Research Seminar Series

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. The seminar emphasizes interdisciplinary exchanges between the social and natural sciences, and speakers are welcome to present early-stage or mature work on a wide range of topics, including migration, local markets, structural change, innovation, and the dynamics of technology, models of combinatorial growth, economic history, social and cultural evolution, the environmental impacts of growth, and trade.

We also welcome methodological contributions in areas such as causal identification or machine learning. The seminar is open to all interested individuals who wish to attend.

Seminars are held on Tuesdays, from 10:00 am to 11:30 am. See the calendar entry for the Zoom registration link. 

Upcoming Events/Recent Seminars

Seminar Archive

Fall 2021

December 20
The Cushioning Effect of Immigrant Mobility
Speaker: Cem Özgüzel
Zoom link

December 13
Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live
Speaker: Nicholas Christakis

December 6
Evaluating Regional Carbon Emissions Trading in China: Effects, Pathways, and Prospects
Speaker: Xiao Li

November 30 
Globalization and the Ladder of Development: Pushed to the Top or Held at the Bottom?
Speaker: Arnaud Costinot

November 22
Anthropogenic Material Cycles and Sustainable Development
Speaker: Weiqiang Chen

November 15
How to Construct Nationally Representative Firm Level Data from the Orbis Global Database: New Facts and Aggregate Implications
Speaker: Sevcan Yesiltas

November 8
Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020 
Speaker: Amory Gethin 

November 1
Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth
Speaker: Ufuk Akcigit, University of Chicago

October 25
Technology Adoption and Late Industrialization
Speaker: Jaedo Choi, University of Michigan

October 18
The Missing Middle Managers: Labor Costs, Firm Structure, and Development
Speaker: Hannes Malmberg, University of Minnesota

October 4
China’s Journey to the West: Using High-Resolution Satellite Imagery to Evaluate Transportation Improvement in Central Asia
Speakers: Cong Peng, Harvard Kennedy School and Gordon Hanson, Harvard Kennedy School 

September 27
Splitting and Shifting Production: Tracking the Global Location of Manufacturing over a Product’s Lifecycle
Speaker: Daniel Stock, Carnegie Mellon University

September 20
Production Ability and Economic Growth
Speaker: Sebastian Bustos, Growth Lab

September 13
Technological Change and the Gender Pay Gap
Speaker: Ljubica Nedelkoska, Growth Lab

Spring 2021

January 12, 2021
Africa’s Manufacturing Puzzle: Evidence from Tanzanian and Ethiopian Firms
Speaker: Dani Rodrik, Harvard Kennedy School

January 21, 2021
Fake News and Cultural Identity Evidence from South Tyrol in 1939
Speaker: Alexia Lochmann, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

January 28
Unbundling the Process of Agricultural Technology Adoption: Experimental Evidence from Kenya
Speaker: Joeri Smits, Harvard Kennedy School, CID

February 4
Closing the Democratic Window of Opportunity: Shocks, Regime Strength and Democratization
Speaker: Jose-Ramon Morales-Arrilla, Harvard University, CID

February 11
Tasks, Occupations, and Wage Inequality in an Open Economy
Speaker: Marc Muendler, UC San Diego

February 25
Strong relationship between resource efficiency and economic complexity
Speaker: Heming Wang

March 4
An Elementary Humanomics Approach to Boundedly Rational Potential Games
Speaker: Michael Campbell, SAS (Eureka)

March 11
The new dualism and the quality hurdle: Towards a development model that is no longer industry-centric
Speaker: Charles Sabel, Columbia Law School

March 18
The Emigration Life Cycle
Speaker:  Michael Clemens, Center for Global Development

March 25
Protectionism and the education-fertility tradeoff in 19th century France
Speaker: Cecilia Garcia-Penalosa, Aix-Marseille School of Economics

April 1
Whiteshift: Ethnic change, populism and polarization
Speaker:  Eric Kaufmann, University of London

April 8
Technological Revolutions and Inter-regional Inequality: the US case in the 20th century
Speaker: Michael Storper, London School of Economics

April 15
Origins and skill composition of new work between 1980 and 2018
Speaker: David Autor, MIT Economics

April 22
The Value Structure of Technologies
Speaker: Carliss Y. Baldwin, Harvard Business School

April 29
Firm Technology Upgrading Through Emerging Work
Speaker:  Enghin Atalay, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

May 13
Air Pollution, Extreme Weather and Infectious Disease: How Health Hazards Threaten Urbanites’ Happiness and the Value of Consumer Cities
Speaker: Siqi Zheng, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning

May 20
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
Speaker: Joseph Henrich, Harvard University,Department of Human Evolutionary Biology

June 3
The Power of Creative Destruction
Philippe Aghion, Harvard University

June 10
Wage employment, unemployment and self-employment across countries
Markus Poschke, Department of Economics, McGill University

June 17
From Micro to Macro: Land Institutions, Agricultural Productivity, and Structural Transformation
Diego Restuccia, University of Toronto

Fall 2020

September 17
Speaker: Swapnil Singh

September 24
Speaker: Kai Gehring

October 1
Speaker: Stefan Bauernschuster

October 8
Speakers: Matti Mitrunen

October 15, 9:00am – 10:30am
Speaker: Yang Yu

October 22
Speaker: Philipp Koch

October 29
Speaker: Romain Wacziarg

November 5
Speaker: Carsten Eckel

November 10, 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Speaker: Laurent Hebert-Dufresne

November 12
Speaker: Pol Antras

November 19, 9:00am – 10:30am
Speaker: Junming Zhu

November 24
Speaker: Muhammed A. Yıldırım 
“Sorting, Matching and Economic Complexity”

December 3
Speakers: Chad Jones

December 10
Speaker: Ljubica Nedelkoska
“Lessons from 80 years of change in occupational tasks in the US (1939-2018)”

December 17
Speakers: James McNerney, Yang Li

Spring 2020

January 28
Speaker: Louis Hyman

February 3
Speakers: Marco Guerzoni, Meijun Liu, Shuo Li

February 10
Speakers: Ulrich Schetter, Willem Thorbecke

February 24
Speakers: Chris MacGee, Neil Thompson

March 2
Speakers: Sultan Orazbayev, Dina Pomeranz

March 9
Speaker: Carliss Baldwin

March 23
Speakers: Swapnil Singh, Hyejin Youn

March 30
Speaker: TBD

April 6
Speaker: Andrew Bernard

April 13
Speaker: Katharina Erhardt

April 20
Speakers: Anina Schwarzenbach, Francisco Arroyo Marioli

April 27
Speaker: TBD

May 4
Speakers: Albana Shehaj, Anna Stansbury

May 11
Speaker: TBD

May 18
Speakers: Maria Del Rio Chanona, Esteban Moro

May 25
Speaker: TBD

June 1
Speakers:  Bledi Taska, Victor M. Yakovenko