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We are pleased to invite you to the next Baltic Economic Association Online Research Seminars and are delighted to welcome Francesco Zanetti (University of Oxford). Francesco Zanetti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford and the David Richards Fellow of Wadham College. He holds a PhD in Economics from Boston College, and a PhD in Economic Theory and Institutions from the University of Bologna. Before joining Oxford in September 2012, he spent eight years in the Bank of England, first as an Economist, Senior Economist and Advisor in the Monetary Analysis Section. He is a visiting scholar at the Bank of International Settlements, the Bank of England and provided technical support and training to more than forty central banks around the world. He held visiting teaching positions at the London School of Economics, London Business School, and the joint IMF Vienna Institute. His research interests are in the fields of Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics and Applied Econometrics. Among other topics, he has worked on labor market dynamics and the effect of structural reforms, the propagation of news shocks, the state dependence of fiscal multipliers, and the impact of unconventional policies. He is a recipient of the British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for the academic year 2020-2021. His past research was supported by the British Academy, Leverhulme Foundation, the Australian Research Cancil, the Zengin Foundation, and the John Fell Fund. He serves as an associate editor for the Economic Journal, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Oxford Economic Papers, as a co-editor for Macroeconomic Dynamics, and as a member of the editorial board for Central Bank Review. His research has appeared in leading academic journals and policy forums.

More about the speaker: https://users.ox.ac.uk/~wadh4073/

Speaker: Francesco Zanetti (University of Oxford)

Title: State Dependence of Fiscal Multipliers: The Source of Fluctuations Matters (with Mishel Ghassibe)

Paper available here.

Abstract:

We develop a general theory of state-dependent fiscal multipliers in a framework featuring interaction between two empirically relevant goods market frictions: idle productive capacity and unsatisfied demand. Our key novel finding is that the source of economic fluctuations determines the cyclicality of fiscal multipliers. Policies that stimulate aggregate demand, such as government spending and consumption tax cuts, have multipliers that are large in demand- driven recessions, but small and possibly negative in supply-driven downturns. On the other hand, policies that boost aggregate supply, such as cuts in taxes on labor income and firms’ payroll and sales, are ineffective in demand- driven recessions, but powerful if the downturn is driven by supply factors. Spending austerity, implemented by a reduction in government consumption, can be the policy with the largest multiplier in severe supply-side recessions and demand-driven booms, provided elasticities of labor demand and supply are sufficiently low. We obtain model- free empirical support for our theoretical predictions by using a novel econometric specification that allows us to estimate spending and tax cut multipliers in recessionary and expansionary episodes, conditional on those being either demand- or supply-driven.

Date: Thursday, November 25

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 880 0197 9487
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The Annual Lithuanian Conference on Economic Research, hosted by the Bank of Lithuania and Vilnius University, will take place on 28 December 2021. Following the success of the 2020 edition, the conference will be held online. This one day conference takes place every year right after Christmas and gives a forum for Lithuanian Economists and their friends to meet each other.

More information: https://meeting2021.econ.lt

Important dates:

• October 25: open submissions
• November 25: deadline for submissions
• December 08: decisions on submissions
• December 27: registration deadline for external participants
• December 28: conference

Organizers:

Audinga Baltrūnaitė (Bank of Italy), Simas Kučinskas (Humboldt University of Berlin), Povilas Lastauskas (Bank of Lithuania), Aurelija Proškutė (Bank of Lithuania), Linas Tarasonis (Vilnius University), Alminas Žaldokas (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminars and are delighted to welcome Yuri Tserlukevich (Arizona State University). Yuri Tserlukevich is a financial economist at Arizona State University. Yuri’s research interests are in dynamic models of firm behaviour, real options, asset pricing implications of investment options, capital structure, debt structure, employee compensation. He also taught and conducted research at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Bocconi University in Milan, New Economic School in Moscow, and WU university in Vienna. Beginning 2014 he is a member of the Advisory Board of the National Bank of the Republic of Belarus, the Advisory Board member for the Ministry of Tax and Duties, and is an economic policy consultant for the office of the President of Belarus. He obtained his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley.

More about the speaker: https://wpcarey.asu.edu/people/profile/1451080

Speaker: Yuri Tserlukevich (Arizona State University)

Title: Risk Management, Agency Cost, and Lending Covenants (with Ilona Babenko and Hendrik Bessembinder)

Abstract:

We document the importance of loan covenants to observed hedging outcomes, by studying lending agreements and derivative positions of U.S. oil and gas producers. The emergence of fracking technology was accompanied by sharp increases in capital spending and borrowing. The contracts involved often include covenants specifying hedging policies, and more frequently for firms with higher expected costs of default. Firms with contractual hedging commitments have lower borrowing costs and perform better during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after controlling for hedging levels. The results imply that understanding firm’s hedging outcomes requires consideration of binding lending covenants employed to mitigate agency conflicts.

Date: Thursday, October 28

Time: 17:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 824 6408 4383
Passcode: 837993

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminars and are delighted to welcome Jura Liaukonyte (Cornell University). Professor Liaukonyte’s research interests lie at the intersection of applied microeconomics, industrial organization, and quantitative marketing. Her current investigations seek to uncover actionable insights from Big Data, quantify advertising impact on consumer choice (particularly advertising content), understand the impact of food labels, and incorporate insights from behavioral economics into traditional choice models. She holds a PhD from the  University of Virginia, and published in journals such as Management Science, American Journal of Agricultural Economics and International Journal of Industrial Organization among others. 

More about the speaker: https://dyson.cornell.edu/faculty-research/faculty/jl2545/

Speaker: Jura Liaukonyte (Cornell University)

Title: Browsing the Aisles or Browsing the App? How Online Grocery Shopping is Changing What We Buy (with Sai Chintala and Nathan Yang)

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of online grocery retail channels on the variety and diversity of items purchased during regular shopping trips. We leverage unique big data that captures both offline (i.e., purchases made at brick-and-mortar grocery outlet) and online (i.e., purchases made via the Instacart platform) shopping behavior for the same household and the same retailer. For comparability of within-household offline and online shopping trips, we use machine learning techniques to identify characteristic shopping trips. Our empirical analysis reveals that shopping cart diversity is noticeably lower for online shopping trips when online trips are considered to be a replacement of offline shopping trips (as opposed to fill-in or stockpiling online trips). We also find that online shopping baskets typically have significantly fewer fruits and vegetables, which are not picked up via alternative shopping channels by most households. To better understand the drivers behind our results, we find that online trips are more similar to each other than offline trips, potentially suggesting a recommendation system design or past-orders-shortcut mechanism behind our results. Finally, we explore the broader health implications of online shopping by assessing its impact on the types of foods purchased.

Date: Thursday, September 30

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

Moderator: Linas Tarasonis

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Meeting ID: 894 4331 9742
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Bank of Lithuania and its Center for Excellence in Finance and Economic Research (CEFER) are pleased to announce its 2^nd Invited Lecture Series given by Prof. Sir Richard Blundell, University College London, and Institute for Fiscal Studies. The two days lecture will be followed by a separate one-day conference. The lecture’s topic is “Micro-econometrics and Policy Analysis”. The lecture is intended for early stage researchers, both at policy institutions and universities, and PhD students at an advanced level. A short description of topics is provided below.

Please note that participation in lecture and conference are mutually exclusive. We invite submission of papers which are applied in nature, have practical/policy implications, and touch on following broad topics:

• Tax policy, labor earnings and inequality
• Human capital investments
• Inequality over lifecycle and across gender

We are also interested in theoretical advances in the very broad field of micro-econometrics and strongly encourage submissions in this field.

Details of the lecture and the conference are as follows:

• Duration of lecture: 12 hours
• Lecture dates: October 13 – 14, 2021
• Conference date: October 15, 2021

Submissions: Please send your submissions by July 1, 2021 to Ms. Laima Štulaitė (LStulaite@lb.lt).

• If you are applying for lectures, please attach your CV.
• If you are applying for the conference, please attach your paper.
• If you want to attend both, please attach both CV and paper, and mention it clearly in your email.

Acceptance decisions will be sent by July 15, 2021.

Participation fee: The participation fee is EUR 200 (incl. VAT)

Event location: The event will be at the premises of Bank of Lithuania, situated in the beautiful old town of Vilnius, capital of Lithuania. More information here: https://www.govilnius.lt/visit-vilnius

Coronavirus contingency: The event dates were set under the presumption that by the end of 2021, Europe will be (mostly) out of this pandemic. However, as the vaccine rollout is slow, we are going to work simultaneously on three contingency plans:

1. In-person event: If the situation improves in summer then only in-person event will be organized.
2. Partial in-person event: The improvement in pandemic situation is heterogeneous across countries. Hence, we will hold in-person event for participants who can travel and arrange online sessions for participants who can’t.
3.  Full online event: If the situation is quite bad, we will resort to full online event.

Topics for the lecture:

• Part I. Methods: 

The first part of this course will discuss six distinct, but related, approaches to microeconomic policy evaluation:

1. social experiment methods,
2. natural experiments,
3. matching methods,
4. instrumental variable methods,
5. discontinuity design methods,
6. control function methods.

• Part II: Dynamic models and methods

The second part of the course will examine recent developments for panel data

1. Dynamic panel data methods.
2. Dynamic discrete choices.

• Part III: Applications:

The third part of the course will examine several specific applications under two broad areas:

1. Tax policy and labor earnings.
2. Education policy and human capital investments.

 Organizers

Established in 2015 by the Bank of Lithuania, CEFER is the main research hub in economics and finance in Lithuania. CEFER is part of a network of National Economic Research Organizations along with the leading research institutes across the globe.  CEFER is also pivotal in organizing major conferences (Baltic economic conference, joint conferences with CEBRA/CEPR and Bank of Poland, among others), co-establishing Baltic economic association, developing joint Ph.D. courses and administering Bank of Lithuania research awards named after Vladas Jurgutis. CEFER runs regular research seminars and workshops. Learn more at https://www.lb.lt/en/of-research

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminar and are delighted to welcome Janis Umblijs (Institute for Social Research, Norway). Janis is a labour economist whose research interests include the integration of migrants, the effect of technological change on the labour market and the role of housing on individual welfare. Janis has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. He has worked on projects that look at topics such as, labour market outcomes of refugees, discrimination against the children of migrants, and how housing affects education outcomes. Before Janis started at ISF, he was a Senior Economist at the consultancy Oslo Economics where he worked on labour market evaluation projects for the Norwegian labour ministry, Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation and the Norwegian Labour and Welfare administration.

More about the speaker: https://www.samfunnsforskning.no/english/people/res/janisu/

Speaker: Janis Umblijs (Institute for Social Research, Norway)

Title: How Robots Change Within-Firm Wage Inequality (with Erling Barth, Marianne Røed and Pål Schøne)

Abstract:

Date: Thursday, May 20

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 833 4587 4064
Passcode: 437578

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminar and are delighted to welcome Matthias Weber (University of St. Gallen). Matthias Weber (PhD University of Amsterdam) works as assistant professor at the University of St. Gallen, where he is also the executive director of the PhD Program in Finance. His research interests lie in the intersection of behavioral economics with financial markets, public finance, and macroeconomics. He has published in several peer-reviewed academic journals, including in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Economic Journal.

More about the speaker: www.weber-matthias.eu.

Speaker: Matthias Weber (University of St. Gallen)

Title: Intertemporal Prospect Theory (with Immanuel Lampe)

Abstract:

Date: Thursday, April 29

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 865 6649 0318
Passcode: 256181

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminars and are pleased to welcome Eeva Mauring (University of Bergen and CEPR).  Eeva is Associate Professor at the University of Bergen and a CEPR Research Fellow. Her research focuses on  microeconomic theory, industrial organisation and information economics.  She published her work in journals such as the Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Eeva holds a Ph.D. in Economic from the University College London. Before joining the University of Bergen, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna.

More about the speaker:

https://sites.google.com/site/eevamauring/home?authuser=0

Speaker: Eeva Mauring (University of Bergen)

Title: Search and Price Discrimination Online

Abstract: I study limited price discrimination based on search costs.“Shoppers” have a zero and “nonshoppers” a positive search cost. A consumer faces a nondiscriminatory “common” price with some probability, or a discriminatory price. In equilibrium, firms mix over the common and the shoppers’ discriminatory prices, but set a singleton nonshoppers’ discriminatory price. Less likely price discrimination mostly benefits consumers. An individual firm’s profit can increase in the number of firms. These results have important implications for regulations that limit price discrimination via reduced tracking (e.g., EU’s GDPR, California’s CCPA) and for evaluating competition online based on the number of firms.

Date: Thursday, March  25

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 829 8133 6801
Passcode: 500212

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminars and are pleased to welcome Dainis Zegners (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University). Dainis is Assistant Professor at the Department of Technology and Operations Management at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University. Dainis’s research focuses on how firms manage information asymmetries on digital platforms and online marketplaces.  He examines this question in the context of media markets such as the e-book market and online news using both economic modelling and empirical techniques such as machine learning and text mining. Dainis holds a Ph.D. and in Management from LMU Munich and a Diploma (equivalent to M.Sc.) in Economics from the University of Bonn. Before joining the Rotterdam School of Management, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Cologne.

More about the speaker: https://sites.google.com/view/dainiszegners/welcome

Speaker: Dainis Zegners (Erasmus University)

Title: Cognitive Performance in the Home Office – Evidence from Professional Chess (with Steffen Künn and Christian Seel)

Abstract: During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, traditional (offline) chess tournaments were prohibited and instead held online. We exploit this as a unique setting to assess the impact of moving offline tasks online on the cognitive performance of individuals. We use the Artificial Intelligence embodied in a powerful chess engine to assess the quality of chess moves and associated errors. Using within-player comparisons, we find a statistically and economically significant decrease in performance when competing online compared to competing offline. Our results suggest that teleworking might have adverse effects on workers performing cognitive tasks.

Date: Thursday, February 25

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 825 2375 9398
Passcode: 063832

We are pleased to invite you to the next BEA’s Online Research Seminars and are pleased to welcome Agne Kajackaite (WZB Berlin Social Science Center). Dr. Agne Kajackaite is a behavioral economist and head of research group”Ethics and Behavioral Economics” at the Berlin Social Science Center. She has received her PhD from the University of Cologne and before joining the Berlin Social Center in 2017 she was a PostDoc at the University of
Southern California in Los Angeles. In her research she aims to understand
unethical behavior, particularly lying behavior, by conducting economic
lab experiments. Further topics in her research are cognitive performance,
gender, incentives, risk preferences, and ignorance. She has published papers in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, PLOS ONE and Games and Economic Behavior.

More about the speaker: https://sites.google.com/site/agnekajackaite/home?authuser=0 

Speaker: Agne Kajackaite (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)

Title: Lying for Image

Abstract: The extensive literature on lying in economics has focused nearly
exclusively on lying for monetary rewards. However, in everyday
interactions, lying to gain a social image benefit – to appear to be
better than one is – is ubiquitous, and perhaps even more common than
lying to gain a material advantage. In this paper, we introduce three
novel lab and online experiments to study lying for social image. We show
that social image is a strong driver of lying behavior. In addition, we
show that people are not willing to lie for money, if the lie could hurt
their social image. In particular, the majority of Democrats would rather
leave the experiment empty-handed than state that they preferred Trump
over Obama.

Date: Thursday, January 21

Time: 16:00 Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn

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Meeting ID: 896 1695 5914
Passcode: 715079