Seminario de Investigación ECOBAS: Diego Puga (Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros)
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Abstract: We develop an urban growth model where human capital spillovers foster entrepreneurship and learning in heterogeneous cities. Incumbent residents limit city expansion through planning regulations so that commuting and housing costs do not outweigh productivity gains. The model builds on strong microfoundations, matches key regularities at the city and economy-wide levels, and generates novel predictions for which we provide evidence. It can be quantified relying on few parameters, provides a basis to estimate the main ones, and remains transparent regarding its mechanisms. We examine various counterfactuals to assess the effect of cities on economic growth and aggregate income quantitatively.
Seminario de Investigación ECOBAS: Brais Álvarez Pereira - UNova (Lisboa)
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Does lack of information reduce the ability of producers to find the right time to sell their products? To answer this question, we ran a two-level cluster randomized control trial among 1988 cashew producers in 290 villages in Guinea-Bissau. Treated producers received weekly messages to their mobiles during the trading season in 2020. The messages provided up-to-date market news, farmgate prices, and gave marketing advice. We found that treated producers sold their cashews more frequently relative to the producers in other experimental groups, who tend to sell their cashews in a single transaction. Treated producers failed to earn higher prices, but earned more from all sales and barters, relative to the control group mean. We explore several mechanisms to understand our results. We found no evidence suggesting that treated producers changed their buyers, the location of their sales, had more bargaining power, better record keeping, or different attitudes towards risk. Given the low cost of our intervention, market information can be a cost-effective tool to increase producers’ revenues.
Seminario de Investigación ECOBAS: Javier López Prol - Yonsei University (Corea do Sur)
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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.
