第四届经济学新秀中国行

由中国经济实验室主办的第四届经济学新秀中国行，邀请了来自经济学各领域最有潜力的年轻学者，他们将在中国多所大学展示各自的工作。来自加州大学伯克利分校的 Cristóbal Otero 和来自伦敦大学学院的 Anna Vitali 将于6月2日(星期五) 到访北京大学国家发展研究院，分享其研究工作成果。详情如下:

9:00-10:15 Cristóbal Otero 讲座

10:30-11:45 Anna Vitali 讲座

(资料图片仅供参考)

地点/Venue：承泽园校区344教室

14:00-17:30: 1v1 Meetings with NSD faculty and students

地点/Venue：

Cristóbal Otero承泽园校区402教室

Anna Vitali承泽园校区403教室

题目/Title: Managers and Public Hospital Performance

主讲人/Speaker: Cristóbal Otero (UC Berkeley)

主持人/Host：席天扬 Tianyang Xi

时间/Time: 9:00-10:15，60分钟演讲，15分钟问答

摘要/Abstract:

We study whether, and how, managers can increase government productivity in the context of public health provision. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we document that top managers (CEOs) account for a significant amount of variation in hospital mortality. We then use a staggered difference-in-differences design, and show that a reform which introduced a competitive selection system for recruiting CEOs in public hospitals reduced hospital mortality by approximately 8%. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition and is robust to several alternative explanations. The financial incentives included in the reform—performance pay and higher wages—do not explain our findings. Instead, we show that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing older doctors with no management training in favor of younger CEOs who had studied management. The mortality effects were driven by hospitals in which the new CEOs had managerial qualifications. These CEOs improved operating room efficiency and reduced staff turnover.

主讲人介绍/Biography:

Cristóbal Otero is an incoming Assistant Professor in Economics at the Columbia Business School. He holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley and an MSc in Political Philosophy from LSE. His areas of interest are public finance, labor economics, and organizational economics, and his current research focuses on how to improve government productivity. Find out more on hiswebsite.

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题目/Title: Consumer Search and Firm Location: Theory and Evidence from the Garment Sector in Uganda

主讲人/Speaker: Anna Vitali (University College London)

主持人/Host：邢剑炜 Jerry Xing

时间/Time: 10:30-11:45，60分钟演讲，15分钟问答

摘要/Abstract:

This paper studies the role of consumer information frictions in driving firms" location choices within cities. I develop a quantitative equilibrium model in which imperfectly informed consumers prefer searching in high-density locations to minimize the cost of gathering information. When choosing location, firms trade-off consumers" preferences for agglomeration, fiercer competition induced by spatial proximity, and lower production costs from supply-side externalities. I estimate the model using bespoke data that I collected from garment firms in Kampala. I combine transaction data (to estimate demand), customer data (to shed light on search) and mystery shoppers data (to measures quality). I find that information frictions lead to substantial agglomeration and limit the ability of high-quality firms to attract customers, allowing lower-quality competitors to survive. Counterfactual scenarios show that the introduction of an e-commerce platform induces a large share of firms to disperse, while also causing customers to shift to high-quality businesses. By contrast, commonly adopted decongestion policies that discourage central clusters without solving information frictions disproportionately harm high-quality firms by increasing consumers" costs of finding high-quality products.

主讲人介绍/Biography:

Anna Vitali is a PhD candidate at University College London. She works on questions in development economics using tools from spatial economics and empirical industrial organization. Specifically, her research focuses on firms and labor markets in developing countries. Anna will join Dartmouth College as a postdictoral fellow in September 2023, and New York University as an Assistant Professor in September 2024.

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