March 18th – 20th, 2019
Empirical Research in Economic History: Recent Topics and Methodologies
This course showcases some recent contributions to the economic history literature, emphasizing its interaction with frontier questions and methodologies from mainstream economic analysis. Topics covered will include the long-run effects of repressive institutions, the nature of sovereign default, the economics of culture and religion in historical perspective, and the role of human capital in economic development, among others. The course will discuss in detail the methodologies specific to historical research, such as the use of archival sources, the construction of time-invariant geographical areas, and the harmonization of monetary and measurement units. In addition, common empirical methods used in the literature (IV, diff-in-diff, regression discontinuity) will be introduced as needed.
Mauricio Drelichman
Dr. Mauricio Drelichman is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia, and a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2003 from Northwestern University. He is a co-author of “Lending to the Borrower from Hell” (Princeton, 2014), which combines detailed archival research with international economics theory to explore the nature of sovereign defaults in the sixteenth century, highlighting their macro-insurance properties. His previous work focused on the nature of the urban economy in early modern Toledo; the structure of the Spanish nobility and its impact on local economies; the role that apparently inefficient institutions can play when legal systems are too rigid to adapt to a changing economic environment; and the interaction between resource windfalls and institutions.
March 20th to 22nd, 2019
Economics of Strategy
This short postgraduate course is designed to expose participants to state-of-the-art, practice oriented research on the economics of strategy. Simply put, some individuals and firms are extraordinarily more successful than others at distinguishing, creating and capturing economic value. How do they do it? At the heart of the course will be our interest in explaining performance differences, both temporary and permanent, between firms. Emphasis will be placed on empirical work deploying credible microeconometric techniques, with an informed view of the economic motivation behind the findings.
The goals of the course are: 1) to provide participants with a broad yet detailed understanding of current scientific knowledge about the economics of strategic decisions in competitive interactions, with an emphasis on the various paths towards value creation and value capture by firms, and 2) to offer insights into a what kinds of strategic analysis can be employed in Peru. The topics included are: foundations, competitive analysis, willingness-to-pay, costs, productivity, and internal organization. The short course will end with a “behind-the-scenes” analysis of recent large-scale projects on competition and value creation.
Gabriel Natividad
Dr. Gabriel Natividad is a Professor of Economics at Universidad de Piura (Lima) and a member of the Lima School of Economics. He received his PhD at UCLA. His finance-related research has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. His work also spans the fields of industrial economics and strategy, and has been published in the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategy Science. Born in Lima in 1977, he studied Economics at Universidad del Pacífico, where he won the Premio Robert Maes in 1995, 1997, 1998, and the Premio Robert Maes Especial in 1999.
March 14th – 16th, 2019
The Economics of Incentives in Public and Private Organizations
This short advanced course reviews the most relevant theoretical and applied work on incentives in private and public organizations. In first place we will review the classic moral hazard models and assess their main predictions. We will discuss the trade-off between incentives and risk assignment and the impact it has on multitasking environments. We will then move towards environments where workers’ efforts are complementary. We will differentiate among situations where this complementarity is embedded in the production process or generated by the organization managerial practices in order to evaluate the impact of incentives. This will be followed by a critical analysis on the role of behavioral biases when agents face different incentive schemes. This in turn will allow us to compare the main predictions under the neoclassical framework with the main empirical findings in settings in which peer pressure, ethnic composition or social connectedness are incorporated into the analysis.
Miguel Ángel Martínez Carrasco
Miguel A. Martinez-Carrasco is an Assistant Professor at The Universidad de los Andes School of Management in Bogotá, Colombia. He obtained his PhD in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, and his BA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His research focuses on understanding the role managerial practices and incentives have as key drivers of productivity gains in private and public organizations. His recent work explores how firms’ termination (firing) policies generate negative spillovers across workers when they handle inputs of different quality, and provides policy guidance to reduce their negative impacts. His work has been published in leading economics journals such as Experimental Economics and the Review of Economic Studies.
