MSCA Fellowships: Review of applications - Elena Shakina
ABSTRACT:
Worker-job match as one of the critical conditions of individual productivity and overall firm performance is far from being comprehensively studied. The vast majority of research endeavors fall into two categories: (1) on the macrolevel – structural unemployment conditioned by a temporary mismatch between qualifications of jobseekers and employers’ demand and (2) on microlevel – a separation propensity or insufficient productivity of a particular worker due to its low fit to position requirements or management styles. A seminal paper by Jovanovic (1979) suggests a solid theoretical grounding of job match and associated turnover phenomena. This paper essentially shifted the frontier and was followed by numerous empirical tests like those by Fredriksson et al. (2018); Kiyotaki & Lagos (2007); Sicilian (1995) demonstrating the economic antecedents and consequences of employee quits in light of so-called “permanent separations” and incomplete information. Along with the literature on economic dimensions of job-matching, organizational psychology has been developing theories on the behavioral fit between worker and management styles as well as perceiver expectations and motivation (McGregor, 2006). Originating from the work by Merton (1948), this theory suggests that both positive and negative perceiver expectations determine their performance. The behavioral perspective of job matching refers to self-fulfilling prophecies (so-called "Pygmalion" and" Golem" effects), psychological pressures, manifold discriminations, including gender gap. This continuum of behavioral responses draws up a substantive dimension of job match and mismatch.
In this research project, we propose a comprehensive examination based on theoretical advancements, several empirical tests, and practical implications of job matching mechanisms in both dimensions. We are currently witnessing a dramatic transformation of the job market which translates into substantially shifting roles of agents – jobseekers, workers, employers, mediators, and regulators. The development of online job boards, open peer-review screening platforms, and professional social networks significantly reduce information asymmetry and transaction costs and potentiate market efficiency. Though it leads to higher worker mobility and knowledge spillovers. That ultimately requires the development of a fundamentally new institutional environment.
The combination of economic and behavioral dimensions of job matching turns to the higher relevance due to the following reasons:
(1) Higher job market efficiency evidently mitigates the dominance of purely economic factors and reinforces behavioral factors to predict and interpret job matching parameters
(2) New wage-setting mechanisms occur as a response to structural shifts in the job market making specific skills and individual traits of jobseekers and their fit to employer identity significant drivers of job matching
(3) Job matching becomes more industry- and firm-specific and allows elaborating ad hoc tools to account for these distinctions and making use of vast unstructured data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) for data processing and prescriptive analytics.
The objectives of the project are accordingly developed to respond to these challenges:
(1) to measure economic consequences of job match and mismatch and to investigate behavior factors (incl, self-fulfilling prophecies, psychological pressures, discriminative biases) on individual and firm performance
(2) to explore alternative wage-setting mechanisms based on data published on major job boards:
(2.1) predicting the value of the domain and non-domain skills from the demand and supply side,
(2.2) discovering and interpreting behavior factors of gaps and market frictions
(3) to examine and run comparative analytics for various contexts of job markets with presumably specific conditions and to suggest effective AI tools for better job matching outcomes
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Sebastián Cea Echenique (University of Los Andes)
Abstract:
In a cap and trade model with an investment in a 2-stage electricity generation capacity with uncertainty, we include limited attention by the social planner. The inclusion of this type of configurations is justified by the fact that setting a precise cap is costly. In our model we define two types of planner rationalities: one oriented to the profits from the sale of rights and the other focused on social welfare. We compute the model for the Chilean case contrasting with the results of Amigo et alii (2021) and carbon neutrality compliance based on the Paris agreement. On the one hand, the results of the Profit oriented model show a significant impact of cap accuracy on the optimal placement of auctioned rights. Simultaneously, this configuration delivers the lowest electricity prices among all models. On the other hand, the Welfare oriented configuration issues the least amount of permits for high carbon budgets.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Mar Reguant - Northwestern University & Barcelona School of Economics
We study the distributional impacts of real-time pricing (RTP) in the Spanish electricity market, which rolled out RTP as the default tariff for a large share of residential customers. We complement aggregate patterns of distributional effects with a method to infer individual households’ income using zip-code income distributions. We identify three channels for the distributional impacts of RTP: consumption patterns, appliance ownership, and location. The first channel makes the switch from monthly to hourly prices progressive since high-income households consume disproportionately more at peak times when real-time prices are higher. However, the other two channels make the switch from annual to monthly prices regressive: low-income households, who tend to have more electric heating, benefit from the price insurance provided by time-invariant prices during winter, when prices tend to be higher and more volatile. Given that prices differences are greater across months than within months, the regressive effect dominated. Using counterfactual experiments, we find that RTP makes low-income households particularly vulnerable to adverse weather shocks during winter. In the future, the wider adoption of enabling technologies (including storage and demand response devices) by the high-income groups might worsen the distributional impacts of RTP.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Francisco Gómez-Martínez - Norwegian Business School
Existing evidence demonstrates that the degree of social homogeneity in a society correlates with various economic indicators. Using experimental techniques, we establish the causal impact of social proximity on socially responsible behavior in markets and its implications for economic welfare.
We develop an experimental market where low-cost production generates a negative externality to a third party, while high-cost production eliminates the externality. We compare behavior in groups
varying whether the third party shares a common identity with buyers and sellers (in-group condition) or not (out-group condition). Our findings indicate that socially responsible behavior is generally robust
across our treatments. However, reducing social heterogeneities improves economic welfare indicators: market prices are significantly higher and the number of offers rejected by the buyers becomes significantly lower. This leads to a striking reduction of economic inequality and improvement of market efficiency. Overall, our experiment shows that the social structure of market environments matters a great deal and has significant implications for the design of institutions.
ECOBAS Research Seminar: Brais Álvarez Pereira - UNova (Lisbon)
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ECOBAS Research Seminar: Javier López Prol - Yonsei University (South Korea)
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ABSTRACT: Opposite to traditional dispatchable technologies, wind and solar have a variable generation pattern. Due to the particular characteristics of electricity markets, this variability poses challenges to their integration, such as the cannibalization effect (decline of their market value as penetration increases), and curtailment. I will review these problems by presenting their quantification for California, and discuss some of the potential solutions, focusing on the potential benefits of spatial integration and deployment coordination of renewable resources across countries.
