现代产业经济学系列讲座第258-259期

现代产业经济学系列讲座第258期

时间：2023年12月27日（周三）15:30-17:00

地点：思源楼326室

题目：Assessing Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects

主讲人：Jianfei Cao, Assistant Professor of Economics, Northeastern University

主持人：俞学文青年副研究员

摘要：

Treatment effect heterogeneity is of major interest in economics, but its assessment is often hindered by the fundamental lack of identification of the individual treatment effects. For example, we may want to assess the effect of insurance on the health of otherwise unhealthy individuals, but it is infeasible to insure only the unhealthy, and thus the causal effects for those are not identified. Or, we may be interested in the shares of winners from a minimum wage increase, while without observing the counterfactual, the winners are not identified. Such heterogeneity is often assessed by quantile treatment effects, which do not come with clear interpretation and the takeaway can sometimes be equivocal. We show that, with the quantiles of the treated and control outcomes, the ranges of these quantities are identified and can be informative even when the average treatment effects are not significant. Two applications illustrate how these ranges can inform us about heterogeneity of the treatment effects.

个人简介：

Jianfei Cao is an assistant Professor of Economics at Northeastern University. Prior to this, he studied at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for his PhD in Econometrics and Statistics. He studies applied and theoretical econometrics. His research has chiefly been in the areas of modern statistical methods in economic applications, causal inference in comparative case studies, and weak identification. His most recent research has studied the properties of clustering structures learned from the data, in problems involving estimation and inference of causal effects.

现代产业经济学系列讲座第259期

时间：2023年12月29日（周五）13:30-14:30

地点：思源楼326室

题目：Proportional vs. Unit Subsidies: Evidence from on Alibaba’s Digital Food Delivery Platform

主讲人：周晓岚教授

主持人：李玲芳教授

摘要：

Using granular geospatial data from Alibaba’s digital food delivery platform in China, we compare the effectiveness of proportional subsidies with unit subsidies on the cooked food sector only or the uncooked food sector only or both sectors. We build a structural model to analyze the competition between shops of cooked food and uncooked food sectors on a platform, incorporating shop price competition, intertemporal demand spillover effects and cross-group network effects (CNEs). We find that the intertemporal demand spillover effects are at both shop and platform levels. The cooked food sector and the uncooked food sector are static substitutes but dynamic complements to each other. On the extensive margin, a unit subsidy on the uncooked food sector is most efficient for a platform to expand its user base. On the intensive margin, an increase in proportional pricing or commission rate on the cooked food sector only is most efficient for a platform to boost the total net gross merchandise volume (GMV). Finally, a unit subsidy on the uncooked food sector only is most efficient for a social-concerned platform.

简介:

周晓岚，山东大学经济学院教授。她获得耶鲁大学经济学博士学位、武汉大学数理经济与数学双学位。她的主要研究领域是产业组织经济学、微观经济学、国际贸易。她的研究成果发表于经济学的顶级期刊The Rand Journal of Economics，International Economic Review等。