The International Policy Center supports the faculty and students of the University of Michigan and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in creating new knowledge, fostering considered debate, and developing the policy leaders of tomorrow.
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.
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.
Please join Professor Susan Collins, the Ford School DE&I Officer, Stephanie Sanders and Global Engagement Program Manager, Cliff Martin for an info session about this exciting opportunity in global engagement.
Indo-Pacific Conference organized by International Policy Center and Center for Japanese Studies features a keynote by Susan Thornton, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Ford Security Seminar will host William G. Rich to discuss about how the changing economic trends and politics of the GCC are Affecting U.S. Security Interests.
Donors have long engaged the private sector by tying foreign aid, forcing recipients to buy from donor countries. But recently, donors have partnered with private money on a larger scale, making tied aid an important area of interest.
Professor Shujiro URATA examines Japan’s current economic situation and identifies the problems, then he discusses the importance of adopting an activist international economic policy with a focus on its relationship with the United States, in order to overcome the problems and achieve sustained economic growth.
In July 2014 Washington Post journalist and former Tehran bureau chief, Jason Rezaian, was arrested by Iranian police on charges of espionage. What followed was a harrowing 544 day stint in an Iranian prison, and an extraordinary campaign led by his family, the Washington Post, and prominent journalism organizations for his release. Join Rezaian for a discussion on his book “Prisoner,” which details his 18-month imprisonment in a maximum security facility, his journey through the Iranian legal system and how his release became part of the Iran nuclear deal.
Interested in how policy issues are tackled in countries beyond the United States? Wondering about the relevance of your policy skills in a non-U.S. context? If you are looking to expand the base of your policy knowledge, this could be the course for you! In winter term 2018 we are launching a new global engagement seminar for undergraduates, the first of its kind at the Ford School!
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.
Daniel Russel is a Senior Fellow and Diplomat in Residence at the Asia Society Policy Institute. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, he served until March, 2017 as the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary on July 12, 2013, Mr. Russel served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Asian Affairs. During his tenure there, he helped formulate President Obama’s strategic rebalance to the Asia Pacific region.
The International Policy Center (IPC) supports the faculty and students of the University of Michigan and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy in creating new knowledge, fostering considered debate, and developing the policy leaders of...
A panel of former ambassadors hosted by the Weiser Diplomacy Center and the American Academy of Diplomacy will focus on the implications of the war in Ukraine globally and for NATO, Europe, Russia and China. October, 2022.
Join us for a discussion of the diplomacy between the United States, key NATO allies, and Russia surrounding the war in Ukraine with Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałęcz, John Beyrle, and Stephen Biegun. September, 2022.
