Economics and finance

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. 

A presentation by Paul Courant, Professor of Public Policy & Jeffrey Smith, Professor of Economics and Public Policy

Policy Talks @ the Ford School Free and open to the public. Reception to follow. Paperback editions of Lawrence Lessig's book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress–and a Plan to Stop It will be available for purchase at the event. Professor Lessig will sign copies of his book during the reception. Join in on the conversation on Twitter: #fordschoollessig This event is co-sponsored by the Michigan Campaign Finance Network. From the speaker's bio: Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L.

Elisa Maffioli, U-M SPH

Interested in a career in Finance or Technology? Learn More From Professor Adrienne Harris!Adrienne A. Harris is a Professor of the Practice at the University of Michigan, as well as a Gates Foundation Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Finance, Law and Policy at the University. Adrienne also advises fintech companies, incumbent financial institutions, and large venture capital firms. Most recently, Adrienne was the Chief Business Officer and General Counsel a San Francisco-based, insur-tech start-up for which she is now an Advisor. Adrienne was a Special Assistant to President Obama for Economic Policy at the National Economic Council in the Obama White House. She spearheaded the development of the Administration’s fintech strategy, chairing both the Interagency Fintech Working Group and the Administration’s Distributed Ledger Technology Task Force. She came to the White House from the U.S. Department of Treasury where she served as Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary. Prior to coming to Washington, D.C., Adrienne was an Associate at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP in New York, where her practice included representing financial institutions in complex regulatory proceedings and M&A transactions. Adrienne earned her M.B.A. from New York University Stern School of Business with specializations in Economics and Management, her J.D. from Columbia University Law School, and her B.A. from Georgetown University.