POID research seminars take place on the first Monday of every month, 1-2pm GMT, Room 32L 2.04. In each session, our researchers and academics present and discuss work in progress in an informal setting.
Please note that these seminars are open to staff and research students from LSE and non-LSE (and by invitation) only.
Lent Term 2023
24 April 2023 - Remote Work across Jobs, Companies, and Space
Speaker: Peter Lambert, LSE (joint work with Nick Bloom, Steven J. Davis, Stephen Hansen, Raffaella Sadun and Bledi Taska)
Location: LSE (hybrid)
16 May 2023 - Estimating production functions with expectations data
Speaker: Agnes Norris-Keiller, POID (joint work with Aureo de Paula and John Van Reenen)
Location: LSE (hybrid)
A flourishing recent literature has focused on consistent estimation of production function parameters using firm-level panel data. Increasingly, researchers have access to observable measures of firms' expectations of future conditions, and we propose an innovative new method for production function estimation exploiting such information. We show that this enables us to relax assumptions regarding input demand policies required by standard approaches, such as those in the Olley and Pakes (1996) tradition. We implement our proposed estimation methodology on data from the UK and compare it to many alternative estimators. These empirical exercises, as well as Monte Carlo simulations, show non-trivial differences in the elasticities of output with respect to factor inputs and a more dispersed productivity distribution in comparison to the alternative estimation methods. We show that standard estimators work particularly poorly (and our method works particularly well) when the environment changes rapidly, and there are substantial idiosyncratic differences between a firm's current and expected levels of output and inputs. This suggests a role for our estimator during periods of considerable uncertainty, such as the COVID-19 Pandemic.
5 June 2023 - Collusion and Innovation: The Case of LCD Cartel, 2001-2006
Speaker: Mitsuru Igami, Yale University
Location: LSE (hybrid)
Collusion is difficult in innovative industries because the prospect of investments to achieve superior competitiveness weakens the incentive to cooperate with competitors. Nevertheless, high-profile cartel cases emerged in the liquid crystal display (LCD) panel industry in 2001-2006. We propose a tractable dynamic-oligopoly model of collusion with endogenous innovation to study the interactions between incentives to collude and innovate in this cartel. Our preliminary estimates suggest: (i) the LCD cartel achieved monopoly price levels in the first few years; (ii) the incentive to innovate would have been higher but for the cartel.
3 July 2023 - TBC
Speaker: Gaia Dossi, LSE
Location: LSE (hybrid)