EOPP Special Event: Summer School on Empirical Methods for Economic Development (23-26 June 2010)

Oriana Bandiera is organizing the Second AMID Summer School on Empirical Methods for Economic Development on June 23-26 at the LSE.

The school is intended for PhD students, post-docs and junior faculty members. The aim is to provide young researchers with a detailed overview of the main methods used in empirical development research. Participants will also have the opportunity to discuss their own research projects with leading researchers in a relaxed and open atmosphere.

Lectures will be delivered by Esther Duflo (MIT), Greg Fischer (LSE), Radha Iyengar (LSE), and Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi) on topics including difference in difference estimators, event studies, instrumental variables, randomised control trials and regression discontinuity approaches. Selected projects by participants will be presented and discussed during the day.

For more details, visit the website at http://econ.lse.ac.uk/staff/bandiera/amid_summerschool_programme.htm

EOPP Special Event: CEPR Public Policy Symposium 2010 (18-19 June 2010)

Oriana Bandiera and Henrik Kleven, along with Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics and CEPR) and Emmanuel Saez (University of California, Berkeley and CEPR) are organizing a symposium on public economics to bring together economists in the field from across Europe and key researchers from outside the region.

The symposium will feature a keynote lecture entitled "Public Finance and Development" to be given by Professor Timothy Besley.

The conference hopes to provide a unique opportunity for researchers from different universities and countries to discuss their work in a relaxed atmosphere and to develop long-term collaborative relationships. It also aspires to provide young researchers with the opportunity to meet and discuss their work with senior economists.

For more details on the conference program and other information, visit the website at http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/3/3540/

EOPP: Recent Publications by Tim Besley, Daniel Sturm, Robin Burgess and Oriana Bandiera

The following papers, by EOPP members, will be published:

Robin Burgess, joint with Dave Donaldson (MIT): Can Openness Mitigate the Effects of Weather Shocks? Evidence from India's Famine Era, is forthcoming in the American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings.

Oriana Bandiera, joint with Valentino Larcinese (LSE) and Imran Rasul (UCL): Heterogeneous Class Size Effects: New Evidence from a Panel of University Students, is forthcoming in the Economic Journal.

Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Selim Gulesci and Munshi Sulaiman, joint with Markus Goldstein (World Bank) and Imran Rasul (UCL): Participation in Adolescent Training Programs, is forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association, Papers and Proceedings.

Tim Besley, Daniel Sturm and Torsten Persson (IIES): Political Competition, Policy and Growth: Theory and Evidence from the United States, is forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies.

For further information and to read abstracts see http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/eopp/_new/publications/recent_publications.asp

"Contract Duration and Investment Incentives: Evidence from Land Tenancy Agreements" forthcoming JEEA, September 2007

A paper by Oriana Bandiera titled "Contract Duration and Investment Incentives: Evidence from Land Tenancy Agreements" is forthcoming in Journal of the European Economic Association in the September 2007 issue. The paper analyses the empirical determinants of contract length, a key and yet neglected dimension of contractual structure. The author estimates contract length and contract type jointly using original data on tenancy agreements signed between 1870 and 1880 in the district of Siracusa, Italy. The findings indicate that the choice of contract length is driven by the need to provide incentives for non observable investment, taking into account transaction costs and imperfections in the credit markets that make incentive provision costly. The results also illustrate that since both length and the compensation scheme are used to provide incentives within the same contract, joint analysis is important for a correct interpretation of the evidence.

"Incentives for Managers and Inequality Among Workers: Evidence from a Firm-level Experiment" QJE May 2007

A paper by Oriana Bandiera, Iwan Barankay, and Imran Rasul entitled 'Incentives for Managers and Inequality Among Workers: Evidence from a Firm-Level Experiment' has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol 122:2 (May 2007). The authors present evidence from a firm level experiment that engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. They find that the introduction of managerial performance pay raises both the mean and dispersion of worker productivity. Analysis of individual level productivity data shows that managers target their effort towards high ability workers, and the least able workers are less likely to be selected into employment. These results highlight the interplay between the provision of managerial incentives and earnings inequality among lower-tier workers.