2008:
Kenji Wada
2007:
Stefania Albanesi
Claudia Olivetti
Espen Henriksen
Roman Sustek
Eric Young
José de Anchorena
2006:
Espen Henriksen

Kenji Wada, a professor at the Graduate School of Business Administration at Keio University, spent a week as a visiting scholar at LAEF in February 2008.  Wada received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1999.  His current research interests include:

While in residence at LAEF, Wada presented a paper in the Economics Department seminar series related to the last topic.  The title of his presentation was “Cop and the Anthem: How could Soapy have avoided being jailed?”  In this paper, Wada considers what type of job-training program will lower the probability of re-entry into jail and lengthen the period between release from and re-entry into jail.

Stefania Albanesi is an associate professor of economics at Columbia University.  She is also a research fellow of the NBER and a research affiliate of the CEPR.  She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 2001.

Professor Albanesi has two main lines of research.  The first is on optimal dynamic taxation in economies with incentive problems due to private information.  In this work, she has dealt with optimal taxation of labor income, assets and entrepreneurial capital.  She is currently exploring the properties of optimal taxes in economies with occupational choice.  In addition, she is investigating the link between the process for family decision making and optimal taxes in economies where agents belong to households.  In her second line of work, she has analyzed the status of women in the labor market.  In a series of papers co-authored with Claudia Olivetti (Boston University), she has explored the impact of medical progress on the rise in the labor force participation of married women in the 20th century, the link between gender earnings differentials and incentive problems in the labor market, and the possible determinants in the difference in the structure of compensation by gender for top executives.

While in residence at LAEF, Professor Albanesi presented a paper in the Economics Department seminar series related to her work on dynamic optimal taxation.  The title of her presentation was “Intertemporal Distortions in the Second Best.”  The paper, co-authored with Roc Armenter, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, explores the fundamental differences between economies in which some form of capital income taxation is optimal in the long run and the ones in which the optimal capital income tax is zero.  The main result is that the government’s ability to intertemporally shift other distortions, such as labor income taxes, underlies the optimality of capital income taxes.

Claudia OlivettiClaudia Olivetti, an Assistant Professor at Boston University,was a visitor at LAEF for one week in December 2007.  Olivetti received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.  Her research focuses on exploring causes and consequences for the changing role of women in the family and in the workplace.  Her current research interests include the investigation of:

While at LAEF, Olivetti presented a seminar to the UCSB Department of Economics professors and graduate students, entitled “Gender and Dynamic Agency: Theory and Evidence on the Compensation of Female Top Executives.”  Women top executives tend to be under-represented at the upper ranks of the corporate structure, tend to work in smaller firms, and receive lower overall compensation (earning about 30% less than their male counterparts - a gap comparable to the one observed for the overall population).  The paper presented by Olivetti, which is joint work with Stefania Albanesi of Columbia University, documents a new fact about the compensation of top executives: the presence of a substantial and highly significant gender difference in the structure of compensation. Specifically, the paper shows that the incentive component of executive pay is much smaller for female than for male executives.  The paper provides a theoretical rationalization for this finding based on a dynamic agency model of executive compensation, where it is assumed that female executives have higher cost of effort.  This assumption is motivated by survey and experimental work documenting the existence of gender asymmetries in the cost of career investment (in particular, family-career trade-offs), and attitudes towards competition and towards initiating negotiations.


(Roman Sustek, Eric Young and Espen Henriksen)

Professor Espen Henriksen of the University of Oslo made a return visit to LAEF in October, 2007.  He previously visited our department in May of 2006.  Professor Henriksen received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.  His current research interests include:

While at LAEF, Henriksen worked on a joint paper with Finn Kydland and Roman Sustek, entitled “The High Correlations of Prices and Interest Rates across Nations.”  He also presented a seminar to the UCSB Department of Economics professors and graduate students.  The title of his presentation was “Taxes and the Global Allocation of Capital.”

Roman Sustek, a research economist at the Bank of England, spent the month of October 2007 as a visiting scholar at LAEF.  Sustek received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005.  His current research interests include:

While in residence at LAEF, Sustek presented a paper in the Economics Department seminar series related to the last topic.  The title of his presentation was “Business Cycle Accounting for Monetary Economies.”  In this paper, Sustek extends the business cycle accounting method of Chari, Kehoe and McGratten to an important class of monetary business cycle models to investigate the quantitative importance of various classes of frictions for the joint dynamics of real and nominal variables over the business cycle.

Professor Eric Young of the University of Virginia was a visitor at LAEF for one week in October 2007.  Professor Young received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2001.  His current research interests include:

While at LAEF, Young presented a seminar to the UCSB Department of Economics professors and graduate students, entitled “A Quantitative Model of Information and Unsecured Credit.”  This paper focuses on the trends in the market for credit card borrowing – namely, that households are borrowing more and using bankruptcy to default on more debt than they used to, while at the same time credit terms are becoming more sensitive to measures of default risk.  The paper, joint work with Richmond Fed economist Kartik Athreya and UVa graduate student Xuan Tam, argues that changes in the information available to lenders can account for all of these trends.  A key innovation is an algorithm to compute competitive equilibria with individualized loan pricing and asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders regarding default risk.

José de Anchorena, an advanced Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, spent the month of February 2007 as a visiting scholar at LAEF. Anchorena is currently working on three papers, all concerned with growth and development, and, in particular, with technology improvement.

One of Anchorena's papers is related to the experience of Argentina's economy in the last 30 years. In particular, it ties the investment-productivity puzzle, uncovered by Kydland and Zarazaga (2001, 2002), with the hypothesis of misalignment of the real exchange rate. The main innovation of the paper is to measure separately technology improvement in traded and non-traded goods, and to incorporate those measures into a general dynamic equilibrium framework.

Anchorena became interested in endogenous technology change due to the huge and volatile annual changes in measured technology levels. In his second paper, he attempts to explain simultaneously the time series of population growth rate and income per capita level for England between 1700 and 2000. The main innovations are to simulate numerically a model proposed by Lucas (2002) and to propose modifications to the model in order to match better the evidence.

The goal of Anchorena's third paper is to relate aggregate productivity levels with demographic variables. In particular, it asks how much of an incentive to increase productivity has been the reduction in household size. On the supply side, the reduction in household size has implied the substitution of market for home production (say, more lunch outside and less at home). On the demand side, the reduction in household size has implied the substitution of market for home consumption (say, more marketed entertainment). Both effects increased the market size of old and new goods and services, and the increased scale created a higher demand for technology improvement. The goal is to model these effects into an endogenous growth process and to determine if the evidence supports it or not. This paper was the main focus of Anchorena's research while in residence at LAEF.

While at LAEF, Anchorena presented a paper in the Economics Department seminar series, "Can We Replicate an Industrial Revolution?" This is the second of the papers described above.

Professor Espen Henriksen of the University of Oslo, Norway, was a visitor at LAEF for two weeks in May 2006. Professor Henriksen received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. His current research interests include:

  • Low- and medium-frequency movements in the current account, and net foreign asset positions.
  • Macroeconomic implications of international demographic dynamics.
  • Portfolio choice over the life cycle in a production economy; restrictions on the macro production function.
  • Co-movements of domestic and international monetary aggregates at business cycle frequencies.
While at LAEF, Espen participated in the “Macroeconomics of Imperfect Risk Sharing” conference. He also presented a seminar to the UCSB Department of Economics professors and graduate students. The title of his presentation was “Post-War Capital Restrictions, Demographics and Welfare Costs.”