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. 

Firms in Product Space: Adoption, Growth and Competition

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: John Morrow, Reader in Economics at King’s Business School

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

Paper Abstract: Which products are potentially produced together? Can any firm eventually supply any new demand? Using multi-product production patterns within and across firms, we recover a continuous cost based distance between products and firms. Product distance implies a product adoption path, with each rank of distance decreasing adoption frequency. When export demand for unproduced products induces domestic adoption, closer firms supply them. Counterfactual production costs imply measures of Revenue Potential and Competitive Pressure. These predict firm sales growth, scope growth and core focus. If all firms produced all products linked by co-production, consumer welfare would increase by 20-30%.

About the Speaker: John Morrow is a Reader in Economics at King’s Business School and is affiliated to the Centre for Economic Performance and Centre for Economic Policy Research. His main research studies firm responses to economic changes such as trade or industrial policies and the consequences for productivity and efficiency, especially in developing countries. John completed a PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a recipient of the FIW Young Economist Award and ETSG Chair Jacquemin Prize. John has taught at Kent State University, London School of Economics, University of Essex and Birkbeck College.

Research Seminar: The Growing Use of Economic Complexity in EU Policy

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: Pierre-Alexandre Balland (Utrecht University & AI Toulouse Institute)

In this hybrid seminar, Pierre-Alexandre Balland will review the growing use of economic complexity within different sections of the European Commission, EU member states, and EU regions. He will then highlight existing limitations and blindspots that the field seriously needs to address. Finally, Pierre-Alex will delve into new policy use cases that could benefit from a complexity angle in the near future.

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

Paper Abstract: Economic complexity offers a powerful paradigm to understand key societal issues and challenges of our time. By focusing on the underlying structure of the economy and systemic interactions it offers new insights on growth, technological change, regional evolution, or inequality. As a result, policy makers around the world are increasingly using economic complexity heuristics and metrics to guide their decisions. 

Research Seminar: New U.S. Industrial Innovation Policies

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: William B. Bonvillian, Lecturer at MIT, and Senior Director for special projects at MIT’s Office of Open Learning

Despite longstanding opposition from mainstream economists and neoliberal perspectives to industrial policy, the United States, confronted by advanced technology competition from China, climate change, and a global pandemic, adopted from 2020-2022 a series of major industrial policy programs. Although the U.S. Defense Department has long practiced industrial policy approaches, and the U.S. has followed industrial economic policies in its agriculture, transportation, electric power and healthcare sectors, the new programs focused on promoting technology innovation, so can be labeled “industrial innovation policy.” The large scale of these efforts amounted to a new step for the U.S. in non-defense sectors.

This talk will review six major examples of new U.S. industrial innovation policies. All involve federal government interventions into the post-research phases of innovation, from development to prototyping, testing, demonstration, and production. 

Summary Paper

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

About the speaker:

William B. Bonvillian is a Lecturer at MIT, and Senior Director for special projects at MIT’s Office of Open Learning, leading research projects on workforce education and technology issues. From 2006 until 2017, he was director of MIT’s Washington Office, supporting MIT’s longstanding role in science policy at the national level. He served as an advisor to MIT’s major cross-campus national policy initiatives on advanced manufacturing, energy technology, life science convergence and online education. He was an MIT representative to President Obama’s industry-university Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) which formed U.S. manufacturing policies in the 2011-2016 period. He teaches courses on innovation systems and science and technology policy at MIT in the and Science Technology and Society and Political Science Departments. Previously, he worked for over 15 years on science and innovation issues as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and earlier was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation.

Development Talk: Building Inclusive Cities

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: Carel Kleynhans, CEO of Divercity Property Group

Moderator: LaChaun Banks, Ash Center Director for Equity and Inclusion

Divercity Property Group is South Africa’s leading investor in well-located affordable housing precincts: Divercity invests in affordable rental housing in well-located urban precincts with scale. In this talk, Carel Kleynhans will discuss specifically what Divercity does in South Africa and why they think that a new vision for urban development that is scalable and commercially viable can really be an instrumental part of addressing  any one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals or any other developmental outcome. 

Location: HYBRID W434 A.B, HKS / Zoom

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. Refreshments will be provided. The Zoom webinar is open to the public.

Navigating Crisis and Leading Change in Moldova with Former Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita

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: Natalia Gavrilita, Former Prime Minister of Moldova

Moderator: Karen Donfried, Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs

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.

About the Speaker: 

Natalia Gavrilița is a member of the Supervisory Board of the National Bank of Moldova, as well as member of the ECFR Board. Natalia Gavrilița served as the 15th Prime Minister of Moldova between August 2021 and February 2023. She led the Government through multiple overlapping crises caused by the war in neighbouring Ukraine, while also advancing ambitious anti-corruption, economic, and governance reforms. During her time in office, Moldova received the largest influx of Ukrainian refugees of any European country, managed to diversify its energy market away from Russian gas, and became a candidate country to the European Union. Gavrilița has had a long history in economics and politics. She served as finance minister from June 2019 to November 2019 when President Maia Sandu was Prime Minister. Earlier in her career, she was Managing Director at the London-based Global Innovation Fund, a hybrid investment fund supporting social innovation in developing countries. She has also worked within the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Economy and for Oxford Policy Management. Throughout her career, she has worked in a number of countries across Africa, Central and South Asia. Gavrilița graduated from Moldova State University with a bachelor’s degree in International Law and also earned a master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard University.

The Wild, Wild West: What Can We Learn From The Cowboy State?

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: Gov. Mark Gordon (R-Wyoming)

Governor Gordon serves as the current chair of the Western Governors’ Association, which includes 19 western states and three U.S. territories in the Pacific region, working across a range of policy issues to advance western priorities in a bipartisan way. Governor Gordon’s initiative as WGA Chair is entitled “Decarbonizing the West,” and this initiative follows in a tradition of initiatives focused on energy opportunities, effective land and water management, and reimagining the rural west.

This discussion is co-sponsored by the Growth Lab and its Pathways to Prosperity research engagement with the State of Wyoming. The conversation is expected to touch upon numerous challenges and opportunities facing Wyoming and western states.

Moderator: Jeff Liebman, Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government

Please register if you would like the possibility of attending the Forum in person. If a seat is unavailable or you will not be attending in person, viewers can stream the event live via the IOP’s YouTube page. You do not need to register for virtual attendance.

About the speaker:

Mark Gordon was elected Wyoming’s 33rd Governor in 2018 and is now serving in his second term. In 2022, Governor Gordon received 79% of the vote, the largest margin of victory of any gubernatorial candidate in Wyoming’s history and the largest vote margin among governors elected in that year. Having successfully led Wyoming through some historically difficult times including the COVID-19 pandemic, Governor Gordon is spearheading efforts to diversify Wyoming’s economy and continue to set Wyoming on a sustainable fiscal path — which he helped to strengthen as Wyoming State Treasurer from October 2012 to January 2019. He and his wife, Jennie, are dedicated to making Wyoming the best place in the nation to raise a family.

Having grown up on a family ranch in Kaycee, Wyoming, worked in the oil and gas industry, and ran several businesses spanning ranching, outdoor recreation, and tourism, Governor Gordon is acutely aware of the challenge of global climate change and has been outspoken about the “climate opportunity” in Wyoming and across the West. He promotes an all-of-the-above energy strategy, as Wyoming is a leader in coal, wind, oil, gas and uranium production. At a recent Conservative Climate Summit, Governor Gordon was quoted as saying,  “As a mountaineer, I know that glaciers are disappearing. As a rancher, I can see what’s happening to our farms. As someone who cares about the world for our future, as a conservative, I feel very strongly that this country needs to get off its butt and do so with honesty and a respect for what’s happening.”

Research Seminar: Dancing With the Stars -Innovations through Interactions

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 hybrid seminar, Santiago Caicedo, an Associate Professor at the Economics Department and Finance Group at Northeastern University will discuss his research on innovation, which uses a new large-scale panel dataset on European inventors matched to their employers and patents.

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

Paper Abstract: An inventor’s own knowledge is a key input in the innovation process. This knowledge can be built by interacting with and learning from others. This paper uses a new large-scale panel dataset on European inventors matched to their employers and patents. We document key empirical facts on inventors’ productivity over the life cycle, inventors’ research teams, and interactions with other inventors. Among others, most patents are the result of collaborative work. Inter- actions with better inventors are very strongly correlated with higher subsequent productivity. These facts motivate the main ingredients of our new innovation-led endogenous growth model, in which innovations are produced by heterogeneous research teams of inventors using inventor knowledge. The evolution of an inventor’s knowledge is explained through the lens of a diffusion model in which inventors can learn in two ways: By interacting with others at an endogenously chosen rate; and from an external, age-dependent source that captures alternative learning channels, such as learning-by-doing.

About the Speaker: Santiago Caicedo is an Associate Professor at the Economics Department and Finance Group at Northeastern University. He graduated with a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. His research connects microdata with economic theory to study social interactions, human capital formation, economic growth, and innovation.

Research Seminar: Money, Time, and Grant Design

The Growth Lab 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: Wei Yang Tham is a Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) and Harvard Business School

Abstract: The design of research grants might be a useful tool for incentivizing more socially valuable science. To better understand the value of grant design as a policy instrument, we conduct two sets of thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we test whether grants with randomized attributes induce different research strategies. Longer grants increase researchers’ willingness to take risks, but only amongst tenured professors, suggesting that job security and grant duration are complementary incentives. Larger grants increase researchers’ willingness to expand ongoing projects, while smaller grants increase researchers’ focus on starting new projects. In our second experiment, we estimate researchers’ willingness to trade off grant size and duration. We find that researchers are relatively unwilling to trade off the amount of funding a grant provides in order to extend the duration of the grant — more money is much more valuable than more time.

Whether attending in-person or online, please register in advance. Room attendance is limited to the Harvard community. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Zoom attendance is open to the public.

About the speaker:

Wei Yang Tham is a Research Scientist at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH) and Harvard Business School. He completed his PhD in Economics at Ohio State University in 2019. Dr. Tham studies innovation and knowledge production in the context of science. His recent work includes eliciting researchers’ preferences and responses to grant design, studying how funding delays affect the movement of human capital across sectors and borders, and estimating the knowledge production function to better understand the optimal distribution of resources in research.