Reading list
Every other lecture, we will discuss two prescribed papers (i.e. that I have either allocated or approved ahead of time). Each paper will be presented (15 minutes) by a group of two students and then discussed (10 minutes). The reading task accounts for 30% of the grade= presenting a paper [group of 2] OR writing a report [alone]. Given the number of students, not everyone can present.
Students not presenting should prepare questions on one of the two papers.
For presentations, please indicate on the signing sheet your 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice, together with your names. Preferences will be aggregated using a complex algorithm.
Presentation and report content and format
Format
Presentation
The presentation should be using slides and last 15 minutes. Please submitted your presentation the Moodle of the class: one submission by group, but do not forget to indicate both names on the first slide.
Grading (=30% of total grade)
- Individual:
- Presentation skill: 5%
- Group
- Quality of the material (slides): 5%
- Summary: 5%
- Critical assessment: 10%
- Suggestion: 5%
Report
The report should be done alone. It should be 2 pages long at most and submitted to the Moodle of the class on the morning of the article is discussed in class.
Grading (=30% of total grade)
- Quality of the document: 5%
- Summary: 5%
- Critical assessment: 10%
- Suggestion: 5%
- Class participation to the discussions: 5%
Content
The presentation and report should be structured around the following dimensions:
- Give a brief summary of what the article was about:
- What are the key (research) questions the author(s) are trying to address?
- Does the paper’s result rely on theoretical or empirical hypothesis?
- What are the main results?
- Critical assessment:
- If the paper is long, you can spend more time on one aspect of the results.
- What is your opinion of the article?
- What are the strengths and the limitations of the paper that you would like to bring forward?
- Possible extension:
- Suggest possible extension(s) of the paper. For example a way to improve the methodology, to extend data limitations, to test another mechanism, to adress a complementary research question.
Article list and schedule
Articles will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Each person is expected to present twice. Please add your name to the table below (you can edit this README directly on GitHub) as soon as you have chosen.
| Lecture | Topic | Article | Presenters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 18 | Forecasting | Borup, Daniel and Schütte, Erik Christian Montes, In Search of a Job: Forecasting Employment Growth Using Google Trends (2019). Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, forthcoming | |
| Mar 18 | Forecasting | Woloszko, N. (2020), "Tracking activity in real time with Google Trends", OECD Economics Department Working Papers, No. 1634, OECD Publishing, Paris. | Zhijia Xiong, Andreas Felderer |
| Apr 1 | Development | Celiku, Bledi; Kraay, Aart. 2017. Predicting Conflict. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8075. World Bank, Washington, DC | Dominic Caviezel |
| Apr 1 | Development | Blumenstock, Joshua & Cadamuro, Gabriel & On, Robert. (2015). Predicting poverty and wealth from mobile phone metadata. Science. 350. 1073-1076. 10.1126/science.aac4420. | Verônica Natividade, David Metzger |
| Apr 22 | Inequality | Francesco Bloise & Paolo Brunori & Patrizio Piraino, (2020) "Estimating intergenerational income mobility on sub-optimal data: a machine learning approach," Working Papers 526, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality. | Riccardo Giacomello, Benjamin Landry |
| Apr 22 | Inequality | Brunori, Paolo, Hufe,Paul & Mahler,Daniel Gerszon, (2018) "The Roots of Inequality: Estimating Inequality of Opportunity from Regression Trees." Policy Research Working Paper;No. 8349. World Bank, Washington, DC. | Damian Durrer |
| May 6 | Environment & Policy | Matheus Bueno, Marica Valente, The effects of pricing waste generation: A synthetic control approach, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 96, 2019 | Caiyi Zhang, Meijun Chen |
| May 6 | Public policy | Doruk Cengiz, Arindrajit Dube, Attila S. Lindner & David Zentler-Munro, (2021) Seeing Beyond the Trees: Using Machine Learning to Estimate the Impact of Minimum Wages on Labor Market Outcomes, NBER working paper | Julian Koller, Haoxin Cai |
| May 20 | Environment | Green, Tomas & Knittel, Christopher. (2020). Distributed Effects of Climate Policy: A Machine Learning Approach. | Antoine Desbordes, Joe Boucher |
| May 20 | Well-being | Algan Y, Murtin F, Beasley E, Higa K, Senik C (2019) Well-being through the lens of the internet. PLOS ONE 14(1): e0209562. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209562 | Florian Dorner |
| May 27 | News | Bybee, Leland and Kelly, Bryan T. and Manela, Asaf and Xiu, Dacheng, The Structure of Economic News (2020). | Jiaying Wang |
| May 27 | Text | Katz DM, Bommarito MJ II, Blackman J (2017) A general approach for predicting the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States. PLoS ONE 12(4): e0174698 | Marina Ivanović, Michael Andres |
| June 3 | Open to suggestion | Student 1, Student 2 | |
| June 3 | Open to suggestion | Student 1, Student 2 | |
| June 3 | Open to suggestion | Student 1, Student 2 | |
| June 3 | Open to suggestion | Student 1, Student 2 | |
| Discrimination | Pierson, E., Simoiu, C., Overgoor, J. et al. A large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops across the United States. Nat Hum Behav 4, 736–745 (2020). | Student 1, Student 2 |