Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many — sometimes all — nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting this property for more than four thousand languages which together account for more than 99 percent of the world’s population.
David Atkin, MIT on A New Engel on the Gains from Trade. Measuring the gains from trade and their distribution is challenging. Recent empirical contributions have addressed this challenge by drawing on rich and newly available sources of microdata to measure changes in household nominal incomes and price indices. While such data have become available for some components of household welfare, and for some locations and periods, they are typically not available for the entire consumption basket. In this paper, we propose and implement an alternative approach that uses rich, but widely available, expenditure survey microdata to estimate theory-consistent changes in income-group specific price indices and welfare. Our approach builds on existing work that uses linear Engel curves and changes in expenditure on income-elastic goods to infer unobserved real incomes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that while based on non-homothetic preferences, the price indices it recovers are homothetic and hence are neither theory consistent nor suitable for distributional analysis when relative prices are changing. To make progress, we show that we can recover changes in income-specific price indices and welfare from horizontal shifts in Engel curves if preferences are quasi-separable (Gorman, 1970; 1976) and we focus on what we term “relative Engel curves”. Our approach is flexible enough to allow for the highly non-linear Engel curves we document in the data, and for non-parametric estimation at each point of the income distribution. We first implement this approach to estimate changes in cost of living and household welfare using Indian microdata. We then revisit the impacts of India’s trade reforms across regions.
The rebirth of Detroit is dependent on a multitude of factors including issues related to urban infrastructure, the revitalization of neighborhoods, and beyond. Critical to this rebirth is investment in the city. For the city administration, this investment means being able to collect sufficient tax revenues to turn on streetlights, police neighborhoods, replace infrastructure, and finance other projects. Unfortunately, one consequence of the challenges faced by the city has been a culture of non-payment of the taxes owed. Over the last three years, the Master of Accounting students at the Ross School of Business have worked closely with the city to help address these non-payment issues. This talk will describe the projects the students have worked on, the benefits to both the city and to the students, and the work that still needs to be done. We will be joined by the city’s Director of Audit and Compliance, Odell Bailey.
The Ford School’s Michigan Politics and Policy class (PubPol 475/750) will be joined by Chase Cantrell, Executive Director and Founder of Building Community Value for a discussion about the future of Detroit on Weds Oct 31, 2:30pm.
We have moved this class session to the larger Ford School Annenberg Auditorium (1120) so this lecture can be open to the public -- we hope to see you there!
The event will be a half-day symposium at which scholars, public officials, private sector representatives, and other census stakeholders will address preparations for the 2020 Census and the challenges it faces, include funding, the proposed citizenship question, and the implications of an inaccurate count.
Historically, public infrastructure systems such as roads, water utilities, and schools are financed using a combination of tax revenue, government and revenue-backed bonds. This system has repeatedly fallen short due to insufficient tax revenue and political aversion towards funding “social infrastructure”. Especially for schools, the access to quality infrastructure is highly correlated (in the US) to poverty, stemming from property values, credit worthiness and other factors. A recent bill (not passed) required a 1:6 leverage of federal with state and private finance, compared to 1:12 in Europe and 1:30 proposed under the Climate accords. Either infrastructure has not been built or upgraded, or private capital has stepped in the breach. At the Center for Smart Infrastructure Finance, we're asking whether data-driven models can close the gap by taking advantage of the internet of things (IoT): smart sensors that deliver information which can be monetized. This seminar will explore how private financing models that leverage digital data supply chains to attract 'efficient capital' (e.g. insurance, options trades, debt securities, variable interest rate bonds) can be adapted to financing public infrastructure while limiting recourse to the citizens that use it, and leveling the economic disparities of access.
Ross School of Business & Ford School of Public Policy
Friends, colleagues, students, and collaborators of John Enrico DiNardo are invited to attend a special conference at the University of Michigan that will celebrate his life and career.
Michigan League Ballroom and Rackham Graduate School Amphitheatre
This workshop will be the first to take an in-depth look at basic income as a poverty alleviation strategy and spur the next generation of research on basic income studies.
The Economics Department at the University of Michigan will be hosting the fourth H2D2 Research Day on Friday, April 20, 2018. We are pleased to have Amitabh Chandra (Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and Director of Health Policy Research, Harvard Kennedy School) as our keynote speaker. We intend for this mini-conference to draw both faculty and student attendees from the University of Michigan as well as from the greater mid-west and Canada. The conference will focus on the subfields of health, history, development, demography and family economics, broadly defined.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
About CIERS: The objective of the Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS) is to engage students and faculty from across the university in conversations around education research using various research methodologies.
Wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children; however, little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors. We use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of Swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents.
Saumitra Jha, Stanford University will present Swords into Bank Shares: Financial Innovations and Innovators in Mitigating Political Violence in EDS Seminar on Tuesday, April 10 at 2:30pm in 201 Lorch Hall.
Economic Development Seminar presents Supreet Kaur (UC-Berkeley). Supreet will present "Scabs: The Social Suppression of Labor Supply" in the joint labor/development seminar on Friday, April 6, 1-2:30PM in Lorch 201.
CLOSUP Lecture Series,
Policy Talks @ the Ford School
The objective of the Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS) is to engage students and faculty from across the university in conversations around education research using various research methodologies.
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
The objective of the Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS) is to engage students and faculty from across the university in conversations around education research using various research methodologies.
