Schedule

15.00-16.00
Barbara Petrongolo “Reservation wages and the wage flexibility puzzle“

Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search and matching model. This paper provides an alternative and informative perspective on the wage flexibility puzzle, which explains why the canonical model can only match the observed cyclicality of wages if the replacement ratio is implausibly high. We show that this failure remains even if wages are only occasionally renegotiated, unless the persistence in unemployment is implausibly low. We then provide some evidence that part of the problem comes from the implicit model for the determination of reservations wages. Estimates for the UK and Germany provide evidence that reservation wages are much less cyclical than predicted even conditional on the observed level of wage cyclicality. We present some evidence that elements of perceived “fairness” or “reference points” in reservation wages may address this model failure.

16.00-16.15
Coffee break

16.15-17.15
David Cesarini “Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players”

We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of wealth on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors ‒ such as the number of lottery tickets ‒ conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large the cross-sectional gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, which include drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that correlations observed in affluent, developed countries between (i) wealth and health or (ii) parental income and children’s outcomes do not reflect a causal effect of wealth.

17.15-18.00
Drinks