Faculty Webinar: Leading Green Growth

As the world transitions to a lower carbon economy, new industries, markets, and paths to economic prosperity are emerging. Join Harvard faculty Ricardo Hausmann and Daniel Schrag for a one-hour webinar on how the current energy transition is reshaping economic opportunity around the world—opening new doors for some and posing threats to others—and explore what this transition means for you.

Please register in advance. The webinar will be recorded and distributed to all attendees. This presentation does not qualify for a certificate. 

HKS Executive Education is offering a one-week on campus program, Leading Green Growth: Economic Strategies for a Low-Carbon World, in April 2024. Under the direction of faculty chairs Ricardo Hausmann and Daniel Schrag, participants will gain a foundational understanding of decarbonization and its economic impact. Application deadline is February 26.

The Growth Lab is researching how countries can leverage trends to develop green growth strategies. Our research involves understanding changes in technology, patterns of demand, and value chains for green industries. Learn more about our Green Growth research agenda. 

Research Seminar: The Economic Impact of Transport Infrastructure: A Review of Project-level vs. Aggregate-level Meta-Evidence

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: Timo Välilä, Honorary Professor, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, UCL

Location: HYBRID: WEXNER W-434 A.B. / Zoom

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance.

Abstract. 
This article undertakes a comparison of quantitative meta-studies at project level and at aggregate level to assess how well the economic impact of transport infrastructure is understood. Project-level analyses, based on the so-called Flyvbjerg database, have documented systematic cost overruns and, less conclusively, traffic demand shortfalls, and they have interpreted these findings as being indicative of negative social welfare consequences of transport infrastructure investment projects. In contrast, aggregate-level meta-analyses find consistently that there is a positive relationship between transport infrastructure and measured economic activity at the level of regions or countries, especially in the long run and at higher levels of geographical aggregation. This seeming tension between the meta-results at different levels has been considered a paradox. However, neither the project-level meta-results, nor the available ex post evaluations of larger samples of transport infrastructure projects provide any conclusive evidence of their social welfare consequences, and even if they did, changes in social welfare and economic activity do not need to point in the same direction. There is therefore no paradox about the economic impact of transport infrastructure – we just do not understand its social welfare consequences at the meta-level as well as we understand its relationship with measured aggregate output.

Research Seminar: Embedding Scientific Migrations

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: Dakota Murray, Research Assistant Professor, Northeastern University

Location: HYBRID / Zoom

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance.

Paper Abstract: 

Human migration and mobility drives major societal phenomena including epidemics, economies, innovation, and the diffusion of ideas. Although human mobility and migration have been heavily constrained by geographic distance throughout the history, advances, and globalization are making other factors such as language and culture increasingly more important. Advances in neural embedding models, originally designed for natural language, provide an opportunity to tame this complexity and open new avenues for the study of migration. Here, we demonstrate the ability of the model word2vec to encode nuanced relationships between discrete locations from migration trajectories, producing an accurate, dense, continuous, and meaningful vector-space representation. The resulting representation provides a functional distance between locations, as well as a “digital double” that can be distributed, re-used, and itself interrogated to understand the many dimensions of migration. We show that the unique power of word2vec to encode migration patterns stems from its mathematical equivalence with the gravity model of mobility. Focusing on the case of scientific migration, we apply word2vec to a database of three million migration trajectories of scientists derived from the affiliations listed on their publication records. Using techniques that leverage its semantic structure, we demonstrate that embeddings can learn the rich structure that underpins scientific migration, such as cultural, linguistic, and prestige relationships at multiple levels of granularity. Our results provide a theoretical foundation and methodological framework for using neural embeddings to represent and understand migration both within and beyond science.

About the Speaker: 

Dakota Murray is a research assistant professor at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern Univeristy. Previously, he worked as a Data Scientist with Digital Science to develop tools and deliver analysis to support decision making in funding agencies. He was also a postdoctoral research associate working at the Center for Complex Network Research with Albert-László Barabási. He received a Ph.D in Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington.

Research Seminar: Appropriate Entrepreneurship? The Rise of Chinese Venture Capital and the Developing World

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: Jacob Moscona, Harvard University

Location: HYBRID WEXNER W-434 AB, HKS / Zoom

Whether attending in person or virtually, please register in advance.

Paper Abstract: (Jacob Moscona, Josh Lerner, Junxi Liu & David Y. Yang) Global high-potential entrepreneurship was traditionally dominated by rich countries, especially the US, until the rise of China as a venture capital powerhouse. We explore the international ramifications of China’s rise, using comprehensive data on global venture activities. We document three sets of findings. First, as the Chinese venture industry rose in importance, investment increased substantially in other emerging markets, particularly in sectors dominated by Chinese companies. Using a broad set of country-level economic and social indicators, we show that this effect was driven by country-sector pairs most similar to their counterparts in China. Second, turning to mechanisms, we show that the increase in venture investments in emerging economies was spurred by local investors and new firms whose business models more closely resembled those of their Chinese counterparts. The findings are not driven by Chinese investors, by countries politically connected to China, or by sectors prioritized by the Chinese government. Third, we find that this growth in emerging-market investment had positive spillovers on sectors in which China was not a global leader and had positive city-level effects on both business formation and patenting. Taken together, our findings suggest that developing countries benefited from the rise of Chinese entrepreneurship, especially where Chinese businesses and technologies were most “appropriate” for local economic conditions.

About the Speaker: Jacob Moscona is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard and a postdoctoral fellow at J-PAL at MIT. In 2024, he will start as an Assistant Professor of Economics at MIT. Jacob’s research focuses on development economics, environmental economics, and the economics of innovation. He received his PhD from MIT in 2021 and AB from Harvard in 2016.

Research Seminar: Green Growth Models and National Decarbonization Capacity

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.

Location: HYBRID Wexner G-02 at HKS / Zoom

Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZtdpZP56QyOg8fOS1J0gHg

Speaker: Daniel Driscoll (Brown University)

Abstract: This talk brings the study of growth models and climate change together under the assumption that the policy priority of economic growth will remain central. The relevant research question from a Growth Model perspective thus becomes ‘to what extent can existing Growth Models switch from carbon-based growth to green growth?’ To answer this question, the presentation explores growth models and national decarbonization capacity from a number of comparative and international political economy perspectives. It starts with national energy systems and balance sheets and ends with international monetary and commodity flows.

University-Industry Collaborations and the Burden of Knowledge: Evidence from the U.S.

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.

Location: Online only Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_UlEuxqQ5QTKINYHeR-xhhA

Speaker: Federico Bignone (University of Warwick)

Paper Abstract: (Coauthored with Russell Thomson) Research collaborations between universities and industry are an important channel of innovation. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview of US university-industry collaborations, drawing upon all US-based scientific publications from 1980 to 2013 in Web of Science, matched to the relevant business characteristics in BvD Orbis. We find that university-industry collaborations increased from 2% to 6% of all indexed publications. A decrease in direct corporate involvement in scientific research accompanies this surge. Furthermore, we show that this increase is influenced by factors related to the nature of science such as the burden of knowledge, rather than companies’ commercial considerations. Specifically, the likelihood of collaboration increases as the speed of scientific progress increases, with differences by firm size.

Bio: Federico Bignone is a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick (UK). He recently earned his PhD in Economics from Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) and the University of Bordeaux (France). His research primarily focuses on economics of innovation and science, as well as corporate finance. Specifically, his projects explore various aspects of the much-discussed decline in corporate science. He examines how the burden of knowledge may affect the likelihood of university-industry collaborations. Additionally, he investigates whether corporate science has become increasingly more applied and whether initial public offerings (IPOs) positively impact companies’ scientific research. Recently, he has been involved in a UK government-funded project on AI new ventures and interactions with the science base.

Research Seminar: Industrial Policy in Developing Countries: Is There a Way to Pick Winners

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. In this seminar, Tristan Reed will discuss his new research on the product space.

Speaker Tristan Reed, Applied economist at the World Bank’s Development Research Group

Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BqIFp594RUWa1H7dl0MJRQ

Development Talk: How Can Wall Street Avoid Funding Dictators?

The Growth Lab’s “Development Talks” is a series of conversations with policymakers and academics working on economic growth and development in countries, regions, states and cities in the US and around the world. The seminar provides a platform for practitioners and researchers to discuss both economic growth and development and analytical work centered on policy.

Speaker: Marcos Buscaglia, Economist, Former Wall Street Analyst and Emerging Markets Expert

Moderator: Javier Murcio, Director, Emerging Markets; Portfolio Manager and Senior Sovereign Analyst at Standish and ex-JP Morgan

Whether attending in-person or virtually, please register in advance. Room attendance is limited to the Harvard community. Seating availability is based on a first-come, first-served basis. Lunch will be provided. The Zoom webinar is open to the public. 

Marcos Buscaglia has more than 30 years doing research on the economies of Emerging Market countries and advising Wall Street companies. He is also emerging as a leading voice on the topic of markets and democracy. He is the founder of Alberdi Partners, a consultancy firm dedicated to political, economic and market analysis of Latin American countries. Buscaglia was for five years chief Latin America economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York and ranked #1 in the Institutional Investor rankings in the categories Latin America economics and Argentina in 2015. He also served as chief economist for Latin America at Citibank in New York, and as chief economist for the Southern Cone countries at Citibank, based in Buenos Aires.

Research Seminar: Anticipating Climate Change Across the United States, with E. Rossi-Hansberg

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: Adrien Bilal – Harvard University

Register: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ORfldxS0QwaTky5BhjVUsw

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/adrienbilal/ Paper: NBER Working Paper 31323 -https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31323/w31323.pdf

Abstract: We evaluate how anticipation and adaptation shape the aggregate and local costs of climate change. We develop a dynamic spatial model of the U.S. economy and its 3,143 counties that features costly forward-looking migration and capital investment decisions. Recent methodological advances that leverage the ‘Master Equation’ representation of the economy make the model tractable. We estimate the county-level impact of severe storms and heat waves over the 20th century on local income, population, and investment.

The estimated impact of storms matches that of capital depreciation shocks in the model, while heat waves resemble combined amenity and productivity shocks. We then estimate migration and investment elasticities, as well as the structural damage functions, by matching these reduced-form results in our framework. Our findings show, first, that the impact of climate on capital depreciation magnifies the U.S. aggregate welfare costs of climate change twofold to nearly 5% in 2023 under a business-as-usual warming scenario.

Second, anticipation of future climate damages amplifies climate-induced worker and investment mobility, as workers and capitalists foresee the slow build-up of climate change. Third, migration reduces substantially the spatial variance in the welfare impact of climate change. Although both anticipation and migration are important for local impacts, their effect on aggregate U.S. losses from climate change is small.

Speaker Bio: Adrien Bilal is a macroeconomist with interests in labor and spatial economics. Adrien received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Economics at the department of Economics at Harvard University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. 

Webinar: Why is South Africa Not Achieving Its Goals?

The Growth Lab recently completed a two-year applied research project which diagnosed causes of South Africa’s economic challenges and and outlined a path forward. The project was a research collaboration centered with South Africa’s National Treasury and in coordination with the Centre for Development and Enterprise.

Speakers:
Ann Bernstein, Executive Director, Center for Development and Enterprise
Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Growth Lab

Please register in advance. 

This event is sponsored by the Centre for Development and Enterprise in South Africa.