin Chor (Dartmouth College): “The Political Economy Consequences of China’s Export Slowdown”. Chor’s work is available here.

10:45-11:15: Coffee Break

11:15-12:15: Capital Market Liberalization and Industrial Policy

Moderator: Chao Wei (GWU)

John Rogers (Federal Reserve Board): “The Effect of the China Connect”

Wenli Li (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia): “Demographic Aging, Industrial Policy, and Chinese Economic Growth”. Li’s work is available here.

12:15-13:15: Lunch and Poster Session

13:15–14:30: Policy Keynotes:

Chad Bown (Peterson Institute for International Economics): “The U.S.-China trade relationship under the Trump administration”. Bown’s work is available here

David Shambaugh (GWU): “Stresses and Strains in U.S.-China Relations: Origins, Consequences, and Outlook”

14:30-15:00: Coffee Break

15:00-16:00: Industrial Policy, Technology Transfer, and Financial Access

Moderator: Maggie Chen (GWU)

Jie Bai (Harvard University): “Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillovers and Industrial Quality Upgrading”

Jing Cai (University of Maryland): “Direct and Indirect Effects of Financial Access on SMEs”

16:00-17:00: The Belt and Road Initiative

Moderator: Stephen Kaplan (GWU)

Jamie P. Horsley (Brookings Institution): “Belt & Road Governance Challenges and Developments”

Scott Morris (Center for Global Development): “Belt & Road’s Debt and Project Risks”

An archive of all previous Annual Conferences on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations is available here.

For more information, please contact Kyle Renner at iiep@gwu.edu or 202-994-5320.

Cosponsored by:

South Africa: Rebuilding the Dream

August 31, 2019March 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events, Stephen C. Smith

Monday, November 11th, 2019

2:00pm – 3:30pm

Lindner Family Commons, Room 602

Elliott School for International Affairs

1957 E Street, NW Washington DC 20052

Event Overview

Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid, South Africa’s economy is in crisis. Inequality in South Africa is the highest in the world; unemployment is on the rise; and economic growth (projected at 0.8 percent in 2019) has hovered precariously close to recession. In After Dawn: Hope After State Capture, former South African Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas, the man who first blew the whistle on corruption in the Zuma administration, offers a blunt assessment of the country’s economic woes and the failures of governance that caused it. He proposes a series of practical solutions to build a growing, job-creating economy that can begin to meet South African’s unfulfilled expectations of economic transformation.

Panelists

Mcebisi Jonas, Author of After Dawn: Hope after State Capture and former Deputy Finance Minister of South Africa

Mcebisi Jonas is author of After Dawn: Hope after State Capture, and chairman designate of MTN, one of Africa’s largest techonology companies. He is the former Deputy Finance Minister of South Africa, a position he held from 2014 to 2016. In that position, he was an early whistle-blower in the “Gupta-Gate” state capture scandal, and was subsequently fired by President Jacob Zuma. He currently serves on President Cyril Ramphosa’s team of international trade and investment “ambassadors.”

Stephen Smith, Professor of Economics and International Affairs and Chair, Department of Economics, GW

Stephen Smith’s work focuses on economic development, with a special focus on solutions to poverty. He also researches economic development strategies, developing country financing issues, and the economics of adaptation to climate change in low-income countries. He has also conducted extensive research on the economics of cooperatives, works councils, and codetermination. He is currently on sabbatical at the UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, in Florence, Italy, where he is a UNICEF Senior Fellow.

Yusuf Shahid, Chief Economist, The Growth Dialogue

Shahid Yusuf is Chief Economist of the Growth Dialogue. Dr. Yusuf brings many decades of economic development experience to the Dialogue, having been intensively involved with the growth policies of many of the most successful East Asian economies during key periods of their histories. He has written extensively on development issues, with a special focus on East Asia and has also published widely in various academic journals. He has authored or edited 24 books on industrial and urban development, innovation systems and tertiary education.

Moderated by Jennifer Cooke, Director of the Institute for African Studies

Jennifer Cooke is formerly the director of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she led research and analysis on political, economic, and security dynamics in Africa. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on U.S.-Africa policy and provides briefings, testimony, and policy recommendations to U.S. policymakers, the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. military.

This event is co-sponosored by the Institute for African Studies.

How Should We Measure City Size? Theory and Evidence Within and Across Rich and Poor Countries

August 11, 2019March 28, 20222019, Anthony Yezer, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

August 2019

Remi Jedwab, Prakash Loungani, and Anthony Yezer

IIEP working paper 2019-11

Abstract: It is obvious that holding city population constant, differences in cities across the world are enormous. Urban giants in poor countries are not large using measures such as land area, interior space or value of output. These differences are easily reconciled mathematically as population is the product of land area, structure space per unit land (i.e., heights), and population per unit interior space (i.e., crowding). The first two are far larger in the cities of developed countries while the latter is larger for the cities of developing countries. In order to study sources of diversity among cities with similar population, we construct a version of the standard urban model (SUM) that yields the prediction that the elasticity of city size with respect to income could be similar within both developing countries and developed countries. However, differences in income and urban technology can explain the physical differences between the cities of developed countries and developing countries. Second, using a variety of newly merged data sets, the predictions of the SUM for similarities and differences of cities in developed and developing countries are tested. The findings suggest that population is a sufficient statistic to characterize city differences among cities within the same country, not across countries.

JEL Codes: R13; R14; R31; R41; R42; O18; O2; O33

Keywords: Urbanization; Cities; Urban Giants; Population; Standard Urban Model; Measurement; Urban Technology; Building Heights; Sprawl; Housing; Transportation

The Economics of Missionary Expansion: Evidence from Africa and Implications for Development

June 8, 2019March 7, 20222019, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

May 2019

Remi Jedwab, Felix Meier zu Selhausen, and Alexander Moradi

IIEP Working Paper 2019-10

Abstract: How did Christianity expand in sub-Saharan Africa to become the continent’s dominant religion? Using annual panel data on all Christian missions from 1751 to 1932 in Ghana, as well as cross-sectional data on missions for 43 sub-Saharan African countries in 1900 and 1924, we shed light on the spatial dynamics and determinants of this religious diffusion process. Missions expanded into healthier, safer, more accessible, and more developed areas, privileging these locations first. Results are confirmed for selected factors using various identification strategies. This pattern has implications for extensive literature using missions established during colonial times as a source of variation to study the long-term economic effects of religion, human capital and culture. Our results provide a less favorable account of the impact of Christian missions on modern African economic development. We also highlight the risks of omission and endogenous measurement error biases when using historical data and events for identification.

JEL Codes: N3, N37, N95, Z12, O12, O15

Keywords: Economics of Religion; Religious Diffusion; Path Dependence; Economic Development; Compression of History; Measurement; Christianity; Africa

Economic and Political Factors in Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Railroads and Roads in Africa 1960–2015

June 8, 2019March 7, 20222017, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

September 2017

Remi Jedwab and Adam Storeygard

IIEP Working Paper 2019-9

Abstract: Transport investment has played an important role in the economic development of many countries. Starting from a low base, African countries have recently initiated several massive transportation infrastructure projects. However, surprisingly little is known about the current levels, past evolution, and correlates of transportation infrastructure in Africa. In this paper, we introduce a new data set on the evolution of the stocks of railroads (1862-2015) and multiple types of roads (1960-2015) for 43 sub-Saharan African countries. First, we compare our estimates with those from other available data sets, such as the World Development Indicators. Second, we document the aggregate evolution of transportation investments over the past century in Africa. We confirm that railroads were a “colonial” transportation technology, whereas paved roads were a “post-colonial” technology. We also highlight how investment patterns have followed economic patterns. Third, we report conditional correlations between 5-year infrastructure growth and several geographic, economic and political factors during the period 1960-2015. We find strong correlations between transportation investments and economic development as well as more political factors including pre-colonial centralization, ethnic fractionalization, European settlement, natural resource dependence, and democracy. This suggests that non-economic factors may have a significant role in the ability of countries to invest in these public goods.

JEL Codes: O11; O18; O20; H54; R11; R12; R40; N77

Keywords: Transportation Infrastructure; Public Investment; Railroads; Roads; Paved Roads; Africa; Growth; Institutions; Comparative Development; History

The Average and Heterogeneous Effects of Transportation Investments: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa 1960-2010

June 8, 2019March 7, 20222019, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

March 2019

Remi Jedwab and Adam Storeygard

IIEP Working Paper 2019-8

Abstract: Previous work on transportation investments has focused on average impacts in high- and middle-income countries. We estimate average and heterogeneous effects in a poor continent, Africa, using roads and cities data spanning 50 years in 39 countries. Using changes in market access due to distant road construction as a source of exogenous variation, we estimate an 30-year elasticity of city population with respect to market access of 0.06–0.18. Our results suggest that this elasticity is stronger for small and remote cities, and weaker in politically favored and agriculturally suitable areas. Access to foreign cities matters little.

JEL Codes: R11; R12; R4; O18; O20; F15; F16

Keywords: Transportation Infrastructure; Paved Roads; Urbanization; Cities; Africa; Market Access; Trade Costs; Highways; Internal Migration; Heterogeneity

Boom-Bust Capital Flow Cycles

June 1, 2019March 7, 20222019, Authors, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Papers

May 2019

Graciela Laura Kaminsky

IIEP Working Paper 2019-7

Abstract: This paper examines the new trends in research on capital flows fueled by the 2007-2009 Global Crisis. Previous studies on capital flows focused on current-account imbalances and net capital flows. The Global Crisis changed that. The onset of this crisis was preceded by a dramatic increase in gross financial flows while net capital flows remained mostly subdued. The attention in academia zoomed in on gross inflows and outflows with special attention to cross border banking flows before the crisis erupted and the shift towards corporate bond issuance in its aftermath. The boom and bust in capital flows around the Global Crisis also stimulated a new area of research: capturing the “global factor.” This research adopts two different approaches. The traditional literature on the push-pull factors, which before the crisis was mostly focused on monetary policy in the financial center as the “push factor,” started to explore what other factors contribute to the comovement of capital flows as well as to amplify the role of monetary policy in the financial center on capital flows to the periphery. This new research focuses on global banks’ leverage, risk appetite, and global uncertainty. Since the “global factor” is not known, a second branch of the literature has captured this factor indirectly using dynamic common factors extracted from actual capital flows or movements in asset prices.

Keywords: The Global Crisis, Capital flow cycles, global banks, “push” and “pull” factors, corporate borrowing, global factors, dynamic latent factor models.

JEL Codes: F30, F34, F65

IMF World Economic Outlook

April 12, 2019March 28, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, International Finance, International Finance Events, International Trade, International Trade Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events

Schedule

9:30 – 9:45	Opening Remarks: Maggie Chen, Director, Institute for International Economic Policy, George Washington University
9:45 – 10:15	Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies • Presenter: Malhar Nabar, Deputy Division Chief, WEO Division, Research Department, International Monetary Fund
10:15 – 10:30	Coffee Break
10:30 – 11:15	Chapter 2: The Rise of Corporate Market Power and Its Macroeconomic Effects • Presenter: Romain Duval, Advisor to the Chief Economist, Research Department, International Monetary Fund • Discussant: Zia Qureshi, Visiting Fellow, Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution
11:15 – 11:30	Coffee Break
11:30 – 12:15	Chapter 3: The Price of Capital Goods: A Driver of Investment Under Threat? • Presenter: Natalija Novta, Economist, WEO Division, Research Department, International Monetary Fund • Discussant: Paulo Bastos, Senior Economist, DECTI, World Bank
12:15	Concluding Remarks

Maggie Chen

George Washington University

Maggie Chen is a professor of economics and international affairs at The George Washington University. Her areas of research expertise include foreign direct investment, international trade, and regional trade agreements and her work has been published extensively in academic journals such as American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of International Economics. She has worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank, a trade policy advisor at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office leading policy analysis on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, and a consultant for various divisions of the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation advising issues ranging from foreign direct investment and technical trade barriers to the Belt and Road Initiative and contributing to various World Bank flagship studies and the World Development Report. She is a co-editor of the Economic Inquiry. Professor Chen received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her B.A. in Economics from Beijing Normal University.

Malhar Nabar

International Monetary Fund

Malhar Nabar is Deputy Division Chief in the World Economic Studies Division, where he is part of the core team that produces the WEO. In previous roles at the IMF, Malhar has covered China and Japan, and was Mission Chief to Hong Kong SAR. Prior to joining the IMF, Malhar taught at Wellesley College. His research interests are in investment and productivity growth, and he has published in various journals including Journal of Development Economics, Economic Inquiry, and Journal of Macroeconomics. He holds a PhD from Brown University and a BA from Oxford University.

Romain Duval

International Monetary Fund

Romain Duval is an advisor to the Chief Economist in the IMF Research Department, where he also leads the Structural Reforms Unit. Previously he was the division chief for Regional Studies of the IMF Asia Pacific Department and led the Regional Economic Outlook. Prior to joining the Fund, he was the division chief for Structural Policies Surveillance at the OECD Economics Department, where he was also the editor of the flagship publication Going for Growth. He has published extensively in leading academic and policy-oriented journals on a wide range of topics including the economics and political economy of labor and product market regulations, growth, productivity, trade, monetary policy, equilibrium real exchange rates, and climate change economics. Over the years his research has also been profiled numerous times in leading global newspapers and magazines such as The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

Zia Qureshi

Brookings Institution

Zia Qureshi is a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He also advises and consults for several other organizations. His research and commentary cover a broad range of global economic issues, including a recent focus on how technology is reshaping the economic agenda. He has published widely on these issues. Prior to joining Brookings, he worked at the World Bank and the IMF for thirty-five years, holding several leadership positions, including serving as Director, Development Economics, at the Bank and as Executive Secretary of the Joint Bank-Fund Ministerial Development Committee. He represented the Bank at major international forums, including the G20. He led a number of Bank and Fund flagship publications. He holds a DPhil in Economics from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Natalija Novta

International Monetary Fund

Natalija Novta is an Economist at the IMF’s Research Department, where she works on the World Economic Outlook. She previously worked in the Western Hemisphere and the Fiscal Affairs Departments contributing to the Regional Economic Outlook and the Fiscal Monitor, respectively. Before joining the Fund, she worked at the Fiscal Council of Serbia, the Serbian Ministry of Finance, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. She holds a PhD in Economics from New York University, and a BA from Harvard University. Her research has focused on economic development, conflict, climate change, trade flows, and public sector employment. She has published at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Conflict Research and International Tax and Public Finance.

Paulo Bastos

World Bank

Paulo Bastos is a Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank in the Trade and International Integration Unit (DECTI). His research interests include the drivers of firm performance in export markets, links between globalization and technological change, and the distributional impacts of trade and FDI. His recent research exploits large administrative data sets to address these topics. He has published in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Industrial Economics and International Journal of Industrial Organization. Prior to joining the World Bank, he held positions at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Commission and the University of Nottingham. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Nottingham and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Porto.

Full WEO Report

Financing the Sustainable Development Goals

April 10, 2019March 28, 2022Adaption to Climate Change Events, Climate Adaptation, International Finance, International Finance Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events

Wednesday, April 10th 2019 8:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Lindner Family Commons

Watch

Information: The last few years have witnessed a seismic shift in investors’ attitudes and demand for social and economic investments in emerging markets. Impact investing, ESG, Green Finance and SDGs are among many of the words that have recently populated investment committees and investor conferences as well as boardrooms. Leveraging GWU’s IIEP Visiting Scholar’s work on Assessing and Monitoring the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAA) and Citi’s GPS research, UN’s SDG: Pathways to Success- A Systemic Framework for Aligning Investment, the event will provide the opportunity to evaluate the progress of SDG financing and to appraise the degree of mobilization of private sector capital in support of the SDGs. Within this analytical context, market participants — issuers, investors, Development Financial Institutions (DFIs) and donors — will discuss the advances and challenges of financing sustainable development. The forum will seek to address the means to scale private sector capital investment, the need to institutionalise SDG financing instruments and structures and the critical contributions that public sector actors, such as donor agencies, can make to realize the “disruption” of the development aid paradigm. The discussion will also touch upon the importance of data capture and disclosure as it relates to the impact and outcomes of the SDG’s investments.

Agenda

7:30–8:00am: Breakfast and Registration 8:00–8.05am: Welcome Remarks

Maggie Chen, Director, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU
Julie Monaco, Managing Director, Global Head Public Sector Group, Corporate and Investment Bank, Citi

8:05–8:20am: Setting the Stage (Presentations of Relevant Research)

Ajay Chhibber, Visiting Scholar, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU
Jason Channell, Head of Social & Responsible Investment Research, Citi

8:20–9:30am: High-Level Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A Panelists

Denis Duverne, Chairman, Board of Directors, AXA
Mahmoud Mohieldin, Senior Vice President, 2030 Development Agenda, United Nations Relations, and Partnerships, World Bank
Donna Sims Wilson, President, Smith Graham & Co.
Sean Jones, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator, Food Security, USAID
Tim Turner, Group Chief Risk Officer, African Development Bank

Organizing Committee: Peter Sullivan (Citi), Ajay Chhibber, Kyle Renner, Sunil Sharma (all George Washington University), and Andreas (Andy) Jobst (World Bank)

Can Globalization Be Saved?

April 3, 2019March 28, 2022Danny M. Leipziger, International Economic Policy, International Trade, Past Events

Thursday, April 11, 2019
2:15- 3:40pm

Panel of discussion and conversation between high-level senior officials in the field of globalization and economics.

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Family Commons
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Drug Money and Bank Lending: The Unintended Consequences of Anti-Money Laundering

March 31, 2019March 7, 20222019, Development Economics, International Finance, Tomas Williams

March 2019

Tomas Williams, Pablo Slutzky, and Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas

IIEP Working Paper 2019-5

Abstract: We explore the unintended consequences of anti-money laundering (AML) policies. For identification, we exploit the implementation of the SARLAFT system in Colombia in 2008, aimed at controlling the flow of money from drug trafficking into the financial system. We find that bank deposits in municipalities with high drug trafficking activity decline after the implementation of the new AML policy. More importantly, this negative liquidity shock has consequences for credit in municipalities with little or nil drug trafficking. Banks that source their deposits from areas with high drug trafficking activity cut lending relative to banks that source their deposits from other areas. We show that this credit shortfall negatively impacted the real economy. Using a proprietary database containing data on bank-firm credit relationships, we show that small firms that rely on credit from affected banks experience a negative shock to investment, sales, size, and profitability. Additionally, we observe a reduction in employment in small firms. Our results suggest that the implementation of the AML policy had a negative effect on the real economy.

JEL Classification: K42, G18, G21

Keywords: money laundering; organized crime; financial system; bank lending; liquidity; economic growth

Agricultural extension, intra-household allocation and malaria

March 31, 2019March 7, 20222019, Development Economics, Yao Pan

March 2019

Yao Pan and Saurabh Singhal

IIEP Working Paper 2019-4

Abstract: Can agricultural development programs improve health-related outcomes? We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the coverage of a large-scale agricultural extension program in Uganda to causally identify its effects on malaria. We find that eligibility for the program reduced the proportion of household members with malaria by 8.9 percentage points, with children and pregnant women experiencing substantial improvements. An examination of the underlying mechanisms indicates that an increase in income and the resulting increase in the ownership and usage of bednets may have played a role. Taken together, these results signify the importance of financial constraints in investments for malaria prevention and the potential role that agricultural development can play in easing it.

Keywords: Malaria, Intra-household Allocation, Agricultural Extension, Regression Discontinuity, Uganda

JEL Classification: I15, I12, D13, O12, Q16.

India and USA: Shared Prosperity, Opportunities, and Challenges

March 19, 2019March 28, 2022India, International Trade, International Trade Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events

Tuesday, March 19th, 2019

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Location: City View Room

Watch

About the Event:

This event is hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP), the Federation of India’s Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. Elliott School Dean Reuben Brigety III will provide welcoming remarks, which will be followed by a fireside chat with H.E. Amb. Shringla moderated by IIEP Visiting Scholar and FICCI Chief Economic Advisor, Ajay Chhibber. A panel of experts on education, infrastructure investments, and pharmaceuticals will conclude the event.

Schedule:

Welcome remarks………………… Professor Maggie Chen
Director, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU
………………… Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II
Dean, Elliot School of International Affairs, GWU
Fireside chat………………………… H.E. Harsh Vardhan Shringla
Ambassador of India to the United States of America
…………………………. Ajay Chhibber
Visiting Scholar, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU
Chief Economic Advisor, Federation of Indian Chambers of
Commerce and Industry
Expert panel……………………..… Subir V. Gokarn
Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and SriLanka, International Monetary Fund
…………………..…… Sofia Mumtaz
President, Lupin Limited
……..………………… Adrian Mutton
Founder & CEO, Sannam S4 Group of companies & U.S.
Business Centers
Moderated by………………….… Ridhika Batra
Country Head / Director, Federation of Indian Chambers of
Commerce and Industry, U.S.

Full Report

Do Constraints on Women Worsen Child Deprivations? Framework, Measurement, and Evidence from India

March 6, 2019March 7, 20222019, Stephen C. Smith, Working Papers

March 2019

Stephen C. Smith, Alberto Posso and Lucia Ferrone

IIEP Working Paper 2019-2

Abstract: This paper provides a framework for analyzing constraints that apply specifically to women, which theory suggests may have negative impacts on child outcomes (as well as on women). We classify women’s constraints into four dimensions: (i) domestic physical and psychological abuse, (ii) low influence on household decisions, (iii) restrictions on mobility, and (iv) limited information access. Each of these constraints are in principle determined within households. We test the impact of women’s constraints on child outcomes using nationally representative household Demographic and Health Survey data from India, including 53,030 mothers and 113,708 children, collected in 2015-16. Outcomes are measured as multidimensional deprivations, utilizing UNICEF’s Multidimensional Overlapping Deprivation Analysis index, incorporating deficiencies in children’s access to water, sanitation, housing, healthcare, nutrition, education and information. Our preferred specification follows Lewbel, constructing internal heteroskedasticity-based instruments; and we present an array of additional econometric strategies and robustness checks. We find that children of women who are subjected to domestic abuse, have low influence in decision making, and limited freedom of mobility are more likely to be deprived. Specifically, our causal analysis uncovers a robust impact of women experiencing constraints in emotional abuse, restrictions on the use of household earnings, and freedom of movement to access health facilities, on child deprivation. We conclude that societal changes that relax constraints on women may have potential complementary benefits for their children. We recommend that analyses showing welfare gains of relaxing constraints on women account for potential additional intra-household benefits, examining other channels through which they operate.

JEL Classifications: I15, I25 I32, O15

Key Words: child deprivations, MODA, child health, child nutrition, education, bargaining, empowerment, domestic abuse, mobility restrictions, information access, gendered constraints, multidimensional measurement, Lewbel estimation, instrumental variables, matching

Works Councils and Workplace Health Promotion in Germany

March 4, 2019March 7, 20222019, Development Economics, Global Governance, Stephen C. Smith, Working Papers

February 2019

Stephen C. Smith, Uwe Jirjahn and Jens Mohrenweiser

IIEP Working Paper 2019-1

Abstract: From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures resulting in an underprovision of occupational health and safety. Works councils may help mitigate these failures. Using establishment data from Germany, our empirical analysis confirms that the incidence of a works council is significantly associated with an increased likelihood that the establishment provides more workplace health promotion than required by law. This result also holds in a recursive bivariate probit regression accounting for the possible endogeneity of works council incidence. Furthermore, analyzing potentially moderating factors such as collective bargaining coverage, industry, type of ownership, multiestablishment status and product market competition, we find a positive association between works councils and workplace health promotion for the various types of establishments examined. Finally, we go beyond the mere incidence of workplace health promotion and show that works councils are positively associated with a series of different measures of workplace health promotion.

JEL Classification: I18, J28, J50, J81.

Keywords: Non-union employee representation, works council, occupational health and safety, workplace health promotion.

A mHealth Voice Messaging Intervention to Improve Infant and Young Child Feeding Practices in Senegal

February 28, 2019March 7, 20222019, Development Economics, Stephen C. Smith, Ultra Poverty

February 2019

Shauna Downs, Jessica Fanzo, Jozefina Kalaj, Joachim Sackey, and Stephen C. Smith

IIEP Working Paper 2019-6

Abstract: Mobile health (mHealth) interventions have the potential to improve infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices; however, gaps in the literature remain regarding their design, implementation and effectiveness. The aims of this study were to: design a mHealth voice messaging intervention delivered to mothers and fathers targeting IYCF practices and examine its implementation and impact in households with children 6-23 months in three rural villages in Senegal. We conducted focus groups (n=6) to inform the intervention development. We then conducted a pilot study (n=47 households) to examine the impact of the intervention on IYCF practices of children 6-23 months. Voice messages were sent to the children’s mothers and fathers over a period of four weeks (2 messages/week; 8 messages in total), and 24-hour dietary recalls and food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) were conducted before and immediately after the implementation of the mHealth intervention to examine its impact on IYCF practices. Overall, 3 of the 8 behaviors increased and one decreased. There was a significant increase in the number of children that consumed fish (60% vs 94%; p=0.008) as measured by the 24-hour recall after the completion of the intervention. We also found significantly higher frequency of egg (p=0.026), fish (p=0.004) and thick porridge (p=0.002) consumption in the previous 7-days measured by the FFQ. Our findings suggest that voice messaging IYCF interventions in Senegal have the potential to improve IYCF behaviors among young children in the short term. Future research should entail scaling-up the intervention and examining its sustainability over the long-term.

JEL Classification: I15, O15; Q12

Keywords: Infant and young child feeding, mHealth, behavior change communication, nutrition, horticulture, farming groups

Pandemics, Places, and Populations: Evidence from the Black Death

February 28, 2019March 7, 20222019, Climate Adaptation, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab

February 2019

Remi Jedwab, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama

IIEP Working Paper 2019-3

Abstract: The Black Death killed 40% of Europe’s population between 1347-1352, making it one of the largest shocks in the history of mankind. Despite its historical importance, little is known about its spatial effects and the effects of pandemics more generally. Using a novel dataset that provides information on spatial variation in Plague mortality at the city level, as well as various identification strategies, we explore the short-run and long-run impacts of the Black Death on city growth. On average, cities recovered their pre-Plague populations within two centuries. In addition, aggregate convergence masked heterogeneity in urban recovery. We show that both of these facts are consistent with a Malthusian model in which population returns to high-mortality locations endowed with more rural and urban fixed factors of production. Land suitability and natural and historical trade networks played a vital role in urban recovery. Our study highlights the role played by pandemics in determining both the sizes and placements of populations.

JEL: R11; R12; O11; O47; J11; N00; N13

Keywords: Pandemics; Black Death; Mortality; Path Dependence; Cities; Urbanization; Malthusian Theory; Migration; Growth; Europe

What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Digital Protectionism?

December 31, 2018March 7, 20222018, Global Governance, International Trade, Susan Aaronson

December 2018

Susan Ariel Aaronson

IIEP Working Paper 2018-13

Abstract: For almost a decade, executives, scholars, and trade diplomats have argued that filtering, censorship, localization requirements, and domestic regulations are distorting the cross-border information flows that underpin the internet. Herein I use process tracing to examine the state and implications of digital protectionism. I make five points: First, I note that digital protectionism differs from protectionism of goods and other services. Information is intangible, highly tradable, and some information is a public good. Secondly, I argue that it will not be easy to set international rules to limit digital protectionism without shared norms and definitions. Thirdly, the US, EU, and Canada have labeled other countries policies’ protectionist, yet their arguments and actions sometimes appear hypocritical. Fourth, I discuss the challenge of Chinese failure to follow key internet governance norms. China allegedly has used a wide range of cyber strategies, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (bombarding a web site with service requests) to censor information flows and impede online market access beyond its borders. WTO members have yet to discuss this issue and the threat it poses to trade norms and rules. Finally, I note that digital protectionism may be self-defeating. I then draw conclusions and make policy recommendations.

Data is Different: Why the World Needs a New Approach to Governing Cross-border Data Flows

November 30, 2018March 7, 20222018, Global Governance, International Trade, Susan Aaronson

November 2018

Susan Ariel Aaronson

IIEP Working Paper 2018-10

Executive Summary: Companies, governments and individuals are using data to create new services such as apps, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). These data-driven services rely on large pools of data and a relatively unhindered flow of data across borders (few market access or governance barriers). The current approach to governing cross-border data flows through trade agreements has not led to binding, universal or interoperable rules governing the use of data. Trade diplomats first established principles to govern cross-border data flows, and then drafted e-commerce language in free trade agreements (FTAs), rather than through the World Trade Organization (WTO), the most international trade agreement. Data-driven services will require a different domestic and international regulatory environment than that developed to facilitate e-commerce. Most countries with significant datadriven firms are in the process of debating how to regulate these services and the data that underpins them. But many developing countries are not able to participate in that debate. Policy makers must devise a more effective approach to regulating trade in data for four reasons: the unique nature of data as an item exchanged across borders; the sheer volume of data exchanged; the fact that much of the data exchanged across borders is personal data; and the fact that although data could be a significant source of growth, many developing countries are unprepared to participate in this new data-driven economy and to build new data-driven services. This paper begins with an overview and then describes how trade in data is different from trade in goods or services. It then examines analogies used to describe data as an input, which can help us understand how data could be regulated. Next, the paper discusses how trade policy makers are regulating trade in data and how these efforts have created a patchwork. Finally, it suggests an alternative approach.

Is There a Kuznets Curve for Intra-City Earnings Inequality?

November 22, 2018March 7, 20222018, Development Economics, Haixiao Wu, Working Papers

November 2018

Haixiao Wu

IIEP Working Paper 2018-9

Abstract: Many papers have found a positive relation between income inequality and city size in the US and other countries. This literature has assumed that the relation is linear. Tests performed here find that it is concave, resembling the classic Kuznets curve. A theoretical model based on the Income Elasticity Hypothesis (IEH), explains that inequality is a concave function of housing prices that tend to increase with city size. Further tests confirm the concavity of the relation between Gini and housing costs that is predicted by the IEH. Although for most cities, inequality still rises with housing costs, if housing costs continue to grow in large cities, inequality should eventually fall, resembling the Kuznets Curve at the country level

The International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook

November 6, 2018March 28, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events, Research Conference

We are delighted to invite you to the International Monetary Fund’s 2018 World Economic Outlook at the George Washington University. The talk will consist of three sections, starting with an overview of global prospects and policies and then moving onto a discussion of the global recovery 10 years after the global financial crisis and challenges for monetary policy in emerging economies.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018
9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
The Commons, 6th Floor
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW
Washington, DC 20052

Schedule of Events

9:30 – 9:45 a.m. Opening Remarks

Maggie Chen, George Washington University

9:45 – 10:15 a.m. Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

Presenter: Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, International Monetary Fund

10:15 – 10:30 a.m. Coffee Break

10:30 – 11:15 a.m. Chapter 2: The Global Recovery 10 Years after the 2008 Financial Meltdown

Presenter: Wenjie Chen, International Monetary Fund
Discussant: David Dollar, Brookings Institute

11:15 – 11:30 a.m. Coffee Break

11:30 – 12:15 p.m. Chapter 3: Challenges for Monetary Policy in Emerging Economies as Global Financial Conditions Normalize

Presenter: Rudolfs Bems, International Monetary Fund
Discussant: Jay Shambaugh, George Washington University

12:15 p.m. Concluding remarks

Chapter 1: Global Prospects and Policies

Global growth for 2018–19 is projected to remain steady at its 2017 level, but its pace is less vigorous than projected in April and it has become less balanced. Downside risks to global growth have risen in the past six months and the potential for upside surprises has receded. Global growth is projected at 3.7 percent for 2018–19—0.2 percentage point lower for both years than forecast in April. The downward revision reflects surprises that suppressed activity in early 2018 in some major advanced economies, the negative effects of the trade measures implemented or approved between April and mid-September, as well as a weaker outlook for some key emerging market and developing economies arising from country-specific factors, tighter financial conditions, geopolitical tensions, and higher oil import bills.

Chapter 2: The Global Recovery 10 Years after the 2008 Financial Meltdown

This chapter takes stock of the global economic recovery a decade after the 2008 financial crisis. Output losses after the crisis appear to be persistent, irrespective of whether a country suffered a banking crisis in 2007–08. Sluggish investment was a key channel through which these losses registered, accompanied by long-lasting capital and total factor productivity shortfalls relative to precrisis trends. Policy choices preceding the crisis and in its immediate aftermath influenced postcrisis variation in output. Underscoring the importance of macroprudential policies and effective supervision, countries with greater financial vulnerabilities in the precrisis years suffered larger output losses after the crisis. Countries with stronger precrisis fiscal positions and those with more flexible exchange rate regimes experienced smaller losses. Unprecedented and exceptional policy actions taken after the crisis helped mitigate countries’ postcrisis output losses.

Chapter 3: Challenges for Monetary Policy in Emerging Economies as Global Financial Conditions Normalize

Inflation in emerging market and developing economies since the mid-2000s has, on average, been low and stable. This chapter investigates whether these recent gains in inflation performance are sustainable as global financial conditions normalize. The findings are as follows: first, despite the overall stability, sizable heterogeneity in inflation performance and in variability of longer-term inflation expectations remains among emerging markets. Second, changes in longer-term inflation expectations are the main determinant of inflation, while external conditions play a more limited role, suggesting that domestic, not global, factors are the main contributor to the recent gains in inflation performance. Third, further improvements in the extent of anchoring of inflation expectations can significantly improve economic resilience to adverse external shocks in emerging markets. Anchoring reduces inflation persistence and limits the pass-through of currency depreciations to domestic prices, allowing monetary policy to focus more on smoothing fluctuations in output.

Private Sector Policymaking

October 18, 2018March 7, 20222018, David Szakonyi, Development Economics, Working Papers

October 2018

David Szakonyi

IIEP Working Paper 2018-8

Development Economics Meets the Challenges of Lagging U.S. Areas Applications to Education, Health and Nutrition, Behavior, and Infrastructure

September 30, 2018March 7, 20222018, Development Economics, Stephen C. Smith, Working Papers

September 2018

Stephen C. Smith

IIEP Working Paper 2018-7

Abstract: This chapter examines the development economics evidence base for insights into policy reforms that would benefit struggling areas in the United States. My focus is on improving education, physical and mental health, infrastructure, and institutions. First, consistent with findings on education policy effectiveness, I propose raising the legal minimum dropout age (prospectively to 19), providing better information about the benefits of completing high school, supporting targeted paraprofessional tutoring, and providing family financial incentives for attending school and graduating from high school. Second, to improve health outcomes in struggling areas, the focus is using and building on existing effective health and nutrition programs and services, identifying ways to include more families who are eligible for but not participating in these programs. Moreover, the recent development and behavioral economics evidence base has extended our understanding of the psychological, cognitive, and economic behavioral lives of the poor; the literature highlights the ways that poverty can impede cognitive functioning, with implications for policies to uplift lagging U.S. areas. Third, a review of evidence on the benefits of improving lagging rural and urban area transportation infrastructure points to the likely benefits of improved connectivity for lagging U.S. areas: reversing the legacy of past discriminatory policies, encouraging sector-based clusters, and extending access to high-speed internet. Finally, the chapter highlights the relevance of some cross-cutting themes in development economics, including the high returns to reliable household microdata and the importance of improving institutions to enable more inclusive, substantial, and lasting progress.

How ETFs Amplify the Global Financial Cycle in Emerging Markets

September 30, 2018March 7, 20222018, International Finance, Tomas Williams, Working Papers

January 2018

Updated: September 2018

Tomas Williams, Nathan Converse, and Eduardo Levy-Yeyati.

IIEP Working Paper 2018-1

Abstract: Since the early 2000s exchange-traded funds (ETFs) have grown to become an important investment vehicle worldwide. In this paper, we study how their growth affects the sensitivity of international capital flows to the global financial cycle. We combine comprehensive fundlevel data on investor flows with a novel identification strategy that controls for unobservable time-varying economic conditions at the investment destination. For dedicated emerging market funds, we find that the sensitivity of investor flows to global financial conditions for equity (bond) ETFs is 2.5 (2.25) times higher than for equity (bond) mutual funds. In turn, we show that in countries where ETFs hold a larger share of financial assets, total cross-border equity flows and prices are significantly more sensitive to global financial conditions. We conclude that the growing role of ETFs as a channel for international capital flows amplifies the incidence of the global financial cycle in emerging markets.

JEL Classification: F32, G11, G15, G23

Keywords: exchange-traded funds; mutual funds; global financial cycle; global risk; push and pull factors; capital flows; emerging markets

An Examination of the Link between Urban Planning Policies and the High Cost of Housing and Labor

September 22, 2018March 7, 20222018, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

September 2018

Anthony Yezer, William Larson, Weihua Zhao

IIEP Working Paper 2018-6

Abstract: Past research has established positive empirical relation between city-level land use regulations and housing costs. One interpretation of these findings is that building restrictions raise the cost of producing housing. Alternatively, these price effects could reflect greater willingness to pay for quality urban design. Disentangling and identifying cost versus amenity factors empirically is an unresolved challenge. This paper presents an alternative to empirical tests, relying instead on the predictions of neoclassical urban theory. Simulations of an open city model demonstrate that theoretical predictions differ substantially from those obtained from empirical testing in two main ways. First, restrictions on land use and housing density influence the price level but not the elasticity of housing supply. Second, the effects of land use restrictions on average house prices are ambiguous and depend on the precise location of the planning restriction. Furthermore, the model generates direct estimates of effects on wages and demonstrates that transportation impediments are more consequential for housing prices than land use restrictions. This indicates a potentially fruitful path for future empirical work, and the possibility of omitted variable bias if transportation impediments are correlated with land use regulation.

JEL Codes: R30, R31, R38

Keywords: monocentric city model, price gradient, zoning, standard urban model

Modelling Economic Development: The Lewis Model Updated

September 22, 2018April 15, 20222018, Carmel Chiswick, Development Economics, Working Papers

September 2018

Carmel Chiswick

IIEP Working Paper 2018-5

Abstract: This analysis updates the dual-economy model of economic development suggested by W. Arthur Lewis in 1954. The updated aggregate model incorporates advances since then in modern labor economics and the findings of empirical studies of LDC economies and it removes Lewis’ implicit assumption that capital-formation is costless to the host LDC country. Specifying investment in human capital for both sectors refocuses attention on workers’ well-being as the ultimate measure of development. Specifying the cost of capital formation permits the distinction between earnings that recover investment costs and the “surplus” available to workers for consumption. Policy implications include resolution of tradeoffs between “trickle-down” vs. “grass roots” development policies.

Keywords: Economic development, growth, human capital, dual-economy model

5th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

September 7, 2018March 30, 2022Anthony Yezer, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference

Friday, September 7, 2018
8:30am to 7:30pm

Preston Auditorium, The World Bank
1818 H Street, NW
Washington, D.C., 20433

Across the developing world, the growth of cities is outpacing effective policy. Low density land use results in rapidly expanding cities, raising the costs of infrastructure and service provision and limiting liveability and productivity. At the same time, limited investments in transport infrastructure such as roads limits the connectivity between individuals and opportunities that make cities engines for growth. Effective policy to address these challenges requires an understanding of the spatial organisation of cities, and how the distribution of private and public investments across a city affect economic growth.

On 7 September 2018, the 5th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference will bring together academics and development practitioners to present and discuss questions relating to the spatial organisation of cities and economic growth. In particular, the conference will be focusing on effective land and transport policy in cities and the implications of urban development for national growth. This conference is hosted by the World Bank (Development Research Group), George Washington University (Institute for International Economic Policy), the International Monetary Fund, and the International Growth Centre.

8:30-9:00 – Coffee and Registration
9:00-10:45 – Welcoming Remarks
- Chair and Moderator:
  Shantayanan Devarajan
  Senior Director, Development Economics, World Bank
- Panelists:
  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira
  Deputy Director UN-Habitat, former mayor of Kigali
  Edward Glaeser
  Professor of Economics, Harvard and International Growth Center
10:45-11:00 – Coffee Break
11:00 -12:30 – Session One: Land
- Mini Keynote: Informal Land Use
  Harris Selod
  Development Research Group, The World Bank
- Backyarding
  Jan Brueckner, Claus Rabe, and Harris Selod
- Compactness
  Vernon Henderson
- Chair:
  TBC
- Discussant:
  Mariaflavia Harari
  Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
12:30-13:30 – Lunch
13.30-14:15 – Keynote Address:
- The Geography of Development
  Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
  Princeton University
- Chair:
  Asli Demirguc-Kunt
  Research Director, Development Research Group, World Bank
14:15 -15:45 – Session Two: Transportation
- Mini Keynote: “Cars in Cities”
  Matthew Kahn
- Transport in a Congested City – A Computer Equilibrium Model Applied to Kampala City
  Louise Bernard, Julia Bird, Tony Venables
- Who Wins? Who Loses? Understanding the Spatially Differentiated Effects of Belt and Road within Central Asia
  Bader El Hifnawy, Somik Lall, Mathilde Lebrand
- Chair:
  Marianna Fay
  Chief Economist, Climate Change
- Discussant:
  Leah Brooks
  Assistant Professor, George Washington University
15:45-16:00 – Coffee Break
16:00-17:30 – Session Three: Urbanization, Growth, and Development
- Mini Keynote:
  Douglas Gollin
- In Search of a Spatial Equilibrium in the Developing World
  Douglas Gollin, Martina Kirchberger, David Lagakos
- Modern Urban Technology and the Future of the New Urban Giants
  Remi Jedwab, Prakash Loungani, Anthony Yezer
- Chair:
  Chris Papageorgiou
  International Monetary Fund
- Discussant:
  Deniz Igan
  Deputy Division Chief, Research Department’s Macro Financial Division, IMF
17:30-18:00 – Break
18:00-19:30 – Cocktail Reception and Welcome Speech by Maggie Chen
- At George Washington University, Lindner Commons Room (6th Floor) of the Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E St. N.W. (at the intersection of E and 19th Streets, on E Street), Washington, DC.

Do Fed Forecast Errors Matter?

August 3, 2018March 7, 20222016, International Finance, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

August 2018

Tara Sinclair, Pao-Lin Tien, & Edward N. Gamber

IIEP Working Paper 2016-14

Abstract: In order to make forward-looking policy decisions, the Fed relies on imperfect forecasts of future macroeconomic conditions. If the Fed’s forecasts are rational, then the difference between the actual outcome and the Fed’s forecast can be treated as an exogenous shock. We investigate the effect of the Fed’s forecast errors on output and price movements under the assumption that the Fed intends to implement policy through a forward-looking Taylor rule with perfect foresight. Our results suggest that although the absolute magnitude of the Fed’s forecast error shock is large, the impact of the shock on the macroeconomy is reassuringly small.

Keywords: Federal Reserve, Taylor rule, forecast evaluation, monetary policy shocks

JEL Classification: E32; E31; E52; E58

Data Minefield: How AI is Prodding Governments to Rethink Trade in Data

April 30, 2018March 7, 20222018, Global Governance, International Trade, Susan Aaronson

April 2018

Susan Ariel Aaronson

IIEP Working Paper 2018-11

Key Points: No nation alone can regulate artificial intelligence (AI) because it is built on crossborder data flows; countries are just beginning to figure out how best to use and to protect various types of data that are used in AI, whether proprietary, personal, public or metadata; countries could alter comparative advantage in data through various approaches to regulating data — for example, requiring companies to pay for personal data; and Canada should carefully monitor and integrate its domestic regulatory and trade strategies related to data utilized in AI.

Opening Up Argentina to the World: Some Strategic Observations

April 30, 2018March 7, 20222018, Danny M. Leipziger, Working Papers

May 2018

Danny Leipziger

IIEP Working Paper 2018-4

Introduction: Argentina is at a decisive point with respect to economic policy, and nowhere is this more apparent than in its external outlook. Exports have never been the main economic driver for economic growth, although, at times, due to domestic issues, they have played an incredibly important role. The Macri Administration has rightly identified trade and investment policies as crucial stepping-stones in the rebuilding of the economy and the repositioning of Argentina to be a competitive international player. Major domestic reforms in the areas of tax and pensions, as well as prudent macro-policies to both gradually reduce fiscal deficits and inflation, will be prerequisites for sustained positive results. These efforts need to be complemented by microeconomic reforms to improve the productivity and efficiency of the economy. This note aims to examine how Argentina, as a late mover into the global economy and as an economy that has experienced serious prior setbacks, can now position itself in a world that that requires the utmost in efficiency and innovation, and in which distance is an increasingly less important constraint to economic activity. We take as given the fact that Argentina has been somewhat isolated from global value chains, that it has not benefited as much as it should have from regional trade agreements, and that it now faces an international economy that is both less robust in terms of commercial trade and also more open to disruptive forces. In other words, Argentina faces internal as well as external obstacles in its announced desire to better integrate into the world economy

Migration and Online Job Search: A Gravity Model Approach

April 27, 2018March 7, 20222018, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

April 2018

Tara Sinclair and Mariano Mamertino

IIEP Working Paper 2018-3

Abstract: Most studies of migration focus on realized migration. Data on realized migration take substantial time to collect and are available to researchers and policymakers only at a significant delay. In this study we consider a new potential data source in the form of tracking the patterns of online job seekers actively searching for a job in a country other than their current home. The advance of internet job search allows job seekers to explore international employment options before making a decision to move. We characterize job seeker interest across national borders by looking at user behavior on a major job search website. We investigate the determinants of cross-border job search using a standard gravity model and find that both the determinants and the relative importance of the determinants for job search are strikingly similar to those for past realized migration. This suggests both that job seekers are likely to act on their international job search and that these data may be useful for predicting future migration patterns. We use our results to explore the labor market mobility implications of a country, such as the UK, leaving the EU and find that leaving the EU may have international immigration impacts similar to increasing the distance between the leaver and the other EU countries by over one third.

JEL Codes: J6, J4, F22, O15

Keywords: international migration, labor mobility, online labor markets, European Union, Brexit

The Rise of Patient Capital: The Political Economy of Chinese Global Finance

April 26, 2018March 7, 20222018, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

July 2018

Stephen Kaplan

IIEP Working Paper 2018-2

Abstract: As the United States has retreated from its lead role in globalization – first because of the 2008 financial crisis, and now under President Donald Trump’s leadership – China has become a major global financial player. China, as the world’s largest saver, has rapidly expanded its cross-border lending since the crisis, more than doubling its overseas banking presence. What are the implications? I contend that China’s state-led capitalism is an important form of patient capital, characterized by a longerterm horizon. While technically classified as mobile capital, its higher risk tolerance and geopolitical shrewdness make state-owned capital less likely to swiftly exit debtor countries. Compared to traditional mobile capital, debtor governments thus gain more policy freedom, particularly during hard times when Western creditors might otherwise impose austerity and other onerous policy conditions. Employing an originally constructed dataset, the China Global Financial Index, I conduct an econometric test across 15 Latin American countries from 1990-2015. I find that left governments are more likely to borrow from China. However, notwithstanding this initial creditor choice, Chinese state-to-state lending then uniformly leads to higher budget deficits. It endows governments with more fiscal space to intervene in their economies by reducing their reliance on conditionality-linked Western financing. These results suggest that Chinese financing could be a development opportunity, but only if governments invest wisely. Otherwise, by lending without policy conditions, China may be encouraging developing country governments to spend without bounds, sowing the seeds for future debt problems.

Can Differences Deceive? The Case of “Foreclosure Externalities”

April 16, 2018March 7, 20222017, Anthony Yezer, Working PapersLeave a Comment

July 2017

Anthony Yezer and Yishen Liu

IIEP Working Paper 2017-29

Abstract: Foreclosure externalities, in which recent foreclosures proximate to a housing unit depress its sales price, are well accepted in the literature. These papers use a geographic differencing strategy to eliminate the problem of selection into treatment. They also assume that the partial and total derivatives of the outcome (house value) with respect to the treatment (foreclosure) are constant and equal. This paper relaxes these assumptions producing very different results. These findings likely generalize to a larger body of research where differencing often in the form of regression discontinuity, propensity score matching, or synthetic controls is used to achieve identification while assuming total and partial derivatives of the outcome with respect to the treatment are constant and equal.

JEL: R23, R30, R31.

Keywords: Foreclosure; Specification error; Loan-to-value ratio; Externalities.

Unilateral and Multilateral Sanctions: A Network Approach

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Sumit Joshi, Working PapersLeave a Comment

November 2017

Sumit Joshi and Ahmed Saber Mahmud

IIEP Working Paper 2017-28

Abstract: The extensive literature on efficacy of sanctions has been mainly focused on a dyadic interaction between sender and target. In contrast, this paper examines sanctions when the sender and target are embedded in a network of linkages to other agents and each agent’s utility is a function of the size of the agent’s component. Efficacy of sanctions is then a function of two factors: the network structure binding the sender and target, and the concavity/convexity of utility in the component size. We consider both unilateral sanctions and multilateral sanctions. We demonstrate how the network architecture, together with the specification of utility, qualifies and sometimes reverses the main tenets of the dyadic approach. We add to the recent work on identifying network architectures that sustain cooperation via the threat of exclusion by showing that the utility specification matters. Thus the same network can be efficacious for sanctions if utility is convex in component size but not if it is concave.

JEL: C72, D74, D85

Keywords: Unilateral sanctions, Multilateral sanction, Sender, Target, Networks, Spanning trees, Cutsets

Network Formation with Multigraphs and Strategic Complementarities

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Sumit Joshi, Working PapersLeave a Comment

November 2017

Sumit Joshi, Ahmed Saber Mahmud and Sudipta Sarangi

IIEP Working Paper 2017-27

Abstract: Economic agents are typically connected to others in multiple network relationships, and the architecture of one network could be shaped by connections in other networks. This paper examines the formation of one network when connections in a second network are inherited under two scenarios: (i) the inherited network is asymmetric allowing for a wide range of graphs called nested split graphs, and (ii) the inherited network is a symmetric type of network belonging to a subclass of regular graphs. Both the inherited and endogenously formed networks are interdependent because the respective actions in each are (weak) strategic complements. This property is su¢ cient to show that those who inherit high centrality will continue to have high centrality. Additionally, the network formed by the agents induces a coarser partition than the inherited network, suggesting the possibility of being able to improve network centrality, but only in a limited manner. Thus, our analysis explains preferential attachment and why inequality is often entrenched in society, how asymmetries in one network may be magnified or diminished in another, and what determines the identity of players occupying the various vertices of asymmetric equilibrium networks.

JEL: C72, D85

Keywords: Network formation, multigraphs, strategic complementarities, Katz-Bonacich centrality, nested split graphs.

Migration Networks and Location Decisions: Evidence from U.S. Mass Migration

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Bryan Stuart, Working PapersLeave a Comment

September 2017

Bryan Stuart and Evan Taylor

IIEP Working Paper 2017-26

Abstract: This paper examines the effects of birth town migration networks on location decisions. We study over one million long-run location decisions made during two landmark migration episodes by African Americans from the U.S. South and whites from the Great Plains. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of migration networks for each receiving and sending location. Our estimates imply that when one randomly chosen African American moves from a birth town to a destination county, then 1.9 additional black migrants make the same move on average. For white migrants from the Great Plains, the average is only 0.4. Networks were particularly important in connecting black migrants with attractive employment opportunities and played a larger role in less costly moves.

JEL: J61, N32, O15, R23, Z13

Keywords: migration networks, location decisions, social interactions, Great Migration

The Long-Run Effects of Recessions on Education and Income

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Bryan Stuart, Working PapersLeave a Comment

August 2017

Bryan Stuart

IIEP Working Paper 2017-25

Abstract: This paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on education and income. Using confidential Census data, I estimate difference-in-differences regressions that exploit variation across counties in recession severity and across cohorts in age at the time of the recession. For individuals age 0-10 in 1979, a 10 percent decrease in earnings per capita in their county of birth reduces four-year college degree attainment by 9 percent and income in adulthood by 3 percent. Simple calculations suggest that, in aggregate, the 1980-1982 recession led to 1-3 million fewer college graduates and $64-$145 billion less earned income per year.

JEL Classification Codes: E32, I20, I30, J13, J24

Keywords: human capital, education, income, recessions

The Effect of Social Connectedness on Crime: Evidence from the Great Migration

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Bryan Stuart, Working PapersLeave a Comment

August 2017

Bryan Stuart and Evan Taylor

IIEP Working Paper 2017-24

Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of social connectedness on crime across U.S. cities from 1960- 2009. Migration networks among African Americans from the South generated variation across destinations in the concentration of migrants from the same birth town. Using this novel source of variation, we find that social connectedness considerably reduces murders, robberies, assaults, burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts, with a one standard deviation increase in social connectedness reducing murders by 13 percent and motor vehicle thefts by 9 percent. Our results appear to be driven by stronger relationships among older generations reducing crime committed by youth.

JEL Classification Codes: K42, N32, R23, Z13

Keywords: crime, social connectedness, Great Migration

Urban Population and Amenities: The Neoclassical Model of Location

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Bryan Stuart, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Bryan Stuart (George Washington University) & David Albouy (the University of Illinois and NBER)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-23

Personal Privacy of HMDA in a World of Big Data

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Anthony Yezer, Global Governance, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Anthony Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-21

Repression, Civil Conflict, And Leadership Tenure: A Case Study of Kazakhstan

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University

IIEP Working Paper 2017-16

Taming the Tiger: Peaceful and Violent Protest and the Repressive Responses of Government

April 14, 2018March 9, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University), M. Rodwan Abouharb (University College London), & N. Susan Gaines (University of Leeds)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-15

Repression, Civil Conflict, And Leadership Tenure: A Case Study of Turkey

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University) & N. Susan Gaines (University of Leeds)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-14

Repression, Civil Conflict, and Leadership Tenure: A Case Study of Honduras

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-13

What are We Talking About when We Discuss Digital Protectionism?

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-9

China’s One Belt One Road Strategy: The New Financial Institutions and India’s Options

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Ajay Chhibber, US-China, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Ajay Chhibber (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-7

Governance Spillovers of Labour Provisions in Free Trade Agreements

April 14, 2018March 7, 20222017, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working PapersLeave a Comment

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-2

Most people know that governments such as the US, EU, and Canada use labour rights provisions in trade agreements to improve labour rights. They believe that policymakers in the developing world will be willing to improve labour rights governance with the incentive of the trade agreement. But in this paper, Aaronson argues that these provisions have broader and equally important spillover effects upon governance. These provisions:

empower workers and other citizens;
facilitate a feedback loop between the developing country government and its citizens on a broad range of issues affecting trade;
promote wage and income equality, which is conducive to development, social stability and democracy;
help policy-makers to better integrate labour rights with other public policies (such as fiscal policy, anti-corruption policies, or criminal laws); and
can help citizens and policy-makers gradually improve governance, increase productivity and advance social cohesion in the community.

Aaronson used a comparative case study approach, examining both the language and studies of the effects of the provisions. For example, she finds that since 2005, U.S. agreements have included provisions in the labour rights chapter related to procedural guarantees and public awareness. The provisions require parties to encourage public participation in the development of labour rights policies. They also require that all persons have “appropriate access to tribunals”, that the “proceedings are fair, equitable, and transparent … open to the public”, give all parties the right to seek review, and educate their public about the law. Taken in sum, these provisions could empower workers (on the demand side of labour rights) through rules on public awareness, public participation, and due process rights. The EU and Canada have begun to adopt similar policies.

Aaronson provides several examples of improved governance. In Guatemala, policymakers learned to coordinate labour rights and fiscal policy so that companies could not get subsidies or avoid taxes if they were found to violate labor rights. Mexican officials learned to protect the rights of Mexican guest workers in the U.S. In 2013, with help from U.S. and Mexican civil society groups, guest workers came together to form the Sinaloa Temporary Workers’ Coalition to defend the rights of guest workers in Mexico and abroad. In 2014, the group complained to the Mexican Ministry of Labor regarding recruitment fees. The Ministry investigated and found 27 violations of the law, resulting in fines. In this example, Mexicans held their government accountable for violations of the law at home.

Aaronson notes that no one has yet done a study as to whether these provisions and consultative bodies actually empower workers. Nonetheless, in a 2016 study of trade and labour rights, the ILO noted that “the impact of labor provisions depends crucially on, first, the extent to which they involve stakeholders, notably social partners such as unions and NGOs.” Workers who are aware of their rights and able to challenge executives and government officials’ decisions are empowered. Over time, empowered workers can promote greater income equality through improved productivity and better share in profits through wage increases. Some analysts argue that this process can advance development, social cohesion and democracy, and can ensure that more people meet their potential. Moreover, these provisions may help to legitimize trade agreements and help them to gain a base of public support.

Pollution or Crime: The Effect of Driving Restrictions on Criminal Activity

March 30, 2018March 7, 20222016, Arun Malik, Paul Carrillo, Working Papers

by Paul E. Carrillo (George Washington University), Andrea Lopez (George Washington University), & Arun Malik (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-31

Redefining Protectionism: The New Challenge in the Digital Age

March 29, 2018March 7, 20222016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-30

Twenty-first century protectionism is a slippery concept. With the introduction of digital trade, it is important for scholars and policymakers to rethink how they define, measure, and address protectionism. This is most clear in the United States where attitudes towards digital trade and digital protectionism have been murky at best.

While the digital is important to all countries, it is particularly important to the United States, where digital trade represents nearly 55 percent of U.S. service exports and has generated an annual trade surplus of over $150 billion. In a principal effort to limit digital protectionism and maintain an open internet for the advancement of the free flow of information, the United States made the move to create binding rules to govern trade in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and was the first country to call out digital protectionism in other nations. Policymakers now understand that information, whether it is created or altered within their county, is an asset. Therefore, measures that restrict content, limit the flow of data, or impose standards that keep out foreign competition could threaten the generativity of the internet as a whole.

However, many governments disagree with the scope and breadth of U.S. claims about digital protectionism. For example, Canadian and Australian policymakers are determined to protect the privacy of their citizens’ health records and require such information to be stored on local servers to an extent that tends to outpace U.S. standards. Adding to the confusion, U.S. arguments against digital protectionism are often inconsistent. For example, in a 2013 report on foreign trade barriers, U.S. officials complained about Japan’s uneven, and Vietnam’s unclear, approach to consumer privacy. At the same time, the United States has argued that China’s failure to enforce its privacy laws is harmful to digital trade.

Despite the importance of digital trade and digital protectionism, the United States has not thought out its stance on questions like: Is a policy truly protectionist? How harmful are these policies to U.S. interests? Are trade sanctions an appropriate response, and which agency should be responsible for making these decisions? As digital trade takes up a bigger portion of the global economy, policymakers and companies will need clarity. Given the stakes, it is important that the United States takes a leading role in defining digital protectionism.

A Fresh Look at Digital Trade in North America

December 1, 2017March 30, 2022Forum, Global Economic Governance Events, International Trade Events, Past Events, Susan Aaronson

Susan Ariel Aaronson

Research Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University

Jessica Nicholson

Department of Commerce

A Fresh Look at Digital Trade in North America

Friday, December 1, 2017

12:00 to 2:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

While TPP has the first binding language in its e-commerce chapter, NAFTA could be the first digital economy trade agreement designed to facilitate data-driven sectors such as the cloud, AI, and the Internet of Things. The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) and the Latin American and Hemispheric Studies Program (LAHS) at the George Washington University as well as the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) present a free event on the data-driven economy in North America. To read Susan Ariel Aaronson’s paper, please click here.

Agenda

Panel 1: Measuring the North American Digital Economy

Speaker: Jessica Nicholson, Department of Commerce
Commentary by:
- Martha Lawless, USITC
- Jordan Khan, Embassy of Canada
- Nicholas Bramble, Google
Moderator: Carl Schonander, Software & Information Industry Association

Panel 2: A Comprehensive Approach to Digital Trade in NAFTA 2.0

Speaker: Professor Susan Ariel Aaronson
Commentary by:
- Dan Ciuriak, Centre for International Governance Innovation
- Guillermo Malpica Soto, Embassy of Mexico
Moderator: Dan Ikenson, Cato Institute

For more information, please contact Kyle Renner at iiep@gwu.edu or 202-994-5320.

Information Please: A Comprehensive Approach to Digital Trade Provisions in NAFTA 2.0

November 30, 2017March 7, 20222018, Global Governance, International Trade, Susan Aaronson

November 2017

by Susan Ariel Aaronson

IIEP Working Paper 2018-12

NAFTA Renegotiation: International Trade and Arbitration Going Forward

November 16, 2017March 30, 2022Forum, International Trade Events, Past Events, Steve Charnovitz

A Panel on NAFTA Renegotiation

International Trade and Arbitration Going Forward

Thursday, November 16, 2017

12:00 to 1:30pm

George Washington University Law School
Tasher Great Room (Burns 101)
2000 H St NW
Washington, DC 20052

With the fifth round of NAFTA renegotiations set to commence on November 17, 2017, the Trump Administration’s objects for investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in the final agreement have been front and center. Given the timeliness and the importance of the renegotiation efforts, the panelists will be in a unique position to discuss the merits of potential changes to the ISDS provisions as well as other aspects of the trade agreement.

Our panelists and moderator will discuss, among other things, potential changes to Chapter 11 ISDS provisions, the intersection of U.S. industry and ISDS, and substantive protections. The International Arbitration Student Association and International Law Society of The George Washington University Law School hopes that you will be able to join us for this panel discussion.

Moderator:

Steve Charnovitz (Professor, The George Washington University Law School) Professor Charnovitz is an associate professor at the GWU Law School. Prior to joining the Law School in 2004, Professor Charnovitz was the director of the Global Environment and Trade Study at Yale and from 1991-1995 he was the policy director at the U.S. Competitiveness Policy Council. Professor Charnovitz serves or has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of international Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, and the World Trade Review. He is a member of the Council on Foreign relations and the American Law Institute. He has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 215 scholarly publications over his career and written multiple books on the topic of international trade law, the most recent being The Path of World Trade Law in the 21st Century.

Panelists:

James Mendenhall (Partner, Sidley Austin)Mr. Mendenhall is a partner in the International Arbitration and International Trade practice groups at Sidley Austin. He is the former General Counsel of the Office of the US Trade Representative where he represented US interests before the WTO and in NAFTA disputes. In this capacity he was the chief negotiator for the US in the Softwood Lumber negotiations with Canada and served as the USTR representative on the CFIUS. Mr. Mendenhall has represented clients in numerous international arbitration and invest-state proceedings under ICSID and UNCIRAL arbitration rules and routinely advises clients on international trade negotiations, trade policy, national security regulations, and legislative matters.
George Kalantzakis (Manager, International Government Affairs, Hess Corporation) Mr. Kalantzakis is the Manager of International Government Affairs at Hess Corporation, a Fortune 500 American based oil and gas company with global operations. Prior to joining Hess, Mr. Kalantzakis worked under the Chief Economist at the American Petroleum Institute. He received his graduate degree from The John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Following graduation from SAIS, he received his MBA from John Hopkins.
Patrick Childress (Associate, Sidley Austin)Mr. Childress is an associate in the International Arbitration practice group at Sidley Austin. He focuses primarily on international dispute settlement including investment treaty arbitration and international commercial arbitration. He has represented investors and governments in proceedings before the ICSID as well as in arbitrations under the Arbitration Rules of the UNCITRAL, the International Chamber of Commerce, and the London Court of International Arbitration.
Todd Tucker (Fellow, Roosevelt Institute)Todd Tucker is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who specializes in economic governance, dispute settlement, and regulatory implications of international trade, investment, and tax treaties. He is a co-author of The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority which explores the history of U.S. Executive-congressional relations on trade. He has authored more than 60 major reports and is often published and cited in and on CNN, NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post for his expertise on the intersection of the domestic and global economy.

Nonunion Employee Representation: Theory and the German Experience with Mandated Works Councils

October 30, 2017March 7, 20222017, Development Economics, Global Governance, Stephen C. Smith, Working PapersLeave a Comment

October 2017

by Stephen Smith (George Washington University) & Uwe Jirjahn (University of Trier)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-22

Businesspeople in Elected Office: Identifying Private Benefits from Firm-Level Returns

September 30, 2017March 7, 20222017, David Szakonyi, International Finance, Working PapersLeave a Comment

September 2017

by David Szakonyi (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-20

Bolder Divestment Not Better Performance Contracts are the Solution for India’s Public Sector

September 30, 2017March 9, 20222017, Ajay Chhibber, Development Economics, Working PapersLeave a Comment

September 2017

by Ajay Chhibber (George Washington University) & Swati Gupta (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-19

State Ownership and Transparency in Foreign Direct Investment: Loose-Lipped Leviathan?

September 30, 2017March 9, 20222017, International Finance, Robert Weiner, Working PapersLeave a Comment

September 2017
by Robert Weiner (George Washington University) & Anthony P. Cannizzaro (Catholic University of America)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-18

Could Austerity Collapse the Economy of Puerto Rico?

September 30, 2017March 9, 20222017, Anthony Yezer, International Finance, Paul Carrillo, Working PapersLeave a Comment

September 2017

by Paul Carrillo (George Washington University), Anthony Yezer (George Washington University), & Jozefina Kalaj (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-17

4th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

September 8, 2017March 30, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Maggie Chen, Research Conference

Friday, September 8, 2017

Preston Auditorium
The World Bank
1818 H Street, N.W., 20433 Washington D.C.

This conference hosted by the World Bank, George Washington University (Institute for International Economic Policy) and the International Growth Centre Cities Program brings together academics and development practitioners to present and discuss the challenges of sustainable urban development in developing countries.

One of the great challenges of 21st century cities in developing countries is that they must fulfill the requirements of connectivity in production for businesses and address the negative externalities for consumers of density with extremely limited financial resources and public capacity. This raises the following questions: What national policies strengthen and weaken developing world cities, and what infrastructure investments deliver the largest growth benefits? In particular, the aim of this conference will be to reflect upon how cities in developing countries should focus their efforts on improving their land and housing sector (see Session 1: Land), their transportation networks (see Session 2: Transportation), or their sanitation infrastructure (see Session 3: Public Services). In other words, how can we build, or rebuild, cities in the future in order to promote economic growth and reduce poverty?

Rémi Jedwab, Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University

Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Paris School of Economics. He was also a visiting Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics for three years. Professor Jedwab’s main fields of research are development and growth, urban economics, public economics and political economy. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the relationship between population growth and economic growth, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Growth and the Journal of Urban Economics. Recently, Professor Jedwab’s research areas have included the phenomenon of urbanization without economic growth, and his research has been highlighted by The Atlantic’s CityLab and the Boston Globe.

Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Harvard

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, where he also serves as Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He studies the economics of cities, and has written scores of articles on urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He has been particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992 and has been at Harvard since then.

Harris Selod, Senior Economist, The World Bank

Harris Selod is a Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank. His current research focuses on urban development, including issues related to transport and land use, as well as land tenure, land markets and the political economy of the land sector in developing countries, with a specific interest in West Africa. His publications cover a variety of topics in urban and public economics including theories of squatting and residential informality, the political economy of transport infrastructure, the effects of residential segregation on schooling and unemployment, or the impact of land rights formalization and place-based policies. He has been chair of the World Bank’s Land Policy and Administration Thematic Group (2011-2013) and is currently leading a World Bank research program on transport.

Keynote Speaker

Paul Romer

Chief Economist and Senior Vice President, World Bank

Dr. Paul Romer took office as the World Bank’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President in October, 2016. Romer is on leave from his position as University Professor at New York University. His initial interest in technological progress led to research on topics ranging from an abstract analysis of how the economics of ideas differs from the economics of objects to practical suggestions about how to improve science and technology policy. More recently, his research on catch-up growth in low- and middle-income countries has emphasized the importance of government policies that encourage orderly urban expansion. Before NYU, Romer taught at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and while there, also started Aplia, an education technology company dedicated to increasing student effort. Romer has also variously taught economics at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester.

Chairs and Panelists

Maggie Chen

Professor of Economics, GW and IIEP

Maggie Xiaoyang Chen is the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. Professor Chen’s areas of research expertise include foreign direct investment, international trade, and regional trade agreements and her work has been published extensively in academic journals. She has worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank, a consultant for various divisions of the World Bank and the International Finance Cooperation, and a trade policy advisor at the U.S. congressional Budget Office leading policy analyses on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. She has also held visiting professor positions in various universities including Boston College and University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China and is a co-editor of the Economic Inquiry. Professor Chen received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her B.A. in Economics from Beijing Normal University.

Craig Kesson

Executive Director for the Directorate of the Mayor, City of Cape Town, South Africa

Craig Kesson is the City of Cape Town Executive Director for the Directorate of the Mayor as well as the Chief Resilience Officer, in partnership with the 100 Resilient Cities Programme. He has worked in several senior roles in city management and has advised a number of metro governments. He previously served as the National Director of Research for South Africa’s Official Opposition. He is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu Natal, the University of Stellenbosch Business School, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. His specialisations are in public policy and strategy; project portfolios, and operations modelling. He is the co-author with Mayor Patricia De Lille of an upcoming book on the nature of city leadership and management planned for publication in August 2017.

Marianne Fay

Chief Economist, Climate Change Group, World Bank Group

Marianne Fay is the chief economist for climate change at the World Bank. She co-directed the World Development Report 2010 on Climate Change. Ms. Fay has served in multiple regions in the World Bank, including Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa, working on infrastructure, urbanization, and more recently on climate change and green growth. Her research has explored the role of infrastructure and urbanization in development, with a particular focus on urban poverty, climate change, and green growth, on which she has authored numerous articles and books. As chief economist for sustainable development, she led the World Bank’s flagship report for the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development.

Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez

Senior Director, Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, The World Bank

Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez is the Senior Director for the World Bank Group’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice. In this position, Mr. Ijjasz-Vasquez leads a team of over 600 technical experts deployed across the world, leveraging global knowledge and collaborating with partners to help tackle the world’s most complex development challenges in: social inclusion and sustainability; mainstreaming resilience in all dimensions development; territorial and rural development; and urban planning, services and institutions. Before this, he was Director for Sustainable Development of the Latin America and Caribbean Region since November 2011, covering infrastructure, environment and climate change, social development, agriculture and rural development, disaster risk management, and urban development with an active portfolio of about $17 billion. From 2007 to 2011, he was based in Beijing, where he managed the Sustainable Development Unit for China and Mongolia. Earlier in his career, he managed the global trust-funded programs ESMAP and WSP in energy and water and sanitation, respectively. Mr. Ijjasz has a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in civil and environmental engineering, with specialization in hydrology and water resources. He has been a lecturer at the Environmental Science and Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University, and at Tsinghua University. He is a Colombian and Hungarian national.

William Maloney

Chief Economist, Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions, World Bank

William F. Maloney is Chief Economist for Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions in the World Bank Group. Previously he was Chief Economist for Trade and Competitiveness and Global Lead on Innovation and Productivity. Prior to the Bank, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1990-1997) and then joined, working as Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America until 2009. From 2009 to 2014, he was Lead Economist in the Development Economics Research Group. From 2011 to 2014 he was Visiting Professor at the University of the Andes and worked closely with the Colombian government on innovation and firm upgrading issues.

Jennifer Semakula Musisi

Executive Director, Kampala Capital City Authority

Jennifer Semakula-Musisi is the first Executive Director of the Kampala Capital City Authority that was established to administer Uganda’s Capital City-Kampala on behalf of the Central Government. Over the past six Years, Jennifer has headed the transformation of the City and initiated a number of activities that have enhanced efficiency in services delivery and paved way for the current steady Transformation of Kampala. The achievements over the period have become an admiration and a benchmark for many upcoming municipalities and Cities in East Africa and beyond. Jennifer is a lawyer by profession. She served as the Commissioner Legal Services and Board Affairs in Uganda Revenue Authority; and; she is an entrepreneur with several successful private businesses in Uganda.

Michael Toman

Research Manager, Environment and Energy Research Program, Development Research Group, The World Bank

Michael Toman (Mike) is Lead Economist on Climate Change in the Development Research Group and Manager of the Energy and Environment Team. His current research interests include alternative energy resources, policies for responding to risks of climate change catastrophes, timing of investments for greenhouse gas reduction, and mechanisms for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through reduced deforestation. During his career Mike has done extensive research on climate change economics and policy, energy markets and policy, environmental policy instruments, and approaches to achieving sustainable development. Prior to joining the World Bank in fall 2008, he held senior analytical and management positions at RAND Corporation, Inter-American Development Bank, and Resources for the Future. His teaching experience includes adjunct positions at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the School of the Environment, University of California at Santa Barbara. Mike has a B.A. from Indiana University, a M.Sc. in applied mathematics from Brown University, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from the University of Rochester.

Anna Wellenstein

Director of Strategy and Operations, Social, Urban, Rural, and Resilience (SURR) Global Practice, World Bank

Anna is a key member of the World Bank’s SURR GP senior management team that sets strategy for analytics and financing in areas such as disaster risk reduction, urban renovation, and geospatial technology. She also oversees partnerships with bilateral, UN, and regional organizations. Anna has over 20 years of experience in urban development. She’s led efforts to design and finance investments, facilitate policy reforms and build capacity to help developing countries reduce poverty and boost equity. Anna has been responsible for technical oversight of new projects financed by the Bank, the portfolio quality of ongoing projects, and setting sector and country strategies. Anna oversees $25 billion in lending to developing countries in over 200 projects, 325 studies and technical assistance projects. She’s developed strong partnerships with governments in countries ranging from large middle income to small island states as well as development agencies and academia.

Horacio Terraza

Lead Urban Specialist for the Latin American Region, The World Bank

Horacio has more than 20 years of professional experience in the urban-environmental field, having worked both in the private sector and multilateral development organizations. He has just rejoined the World Bank as Lead Urban Specialist for the Latin American Region focusing on cities and Resilience. During the previous 6 years he worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as the Coordinator of the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative (ESCI) and also as Principal Water Specialist. Before the IDB Horacio worked for 11 years as a Senior Environmental Specialist at the World Bank, leading the urban environmental agenda in the Latin American Department. Prior to that, he worked in the private sector as a Project Manager for environmental engineering companies providing treatment and final disposal of hazardous substances. Horacio was trained as a mechanical engineer at the National University of La Plata in Argentina and holds a Master’s in International Economics and International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Presenters

Robert Buckley

Affiliated Scholar, Urban Institute

Bob Buckley is an Affiliated Scholar at the Urban Institute. He was Managing Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, Advisor at the World Bank, and Senior Fellow at the New School. He has written widely on urbanization and development in both the popular press and academic journals, and has helped prepare projects in a variety of places.

Gilles Duranton

Accessibility and Mobility in Urban India, Wharton School

Gilles Duranton is Professor of Accessibility and Mobility in Urban India and holds the Dean’s Chair in Real Estate. He joined the Wharton School in 2012 after holding academic positions at the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics. A graduate from HEC Paris and Sorbonne University, he obtained his PhD in economics jointly from the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on urban and transportation issues. His empirical work is concerned with urban growth and the estimation of the costs and benefits of cities and clusters. He is also interested in the effects of transportation infrastructure on urban development and the evaluation of local policies. He also conducts theoretical research to gain insight about the distribution of city sizes, the skill composition, and sectoral patterns of activities in cities.

Somik Lall

Lead Economist, The World Bank

Somik V. Lall is a Lead Economist for Urban Development at the World Bank’s Urban Development and Resilience Unit in the Sustainable Development Network. He is the lead author of a World Bank report on urbanization “Planning, Connecting, and Financing Cities Now: Priorities for City Leaders.” He was a core team member of the 2009 World Development Report “Reshaping Economic Geography”, and recently Senior Economic Counsellor to the Indian Prime Minister’s National Transport Development Policy Committee. Somik currently leads a World Bank program on the Urbanization Reviews, which provides diagnostic tools and a policy framework for policymakers to manage rapid urbanization and city development. His research interests span urban and spatial economics, infrastructure development, and public finance. He has over 40 publications featuring in peer reviewed journals, edited volumes, and working papers. Somik holds a bachelors degree in engineering, masters in city planning, and doctorate in economics and public policy.

Daniel da Mata

Researcher, Institute for Applied Economic Research

Daniel Da Mata is a Tenured Researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Cambridge. Since joining Ipea in 2004, he has held several positions at the institute, including Head of Urban Studies and Head of Quantitative Research Division. His research on Urban, Public and Development Economics has been published in peer reviewed journals and book chapters. He has recently won the BMZ/GIZ Public Policy Award and the European Regional Science Association EPAINOS Award.

Matthew Turner

Professor of Economics, Brown University

Matthew Turner is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. He regularly teaches courses in urban and environmental economics, and occasionally, microeconomic theory. He is broadly interested in environmental and urban policy and his recent research focuses on the economics of land use and transportation. Professor Turner holds a Ph. D. in economics from Brown University and is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Urban Economics. His research appears in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies and Econometrica, and is regularly featured in the popular press.

Anthony Venables

Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies

Tony Venables CBE is Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford where he also directs the Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies and a programme of research on urbanisation in developing economies. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Econometric Society. Former positions include Chief Economist at the UK Department for International Development, professor at the London School of Economics, research manager of the trade research group in the World Bank, and advisor to the UK Treasury. He has published extensively in the areas of international trade, spatial economics, and natural resources, including work on trade and imperfect competition, economic integration, multinational firms, and economic geography.

Discussants

Alain Bertaud

Adjunct Professor, Marron Institute

Alain Bertaud is an Adjunct Professor at the Marron Institute and a senior research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project. At the moment, he is writing a book about urban planning that is tentatively titled Order Without Design. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port au Prince (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).

Leah Brooks

Assistant Professor, Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration, George Washington University

Leah Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University. After receiving her PhD from UCLA in 2005, she taught at the University of Toronto and McGill University, and worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her research interest is urban political economy. Her work to date has examined Business Improvement Districts to understand the resolution of collective action problems, and the Community Development Block Grant program to analyze the political economy of grant giving at the municipal and sub-municipal levels. She has documented the existence and analyzed the impacts of municipally-imposed tax and expenditure limits, studied the premium required to assemble land, analyzed the long-term effects of streetcars on urban form, and is hard at work examining the impact of containerization on cities.

Maisy Wong

Associate Professor, Real Estate at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Maisy Wong is an Associate Professor of Real Estate at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. Her current research interests include household mobility and sorting behavior, urbanization in developing countries, and real estate finance. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, AEJ: Applied Economics, and Journal of Finance. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, at Berkeley.

8:30-9:00 AM Coffee and Registration

9:00-10:45 AM Opening Session: Urban Governance

Welcoming Remarks: Michael Toman, Research Manager, Energy and Environment, Development Research Group, The World Bank; Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, Senior

Director, Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, The World Bank

Chair: William Maloney, Chief Economist, Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions, The World Bank

Panelists: Craig Kesson, Executive Director for the Directorate of the Mayor, City of Cape Town, South Africa; Edward Glaeser, Professor of Economics, Harvard

and IGC; Jennifer Musisi, Executive Director, Kampala Capital City Authority, Uganda; Paul Romer, Chief Economist and Vice-President, The World Bank

10:45-11:00 AM Coffee Break

11:00 AM-12:30 PM Session 1: Land

Chair: Horacio Terraza, Lead Urban Specialist for the Latin American Region, The World Bank

11:00-11:20 AM Mini keynote (Video): “Land in the Urban Development Agenda,” Harris Selod, Development Research Group at The World Bank

11:20-11:40 AM Paper 1.1 (Video) “Building the City: Sunk Capital, Sequencing, and Institutional Frictions,” Anthony Venables (University of Oxford), joint with

Vernon Henderson (LSE) and Tanner Regan (LSE)

11:40-12:00 PM Paper 1.2 “On the Determinants of Slum Formation,” Daniel da Mata (IPEA), joint with Tiago Cavalcanti (University of Cambridge) and Marcelo

Santos (IIER)

12:00-12:15 PM Discussion (Video): Alain Bertaud, NYU Urbanization Project

12:15-12:30 PM Q&A

12:30-1:30 PM Lunch

1:30-2:15 PM Keynote Addresses: Cities, Growth, and Planning

Paul Romer, Chief Economist and Vice-President, The World Bank

Chair: Phil Hay, Communication Adviser, Development Economics, The World Bank

2:15-3:45 PM Session 2: Transportation

Chair: Marianne Fay, Chief Economist, Sustainable Development Vice-Presidency, The World Bank

2:15-2:35 PM Mini keynote (Video): “Transport Infrastructure in the Urban Development Agenda,” Somik Lall, The World Bank

2:35-2:55 PM Paper 2.1 (Video) “Congestion in Bogota,” Gilles Duranton (Wharton Business School)

2:55-3:15 PM Paper 2.2 “Subways and Urban Air Pollution,” Matthew Turner (Brown University)

3:15-3:30 PM Discussion (Video): Leah Brooks, George Washington University

3:30-3:45 PM Q&A

3:45-4:00 PM Coffee Break

4:00-5:30 PM Session 3: Public Services

Chair: Michael Toman, Research Manager, Energy and Environment, Development Research Group, The World Bank

4:00-4:20 PM Mini keynote (Video): “Urban Sanitation in the Urban Development Agenda,” Rémi Jedwab (George Washington University)

4:20-4:40 PM Paper 3.1 (Video) “Financing Sewers in the 19th Century’s Largest Cities: A Prequel for African Cities?,” Robert Buckley (The Urban Institute)

4:40-5:00 PM Paper 3.2 “Water, Health, and Wealth,” Ed Glaeser (Harvard University), with Nava Ashraf, Abraham Holland, and Bryce Steinberg

5:00-5:15 PM Discussion (Video): Maisy Wong (The Wharton School)

5:15-5:30 PM Q&A

6:00-7:30 PM Cocktail Reception and Welcome Speech by Maggie Chen (George Washington University)

At the George Washington University, Lindner Commons Room (6th Floor) of the Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E St. N.W. (at the intersection of E and

19th Streets, on E Street), Washington, DC

Capital Inflows, Sovereign Debt and Bank Lending: Micro-Evidence from an Emerging Market

August 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, International Finance, Tomas Williams, Working PapersLeave a Comment

August 2017

by Tomas Williams (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-12

Capital Flows and Sovereign Debt Markets: Evidence from Index Rebalancings

August 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, International Finance, Tomas Williams, Working PapersLeave a Comment

August 2017

by Tomas Williams (George Washington University) and Lorenzo Pandolfi (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-11

International Asset Allocations and Capital Flows: The Benchmark Effect

August 29, 2017March 9, 20222017, International Finance, Tomas Williams, Working PapersLeave a Comment

August 2017

by Tomas Williams (George Washington University), Claudio Raddatz (IMF), and Sergio L. Schmukler (World Bank)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-10

Agricultural Extension and Technology Adoption for Food Security: Evidence from Uganda

July 30, 2017March 9, 20222015, Development Economics, Stephen C. Smith, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers, Yao Pan

July 2017

by Yao Pan, Stephen C. Smith, and Munshi Sulaiman

IIEP Working Paper 2015-11

7th Annual Washington Area International Trade Symposium (WAITS) Conference

April 19, 2017March 30, 2022International Trade Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events, Research Conference

Friday, April 21, 2017

Elliott School of International Affairs
George Washington University 1957 E Street NW Suite 505
Washington D.C. 20052

The Washington Area International Trade Symposium (WAITS) is a forum that highlights trade research at institutions in the Washington D.C. area. Its primary activity is sponsoring an annual research conference where scholars present their latest academic work. Researchers from George Washington University, American University, the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Board, Georgetown University, the Inter-American Development Bank, Johns Hopkins University (SAIS), the U.S. International Trade Commission, the University of Maryland, and the World Bank have all participated in the symposium.

Contact iiep@gwu.edu with any questions.

View the Schedule

8:30 – 9:00 AM: Continental Breakfast and Registration

9:00 – 9:40 AM: Eunhee Lee (University of Maryland):
“Trade, Inequality, and the Endogenous Sorting of Heterogeneous Workers”
Discussant: Lindsay Oldenski (Georgetown University)

9:40 – 10:20 AM: Ferdinando Monte (Georgetown University):
“The Local Incidence of Trade Shocks”
Discussant: Illenin Kondo (Federal Reserve Board)

10:20 – 10:40 AM: Coffee Break

10:40 – 11:20 AM: Paul Piveteau (SAIS-Johns Hopkins):
“An empirical dynamic model of trade with consumer accumulation”
Discussant: Colin Hottman (Federal Reserve Board)

11:20 – 12:00 PM: Aaron Flaaen (Federal Reserve Board):
“The Role of Transfer Prices in Profit Shifting by U.S. Multinationals: Evidence from the 2004 Homeland Investment”
Discussant: JaeBin Ahn (International Monetary Fund)

12:00 – 1:40 PM: Lunch and Keynote:
Keith Maskus (Chief Economist Department of State and University of Colorado-Boulder)

1:40 – 2:20 PM: Maggie Chen (George Washington University):
“An Anatomy of Foreign Investment News”
Discussant: Rod Ludema (Georgetown University)

2:20 – 3:00 PM: Moises Yi (Census Bureau):
“Industry Mix, Local Labor Markets, and the Incidence of Trade Shocks”
Discussant: Marisol Rodriguez Chatruc (Inter-American Development Bank)

3:00 – 3:20 PM: Coffee Break

3:20 – 4:00 PM: Juan Blyde (Inter-American Development Bank):
“The Impact of Chinese Competition on Mexican Labor Outcomes”
Discussant: Claire Brunel (American University)

4:00 – 4:40 PM: Aaditya Mattoo (World Bank):
“Trade Creation and Trade Diversion in Deep Agreements”
Discussant: Peter Herman (United States International Trade Commission)

George Washington University’s Institute for International Economic Policy, housed at the Elliott School of International Affairs, is dedicated to producing and disseminating high-quality non-partisan academic and policy relevant research on international economic policy. Areas of focus include international trade, international finance, and development economics.

Prioritizing African Trade: Policies & Practices

April 19, 2017March 30, 2022Forum, International Trade Events, Michael O. Moore, Past Events

A Discussion on Prioritizing African Trade: Policies and Practices

Click here to view a recording of the event

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

4:00 to 6:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

China’s New Silk Road Strategy and India’s Options: Competitive Competition?

April 17, 2017March 30, 2022Ajay Chhibber, Forum, International Trade Events, Past Events

Dr. Ajay Chhibber

Visiting Scholar, Institute for International Economic Policy, GWU

China’s New Silk Road Strategy and India’s Options: Competitive Cooperation?

Monday, April 17, 2017

12:15 to 1:30pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Public Sector Undertakings: Bharat’s other Ratnas

March 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, Ajay Chhibber, Development Economics, Working PapersLeave a Comment

March 2017

by Ajay Chhibber (George Washington University) & Swati Gupta (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-6

Reviving Private Investment in India: Determinants and Policy Levers

March 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, Ajay Chhibber, International Finance, Working PapersLeave a Comment

March 2017

by Ajay Chhibber (George Washington University) & Akshata Kalloor (National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-5

Negative Shocks and Mass Persecutions: Evidence from the Black Death

March 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Working PapersLeave a Comment

March 2017

by Remi Jedwab (George Washington University), Mark Koyama (George Mason University) & Noel Johnson (George Mason University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-4

The authors of this paper examine the Black Death persecutions committed against the Jewish people to demonstrate the factors that determine when a minority group will face persecution. A theoretical framework is developed that predicts that there is an increased probability that minorities are scapegoated and persecuted when negative shocks occur. However, if the shocks become more severe, the probability of persecution may decrease when economic complementarities exist between the majority and minority groups. To accomplish this, the authors gathered data on a city-level on Black Death mortality and Jewish persecution. An aggregate level showed that scapegoating led to an increase in the baseline probability of persecution. On the city-level, high plague mortality rates did not align with increased persecutions. Persecutions were found to be more likely in cities with a history of antisemitism and less likely in locations where Jews were featured in important economic roles.

The Black Death had wide-ranging social effects, and historians and economists often look to the Black Death as a direct cause of scapegoating and persecution of Jewish communities. The authors contradict this view using city-level Black Death mortality rates and Jewish persecution, demonstrating that the higher the mortality in a city, the less likely persecution would occur. This was accentuated in cities where Jews played important economic roles. They show that, while the Black Death shock was the initial impetus for antisemitic persecution in Europe, it was mainly patterns of differences in economic standing between minority and majority groups that explain local variation in persecution.

Their work contributes to several literatures, such as recent work on the economics of mass killings. They also add to literature on the relationship between shocks and the persecution of minorities, which emphasizes the role played by economic complementarities between groups, and literature on antisemitism. Their study provides a unique perspective, as well, as the Black Death provides a very well suited setting to examine the causes of mass killings.

In their framework, negative shocks can increase both the incentive to persecute a minority and to raise that minority’s economic value. The authors conclude that the decision to persecute the minority is dependent upon how the intensity of the shock interacts with the benefit one gains from persecution and the economic benefits gained from the presence of the minority. While their research suggested there are underlying biases against minorities, it also demonstrated that complementary economic activities between minority groups and majority groups could reduce inter-group aggression.

Uncertainty and Trade Elasticities

March 30, 2017March 9, 20222017, International Trade, Olga Timoshenko, Working PapersLeave a Comment

March 2017

by Olga A. Timoshenko (George Washington University) & Erick Sager (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-8

Economic and Political Factors in Infrastructure Investment: Evidence from Railroads and Roads in Africa 1960–2015

February 28, 2017March 9, 20222017, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Working PapersLeave a Comment

February 2017

by Remi Jedwab (George Washington University) & Adam Storeygard (Tufts University)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-3

How Presidents Make Economic Policy in Times of Crisis” feat. Alejandro Bonvecchi

February 16, 2017March 30, 2022Forum, International Trade Events, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events, Stephen B. Kaplan

How Presidents Make Economic Policy in Times of Crises

Thursday, February 16, 2017

12:00 to 2:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

This project argues that presidents organize decision-making to respond to economic crises not driven by personality or institutional constraints, but rather by cognitive contexts. The higher the frequency of crises, the more inclined the president to use hierarchical, rather than collegial, decision-making processes. The argument is tested comparing cases in the US and Argentina.

Alejandro Bonvecchi holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Essex. He is an Assistant Professor at the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires and an Adjunct Research of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Argentina, where he works on presidential and legislative politics and the political economy of economic policymaking. He has published four books, and his work has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Publius, Latin American Politics and Society, and Journal of Politics in Latin America.

View the presentation here

Discussants

Stephen Kaplan, Associate Professor of Political Science and International affairs at The George Washington University

Stephen B. Kaplan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics. Professor Kaplan joined the GWU faculty in the fall of 2010 after completing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University and his Ph.D at Yale University. While at Yale, Kaplan also worked as a researcher for former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Prior to his doctoral studies, Professor Kaplan was a senior economic analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, writing extensively on developing country economics, global financial market developments, and emerging market crises from 1998 to 2003. He received his B.A in International Relations and Economics from Tufts University, and an M.S in International Economic Development from Georgetown University.

Jay Shambaugh, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at The George Washington University

Jay Shambaugh is a professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University. He is the director of the Institute for International Economic Policy. Professor Shambaugh’s area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. His work includes analysis of the interaction of exchange rate regimes with monetary policy, capital flows, and trade flows as well as studies of international reserves holdings, country balance sheet exchange rate exposure, the cross-country impact of fiscal policy, and the current crisis in the euro area. In addition to his book, Exchange Rate Regimes in the Modern Era (MIT Press, 2009), Shambaugh has published in The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Shambaugh taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and served as first Senior Economist for International Economics and then Chief Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and a visiting scholar at the IMF. Shambaugh received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Trumping Trade Orthodoxy

February 3, 2017March 30, 2022International Trade Events, Jay Shambaugh, Maggie Chen, Michael O. Moore, Past Events, Research Conference, Steve Charnovitz

Friday, February 3, 2017

9:00am to 4:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

President Trump has promised a markedly new direction in U.S. trade policy through tweets, appointments, and executive orders. Regardless of these first steps and initial press reports, substantial questions remain about whether some of the actions in fact can be adopted within existing legislative and constitutional constraints. In other areas, President Trump’s authority to pursue radically different policies likely are well-established. George Washington’s Institute for International Economic Policy hosted a full day conference to examine what President Trump can, and cannot, do on trade policy without new congressional authorization. Participants will hear from panels that will include a team of two leading lawyers and economists with substantial first-hand trade policy experience. This conference provided audience members with important perspectives on the limits of President Trump’s emerging trade policy.

View video from the conference at the IIEP YouTube Channel

View the Schedule

8:15 AM – 9:00 AM: Registration and Breakfast

9:00 AM – 9:15 AM: Opening Remarks and Introduction, Michael Moore (George Washington University)

9:15 AM – 10:15 AM: Trade Remedies

The President has substantial leeway for initiating various trade remedy actions (antidumping, countervailing duty, and safeguards). U.S. trade law practice and procedure may limit the scope of imposing duties under these provisions.

Matt Nolan, Arent Fox LLP
Michael Moore, George Washington University

10:15 AM – 11:15 AM: China as a ‘Currency Manipulator’

The U.S. Treasury may determine that a country manipulates its currency but only under certain statutory conditions. Would China qualify under those provisions? What consequences might it face if China is declared a “currency manipulator”?

Steve Charnovitz, George Washington University
Jay Shambaugh, George Washington University

11:15 AM – 11:30 AM: Coffee Break

11:30 AM – 12:30 PM: Renegotiating/Leaving Existing Trade Agreements

U.S. trade agreements such as NAFTA allow for either Party to announce a withdrawal with six months’ notice. Can President Trump do so without congressional approval? What would be the impact on U.S. trade and investment flows if he were to follow through with such threats?

Joel Trachtman, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
Thomas Prusa, Rutgers University

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM: Lunch

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM: Tax Policy, Investment Agreements, & Foreign Direct Investment

President Trump has suggested imposing 35 percent tariffs on individual U.S. firms that offshore manufacturing jobs. Can the Administration single out individual companies in this way? How might such threats increase uncertainty on inward and outward U.S. foreign investment?

Michael Smart, Rock Creek Advisors
Maggie Chen, George Washington University

2:30 PM – 2:45 PM: Coffee Break

2:45 PM – 3:45 PM: Possible WTO Disputes

An aggressive new U.S. trade policy may result in formal disputes with WTO members. What are the most likely cases that might arise? How might the U.S. economy be affected if the WTO rules in favor of those who contest new U.S. approaches in trade policy?

James Mendenhall, Sidley Austin LLP
Chad Bown, Peterson Institute for International Economics

3:45 PM – 4:00 PM: Concluding Remarks

How Sustainable Are Benefits from Extension for Smallholder Farmers? Evidence from a Randomised Phase-Out of the BRAC Program in Uganda

January 31, 2017March 9, 20222017, Development Economics, Ram Fishman, Stephen C. Smith, Ultra Poverty, Working PapersLeave a Comment

January 2017

by Stephen C. Smith (George Washington University), Vida Bobić (George Washington University), Ram Fishman (Tel Aviv University), & Munshi Sulaiman (Save the Children)

IIEP Working Paper 2017-1

IMF Africa Regional Economic Outlook

January 24, 2017March 30, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference, Stephen C. Smith, Steve Suranovic

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

9:00am to 12:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Africa continues to experience great opportunities for growth while also facing several great challenges. Sustained economic growth, income inequality, gender disparities, and competitiveness in the global trade arena are all issues with the potential to make or break the continent’s development as a region. The African Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) publishes the Regional Economic Outlook (REO): Sub-Saharan Africa report twice a year. Review the latest report here.

Panel I: Multispeed Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

IMF Presenter: Jesus Gonzalez-Garcia
Discussants: Temesgen Deressa and Marcus King

Panel II: Exchange Rate Regimes in Sub-Saharan Africa: Experiences and Lessons

IMF Presenter: Haris Tsangarides
Discussants: Ajay Chhibber, Steve Suranovic, and Kingsley Moghalu

Panel III: Enhancing Resilience to Natural Disasters in Sub-Saharan Africa

IMF Presenter: Vimal Thakoor
Discussants: Remi Jedwab, Stephen C. Smith, and Temesgen Deressa

9th Annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S. China Economic Relations

November 11, 2016March 30, 2022Chao Wei, Maggie Chen, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference, Steve Charnovitz, Susan Aaronson, U.S.-China Economic Relations EventsLeave a Comment

Click here to view videos

The U.S.-China relationship is now second to none in importance for international economic relations and policy and accordingly is a major focus of IIEP. The centerpiece of this initiative is our annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic and Political Relations

This year, key topics discussed will include China’s financial market, the state of China’s macro-economy, the China-Africa relationship, and China’s outward investments and their impacts. For more information about the conference and bios of each panelist, visit our blog.

An archive of all previous Annual Conferences on China’s Economic Development and U.S.-China Economic Relations is available here. For more information, please contact Kyle Renner at iiep@gwu.edu or 202-994-5320.

Schedule of Events

8:00 – 8:50AM Coffee and Continental Breakfast

8:50 – 9:00AM Welcome and Overview of the Conference

Stephen Smith, Director, Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP), Professor of Economics and International Affairs, GWU

9:00 – 11:00AM Panel 1: The Future of Trade Integration in the Asia Pacific

Moderated by IIEP affiliate Steve Suranovic, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, The George Washington University

Jeff Schott, Peterson Institute for International Economics, “Will the US Invest in or Divest from Asia-Pacific Economic Integration?”
Michael Plummer, JHU, “Megaregionalism in the Asia-Pacific and Options for Shared Chinese-US Leadership”
Jiandong Ju, Shanghai University of Finance & Economics, “Huaxia Community: A FTA and a New Architecture for the Global Economic System”

11:00 – 11:15AM Coffee Break

11:15 – 12:45PM Panel 2:The Internet in China’s Economy

Moderated by IIEP affiliate Susan Aaronson, Research Professor of Intenrational Affairs, The George Washington University

Hong Xue, Beijing Normal University, “Chinese Electronic Commerce Law: the New Basic Law for Digital Economy”
Jingting Fan, UMD, “The Alibaba Effect: Spatial Consumption Inequality and the Welfare Gains from e-Commerce”
Maggie Chen, George Washington University, “International Trade on the Internet: Evidence from Alibaba”

12:45 – 2:00PM Lunch

2:00 – 3:30PM Panel 3: Trade, Migration, and Wage Premium in China

Moderated by IIEP affiliate Joseph Pelzman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, The George Washington University

Chao Wei, George Washington University, The Short and Long of Trade and Migration Reforms in China (joint with Xiaodong Zhu)
RuiXue Jia, UCSD, “Access to Elite Education, Wage Premium, and Social Mobility: The Truth and Illusion of China’s College Entrance Exam”
Eunhee Lee, University of Maryland at College Park, “Trade, Inequality, and the Endogenous Sorting of Heterogeneous workers”

3:30 – 4:00PM: Coffee Break

4:00 – 5:30PM Panel 4: China’s Macroeconomy, Urban Growth and Policy Analysis

Moderated by IIEP affiliate Remi Jedwab, Professor of Economics and International Affairs, The George Washington University

Zheng Liu, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (also affiliated with the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance),“Reserve Requirements and Optimal Chinese Stabilization Policy”
Matthew Turner, Brown University, “Highways, Market Access and Urban Growth in China”
Kai Zhao, University of Connecticut, “The Chinese Saving Rate: Productivity, Old Age Support and Demographics

Inclusive and Sustainable Growth in India: Policy Challenges and Prospects

October 5, 2016March 30, 2022Ajay Chhibber, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, India, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Watch the conference videos

Click here to access the morning speakers

Click here to access the afternoon speakers

Click here to access all other remarks

To prepare for the future, India emphasizes addressing inclusive and sustainable growth, eliminating poverty, and expanding their urban sphere. The growth-orientated government faces challenges in creating efficient policy reforms to fit their agenda. Issues including poverty, inequality, lack of infrastructure, and an unfinished plan for reform limit the country’s tremendous growth prospects.

How can India utilize macro economic policy for faster growth? What additional policies are needed to boost infrastructure and urbanization? How is India responding to climate change and sustainability? How can revised policy and programs aid in eradicating poverty?

The Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs and India’s National Institute of Public Finance and Policy hosted a conversation with top academic researchers, officials from the IMF, NIPFP, and World Bank, and current and former advisors of the Indian governments.

View the Schedule

8:30 – 9:00AM: Continental Breakfast

9:00 – 10:00AM: Opening Session

Welcome Address
- Ambassador Reuben Brigety, Dean of the Elliott School
Key Note Address: “India’s Reform Challenges and Unfinished Reform Agenda”
- Arvind Subramaniam, Chief Economic Advisor, Government of India

10:00 – 11:15AM: Session I – “Macro Economic Policy for Faster Growth”

Chair: Dr. Ajay Chhibber, IIEP & NIPFP
Dr. Subir Gokarn, Exective Director, India IMF
Dr. Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP, “A Macro-Fiscal Snapshot“

11:15 – 11:30AM: Coffee Break

11:30AM – 1:00PM: Session II – “India’s Commitment to Climate Change and Sustainable Growth”

Chair: Prof Stephen Smith, Director, IIEP
Dr. Rita Pandey, NIPFP, “Biodiversity: conservation a key strategy in addressing CC in India“
Dr. Manish Bapna, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, WRI, “The New Climate Economy: Opportunities for India“
Dr. Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP, “Financing Sustainable Development in India“

1:00 – 2:00PM: Lunch: Luncheon Address

Dr. Junaid Kamal Ahmad, Country Director, India, World Bank

2:00 – 3:15PM: Session III – “Infrastructure and Urban Drivers of Growth”

Chair: Prof Remi Jedwab, IIEP
Dr. Sam Asher, World Bank and Centre for Policy Research, “The Many Costs of Remoteness“
Dr. Maureen Cropper, University of Maryland, “Air Pollution, Environmental Regulation and the India Electricity Sector“

3:15 – 3:30PM: Coffee Break

3:30 – 4:45PM: Session IV – “Equitable Growth and Poverty Eradication: Measurement, Programs, and Policies”

Chair: Prof James Foster, IIEP
Dr. Anirudh Krishna, Duke University, “Hidden Dimensions of Equity and Poverty Education: The Tasks Ahead“
Dr. Sonalde Desai, University of Maryland and NCAER, “Rethinking Social Safety Nets in an Era of Declining Poverty“

4:45 – 5:30PM: Closing Address: “Getting India back to the Growth Turnpike: What will it take?“

Dr. Rakesh Mohan, Yale University, and former Executive Director, India, IMF
Dr. Ajay Chhibber, IIEP & NIPFP

Location Fundamentals, Agglomeration Economies, and the Geography of Multinational Firms

August 30, 2016March 9, 20222016, International Trade, Maggie Chen, Working Papers

August 2016

by Maggie Xiaoyang Chen (George Washington University) & Laura Alfaro (Harvard Business School and NBER)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-18

Disruptive Technologies and their Implications for Economic Policy: Some Preliminary Observations

June 30, 2016March 9, 20222016, Danny M. Leipziger, Development Economics, Working Papers

June 2016

by Danny Leipziger & Victoria Dodev (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-13

Digital Trade Conference: The End of Trade as We Know It?

May 5, 2016March 30, 2022Past Events, Research Conference, Susan Aaronson, U.S.-China Economic Relations Events

Thursday and Friday, May 5-6, 2016

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

The Internet and associated technologies are both a platform for trade and a technology transforming trade. We define digital trade as commerce in products and services delivered via the Internet (USITC: 2013, i). Although digital trade is the fastest growing component of trade, policymakers are just learning how to create an environment to facilitate such trade in developed and developing countries alike. The Transpacific Partnership (TPP) is the first trade agreement to include binding provisions related to the information flows that power digital trade, but that agreement (and others under negotiation) say little about the domestic and international regulatory context in which the Internet functions. However, as the World Bank notes, an effective regulatory environment is essential to reaping the benefits of the information economy and digital trade (World Bank: 2016)

Trade agreements may not be the best place to regulate information flows — which are a global public good that governments should provide and regulate effectively in a cooperative manner with other governments. Moreover, many Internet issues that involve information flows, such as privacy or the security of data are not market access issues (the traditional turf of trade agreements) issues (Aaronson: 2016).

In this conference, we will examine digital trade as well as barriers to cross-border information flows. We will also discuss the role of trade agreements as tools of Internet governance; examine the domestic and international regulatory environment for information; and focus on how to cooperate to encourage cross-border information flows. We plan to encourage audience and panelist dialogue about these issues.

The Internet Society DC Chapter (ISOC-DC) will be providing a live stream of the conference to be linked to this page.

Susan Ariel Aaronson, Research Professor of International Affairs and a Cross-Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs

Susan Ariel Aaronson is Research Professor of International Affairs and a Cross-Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. She is currently the Carvalho Fellow at the Government Accountability Project and was the former Minerva Chair at the National War College. Aaronson’s research examines the relationship between economic change and human rights. She is currently directing projects on digital trade and digital rights, repression and civil conflict; trade, trust and transparency; and whistleblowers at international organizations such as the UN and WIPO. Her work has been funded by major international foundations including MacArthur, Ford, and Rockefeller; governments such as the Netherlands, U.S., and Canada; the UN, ILO, and World Bank, and U.S. corporations including Ford Motor and Levi Strauss. Dr. Aaronson is a frequent speaker on public understanding of globalization issues and international economic developments. She regularly comments on international economics on “Marketplace” and was a monthly commentator on “All Things Considered,” “Marketplace,” and “Morning Edition.” She has also appeared on CNN, the BBC, and PBS to discuss trade and globalization issues. Aaronson was a Guest Scholar in Economics at the Brookings Institution (1995–1999); and a Research Fellow at the World Trade Institute 2008-2012.

Maja Andjelkovic, World Bank Mobile Innovation Specialist

Maja is interested in the potential of entrepreneurship and human ingenuity to contribute to economic, environmental and social development. She has spent over 12 years connecting these fields, including as product manager in a web-technology startup, lead researcher at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and counselor for Canada for the World Bank Group. Since 2009, she has worked to expand infoDev’s mobile innovation program, including by extending our offering to better serve women founders of tech startups in emerging and frontier markets. Maja is pursuing a doctorate at the University of Oxford under Professor Bill Dutton, with a focus on innovation ecosystems and with support from Oxford University Press.

Michael Ferrantino, World Bank Lead Economist

Michael J. Ferrantino is Lead Economist in the World Bank Group Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice. Prior to joining the Bank, he was Lead International Economist at the US International Trade Commission. Michael’s published research spans a wide array of topics relating to international trade, including non-tariff measures and trade facilitation, global value chains, the relationship of trade to the environment, innovation, and productivity, and US-China trade. He has taught at Southern Methodist, Youngstown State, Georgetown, American, and George Washington Universities. Michael’s recent work includes: “The Benefits of Trade Facilitation: A Modelling Exercise,” prepared for the World Economic Forum’s January 2013 report on supply chains, “Enabling Trade: Valuing Growth Opportunities;” a chapter on non-tariff measures in The Ashgate Research Companion to International Trade Policy (2012); and “Evasion Behaviors of Exporters and Importers; Evidence from the U.S.-China Trade Data Discrepancy,” with Xuepeng Liu and Zhi Wang, Journal of International Economics, 2012. Michael holds a PhD from Yale University.

Kyle Renner, IIEP Operations Manager

Kyle Renner manages the Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) and provides career and academic advice for the International Trade and Investment Policy (ITIP) master’s program at the Elliott School for International Affairs. Kyle manages IIEP’s research agenda which is broadly concentrated on the areas of international trade, international finance, and international development; with special focus on U.S.-China economic relations, climate change adaptation, ultra-poverty, and global economic governance. He has managed sponsored research projects funded by USAID, the Asian Development Bank, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Hewlett, Ford, and MacArthur foundations among others. He is also responsible for organizing IIEP’s many events, including scholarly seminars, working groups, policy fora, and research conferences. Kyle provides academic and professional counseling to students in the ITIP program, and serves on the ITIP Program Committee. Kyle completed his B.A. and M.A. in International Affairs at the Elliott School for International Affairs, focusing on international politics, conflict and conflict resolution, and the Middle East. He is interested in the areas of self-sustainable education and business development, and their impact on civil society and economic growth.

Keynote Speakers

Susan Lund, Partner, McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company (author of Digital Globalization—the New Flows)

Susan Lund is a partner of McKinsey & Company and a leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. She conducts economic research on global financial markets, trade, labor markets, and country productivity and growth.

Her latest report focuses on how digital technologies are transforming globalization. Other recent research examines the continuing accumulation of global debt and potential risks; how digital talent platforms are transforming labor markets; and growth prospects for African economies given the collapse of commodity prices. Susan has an active travel schedule discussing research findings with business executives and policy makers, and she is a frequent speaker at global conferences.

She has authored numerous articles on digital globalization. Susan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the National Association of Business Economists, and the Conference of Business Economists.

Klaus Tilmes, Senior Director, World Bank Group Global Practice on Trade and Competitiveness

Klaus Tilmes is Director of the Trade & Competitiveness Global Practice at the World Bank Group. In his position, Tilmes is responsible for such global themes as Trade, Competitive Sectors, Investment Climate and Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Prior to his current position, Klaus was the Director of the Financial and Private Sector Development (FPD) Network at the World Bank, a position he held from 2010 to 2014. Tilmes has a Master’s degree in Public Administration focused on Development Economics and Public Sector Management from Harvard University, and a Master’s in Economics from the University of Mannheim.

Panelists

Susan Ariel Aaronson, Research Professor of International Affairs and a Cross-Disciplinary Fellow at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs

Daniel Adidwa, Tour2.0, South Africa

Mr. Adidwa is a leader who is passionate about entrepreneurship and technology. He takes pleasure in channeling this passion through sourcing innovative solutions, that address current problems within the African continent and taking these solutions to market.

He is a qualified marketer and attained his BA Degree in Integrated Marketing Communication and a Diploma in Account Management from the AAA School of Advertising. Daniel has worked at various communications agencies, where he worked on various local and international blue chip accounts.

He is passionate about the African continent, its people and the stories behind African communities. He believes that technology can play a large role in getting the world to experience real African Stories. He currently holds the position of CEO of Tour2.0 and Vice-Chairman of the Regional Tourism Association of Southern Africa (RETOSA) youth steering committee.

Usman Ahmed, Director, Global Public Policy, PayPal

Usman Ahmed is the Head of Global Public Policy at PayPal Inc. His work covers a variety of global issues including financial services regulation, innovation, international trade, and entrepreneurship. He has given talks on these subjects at conferences and universities around the world and has published in the World Economic Forum Global Information Technology Report, Journal of World Trade, and the Michigan Journal of International Law. Ahmed is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law School where he teaches courses on international law and policy issues related to the Internet. Prior to PayPal, Usman worked at a number of policy think tanks in the Washington DC area focusing on good governance issues. Ahmed earned his JD from University of Michigan, his MA from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and his BA from University of Maryland.

Robert D. Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

As founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), Robert D. Atkinson leads a prolific team of policy analysts and fellows that is successfully shaping the debate and setting the agenda on a host of critical issues at the intersection of technological innovation and public policy.

He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” and Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology.”

A sought-after speaker and valued adviser to policymakers around the world, Atkinson’s books include Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (link is external) (Yale, 2012), Supply-Side Follies: Why Conservative Economics Fails, Liberal Economics Falters, and Innovation Economics is the Answer (link is external) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), and The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth (link is external) (Edward Elgar, 2005). He also has conducted groundbreaking research projects and authored hundreds of articles and reports on technology and innovation-related topics ranging from tax policy to advanced manufacturing, productivity, and global competitiveness.

Abdoul Aziz Sy, Vice President for International Rights and Strategy, Public Knowledge

Abdoul Aziz Sy holds a Master in International Sustainable Development from Brandeis University in the United States. He joined the team Upstart in March 2014 as project manager of the ICT project for Good Governance, coordinated by Upstart in partnership with OSIWA Foundation. Aziz also holds a BA in International Relations and has been for 2 years vice president of SIFE team (Students in Free Enterprise) Suffolk University with the aim to find entrepreneurial solutions to improve the lives of communities. His career includes such courses in structures such as Ernst & Young and the American NGO Ashoka.

Brian Bieron, Director of Public Policy, eBay and Main Street

Brian Bieron is Executive Director of the Public Policy Lab. Bieron has published and spoken on a broad variety of issues at the nexus of technology and commerce including taxation, telecommunications, customs, and intellectual property.

Bieron led eBay’s US Government Relations Team in Washington, DC from 2004 to 2012, overseeing eBay staff, outside lobbying firms, a DC-based PR firm, various trade associations and a federal political action committee. These resources were focused on issues important to eBay and its community of users, including sales tax collection on the Internet, net neutrality, proposals to ISP third-party liability, and cross-border trade policies impacting small businesses.

Prior to joining eBay, Bieron spent three-and-a-half years as a Director at Clark & Weinstock, one of Washington’s leading bipartisan lobbying and consulting firms. He supported a wide range of clients, including leading technology, telecommunications, and financial services companies such as Microsoft, AT&T, PhRMA, NASDAQ, and eBay. He also spent twelve years on Capitol Hill as a congressional staff person, including service as Policy Director for House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, where he played a lead role on key congressional trade and technology issues.

Nicholas Bramble, Public Policy Manager, Google

Nicholas Bramble is a Public Policy Manager at Google, where he focuses on trade policy and international relations. Prior to joining Google he was a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and served as a lecturer and director of the Law and Media Program at Yale Law School. He filed amicus briefs in Golan v. Holder and FCC v. Fox, and has published articles in Hastings Law Journal, Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.

Mr. Bramble earned his J.D. at Harvard Law School and holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford University. He clerked for the Honorable Charles F. Lettow on the US Court of Federal Claims, and was a visiting researcher at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy.

Ralph Carter, Managing Director, Federal Express

As Managing Director of Legal, Trade & International Affairs, Ralph Carter is responsible for coordinating FedEx’s international regulatory affairs, including trade policy. Mr. Carter joined FedEx in Brussels, Belgium in 2001 and directed FedEx’s government affairs activities with the European Commission, Parliament and Council, as well as with Member State governments. Mr. Carter also served as in-house legal counsel responsible for commercial transactions and regulatory compliance for Central and Eastern Europe.

Before joining FedEx, Mr. Carter worked in the United States Department of State, serving as the Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador to the European Union. He is currently a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy.

Mr. Carter has a BS and JD from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and a Masters of Laws from American University.

Anupam Chander, Professor of Law, UC-Davis, author of “The Electronic Silk Road”

Anupam Chander is Director of the California International Law Center and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis. A graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, he has been a visiting professor at Yale, Chicago, Stanford, and Cornell. The author of The Electronic Silk Road (Yale University Press), he has published widely in the nation’s leading law journals, including the Yale Law Journal, the NYU Law Review, and the California Law Review. He practiced law in New York and Hong Kong with Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He served on the executive council of the American Society of International Law and serves as a judge for the Stanford Junior International Faculty Forum. The recipient of Google Research Awards and an Andrew Mellon grant on the topic of surveillance, he is a member of the ICTSD/World Economic Forum E15 expert group on the digital economy and the World Economic Forum expert group on Internet fragmentation.

Krista Cox, Director of Public Policy Initiatives, Association of Research Libraries

Krista Cox is the director of public policy Initiatives at ARL. In this role, she advocates for the policy priorities of the Association and executes strategies to implement these priorities. She monitors legislative trends and participates in ARL’s outreach to the Executive Branch and the US Congress.

Prior to joining ARL, Krista worked as the staff attorney for Knowledge Ecology International, an organization dedicated to searching for better outcomes, including new solutions, to the management of knowledge resources, particularly in the context of social justice. While at KEI, she wrote and filed amicus briefs in various intellectual property cases; attended the WIPO Diplomatic Conference that concluded the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled; and worked extensively on promoting better policies for the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). She also has prior experience as the staff attorney for Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, an organization that promotes access to medicines, particularly those technologies created through federal funding.

Krista received her JD from the University of Notre Dame and her BA in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is licensed to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and the State Bar of California.

Michael Ferrantino, World Bank Lead Economist

Paul Fehlinger, Manager and Co-Founder, Internet & Jurisdiction Project

Paul Fehlinger is the Manager and Co-Founder of the Internet & Jurisdiction Project. He is actively engaged in global Internet fora, including as a speaker at venues such as the UN Internet Governance Forum, OECD, or Council of Europe. Paul was appointed to the Advisory Network of the Global Commission on Internet Governance and to the Working Group on Rule of Law of the Freedom Online Coalition. He is also a participant in the Council of Europe Committee of Experts on Cross-border Flow of Internet Traffic and Internet Freedom, and the World Economic Forum’s Future of the Internet Initiative.

He holds a Master in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris, where he specialized in Internet politics and new modes of global governance. He was a scholar of the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung), a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and holds a BA in European Studies from Maastricht University. Prior to launching the Internet & Jurisdiction Project, Paul wanted to become a journalist and worked for a political news broadcaster in Berlin and an international radio station in Paris.

Sean Flynn, Professional Lecturer, American University School of Law

Sean Flynn teaches courses on the intersection of intellectual property, trade law, and human rights and is the Associate Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). At PIJIP, Professor Flynn designs and manages a wide variety of research and advocacy projects that promote public interests in intellectual property and information law and coordinates PIJIP’s academic program, including events, student advising and curriculum development. Professor Flynn’s research examines legal frameworks promoting access to essential goods and services. He serves as counsel for advocacy organizations and state legislatures seeking to promote and defend regulations that promote access to essential medicines. (PIJIP).

Prior to joining WCL, Professor Flynn completed clerkships with Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson on the South African Constitutional Court and Judge Raymond Fisher on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He also represented consumers and local governments as a senior associate with Spiegel & McDiarmid and as senior attorney for the Consumer Project on Technology, served on the policy team advising then Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Deval Patrick, and taught Constitutional Law at the University of Witwaterstrand, South Africa.

Damien Levie, EU Delegation, Trade and Agricultural Affairs

Damien Levie heads the Trade and Agriculture Section of the European Union Delegation in Washington, DC.

Before coming to Washington, he was a member of the Cabinet (personal office) of EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht from 2009 to 2012. He subsequently headed the USA and Canada team of the Directorate General for Trade at the European Commission. During that period, he contributed to the pursuit of an ambitious EU trade policy agenda with the Americas, in particular the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the U.S. and the EU, for which he was deputy chief negotiator.

Damien joined the European Commission in 2001, working on issues including merger control policy and REACH, the EU’s basic chemical regulation. From 2005 to 2009, he served in the Cabinet of Louis Michel, EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid. During that period, he worked on economic development policy in Africa as well as European economic integration issues.

He has law degrees from KU Leuven and the University of Chicago Law School and an economics degree from UC Louvain. He was a lawyer at a major US law firm in Brussels and New York from 1994 to 2001.

Jeremy Malcolm, Senior Global Policy Analyst, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jeremy Malcolm joined EFF’s international team in 2014 and works on the international dimensions of issues such as intellectual property, network neutrality, Internet governance, and trade. Prior to that he worked for Consumers International coordinating its global programme Consumers in the Digital Age. Jeremy graduated with degrees in Law (with Honours) and Commerce in 1995 from Murdoch University, and completed his PhD thesis at the same University in 2008 on the topic of Internet governance. Jeremy’s background is as an information technology and intellectual property lawyer and IT consultant. He enjoys acting, writing and coding, and his ambitions include writing an original science fiction novel, learning to juggle and learning Japanese (ideally both at once).

Jeremy is admitted to the bars of the Supreme Court of Western Australia (1995), High Court of Australia (1996) and Appellate Division of New York (2009). He is a former co-coordinator of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus, founder of Best Bits, and currently a Steering Committee member of the OECD Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council.

Joshua Meltzer, Senior Fellow, Brookings

Dr. Joshua Meltzer is a senior fellow in Global Economy and Development at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. Dr. Meltzer is also a reviewer for the Journal of Politics and Law. His work focuses on international trade law and policy issues relating to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Free Trade Agreements.

Sandy Reback, Director, Global Public Policy, Akamai

Sanford Reback, Director of Global Public Policy at Akamai Technologies, has more than 25 years of policy, business, and legal experience in the technology sector. He served as Deputy General Counsel for Policy at UUNET Technologies, then the world’s largest Internet service provider (ISP); Senior International Counsel at MCI, then a Fortune 100 company; and a senior executive at two venture-backed technology companies. In the Executive Office of the President at the U.S. Trade Representative, Reback helped negotiate NAFTA, the World Trade Organization agreements, and several international technology agreements. Immediately prior to joining Akamai, he was Senior Technology Analyst and Director of Global Business at Bloomberg Government. Reback holds a B.A. in political science from Stanford University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and was a Fulbright Fellow in London.

Kevin M. Rosenbaum, Of Counsel, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP; Counsel to the International Intellectual Property Alliance

Kevin Rosenbaum has over sixteen years of experience counseling on intellectual property and international trade matters as well as with legislative and regulatory processes and policy development related to international trade and the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in foreign markets. He currently serves as counsel to the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), a coalition of five copyright-based industry trade associations (comprised of over 3,200 companies), on international copyright protection and enforcement matters.

Carolina Rossini, Vice President for International Rights and Strategy, Public Knowledge

Carolina Rossini is the Vice President for International Rights and Strategy at Public Knowledge. Previously, Carolina was a Project Director at New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the International Intellectual Property Director at Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), and a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University.

Alongside her work at Public Knowledge, she is a Global Partners Digital International Associate, an X-Lab fellow for New America Foundation, and an Advisory Board Member of Open Knowledge Foundation for both the UK and Brazil. She is also an Advisory Board Member for Saylor Foundation, Instituto Educadigital, and InternetLab. Carolina has an LLM in Intellectual Property from Boston University, an MBA from Instituto de Empresas, an MA in International Economic Negotiations from UNICAMP/UNESP, and a JD from University of Sao Paulo – USP.

Matthew Schruers, Vice President, Law & Policy, Computer & Communications Industry Association

Matthew Schruers is Vice President for Law & Policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), where he represents and advises the association on domestic and international policy issues including intellectual property, competition, and trade. He is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Georgetown Graduate School Program on Communication, Culture, and Technology (CCT), where he teaches courses on intellectual property.

Mr. Schruers joined CCIA from Morrison & Foerster LLP in 2005, where he practiced intellectual property, antitrust, and administrative law. Mr. Schruers received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review, and received his B.A. from Duke University.

Shawn Tan, World Bank

Shawn Tan is an Economist in the World Bank’s Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice. He is currently working on trade policy and private sector development issues for countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He was in the core team of the 2016 World Development Report “Digital Dividends”, where he authored the international trade sections. Prior to working at the World Bank, he worked at the Singapore Economic Development Board as a senior officer in the International Policy Division, where he was involved in Singapore’s trade agreement negotiations, ASEAN trade and investment forums and trade facilitation for MNCs in Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics for the University of Melbourne. His research interests are broadly in international trade and the effects of institution, policy and regulation changes on firms.

Diego Molano Vega, former ICT Minister of Colombia

Mr. Molano is Electronic Engineer, born in Boyacá and Master in Economy. Diego Molano Vega is an outstanding international expert in the telecommunications world, area in which he has been working during twenty years in entities as the Colombian Regulatory Commission of Telecommunications (CRT) and multinationals.

Moderators

Maja Andjelkovic, Mobile Innovation Specialist, World Bank

Victoria Guida, Trade Reporter, POLITICO

Victoria Guida has covered trade for roughly four years, first at Inside U.S. trade and now at POLITICO Pro, the subscriber-only policy side of the Washington publication. Before covering trade, she worked briefly as a business reporter for the Charlotte Observer.

Originally from Dallas, Texas, she is a graduate of the University of Missouri, where she majored in journalism and political science.

Martin Molinuevo, Consultant, World Bank

Martín Molinuevo is a consultant in the World Bank Group Trade and Competitivness Global Practice, where he focuses on international trade in services, trade agreements, and regulation. He has previously worked for a number of international organizations, including the WTO, UNCTAD, and the EU on matters related to trade in services, foreign investment, and dispute settlement. Martin, a lawyer by training, holds a Doctor Iuris magna cum laude from the University of Bern, Switzerland, and has published articles in international journals, contributed chapters to various edited books, and published a book on trade and investment agreements (“Protecting Investing in Services: Investor-State Arbitration vs. WTO Dispute Settlement,” Wolters-Kluwer, 2012).

Hanna Norberg, Tradeeconomista.com

Hanna C. Norberg is an independent Trade Policy Advisor and the founder of TradeEconomista.com. She obtained her Ph.D in International Economics from Lund University, Sweden in 2000. She has substantial experience of both micro and macro economics as well as applied economics from working as advisor, consultant, researcher and university lecturer. Her primary interests are trade, trade policy, economic integration and development. She has extensive experience in policy implication from working numerous trade policy impact assessment projects for the European Commission (FTAs covering the majority of the world e.g. T-TIP, Japan and ASEAN, Korea, various MENA countries, Mercosur) and national governments. In addition, she has done work for ECFIN, OECD, WTO and multiple parts of the Swedish government.

Tracey Samuelson, American Public Media (APM)

Tracey Samuelson is a New-York based reporter for APM’s Marketplace, covering business and economic stories, with a recent focus on international trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In addition to Marketplace, her radio stories have appeared on NPR, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and the Planet Money podcast, as well as in print for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Christian Science Monitor, among others.

2:30 – 4:00 PM: Panel 1, The Enabling Environment for Digital Trade as a Tool for Development

Moderator: Martin Molinuevo, World Bank

Panelists: Abdoul Aziz Sy (CTIC Dakar, Senegal), Daniel Adidwa (Tour2.0, South Africa), Diego Molano Vega (former ICT Minister of Colombia), and Michael Ferrantino(World Bank)

4:00 – 4:15 PM: Coffee Break

4:15 – 5:30 PM: Panel 2, A Conversation on Rethinking IPR Online to Support Development

Moderator: Maja Andjelkovic, World Bank

Panelists: Sean Flynn (Professional Lecturer, American University School of Law), Kevin M. Rosenbaum (Of Counsel, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP; Counsel to the International Intellectual Property Alliance), Rob Atkinson (President, Information Technology and Innnovation Foundation), Krista Cox (Director of Public Policy Initiatives, Association of Research Libraries), and Matthew Schruers (Computer & Communications Industry Association)

5:30 – 6:30 PM: First Keynote, Klaus Tilmes (Director, Trade & Competitiveness, World Bank)

9:00 – 10:30 AM: Panel 3, Barriers to Digital Trade as a Tool for Development

Moderator: Victoria Guida, Politico

Panelists: Shawn Tan (principal author of the international trade section of World Development Report 2016, World Bank), Ralph Carter (Managing Director, Federal Express), Anupam Chander (Professor of Law, UC-Davis, author of “The Electronic Silk Road”), and Usman Ahmed (Director, Global Public Policy, PayPal)

10:30 – 11:00 AM: Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:30 PM: Panel 4, Do Provisions Regulating Digital Trade Need a Rethink?

Moderator: Hanna Norberg, Tradeeconomista.com

Panelists: Sandy Reback (Director, Global Public Policy, Akamai), Carolina Rossini (Vice President, International Policy, Public Knowledge), Jeremy Malcolm (Senior Global Policy Analyst, Electronic Frontier Foundation), Damien Levie (EU Delegation, Trade and Agricultural Affairs), and Nicholas Bramble (Public Policy Manager at Google)

12:30 – 2:00 PM: Luncheon Keynote: Susan Lund, Partner, McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company (author of Digital Globalization—the New Flows)

2:15 – 3:45 PM: Panel 5, Future Barriers to Digital Trade and Digital Trade Agreements

Moderator: Tracey Samuelson, APM

Panelists: Brian Bieron (Director of Public Policy, eBay and Main Street), Joshua Meltzer (Senior Fellow, Brookings), Paul Fehlinger (Internet and Jurisdiction), and Susan Ariel Aaronson (Research Professor and Cross Disciplinary Fellow, GWU).

Susan Aaronson has written extensively on digital trade, raising questions about both the process and the content of digital trade provisions and what they mean for the Open internet, digital rights and digital trade. View her free Course on Digital Trade and Global Internet Governance through ICANN.

Publications

- Aaronson, Susan Ariel. 2016. “The Digital Trade Imbalance and Its Implications for Internet Governance” Global Commission on Internet Governance, February.
- Aaronson, Susan Ariel. 2015. “What does TPP mean for the Open Internet?” Institute for International Economic Policy, November.
- Aaronson, Susan Ariel. 2015. “Why Trade Agreements Are Not Setting Information Free: The Lost History and Reinvigorated Debate over Cross-Border Data Flows, Human Rights and National Security.” World Trade Review, April.
- Aaronson, Susan Ariel and Michael Owen Moore. 2013. “A Trade Policy for the Millennials.” Baltimore Sun, December 13.
- Aaronson, Susan Ariel. with M. Townes. 2012. “Can Trade Policy Set Information Free: Trade Agreements, Internet Governance and Internet Freedom (Policy Brief).”
- Atkinson, Robert and Nigel Cory. “Financial Data Does Not Need or Deserve Special Treatment in Trade Agreements.“April 2016.
- Atkinson, Robert. “Transatlantic Digital Cooperation Will Require Hard Debates.” April 2016.
- Atkinson, Robert, Andrea Renda and Guillaume Xavier-Bender. “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Why the Digital Single Market Matters for Transatlantic Relations.” January 2016.
- Chander, Anupam. “The Electronic Silk Road.” Yale University Press (2013); Cambridge University Press for South Asian edition with new foreword (Feb. 2014).
- Fehlinger, Paul and B. De La Chapelle. “Jurisdiction on the Internet: From Legal Arms Race to Transnational Cooperation.” April 2016.
- Friedman, Allan and P.W. Singer. “Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know.” 2014.
- Lee-Makiyama, Hosuk with Matthias Bauer. “The Bundes Cloud: Germany on the Edge to Discriminate Against Foreign Suppliers of Digital Services.” September 2015.
- Lee-Makiyama, Hosuk with Erik van der Marel and Matthias Bauer. “Data Localisation in Russia: A Self-imposed Sanction.” June 2015.
- Lee-Makiyama, Hosuk with Erik van der Marel and Matthias Bauer.”A Friendly Fire On Economic Recovery: A Methodology to Estimate the Costs of Data Regulations.” October 2014.
- Sweden National Board of Trade, “Trade Regulation in a 3D Printed World – a Primer,” 2016.
- Tan, Shawn. “World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends“

E15Initiative

- Ahmed, Usman and Grant D. Aldonas. “Addressing Barriers to Digital Trade,” December 2015.
- Ahmed, Usman and Anupam Chander. “Information Goes Global: Protecting Privacy, Security and the New Economy in a World of Cross-border Data Flows,” November 2015.
- Kariyawasam, Rohan. “New WTO Trade Rules for Bits and Bytes?,” November 2015.
- Lund, Susan and James Manyika. “How Digital Trade is Transforming Globalisation,” January 2016.
- Meltzer, Joshua. “Maximizing the Opportunities of the Internet for International Trade,” January 2016.
- Meltzer, Joshua. “A New Digital Trade Agenda.” August 2015.
- Rentzhog, Magnus and Emilie Anér. “The New Services Era – Is GATS up to the Task?” November 2014.

National Foreign Trade Council

For more informatio

The Value of Reputation in Trade: Evidence from Alibaba

April 30, 2016March 9, 20222016, International Trade, Maggie Chen, Working Papers

April 2016

by Maggie X. Chen (George Washington University) & Min Wu (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-20

6th Annual Washington Area International Trade Symposium (WAITS) Conference

April 29, 2016March 30, 2022International Trade Events, Maggie Chen, Past Events, Research Conference

Friday, April 29, 2016

School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University
Bernstein-Offit Building, Room 500
1717 Massachusetts Ave. NW
Washington D.C. 20036

Contact iiep@gwu.edu with any questions.

View the Schedule

8:30 – 9:00 AM: Continental Breakfast and Opening Comments

9:00 – 9:45 AM: JaeBin Ahn (International Monetary Fund):
“Reassessing the Productivity Gains from Trade Liberalization”
Discussant: Jennifer Poole (American University)

9:45 – 10:30 AM: Olga Timoshenko (George Washington University):
“Learning, Prices, and Firm Dynamics”
Discussant: Luca David Opromolla (Banco de Portugal, University of Maryland and CEPR)

10:30 – 10:45 AM: Coffee Break

10:45 – 11:30 AM: Mine Senses (Johns Hopkins University):
“Trade Shocks and the Provision of Local Public Goods”
Discussant: Erhan Artuc (World Bank)

11:30 – 12:15 PM: J. Bradford Jensen (Georgetown University, Peterson Institute and NBER):
“The Tradability of Services: Geographic Concentration and Trade Costs”
Discussant: Jose Signoret (US International Trade Commission)

12:15 – 1:00 PM: Lunch Break

1:00 – 2:00 PM: Kadee Russ (University of California-Davis, Council of Economic Advisers and NBER):
“Trade Policy in Practice: The TPP from an Insider’s Perspective”

2:00 – 2:15 PM: Coffee Break

2:15 – 3:00 PM: Maria Tito (Federal Reserve Board):
“Misallocation, Trade, and Productivity: Evidence from Chinese Data”
Discussant: Maggie Chen (George Washington University)

3:00 – 3:45 PM: Chad P. Bown (Peterson Institute and CEPR):
“Global Supply Chains and Trade Policy”
Discussant: Juan Blyde (Inter-American Development Bank)

3:45 – 4:00 PM: Coffee Break

4:00 – 4:45 PM: Claire Brunel (American University):
“Green Innovation and Green Manufacturing: Links Between Environmental Policies, Innovation and Production”
Discussant: Cristina Tello Trillo (Census Bureau)

4:45 – 5:00 PM: Closing Remarks

Economics and Political Economy of Africa

April 28, 2016March 30, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, James Foster, Past Events, Research Conference, Sarah Baird, Stephen C. Smith

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Elliott School of International Affairs
Lindner Commons, 6th floor
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy at George Washington University, this conference brings together scholars to discuss important new research on the political economy and economics of sub-Saharan Africa. The core organizers are Remi Jedwab (ESIA and Department of Economics at GWU) and Eric Kramon (ESIA And Department of Political Science at GWU). Faculty presenters include Richard Akresh, Jenny Aker, Pascaline Dupas, Evan Lieberman, Edward Miguel, Ameet Morjaria, Nathan Nunn, and Leonard Wantchekon.

Rémi Jedwab, Assistant Professor of Economics

Rémi Jedwab is an assistant professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Paris School of Economics. He was also a visiting Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics for three years. Professor Jedwab’s main field of research is urban economics, though his work also has strong development economics, public economics/political economy and economic history themes. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and agricultural and economic development in Africa. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal and the Journal of Economic Growth. Recently, Professor Jedwab research areas have included the phenomenon of urbanization without economic growth, and his research has been highlighted by The Atlantic’s CityLab and the Boston Globe.

Eric Kramon, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Professor Kramon’s research focuses on barriers to accountability and good governance in developing democracies, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. His current book project examines the causes and consequences of vote buying during African elections. Other projects investigate the role of election observation in promoting electoral quality; ethnicity and the politics of public goods provision; and the determinants of ethnic voting.

Keynote Speakers

Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II, The George Washington University

Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II most recently served as the appointed Representative of the United States of America to the African Union and Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN Economic Commission for Africa on September 3, 2013. Prior to this appointment, Ambassador Brigety served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of African Affairs from November 14, 2011 until September 3, 2013 with responsibility for Southern African and Regional Security Affairs.

From December 2009 to November 2011, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. In this capacity, he supervised U.S. refugee programs in Africa, managed U.S. humanitarian diplomacy with major international partners, and oversaw the development of international migration policy.

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Ambassador Brigety previously served as Director of the Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress from January 2008 to November 2009 and as a Special Assistant in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development from January 2007 to January 2008. From November 2008 to January 2009, he also served as a senior advisor for Development and Security to the U.S. Central Command Assessment Team in Washington and in Doha, Qatar.

Ambassador Brigety is a 1995 distinguished midshipman graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he earned a B.S. in political science (with merit), served as the Brigade Commander and received the Thomas G. Pownall Scholarship. He also holds an M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Cambridge, England. Ambassador Brigety is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a recipient of the Council’s International Affairs Fellowship.

Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley

Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000. He earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and Stanford University. Ted’s main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. Ted is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and Journal of Development Economics, is a recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics.

He co-founded the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in 2007 and serves as Faculty Director. He has served as the Co-organizer (with Dan Posner of UCLA) of theWorklng Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) since 2002. Ted is also the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS).

Miguel has written two books, Africa’s Turn? (MIT Press 2009), and, with Ray Fisman, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations(Princeton University Press 2008). Economic Gangsters has been translated into ten languages, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof praises it as “smart and eminently readable”. Miguel’s other writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Forbes, and the New York Times.

Leonard Wantchekon, Princeton University & African School of Economics

Wantchekon is Professor in the Politics department and Woodrow Wilson School, and associated faculty in the Economics department at Princeton University. His research is broadly focused on political and economic development, particularly in Africa. His specific interests include the political economy of infrastructure provision, education and human capital externalities, democratization, clientelism and redistributive politics, the resource curse, and the long-term social impact of historical events. He is the author of numerous publications in leading academic journals such as American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal pf Economics, the American Political Science Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the journal of Law, Economics and Organization and, World Politics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the founder the African School of Economics (ASE), which opened in Benin in September 2014.

Speakers

Jenny C. Aker, Tufts University

Jenny C. Aker is an Associate Professor of Development Economics at the Fletcher School and Department of Economics at Tufts University. She is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development , a member of the Advisory Board for CDA, Frontline SMS and the Boston Network for International Development (BNID) . She also serves as the Deputy Director of the Hitachi Center for Technology and International Affairs and is the Interim Director for the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy (CIERP). After working for Catholic Relief Services as Deputy Regional Director in West and Central Africa between 1998 and 2003, Jenny completed her PhD in agricultural economics at the University of California-Berkeley. Jenny works on economic development in Africa, with a primary focus on the impact of information (and information technology) on development outcomes, particularly in the areas of agriculture, agricultural markets, adult education and financial inclusion; the determinants and impacts of agricultural technology adoption; and the impact of different mechanisms and modalities of social protection (cash and in-kind transfers). Jenny has conducted field work in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, DRC, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Tanzania, as well as Haiti and Guatemala.

Richard Akresh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Richard Akresh is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 2004. His research focuses on child health and education in Africa and spans the fields of development, health, and labor economics. He has explored the impact of conflict on human capital and health investments for young children as well as the long-term consequences of exposure to war as a child. He has studied how household structure and sibling rivalry impact households’ decisions concerning educational investments in their children. He has conducted randomized control trials of alternative ways to deliver cash transfers to poor households in Africa to improve child health and education. He is also interested in questions about child labor, migration, and intra-household bargaining. He is a Research Associate of the NBER, a BREAD Research Affiliate, a Research Fellow at IZA, and a Senior Affiliate at HiCN.

Eric Kramon, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Evan S. Lieberman, MIT

Evan Lieberman is the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa at MIT. Previously, Lieberman was a member of the faculty at Princeton University for 12 years, and a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BA from Princeton. Lieberman’s research is concerned with understanding the determinants of good governance and policy-making, and the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. He also writes and teaches on research methods for comparative analysis. Lieberman is the author of two scholarly books, Race and Regionalism in the Politics of Taxation (Cambridge 2003) and Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS (Princeton 2009) and numerous scholarly articles that have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, Social Science and Medicine, and other journals. He received the David Collier mid-career achievement award at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Lieberman serves on the board of directors of the Southern African Legal Services Foundation, the international advisory board of the African School of Economics, and is a member of the egap network.

Ameet Morjaria, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Ameet Morjaria is an Assistant Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Prior to joining Kellogg in 2015, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Centre for International Affairs and a Giorgio Ruffolo Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at the Centre for International Development, Harvard Kennedy School. He completed his PhD in Economics at the London School of Economics. His research interests are in development economics, organizations and political economy. His current research focuses on understanding the impact of competition on productivity and relational contracts, industrial policy in developing countries, the impact of electoral conflict on firm operations, and the political economy of resource management in weak democracies. He has consulted for the World Bank, Kaiser Associates and prior to graduate school worked in investment banking at Deutsche Bank.

Nathan Nunn, Harvard University

Nathan Nunn is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Nunn was born in Canada, where he received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 2005. Professor Nunn’s primary research interests are in economic history, economic development, cultural economics, political economy and international trade. He is an NBER Faculty Research Fellow, a Research Fellow at BREAD, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA). He is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics. One stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the long-term impact that historic events have on current economic development. In particular, he has studied how history shapes the evolution of institutions and cultures across societies. He has published research empirically examining the historical foundations of current outcomes such as distrust, gender norms, religion, and support for democracy. A second stream of Professor Nunn’s research examines economic development in a contemporary context. He has published research examining the effects of Fair Trade certification, CIA interventions, industrial policy, and foreign aid. A third stream of Professor Nunn’s research focuses on the importance of contracting institutions for international trade. He has published research showing that a country’s ability to enforce written contracts is a key determinant of comparative advantage, as well as research examining how contracting frictions affects firms decision to engage in FDI versus outsourcing.

Rebecca Thornton, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Rebecca Thornton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Prior to that, Dr. Thornton was in the Department of Economics and a Research Affiliate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. Dr. Thornton completed her PhD in Political Economy and Government with a joint degree from the Harvard University Economics Department and the J.F. Kennedy School of Government in 2006. She was an NIA post-doc from 2006 to 2008 at the University of Michigan Population Studies Center. Her research focuses on health and education in developing countries including topics such as HIV prevention, reproductive health, primary education, and social networks. Dr. Thornton is an affiliate with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) whose main aims are to use experimental methods to translate research into policy action and alleviate poverty in the developing world. She is also a junior affiliate in BREAD (Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development).

Discussants

Sarah Baird, The George Washington University

Sarah Baird is an Associate Professor of Global Health and Economics in the Department of Global Health. She is also an Affiliated Faculty at The Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP) at the Elliot School of International Affairs. Dr. Baird is a development economist whose research focuses on the microeconomics of health and education in developing countries with an emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa. She has worked on areas as diverse as the schooling and health of young women in Malawi, community-driven development in Tanzania, deworming in Kenya, and global infant mortality. She received her Ph.D. in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley in 2007.

Markus Goldstein, The World Bank

Markus Goldstein is a development economist with experience working in Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia. He is currently a Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank, where he leads the Gender Innovation Lab. His current research centers on issues of gender and economic activity, focusing on agriculture and small scale enterprises. He is currently involved in a number of impact evaluations on these topics across Africa. Markus has taught at the London School of Economics, the University of Ghana, Legon, and Georgetown University. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

James Habyarimana, Georgetown University

James Habyarimana joined the McCourt School Public Policy in 2004 after completing doctoral studies at Harvard University. His main research interests are in Development Economics and Political Economy. In particular he is interested in understanding the issues and constraints in health, education and the private sectors in developing countries. In health he is working on understanding the impact of policy responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa and evaluating a number of health improving interventions in road safety and water, sanitation and hygiene. In education, his work focuses on identifying programs and policies to improve access and quality of secondary schooling. His primary regional focus is Africa. He has been a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development. At the McCourt School, James teaches the second course in regression methods and courses on the history of development and education and health policy in developing countries.

Adrienne LeBas, American University

Adrienne LeBas (PhD, Columbia University) joined the Department of Government in the fall of 2009. Prior to joining AU, LeBas was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Assistant Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her research interests include social movements, democratization, and political violence. She is the author of the award-winning From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011) and articles in the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Democracy, Comparative Politics, and elsewhere. LeBas also worked as a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Zimbabwe, where she lived from 2002 to 2003. Her most recent work looks at attitudes toward taxation in urban Nigeria. During the 2015-2016 academic year, LeBas will be a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. She will be working on her second book, which investigates the reasons for persistent election violence in some democratizing countries.

Kenneth Leonard, University of Maryland

Kenneth Leonard is an associate professor in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, specializing in the delivery of public services to rural populations in Africa. He has lived and worked in several African countries, including Cameroun, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi and Liberia. His work has highlighted the important roles played by both traditional healers and nongovernmental organizations in the delivery of health care as well as the ways that social networks within communities help individuals to make better decisions.

John McCauley, University of Maryland

Dr. McCauley is an Assistant Professor of Government and Politics. His research focuses on ethnic and religious conflict, economic development, and informal political institutions in Africa. He has published articles on these topics in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Political Psychology, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others. His book manuscript, The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa, is currently under review. Dr. McCauley received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2010. He has a B.A. in Economics from the College of William & Mary and an M.A. in International Relations from Yale University. Prior to joining the faculty at Maryland, he was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In addition to his research, Dr. McCauley teaches courses on the Politics of the Developing World, African Politics, Field Research Methods, and Religion and Politics around the World. In 2013, he was awarded the Excellence in Teaching award from the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

Mũthoni Ngatia, Tufts University

Mũthoni Ngatia is an assistant professor of Economics at Tufts University. She is currently on sabbatical at the World Bank. Her research has looked at how social networks affect individuals’ behaviour in developing countries. She has an A.B. in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. Mũthoni is the recipient of grants from J-PAL, PEDL, Kilimo Trust, and The Russell Sage Foundation among others.

Ken Opalo, Georgetown University

Ken Opalo is an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. His research interests include the political economy of development; legislative development; and electoral politics in emerging democracies. Ken’s current book project examines the evolution of legislatures in emerging democracies, with a focus on explaining the observed variation in the institutionalization and strength of African legislatures.

Session Chairs

Derick Brinkerhoff, The George Washington University & RTI

Dr. Derick W. Brinkerhoff is Distinguished Fellow in International Public Management with RTI International (Research Triangle Institute) and is an associate faculty member at George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. His research and consulting focuses on policy implementation, democracy and governance, decentralization, citizen participation, social accountability, partnerships, and fragile conflict-affected states. He has worked with international donors, public sector agencies, NGOs, and the US military across a broad range of development sectors in 30 countries, with a long-term focus on the health sector. From 1990-2001, he was research director of USAID’s Implementing Policy Change project. Dr. Brinkerhoff is a co-editor for the journal, Public Administration and Development; and serves on the editorial board of International Review of Administrative Sciences. He is the co-chair of the governance work group of the Society for International Development’s Washington DC chapter. He has published extensively, including eight books and numerous articles and book chapters. He holds a doctorate in public policy and administration from Harvard University and a masters in public administration from the University of California, Riverside. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.

Jennifer Brinkerhoff, The George Washington University

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff is Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She holds a Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an MPA from the Monterey Institute of International Studies. She teaches courses on public service, international development policy and administration, development management, and organizational behavior. She is particularly keen on encouraging people to pursue service careers, thoughtfully grounding their commitment to change in self-awareness and working in communities. To that end, she and her husband, Derick W. Brinkerhoff, published Working for Change: Making a Career in International Public Service (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2005). Dr. Brinkerhoff has expertise on public-private partnership, governance, NGOs, development management, and diasporas. Her publications include seven books, as well as four co-edited journal issues and over fifty articles and book chapters on topics ranging from institutional reform, to evaluation; NGOs; failed states; governance; and diaspora identity, development contributions, citizenship, and policy. She is the author of Institutional Reform and Diaspora Entrepreneurs: The In-Between Advantage (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2016), Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Partnership for International Development: Rhetoric or Results? (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); and co-editor of NGOs and the Millennium Development Goals: Citizen Action to Reduce Poverty (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). Dr. Brinkerhoff consults for multilateral development banks, bilateral assistance agencies, NGOs, and foundations. Her applied work encompasses partnership, civil society, institutional development, development management, and training methodologies, and includes work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands; and in Africa, China, Mongolia, Central Asia, and Russia for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank. She has provided policy advice to the U.S. State Department on its diaspora engagement strategy and conducted diaspora-related commissioned research for USAID, the Asia Development Bank, the Migration Policy Institute, the Nordic Africa Institute, the United Nations, and the World Bank. She has also advised studies for the Africa Diaspora Policy Centre, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. She has delivered training related to diasporas and development to U.S. State Department Foreign Service and Desk Officers, USAID staff, international development consulting firms, and diaspora organizations and other government officials in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Sweden.

James Foster, The George Washington University

James E. Foster is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University and holds a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo (Mexico).

Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in México. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu. Foster regularly teaches introductory and doctoral courses on international development and each spring joins with Professor Basu in presenting an undergraduate course on Game Theory and Strategic Thinking, to which staff and Board members of the World Bank are also invited.

Professor Foster is also Research Fellow at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), Department of International Development, Oxford University, and a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Working Group, Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, University of Chicago. This year he is serving on the World Bank’s Commission on Global Poverty.

Stephen Smith, The George Washington University

Stephen C. Smith is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he is Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy. He received his PhD in economics from Cornell University and has been a Fulbright Research Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Specialist, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Jean Monnet Research Fellow; he is currently a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, an IZA Research Fellow, and a member of the Advisory Council of BRAC USA. He is Principal Investigator for the research project, “Complementarities of Training, Technology, and Credit in Smallholder Agriculture: Impact, Sustainability, and Policy for Scaling-up in Senegal and Uganda,” funded by BASIS / USAID. From 2009-2012, Smith served a previous term as Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy, where he helped create its four signature initiatives: climate adaptation in developing countries; extreme poverty; global economic governance; and the “G2 at GW” series. In the 1990s, he designed and served as first director of GW’s International Development Studies Program. From 2004-2008, he served as co-Principal Investigator, along with Prof. Jim Williams, of GW’s partnership with BRAC University (in Bangladesh). Professor Smith has also served as director of the Research Program in Poverty, Development, and Globalization.directs the Research Program in Poverty, Development, and Globalization. Smith has done on-site research and program work in several regions of the developing world including Bangladesh, China, Ecuador, India, Uganda, and Former Yugoslavia, and has been a consultant for the World Bank, the International Labour Office (ILO, Geneva), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Institute for Development Economics Research (UN-WIDER, Helsinki). Smith has also conducted extensive research on the economics of employee participation, including works councils, ESOPs, and labor cooperatives, which has included on-site research in Italy, Spain, and Germany, as well as China and India.

Lindner Commons, 1957 E St. NW, 6th floor

8:30 – 9:10AM: Breakfast and Welcome

8:30 – 9:00AM: Breakfast
9:00 – 9:10AM: Welcome

9:10 – 10:50AM: Session I

Chair: Stephen Smith, Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy, George Washington University

- 9:10 – 10:00AM: Guns and Roses: Flower Exports and Electoral Violence in Kenya, Ameet Morjaria (Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University), joint with Rocco Macchiavello (Warwick) and Christopher Ksoll (Mathematica Policy Research).

Discussant: Adrienne Lebas (American University)

- 10:00 – 10:50AM: Making the Grade: Increasing Returns to Investment in Teacher Training in Northern Uganda, Rebecca Thornton (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Discussant: Muthoni Ngatia (Tufts University)

10:50 – 11:00AM: Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:40PM: Session II

Chair: James Foster (George Washington University)

- 11:00 – 11:50AM: Child Labor, Schooling, and Child Ability, Richard Akresh (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), joint with Emilie Bagby (UIUC), Damien de Walque (World Bank), and Harounan Kazianga (Oklahoma).

Discussant: Sarah Baird (George Washington University)

- 11:50AM – 12:40PM: Call Me Educated: Evidence from a Mobile Monitoring Experiment in Niger, Jenny Aker (Tufts University).

Discussant: Markus Goldstein (The World Bank)

12:40 – 1:50PM: Lunch

1:50 – 3:30PM: Session III

Chair: Jennifer Brinkerhoff (George Washington University)

- 1:50 – 2:40PM: Bride Price and Female Education, Nathan Nunn (Harvard University), joint with Nava Ashraf (LSE), Natalie Bau (Toronto), and Alessandra Voena (Chicago).

Discussant: Kenneth Leonard (University of Maryland)

- 2:40 – 3:30PM: Education and Long Term Social Mobility in Benin, Leonard Wantchekon (Princeton University & African School of Economics).

Discussant: James Habyarimana (Georgetown University)

3:30 – 3:50PM: Coffee Break

3:50 – 5:30PM: Session IV

Chair: Derick Brinkerhoff (George Washington University & RTI)

- 3:50 – 4:40PM: Nuanced Accountability: Voter Responses to Service Delivery in Southern Africa, Evan Lieberman (Massachussets Institute of Technology).

Discussant: John McCauley (University of Maryland)

- 4:40 – 5:30PM: How Coethnicity Moderates The Effect of Information On Voting Behavior: Experimental Evidence from Benin, Eric Kramon (George Washington University), joint with Claire Adida (UCSD), Jessica Gottlieb (Texas A&M) and Gwyneth McClendon (Harvard).

Discussant: Ken Opalo (Georgetown University)

5:30 – 5:50PM: Coffee Break

5:50 – 7:00PM: Keynote Speakers

5:50 – 6:00PM: Ambassador Reuben E. Brigety II, Dean, The Elliott School of International Affairs
6:00 – 6:10PM: Presentation of the African School of Economics. Leonard Wantchekon, African School of Economics and Princeton University
6:10 – 7:00PM: Prospects for Rural Electrification in Africa. Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley

7:00 – 8:30PM: Reception with African Beer and Wine

The Political Economy of Sovereign Borrowing: Explaining the Policy Choices of Highly Indebted Governments

March 31, 2016March 9, 20222015, Global Governance, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

by Stephen B. Kaplan (The George Washington University) and Kaj Thomsson (Maastricht University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-1

Testing the Association between Foreclosure and Nearby House Values: Can Differences Deceive?

March 28, 2016March 9, 20222016, Anthony Yezer, Working Papers

by Anthony Yezer (George Washington University) & Yishen Liu (Fannie Mae)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-29

Partisan Technocratic Cycles in Latin America

March 27, 2016March 9, 20222016, Global Governance, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

by Stephen Kaplan (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-28

Systemic and Idiosyncratic Sovereign Debt Crises

March 26, 2016March 9, 20222016, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Papers

by Graciela Laura Kaminsky (George Washington University) & Pablo Vega-García (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-27

Globalization in the Periphery: Monetary Policy: What is Gained, What is Lost

March 25, 2016March 9, 20222016, Graciela Laura Kaminsky, Working Papers

by Graciela Laura Kaminsky (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-26

The Cost of Greening Stimulus: A Dynamic Discrete Choice Analysis of Vehicle Scrappage Programs

March 24, 2016August 31, 20182016, Chao Wei, Working Papers

by Chao Wei (George Washington University) & Shanjun Li (Cornell University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-25

Travel Time Use Over Five Decades

March 23, 2016August 31, 20182016, Chao Wei, Working Papers

by Chao Wei (George Washington University) & Chen Song (University of International Business and Economics)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-24

What are the Responsibilities of Tech Companies in an Age of International Terrorism?

March 23, 2016March 30, 2022Forum, Global Economic Governance Events, Past Events, Susan Aaronson

Dr. Susan Ariel Aaronson

The George Washington University

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

12:00 to 1:30pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Repression, Civil Conflict, and Leadership Tenure: A Case Study of Bahrain

March 22, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-23

Foreign Rivals are Coming to Town: Responding to the Threat of Foreign Multinational Entry

March 21, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Maggie Chen, Working Papers

by Maggie X. Chen (George Washington University) & Cathy Ge Bao (University of International Business and Economics)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-22

Repression, Civil Conflict, and Leadership Tenure: A Case Study of Argentina

March 20, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-21

At the Intersection of Cross‐Border Information Flows and Human Rights: TPP as a Case Study

March 18, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson

IIEP Working Paper 2016-19

How Do Electoral Quotas Influence Political Competition? Evidence from Municipal, State, and National Elections in India

March 16, 2016August 31, 20182016, Adam Ziegfeld, Global Governance, Working Papers

by Adam Ziegfeld (George Washington University) & Adam Michael Auerbach (American University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-16

The EMG Distribution and Aggregate Trade Elasticities

March 15, 2016October 1, 20182016, International Trade, Olga Timoshenko, Working Papers

May 2016

by Olga A. Timoshenko (George Washington University) & Erick Sager (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-15

At the Intersection of Cross-Border Information Flows and Human Rights: TPP as a Case Study

March 12, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-12

Repression, Civil Conflict, and Leadership Tenure; The Thai Case Study: 2006-2014

March 10, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Uncategorized, Working Papers

by Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-10

Repression, Civil Conflict, and Leadership Tenure; The Sri Lanka Case Study

March 9, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-9

Working by Design: New Ideas to Empower U.S. and European Workers in TTIP

March 8, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-8

Can Transparency in Supply Chains Advance Labor Rights? Mapping of Existing Efforts

March 7, 2016August 31, 20182016, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-7

Can Transparency in Supply Chains Advance Labor Rights? Mapping of Existing Efforts

March 6, 2016August 31, 20182016, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by. Susan Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-6

Online Job Search and Migration Intentions Across EU Member States

March 5, 2016August 31, 20182016, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

by Tara Sinclair (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-5

Costly Screening, Self-Selection, Fraud, and the Organization of Credit Markets

March 4, 2016October 23, 20182016, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

March 2016

by Anthony Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-4

The Two Fragilities: Vulnerability to Conflict, Environmental Stress, and their Interactions as Challenges to Ending Poverty: A Policy Analysis

March 1, 2016October 19, 20182016, Climate Adaptation, Stephen C. Smith, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers

by Stephen Smith (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-1

Climate Preferences, Obesity, and Unobserved Heretogeneity in Cities

February 28, 2016January 30, 20192016, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

February 2016

by Anthony Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-3

Learning, Prices, and Firm Dynamics

February 28, 2016January 23, 20192016, International Trade, Olga Timoshenko, Working Papers

February 2016

by Olga Timoshenko (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2016-11

Market Ethics With Trade in an Edgeworth Box

December 31, 2015August 31, 20182015, Steve Suranovic, Working Papers

by Steven Suranovic (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-21

Surge Pricing and Price Gouging: Public Misunderstanding as a Market Imperfection

December 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, International Trade, Steve Suranovic, Working Papers

December 2015

by Steven Suranovic (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-20

Worms at work: Long-run impacts of a child health investment

November 30, 2015March 11, 20222015, Sarah Baird, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers

by Sarah Baird (George Washington University), Joan Hamory Hicks (UC-Berkeley, CEGA), Michael Kremer (Harvard University, NBER), and Edward Miguel (UC-Berkeley, NBER)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-16

Long-Term Impacts of High Temperatures on Economic Productivity

October 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Development Economics, Paul Carrillo, Ram Fishman, Working Papers

October 2015

by Ram Fishman, Jason Russ, and Paul Carrillo (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-18

“Bones, Bacteria and Break Points: The Heterogeneous Spatial Effects of the Black Death and Long-Run Growth” (Trade and Development Workshop)

October 13, 2015April 2, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Seminar

Remi Jedwab

The George Washington University

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

12:30 to 2:00pm

John W. Kendrick Seminar Room
Room 321 at 2115 G Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

Travel Time Use Over Five Decades

September 30, 2015April 15, 20222015, Chao Wei, Working Papers

by Chao Wei (George Washington University) and Chen Song (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-19

A State-Level Analysis of Okun’s Law

September 30, 2015March 11, 20222015, Amy Guisinger, International Finance, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

September 2015

by Amy Guisinger (George Washington University), Ruben Hernandez-Murillo (Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland), Michael Owyang (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and Tara Sinclair (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-17

Person Equivalent Headcount Measures of Poverty

August 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Development Economics, James Foster, Stephen C. Smith, Tony Castleman, Ultra Poverty, Working Papers

August 2015

by Tony Castleman, James Foster, and Stephen C. Smith (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-10

The Energy Implications of City Size and Density

June 30, 2015March 11, 20222015, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

June 2015

by Anthony Yezer (George Washington University) and William Larson (Federal Housing Finance Agency)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-15

Amenity, Diversity and Obesity: Unobserved Heretogeneity in Cities

June 30, 2015March 11, 20222015, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

June 2015

by Stephen Popick (George Washington University) and Anthony Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-12

Banking Unconditionally: The Political Economy of Chinese Finance in Latin America

April 30, 2015March 11, 20222015, Stephen B. Kaplan, US-China, Working Papers

by Stephen Kaplan (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-14

Repression, civil conflict and leadership tenure; the Thai Case Study: 2006-2014

March 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-9

Fighting the Last Economic War: Crisis and Austerity in Latin America

March 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Global Governance, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

by Stephen Kaplan (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-13

The Repeat Time-On-The-Market Index

March 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Paul Carrillo, Working Papers

by Paul E. Carrillo and Benjamin Williams (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-8

Urbanization without Growth in Historical Perspective

March 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

March 2015

by Remi Jedwab (The George Washington University) and Dietrich Vollrath (University of Houston)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-7

Firm Learning and Growth

February 28, 2015March 11, 20222015, International Trade, Olga Timoshenko, Working Papers

February 2015

by Costas Arkolakis (Yale University), Theodore Papageorgiou (NBER McGill University), and Olga Timoshenko (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-5

Rounding the Corners of the Policy Trilemma: Sources of monetary policy autonomy

February 28, 2015March 11, 20222015, International Finance, Jay Shambaugh, Working Papers

February 2015

by Michael W. Klein and Jay C. Shambaugh (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-4

International Currency Exposures, Valuation Effects and the Global Financial Crisis

February 28, 2015March 11, 20222015, International Finance, Jay Shambaugh, Working Papers

February 2015

by Agustín S. Bénétrix (Trinity College Dublin), Philip R. Lane (Trinity College Dublin Trinity College Dublin and CEPR), and Jay C. Shambaugh (The George Washington University and NBER)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-3

The Mortality Transition, Malthusian Dynamics, and the Rise of Poor Mega-Cities

January 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, Development Economics, Remi Jedwab, Working Papers

January 2015

by Remi Jedwab (The George Washington University) and Dietrich Vollrath (University of Houston)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-6

The Meaning of Fair Trade

January 31, 2015March 11, 20222015, International Trade, Steve Suranovic, Working Papers

January 2015

by Steve Suranovic (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2015-2

USAID and GW Discuss Ending Extreme Poverty

January 27, 2015April 2, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, Past Events, Stephen C. Smith

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

3:00 to 5:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

As the world achieved the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015, developed and developing countries have focused more sharply on the tougher challenge of eliminating “extreme poverty.” In 2013, USAID initiated a dialogue within the development community about how to achieve this goal. The Trachtenberg and Elliott schools welcomed USAID to provide an update on progress and approaches to the problem of ending extreme poverty and encouraging continued discussion on Tuesday, January 27.

Alex Thier, Assistant to the Administrator for the Policy, Planning, and Learning Bureau at USAID, shared an engaging presentation about USAID’s mission to end extreme poverty. Following the presentation, GW Economics Professor Stephen C. Smith offered remarks on the ways GW is engaging this topic (view his slides here). The presentation, remarks and audience discussion were followed with a short networking reception for attendees.

For more information, please contact Kyle Renner at iiep@gwu.edu or 202-994-5320

Cosponsored by:

The China Boom in Latin America: An End to Austerity

December 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Stephen B. Kaplan, US-China, Working Papers

by Stephen B. Kaplan (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-19

2nd Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

November 12, 2014April 2, 2022Danny M. Leipziger, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Jay Shambaugh, Past Events, Remi Jedwab, Research Conference

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

8:30am to 8:00pm

World Bank Headquarters, Washington, D.C

This conference hosted by the World Bank, George Washington University (Institute for International Economic Policy), and the Growth Dialogue brings together academics and development practitioners to present and discuss the challenges of urbanization in developing countries.

For more information about this conference, click here.

USAID BASIS AMA CRSP/I4 Index Insurance Innovation Initiative 2014 Technical Committee Meeting

November 6, 2014April 2, 2022Past Events, Research Conference, Stephen C. Smith

Cosponsored with University of California – Davis

Thursday and Friday, November 6-7, 2014

12:00 to 5:15pm

George Washington University, Washington DC

This event was a gathering of researchers and stakeholders involved with the Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4) at UC Davis. Presentations at this event came in three primary types:

New Project Presentations
Project Updates
Research Paper Presentations.

These different presentations reflect the different stages these projects are at in implementation, and are meant to keep stakeholders apprised of current project status and recent developments, as appropriate.

Presentations:

New Project Presentation: E-Warehousing for Smallholder Farmers
Craig McIntosh, University of California San Diego
Lorenzo Casaburi, Stanford University
Project Update 1: Complementarities of Training, Technology, and Credit in Smallholder Agriculture: Impact, Sustainability, and Policy for Scaling-up in Senegal and Uganda
Stephen Smith, George Washington University
Project Update 2: Demand and Supply Constraints to Improved Sorghum Technology Adoption and their Gender-Differentiated Effects in Burkina Faso
Andrew Dillon, Michigan State University
Research Paper Presentation: Signals, Similarity and Seeds: Social Learning in the Presence of Imperfect Information and Heterogeneity
Emilia Tjernstrom, University of California Davis
Chris Udry, Yale University
New Project Presentation: Agglomeration Payments and Conservation Agriculture in Malawi
Gregory Parkhurst, Weber State University
Stephen Smith, George Washington University
Project Update 3: Household-Level Impacts of System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in Haiti: An SRI intervention with training, insured credit, and coordination by irrigation bloc
Travis Lybbert, University of California Davis
USAID Relations and Data Sharing
Lena Heron, USAID
Panel Presentation: BASIS Seed Awards Communication, Search, and Mobile Phones: A Telephone Directory Intervention in Tanzania
Jenny Aker, Tufts University
Rural Livelihoods and Institutional Reform in Small-Scale Fisheries in Tanzania
Yaniv Stopnitzky, University of San Francisco
A Quasi-Experimental “Post-Mortem” Study of a Discontinued Insurance Product in Haiti
Aaron Isaac Baum, Columbia University
Project Update 4: Tailoring Contract Farming to Smallholders: Experimental Evidence on Enrollment Impact, Insurance Provision, and Communication Technologies
Lorenzo Casaburi, Stanford University
Project Update 5: Promoting Improved Production Technologies among Smallholders in Ghana via Interlinked Credit and Index Insurance Contracts
Mario Miranda, Ohio State University
Research Paper Presentation: A Multiple Interventions Approach to Increasing Technology Adoption: Evidence From Mexico
Xavier Gine, World Bank
Andrew Dillon, Michigan State University
New Project Presentation: Evaluating the effect of site-specific soil information on farmer input choices and the relationship between poverty and soil quality
Cheryl Palm, Columbia University
Michael Carter, University of California, Davis
New Project Presentation: Evaluation of the Welfare Impacts of a Livestock Transfer Program in Nepal
Nick Magnan, University of Georgia
Alain de Janvry, University of California Berkeley
New Project Presentation: Combining technological and institutional innovations for risk management and risk coping by smallholder farmers in Bangladesh
Alain de Janvry, University of California Berkeley
Travis Lybbert, University of California Davis
Project Update 6: Disseminating Innovative Resources and Technologies to Smallholders (DIRTS) in Northern Region, Ghana
Chris Udry, Yale University
Research Paper Presentation: Insights from Behavioral Economics on the Design of Agricultural Index Insurance
Discontinuity of Preferences and Insurance Demand: Results From a Framed Field Experiment in Burkina Faso
Ex-ante Impacts of Agricultural: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Mali
Michael Carter, University of California, Davis
Xavier Gine, World Bank

When Should Governments Subsidize Health? The Case of Mass Deworming

October 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Development Economics, Sarah Baird, Working Papers

October 2014

by Sarah Baird (George Washington University), Joan Hamory Hicks (UC-Berkeley, CEGA), Michael Kremer (Harvard University, NBER), Edward Miguel (UC-Berkeley, NBER), Amrita Ahuja, and Shawn Powers

IIEP Working Paper 2014-22

State Capitalism: Its Evolution and Contribution to Industrialization and Development

October 31, 2014April 2, 2022Ajay Chhibber, Danny M. Leipziger, Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Forum, Past Events

The seminar, organized by the Growth Dialogue at George Washington University School of Business, discussed the evolving role of state capitalism in major economies and measures introduced to enhance the efficiency of state enterprises.

State capitalism exists in most countries; however, it is particularly important in the BRICS. The seminar featured three distinguished speakers who examined the roles of state enterprises and the state more broadly in the development strategies of Brazil, China and India. We heard how the state balances its economic objectives with the realities of the market, how it seeks to influence the direction of the economy via SOEs, and how successful these efforts have been. The Seminar featured the following guest speakers:
Aldo MUSACCHIO, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Pieter BOTTELIER, Senior Adjunct Professor, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), John Hopkins University

Ajay CHHIBBER, Former Director General, Independent Evaluation, India and Assistant Secretary General, United Nations for Asia Pacific

Moderator: Danny Leipziger, Professor of International Business and International Affairs, George Washington School of Business; Managing Director, The Growth Dialogue.

Friday, October 31, 2014

George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052

Hosted by: Our Collaborators at the Growth Dialogue

Event Inquiry: info@growthdialogue.org

Why Does Skill Intensity Vary Across Cities? Housing Cost and True Human Capital

August 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

August 2014

by Daniel A. Broxterman (George Washinton University) and Anthony M. Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-15

The Political Economy of Macroeconomic Policymaking: Economic Crises and Technocratic Governance

July 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Global Governance, Stephen B. Kaplan, Working Papers

by Stephen B. Kaplan (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-18

Evaluating Forecasts of a Vector of Variables: A German Forecasting Competition

July 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Herman Stekler, International Finance, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

July 2014

by Hans Christian Müller-Dröge (Handelsblatt Newspaper), Tara M. Sinclair (The George Washington University), and Herman Stekler (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-17

The Energy Implications of City Size and Density

July 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Anthony Yezer, Development Economics, Working Papers

July 2014

by William Larson (Bureau of Economic Analysis), and Anthony M. Yezer (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-16

Can Trade Policy Set Information Free

June 30, 2014March 11, 20222014, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-9

Does the WTO Help Member States Clean Up?

June 30, 2014March 11, 20222014, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University) and M. Rodwan Abouharb (University London College)

IIEP Working paper 2014-7

Trade Imbalance: Juggling the Needs of Investors and the Public Interest in TTIP

June 30, 2014March 11, 20222014, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University) and Rob Maxim (George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-8

Putting the Blame on Governments Why Firms and Governments have Failed to Advance the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights

June 30, 2014March 11, 20222014, Global Governance, Susan Aaronson, Working Papers

by Susan Ariel Aaronson (George Washington University) and Ian Higham (EIRIS)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-6

What Can We Learn From Revisions to the Greenbook Forecasts?

May 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Herman Stekler, International Finance, Tara Sinclair, Working Papers

May 2014

by Tara M. Sinclair (The George Washington University), Jeff Messina (The George Washington University) and Herman Stekler (The George Washington University)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-14

Fiscal Discoveries and Yield Decouplings

May 31, 2014March 11, 20222014, Ana Fostel, International Finance, Working Papers

May 2014

by Luis Catão (IMF), Ana Fostel (George Washington University), and Romain Ranciere (IMF)

IIEP Working Paper 2014-21

About the Event Series

About the Event Series

Friday, November 1, 2019 9:30a.m. – 12:15p.m. Lindner Family Commons (6th Floor) Elliott School of International Affairs 1957 E Street, NW Washington, DC 20052

Schedule of Events

Friday, September 7, 20188:30am to 7:30pm

Susan Ariel Aaronson

Research Professor of International Affairs, The George Washington University

Jessica Nicholson

Department of Commerce

A Fresh Look at Digital Trade in North America

Friday, December 1, 2017

12:00 to 2:00pm

Elliott School of International Affairs 1957 E Street NW Washington, DC 20052

A Panel on NAFTA Renegotiation

International Trade and Arbitration Going Forward

Thursday, November 16, 2017

12:00 to 1:30pm

George Washington University Law School Tasher Great Room (Burns 101) 2000 H St NW Washington, DC 20052

Friday, September 8, 2017

Preston Auditorium The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., 20433 Washington D.C.

Rémi Jedwab, Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs, George Washington University

Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics, Harvard

Harris Selod, Senior Economist, The World Bank

Keynote Speaker

Friday, November 1, 2019
9:30a.m. – 12:15p.m.
Lindner Family Commons (6th Floor)
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street, NW Washington, DC 20052

Friday, September 7, 2018
8:30am to 7:30pm

Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW
Washington, DC 20052

George Washington University Law School
Tasher Great Room (Burns 101)
2000 H St NW
Washington, DC 20052

Preston Auditorium
The World Bank
1818 H Street, N.W., 20433 Washington D.C.