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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241106T113000
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DTSTAMP:20260417T143352
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UID:14987-1730892600-1730897100@growthlab.hks.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Research Seminar - Forecasting Macroeconomic Dynamics Using a Calibrated Data-Driven Agent-Based Model
DESCRIPTION:The Growth Lab’s Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development. 	Speaker: Samuel Wiese\, University of Oxford 	Whether attending in person or virtually\, please register in advance. 	Abstract: In the last few years\, economic agent-based models have made the transition from qualitative models calibrated to match stylised facts to quantitative models for time series forecasting\, and in some cases\, their predictions have performed as well or better than those of standard models (see\, e.g. Poledna et al. (2023a); Hommes et al. (2022); Pichler et al. (2022)). Here\, we build on the model of Poledna et al.\, adding several new features such as housing markets\, realistic synthetic populations of individuals with income\, wealth and consumption heterogeneity\, enhanced behavioural rules and market mechanisms\, and an enhanced credit market. We calibrate our model for all 38 OECD member countries using state-of-the-art approximate Bayesian inference methods and test it by making out-of-sample forecasts. It outperforms both the Poledna and AR(1) time series models by a highly statistically significant margin. Our model for all 38 OECD member countries using state-of-the-art approximate Bayesian inference methods and test it by making out-of-sample forecasts. It outperforms both the Poledna and AR(1) time series models by a highly statistically significant margin. Our model is built within a platform we have developed\, making it easy to build\, run\, and evaluate alternative models\, which we hope will encourage future work in this area. 	Speaker Bio: Samuel Wiese is a graduate student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a member of the Complexity Economics group at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). Before starting his PhD\, he completed a Diploma in Mathematics at the University of Leipzig and worked as a research assistant at Cornell University and at the Chebyshev Laboratory at St. Petersburg State University. He is interested in learning on random games and macroeconomic agent-based modelling.
URL:https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/event/research-seminar-forecasting-macroeconomic-dynamics-using-a-calibrated-data-driven-agent-based-model/
LOCATION:HYBRID Perkins Rubenstein 429 / Zoom
CATEGORIES:Academic Research Seminars
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241113T113000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241113T124500
DTSTAMP:20260417T143352
CREATED:20241021T221100Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250910T003257Z
UID:14989-1731497400-1731501900@growthlab.hks.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:Research Seminar - Procuring Low Growth: The Impact of Political Favoritism on Public Procurement and Firm Performance in Bulgaria
DESCRIPTION:The Growth Lab’s Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development. 	Speaker: Mihaly Fazekas. Associate Professor\, Central European University 	Whether attending in person or virtually\, please register in advance. 	Authors: Mihaly Fazekas\, Viktoriia Poltoratskaya\, Marc Schiffbauer\, and Bence Tóth 	Paper Abstract: This paper assesses the impact of favoritism in public procurement on private sector productivity growth. To this end\, it combines three novel microeconomic datasets: administrative data on firms including over 4 million firm-year observations and rich financial and ownership information\, public procurement transactions data for 150\,000 published contracts and their tenders\, and a newly assembled dataset on firms’ political connections drawing on asset declarations\, sanction lists\, and offshore leaks. This comprehensive dataset allows us to trace the impact of favoritism in allocating government contracts to economic growth. Specifically\, we find that politically connected firms are 18-32 percent more likely to win public procurement contracts due to their preferential access to uncompetitive tenders. Public procurement results in higher subsequent productivity and employment growth only if it has been awarded through competitive tenders. Firms winning contracts through uncompetitive procedures have flat growth but make higher profit margins. Consistent with these findings\, we show that firms awarded uncompetitive public procurement contracts obtain rents from overpaid contracts\, by 9-11 percent. The results suggest that aggregate annual TFP growth would have been 8 percent higher in the absence of favoritism in public procurement. 	Speaker Bio: Mihaly Fazekas is an associate professor at the Central European University\, Department of Public Policy\, with a focus on using data science methods to understand the quality of government globally. He is also the scientific director of an innovative think-tank\, the Government Transparency Institute. He has a PhD from the University of Cambridge where he pioneered data science methods to measure and understand high-level corruption in Central- and Eastern Europe. His research and policy interests revolve around corruption\, favouritism\, private sector collusion\, and government spending efficiency. Methodologically\, he has experience in both quantitative and qualitative methods in diverse fields such as public policy\, data science\, and political science. He worked at the University of Cambridge as the scientific coordinator of the Horizon 2020 funded project DIGIWHIST which used data science approaches to measuring corruption risks\, administrative capacity\, and transparency in public procurement in 33 European countries. His articles appeared in diverse\, high-quality journals such as the American Journal of Political Science\, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory\, Governance\, Regional Studies\, World Development\, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice\, the Lancet\, or International Journal of Data Science and Analytics. His policy reports have been published by prestigious organisations such as the World Bank\, the OECD\, or the European Commission. He regularly consults the European Commission\, United Nations\, OECD\, World Bank\, and a range of national governments and NGOs across the globe. In 2020\, he has won the IMF’s Anti-Corruption Challenge leading an interdisciplinary team from across government and academia.
URL:https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/event/research-seminar-procuring-low-growth-the-impact-of-political-favoritism-on-public-procurement-and-firm-performance-in-bulgaria/
LOCATION:HYBRID Perkins Rubenstein 429 / Zoom
CATEGORIES:Academic Research Seminars
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20241120T233000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20241120T233000
DTSTAMP:20260417T143352
CREATED:20241114T001700Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250910T004624Z
UID:15071-1732145400-1732145400@growthlab.hks.harvard.edu
SUMMARY:The Social and Environmental Consequences of the Twin Energy-Digital Transition
DESCRIPTION:The Growth Lab’s Research Seminar series is a weekly seminar that brings together researchers from across the academic spectrum who share an interest in growth and development. 	Speaker: Aurélien Saussay\, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow\, Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics 	Whether attending in person or virtually\, please register in advance. 	Abstract: We analyze the labor market and environmental impacts of the concurrent diffusion of green and automation technologies using a novel dataset linking patent data to establishment-level job postings from 2010 to 2023. We develop a new measure of establishment-level technology adoption by constructing semantic similarity links between patent content and skill requirements in online job advertisements. We contribute three novel findings. First\, we document substantial heterogeneity in the labor market impacts across green technology types: innovations in green ICT and buildings technologies appear labor-augmenting\, while advances in green transportation and smart grids tend to be labor-saving. Over time\, green innovation as a whole has become increasingly labor-saving. Second\, using a shift-share instrumental variable (SSIV) empirical design\, we find that increased green technology adoption leads to job creations\, which are moderately skill-biased. Finally\, despite potential concerns\, we find no evidence that automation technology adoption weakens emissions reductions at the establishment level. Our results suggest that the twin green-digital transition may support both employment and environmental goals. 	Speaker bio: Aurélien Saussay is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics. He currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2022-2025). He will be visiting Harvard Kennedy School in the Fall Semester 2024. His research focuses on the interaction between economic inequality and climate change mitigation policies\, in order to address the social and political acceptance challenges that hamper the implementation of effective decarbonisation. He aims to estimate the impacts of climate change mitigation on economic agents empirically to help improve the design of decarbonization policies. He was previously an economist at OFCE\, Sciences Po\, where he led the environmental economics team. He remains an associate researcher and is one of the main co-authors of the Multi-sector Macroeconomic Model for the Evaluation of Environmental and Energy policies (ThreeME)\, which is used extensively in France\, the Netherlands\, Mexico and Indonesia to assess the economic consequences of energy transition scenarios. 	  	 
URL:https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/event/the-social-and-environmental-consequences-of-the-twin-energy-digital-transition/
LOCATION:HYBRID – Zoom / Perkins\, Rubenstein 429 at HKS
CATEGORIES:Academic Research Seminars
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