News
Francesco Amodio and Nicolas de Roux
Nicolas de Roux and Luis R. Martinez
Corruption and the Lava Jato Scandal in Latin America brings together key international and interdisciplinary perspectives to shine new light on Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, Latin America’s largest corruption scandal to date.
Mateus Dias, Rudi Rocha, and Rodrigo R. Soares
Nicolas de Roux, Marcela Eslava, Santiago Franco, and Eric Verhoogen
In the online panel of the 24th Forum 2000 Conference on October 14th, titled “Can we take advantage of the disaster? The economic priorities for a New World”, Jan Svejnar, Professor and Director of the Center on Global Economic Governance (CGEG) and Jeffrey D. Sachs, University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University discuss.
Evan Plous Kresch, Rodrigo Schneider, Henrique Veras de Paiva Fonseca, and Meredith Walker
Anja Benshaul-Tolonen, Sandra Aguilar-Gomez, Naomi Heller Batzer, Rebecca Cai, Elias Charles Nyanza
Masih A. Babagoli, Anja Benshaul-Tolonen, Garazi Zulaika, Elizabeth Nyothach, Clifford Oduor, David Obor, Linda Mason, Emily Kerubo, Isaac Ngere, Kayla F. Laserson, Rhiannon Tudor Edwards, Penelope A. Phillips-Howard.
Ben Fitch-Fleischmann and Evan Plous Kresch
BRICLab is pleased to be joined by three journalists from Brazil, Murilo Salviano and Breno Pires for the 2020 year.
Abstract
Does identity—one’s concept of self—influence economic behavior in the labormarket? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on labor supply. In a field experiment, casual laborers belonging to different castes choose whether to take up various real job offers. All offers involve working on a default manufacturing task and an additional task. The additional task changes across offers, is performed in private, and differs in its association with specific castes. Workers’ average take-up rate of offers is 23 percentage points lower if offers involve working on tasks that are associated with castes other than their own. This gap increases to 47 pp if the castes associated with the relevant offers rank lower than workers’ own in the caste hierarchy. Responses to job offers are invariant to whether or not workers’ choices are publicized, suggesting that the role of identity itself—rather than social image—is paramount. Using a supplementary experiment, I show that 43% of workers refuse to spend ten minutes working on tasks associated with other castes, even when offered ten times their daily wage. This paper’s findings indicate that identity may be an important constraint on labor supply, contributing to misallocation of talent in the economy.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Jan Svejnar, Katherine Terrell
Abstract
Our estimates, based on large firm-level and industry-level data sets from eighteen countries, suggest that FDI and trade have strong positive spillover effects on product and technology innovation by domestic firms in emerging markets. The FDI effect is more pronounced for firms from advanced economies. Moreover, our results indicate that the spillover effects can be detected with micro data at the firm-level, but that using linkage variables computed from input-output tables at the industry level yields much weaker, and usually insignificant, estimated effects. These patterns are consistent with spillover effects being rather proximate and localized.
Published in European Economic Review, v. 121, January 2020