Upcoming departmental seminars are listed below
All seminars will take place in Room 250A, Agricultural Administration Building (2120 Fyffe Rd.) from 10:30am-12:00pm unless otherwise noted. Light refreshments will be served from 10:00-10:30 in the reception area outside of room 250A. We look forward to seeing you!
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Upcoming seminars:
October 20: Dr. Khushbu Mishra (Stetson University)
"Mother’s education and child marriage among women – evidence from India"
Abstract:
Child marriage is still practiced in many cultures and it primarily affects girls. In India, child marriage is a significant obstacle to the country's social and economic growth as well as a major threat to various life outcomes of women, including their health. The practice of child marriage is complex and deeply rooted in patriarchy, religious traditions, social practices, and economic factors. Mothers play an important role in their children’s development and their life outcomes including marital outcomes. However, there is a lack of research in this area. In this regard, we explore one of these characteristics of mothers, particularly, mother’s education, and its impact on their daughter’s marriage age. We hypothesize that daughters of mothers with higher education are less likely to experience child marriage. We utilize the India Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II) which is a nationally representative survey, conducted in 2011-2012. We define child marriage as women who were married before the legal age of 18, following the national legal definition. We estimate the effect of mother’s education on child marriage using three different approaches: linear probability model, instrumental variable approach, and coarsened exact matching. We find a strong evidence of reduced child marriage with increased mother’s education. These findings imply that mother’s education is instrumental in reducing the incidence of child marriage in India. This has further implications on the lifelong economic and social wellbeing of these girls.
October 27: Dr. Jared Hutchins (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
"New Product Characteristics and Agricultural Input Markets"
Abstract:
I use a hedonic model to estimate the impact of introducing new product characteristics into the dairy cattle genetics market in the United States. To guide producers toward more sustainable cattle, both governments and breed associations suggest releasing new traits on environmental sustainability and incorporating them into existing selection indices. Using the prices and characteristics of over 24,000 dairy bulls sold between 2000 and 2010, I estimate the impact of introducing new health traits on the prices of dairy bulls to understand how dairy producers adopt new genetic traits. Despite releasing several health traits during this period, dairy farmers only valued health traits a little more at the end of the period than they did at the beginning. In particular, some health traits did not factor positively into the price until three to four years after their introduction. I also find that dairy farmers appear to value physical traits higher than the USDA recommends, especially body size, which may impede the adoption of new traits aimed at environmental sustainability in the future.
November 3: Dr. Daniel Karney (Ohio University)
"A Model of the Model: Unpacking CGE Results on Carbon Leakage from Climate Policy"
Abstract:
Computational general equilibrium (CGE) models are often used to evaluate a major tax reform, trade restriction, or environmental policy. The details in such models are useful to capture the many complexities of such problems but can make results difficult to interpret. Some readers may view the CGE model as a “black box” that uses a set of input parameters in unknown ways to generate predictions. Analytical general equilibrium (AGE) models may provide better intuition and interpretation, but they cannot capture relevant complexities. Here, we propose a method to get the best from both: use CGE models for detailed predictions and AGE models to understand the operation of the CGE model – a model of the model. We apply this idea to climate policy. An emission restriction is likely to cover only some regions and sectors, so a concern is leakage – the increase in emissions elsewhere. We build a series of AGE models to identify key economic determinants of leakage, and we label seven different effects within that one outcome. We then use parameters from three existing CGE models in our AGE formulas to calculate the signs and magnitudes of the seven effects in each CGE model. The identified “fuel price effect” is the largest positive effect on leakage, while the other six effects in combination have a significant net negative effect on leakage.
December 1: Dr. Donghyuk Kim (Iowa State University)
"Quantifying the Welfare Impact of State Competition for Firms: The Case of Craft Brewers"
Abstract:
We study the welfare impact of state competition for firms with incentives. A simple model of state competition and firm location choice enables welfare calculation with the first-order condition for incentives and firm profit function parameters. In an application to the craft brewing industry, we estimate the profit function by instrumenting endogenous incentives with a proxy for past lobbying activities of brewers in competing states. We find that state competition mostly transfers tax dollars to firms without changing their geography. This is because firm profits vary more than state values, even though states with lower firm profits value firms more.