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.
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.
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.
Towsley Policymaker in Residence Javed Ali will moderate a panel discussion with three leading counterterrorism experts--Peter Bergen, Barbara McQuade, and Chris Costa.
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.
WCEE Lecture. Poland, the EU, and Illiberal DemocracyKrzysztof Śmiszek, Polish human rights lawyer, activist, and managing editor of The Anti-Discrimination Law Review
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.
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.
Citi Foundation Lecture,
Policy Talks @ the Ford School
In this public talk, Vice Admiral Ota will discuss pressing issues in Northeast Asian security, including current tensions surrounding North Korea, China’s military posture, territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas, and how Japan is preparing to deal with each of these matters.
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.
