The Archive as Witness. Bucharest: space | image | voice

This practice-led research project investigates the relationship between place, memory and archives in cities transformed by radical erasure. It is focused on Bucharest in Romania, where the central historical area of the city surrounding Uranus Hill was razed in the 1980s by the political regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu to make way for a new centre of power. By working with different archival sources, I aim to bring to life the memory of the erased districts of Bucharest, to help overcome the trauma of demolition and displacement. The project addresses the role of archives and cultural memory in difficult historical contexts and in the process of coming to terms with the past. How can the archive act as a witness of the past in the context of the present? What are the different modalities of activating archival material, and of bringing it into public space and consciousness? What is the role of the voice and the body in activating the archive? The archive is seen as a possible response to erasure, witness to a historical moment and a place that no longer exists. It connects past and present, individual experiences and collective memories; it provides a place of knowledge and imagination for the future. My research is based on theories of memory and archives, particularly through the conceptual lens of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. In my practice-led work I operate at the intersection between archival and memorial art practices, moving from a passive, collected archive, to generating, transforming and performing archival material through visual and bodily engagement with images. Archival fragments (photographs, testimonies, memory drawings) are brought into the public sphere and activated either through performative actions or by being placed in temporary and site-specific installations in the city. The different works generate occasions for dialogue between generations, inserting the archival material in the collective imagination. They provide a model of participatory practice that can be applied to various conditions of displacement or erasure

Summary: Universal Basic Income

Concern over massive structural unemployment, due to technological automation and globalization, is on the rise. Universal Basic Income (UBI) has attracted attention from both sides of the aisle as one potential solution to a scenario where a large number of people are not able to earn a livable wage. In order to understand the economic implications of UBI, economists have studied previous and current examples of UBI-type programs, analyzing their impact on consumption, labor force participation, education, health, and other key metrics.https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi_bschool/1010/thumbnail.jp

The Other Side of a Merger: Labor Market Power, Wage Suppression, and Finding Recourse in Antitrust Law

Labor market concentration can worsen after a merger takes place, and this heightened concentration can negatively affect wages. The focus of antitrust analysis, however, has been on the prices of consumer products, not the wages of laborers. New research indicates that, on average, labor markets are highly concentrated, and that higher concentration is associated with significantly lower posted wages for new jobs. This brief uses existing economic tools to develop a model for evaluating labor market concentration and its effects, to determine if a merger will run the risk of anticompetitively suppressing wages, employment, and output. Regulators can use this model to apply antitrust principles to labor markets, as a basis for antitrust enforcement.https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi/1055/thumbnail.jp

Mismatch unemployment and the geography of job search

Could we significantly reduce U.S. unemployment by helping job seekers move closer to jobs? Using data from the leading employment board CareerBuilder.com, we show that, indeed, workers dislike applying to distant jobs: job seekers are 35% less likely to apply to a job 10 miles away from their ZIP code of residence. However, because job seekers are close enough to vacancies on average, this distaste for distance is fairly inconsequential: our search and matching model predicts that relocating job seekers to minimize unemployment would decrease unemployment by only 5.3%. Geographic mismatch is thus a minor driver of aggregate unemployment

Cyclical Budgetary Policy and Economic Growth: What Do We Learn From OECD Panel Data?

This paper uses yearly panel data on OECD countries to analyze the relationship between growth and the cyclicality of government debt. We develop new time-varying estimates of the cyclicality of public debt. Our main findings can be summarized as follows: (i) less procyclical public debt growth can have significantly positive effects on productivity growth, in particular when financial development is lower; (ii) public debt growth has become increasingly countercyclical in most OECD countries over the past twenty years, but this trend has been less pronounced in the EMU; (iii) less financially developed or more open economies display less countercyclical public debt growth.Economic

Analyzing Consumer’s Behaviour in Risk and Uncertainty Situations

In the paper we will generalize the Slutsky Equation in risk and uncertainty situations using the compensated and uncompensated demand and some local measures of risk aversion. We will obtain a nonlinear optimization problem of maximizing the expected utility; this problem will be solved using the Kuhn-Tucker method. We use the results to analyze the income and substitution effects of price changes on demand in risk and uncertainty conditions.Compensated demand, risk aversion, Slutsky Equation, uncertainty, uncompensated demand

Anticompetitive Mergers in Labor Markets

Mergers of competitors are conventionally challenged under the federal antitrust laws when they threaten to lessen competition in some product or service market in which the merging firms sell. In many of these cases the threat is that in concentrated markets—those with only a few sellers—the merger increases the likelihood of collusion or collusion-like behavior. The result will be that the post-merger firm will reduce the volume of sales in the affected market and prices will rise. Mergers can also injure competition in markets in which the firms purchase, however. Although that principle is widely recognized, very few litigated cases have applied the merger law to buyers. The fear is that firms who collectively have power in the market in which they buy will be able to suppress the price that they pay. Such exercises of “monopsony” power are mirror images of the monopoly power exercised in selling markets. The post-merger firm reduces the number of purchases and forces the market price down. This article concerns an even more rarefied subset, and one that has received little attention in merger law. Nevertheless, its implications are staggering. Some mergers may be unlawful because they injure competition in the labor market by enabling the post-merger firm anticompetitively to suppress wages or salaries. To the best of our knowledge no court has ever condemned a merger because of its anticompetitive effects in labor markets

Racial Inequality in the U.S. Unemployment Insurance System

The article of record as published may be found at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4165324The U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) system operates as a federal-state partnership, where states have considerable autonomy to decide on specific UI rules. This has allowed for systematically stricter rules in states with a larger Black population. We study how these differences in state rules create a gap in the unemployment insurance that Black and White unemployed workers receive. Using administrative data from random audits on UI claims in all states, we first document a large racial gap in the UI that unemployed workers receive after filing a new claim. Black claimants receive an 18% lower replacement rate (i.e., benefits relative to prior wage, including denials) than White claimants. In principle, the replacement rate of each claimant mechanically depends on the rules prevailing in her state and on her work history (e.g., the earnings before job loss and the reason for separation from prior employer). Since we observe claimants' UI-relevant work history and state, we are in a unique position to identify the role of each factor. After accounting for Black-White differences in work history, differences in rules across states create an 8% Black-White gap in replacement rate (i.e., slightly less than half of the overall gap). Using a standard welfare calculation, we show that states with the largest shares of Black workers would gain the most from having more generous UI rules. Altogether, our results highlight that disparate state rules in the UI institution create racial inequality without maximizing overall welfare.This work was funded by a Washington State University Faculty Seed grant awarded to CJD and a Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program grant W81XWH-16-1- 0319 awarded to Hans Van Dongen.This work was funded by a Washington State University Faculty Seed grant awarded to CJD and a Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program grant W81XWH-16-1- 0319 awarded to Hans Van Dongen

The economics of unfair dismissal in the United Kingdom, and other topics in public policy.

Workers and firms face substantial uncertainties about their prospects in the labor and product markets. The first three chapters of this thesis analyze how firing costs affect firms' behavior and workers' outcomes in the face of uncertainty about match quality and changing economic conditions. In the final chapter, I show how macroeconomic policy can reduce the risks associated with changing economic conditions. First, I examine a 1999 UK reform that lowered from two years to one year the tenure necessary for a worker to be able to sue their employer for unfair dismissal. After the reform, we observe a significant decrease in the firing hazard for workers with zero to two years tenure relative to the control group, and no overall increase in unemployment. Using a simple model based on the assumption that firms learn about match quality over time, I show that the empirical results are consistent with increased match quality after the reform. Second, I generalize the simple model developed in the first chapter. In particular, I allow for match quality to change over time. The model is useful to understand and predict how firing costs and various forms of uncertainty affect the separation hazard. Thirdly, I analyze the implementation of unfair dismissal legislation by judges in the UK. Judges seem to compromise between workers' and firms' interests. If workers are unemployed, judges decide more often in their favour when unemployment rates are higher. The reverse is true when workers have found a new job. Finally, in work co-authored with Philippe Aghion, we examine whether the government borrowing and spending more in recessions can increase growth by relaxing economic agents' credit constraints. Using a panel data of OECD countries, we find that indeed countercyclical public debt policy is more growth enhancing when private credit is less abundant

Technology and Financial Structure: Are Innovative Firms Different?

We use data on publicly traded U.K. firms to investigate whether financing choices differ systematically with R&D intensity. As well as looking at a balance sheet measure of the debt/assets ratio, we also consider the probability of raising finance by issuing new equity, and the shares of bank debt and secured debt in total debt. We find a nonlinear relationship with the debt/assets ratio: firms that report positive but low R&D use more debt finance than firms that report no R&D, but the use of debt finance falls with R&D intensity among those firms that report R&D. We find a simpler relationship with the probability of issuing new equity: Firms that report R&D are more likely to raise funds by issuing shares than firms that report no R&D, and this probability increases with R&D intensity. The shares of bank debt and secured debt in total debt are both lower for firms that report R&D compared to those that do not, and tend to fall as R&D intensity rises. We discuss possible explanations for these patterns.Economic