Abstract: Modern economy features rich production linkages and frictional, segmented labor markets. We develop a new theoretical framework to study how they interact. Productivity shocks in relatively upstream sectors affect production in other sectors directly through the production of intermediate goods and indirectly through labor markets. Because different sectors hire similar workers, changes in labor demand in one sector affect the number of available workers in other sectors. This changes hiring costs and, therefore, output across the network. We find that, under a wide range of wage assumptions, labor market frictions amplify the response of aggregate output to sector-specific productivity shocks. We apply our model to analyze the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war during the "Great Resignation." Our model generates a modest decline in output, a pronounced increase in tightness, and relative price increases in energy-intensive sectors and their downstream sectors.
Abstract: This paper studies gender and tone in economics presentations using a replicable, scalable, machine-learning approach. We train a deep convolutional neural network to impute labels for gender, age, and tone-of-voice. We apply this to recorded presentations from the 2022 NBER Summer Institute to measure tone at a high-frequency level. We find that female economists are more likely to speak in a positive tone and less likely to be spoken to in a positive tone, even by other women. We find that male economists are significantly more likely to sound angry or stern compared to female economists.
Abstract: Ethical certification labels are increasingly popular as people become more conscious of global trade inequality. However, verifying the truthfulness of these certification labels is difficult in a deep global supply chain, and false certification exists. I propose a two-seller, one-buyer duopoly signaling game to study how prosocial preferences and information barriers contribute to false certification in the market for ethically sourced and labelled products. My results show that buyer-side prosocial preferences, such as warm glow and altruism, make room for false certification. When the buyer is driven by warm glow, false certification occurs regardless of information availability. When the buyer has no information on the seller’s prosocial type, sellers who certify truthfully are at a competitive disadvantage and the market is flooded with falsely certified products. Also, when buyers are more likely to believe in products that exhibit high certification effort, such as fancier packaging and more elaborate websites, sellers try to out-certify each other in order to out-compete each other, and certification becomes even more costly.