Research
The school’s core strengths lie in international economics, macroeconomics and industrial organization. Research topics include economics of free trade agreements and bilateral trade flows, international transmission of business cycles, labor market demands, monetary policy within the open economy context, economics of entrepreneurship, and competitive effects of mergers and acquisitions. Other topics include taxation of multinational firms, economics of nonprofits, analysis of stock price movements, R&D subsidies, and the dynamics of technological change.
Working Papers
For a list of current projects, please see the School of Economics Working Paper Series. The Working Paper series is current but as of yet unpublished work.
Recent Work
Gandhi, Amit & Samek, Anya & Serrano-Padial, Ricardo. “On Information and the Demand for Insurance”
Technological advances in the insurance industry mean that insurers may be better informed about underlying risks than consumers. We evaluate the impact of these information frictions by combining demand elicitation surveys with insurance claim data. We find an ‘information premium’ - i.e., consumers are willing to pay more for insurance when risks are uncertain. Importantly, we find that the information premium is negatively correlated with risk aversion. This leads to a selection effect: individuals who purchase insurance are not necessarily the most risk averse. The resulting misallocation of insurance can lead to large welfare losses and biased risk preference estimates.
Olivero, Maria & Dvalishvili, Mikheil. “What Do Stimulus Packages Mean for Consumer Credit Markets?”
We study the links between fiscal stimulus packages during times of crisis and households’ access to consumer credit. We do so by using household-level data on income and liabilities from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and estimating an empirical model along those in the literature on the consumption effects of these packages. We find that receiving a check from the government consistently translates into a reduction in both outstanding liabilities and the household’s share of aggregate credit. This effect is present for each credit type as well as for the total, and it is robust to controlling for income levels and demographic characteristics correlated with consumers’ access to credit.
Larch, Mario & Shikher, Serge & Syropoulos, Costas & Yotov, Yoto. “Quantifying the Impact of Economic Sanctions on International Trade in the Energy and Mining Sectors”
Capitalizing on the latest developments in the gravity literature, we utilize two new datasets on sanctions and trade to study the impact of economic sanctions on international trade in the mining sector, which includes oil and natural gas. We demonstrate that the gravity equation is well suited to model bilateral trade in mining and find that sanctions have been effective in impeding mining trade. Our analysis reveals that complete trade sanctions have reduced bilateral mining trade by about 44 percent on average. We also document the presence of significant heterogeneity in the effects of sanctions on mining trade across mining industries and across sanction episodes/cases, depending on the sanctioning and sanctioned countries, the type of sanctions used, and the direction of trade flows. We take a close look at the impact of recent sanctions on Iran and Russia.
View all current working papers on the IDEAS RePec Database.
For a complete list of published work, we invite you to visit our faculty profiles.
