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18:30 | Economics Discovery Hub
First Meeting iekonomie.cz - Discussion about Markets and Taxi Service Regulations
Filip Matějka (CERGE-EI) and Ondřej Krátký (cofounder Liftago)
This event is in Czech, find out more on our Czech website.
15:00 | Micro Theory Research Seminar
Helios Herrera, Ph.D. (U. of Warwick) “The Marginal Voter’s Curse”
The University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Authors: Helios Herrera, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, and Joseph C. McMurray
Abstract: Recent empirical evidence suggests that votes influence policy outcomes by contributing to electoral margins, even away from the 50% threshold. If the impact of a vote is frequent and small, rather than rare and huge, however, then the swing voter’s curse, useful for explaining patterns of voter participation, should not arise. Nevertheless, we show in this paper that this opposite voting calculus generates a new reason for abstention, to avoid the marginal voter’s curse of nudging the policy outcome in the wrong direction. Surprisingly, the marginal voter’s curse turns out to be stronger than the swing voter’s curse. In fact, in a model with both incentives, marginal considerations come to completely dominate pivotal considerations as the electorate grows large, revealing that predictions based on the standard voting calculus are knife-edge.
JEL classiffication: C72, D70
Keywords: Turnout, Information aggregation, Underdog effect
Full Text: “The Marginal Voter’s Curse”
16:30 | Macro Research Seminar
Kamila Sommer, Ph.D. (Fed Board) “Student Loans and Homeownership”
Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors, USA
Authors: Alvaro Mezza, Daniel Ringo, Shane Sherlund, and Kamila Sommer
Abstract: We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the student's home state. A 10 percent increase in student loan debt causes a 1 to 2 percentage point drop in the homeownership rate for student loan borrowers during the first five years after exiting school. Validity tests suggest that the results are not confounded by local economic conditions or non-random selection into the estimation sample.
JEL Classification: D14, I22, R21
Full Text: “Student Loans and Homeownership”
