Research Seminars  2026

Tuesday, usually 4:15 pm - 5:30 pm, room E230.

The research seminar is organized by Prof. Christelle Dumas and Prof. Mark Schelker.

How to add the ecopol research calendar to your calendar:

• In Outlook: go to Calendar, then "Open calendar" (in Home), select "From Internet" and copy paste the link.
• In Google Agenda: click on the small arrow right to "Autres Calendriers/Other calendars", select "Ajouter par URL/Add by URL" and copy paste the following link. 

• February

  February 24,
  Presenter: Igor Letina, University of Bern
  Title: "Market-Bound Research Contests"
  Abstract: In many instances, the social value of an innovation is much larger than the profits that a firm can obtain by selling the innovation on the market. When this is the case, a research contest can help align incentives and increase welfare. This paper examines the optimal design of research contests when the objective of the contest designer is the discovery and broad adoption of socially valuable innovations. We show that the contest designer benefits from conditioning the size of the prize on the market performance of the winner. The optimal contest features two quantity cutoffs and two prize levels. The low prize is awarded if the winner sells a quantity greater than the first cutoff while the high prize is awarded if the winner sells a quantity greater than the second cutoff.

• March

  March 10,
  Presenter: Vincent Somville, NHH Norwegian School of Economics
  Title: "On the doorstep of adulthood: Empowerment, entrepreneurship and fertility of young women in Tanzania"
   : 3:15pm
  Room: E040

  March 24,
  Presenter: Michela Bia, LISER
  Title: “Harnessing Genetic Variants for Local Average Treatment Effect Estimation”
  Abstract: When multiple instruments are available, conventional instrumental variable estimators aggregate across potentially heterogeneous margins of compliance and may yield effects that lack a clear economic interpretation. The problem is compounded when some instruments violate the exclusion restriction, as is common in certain empirical contexts such as those using genetic variants as instrumental variables. We propose a clustering-based plurality framework for instrumental variable estimation that jointly addresses instrument heterogeneity and invalid instruments. Rather than imposing a single common causal parameter, our approach groups instruments according to similarity in first-stage and applies a plurality rule on subgroups with similar reduced-form to identify locally valid subsets. This yields a collection of margin-specific local average treatment effects instead of a single pooled estimate. We extend plurality-based identification to settings with non-mutually exclusive instruments, such as Mendelian Randomization designs where all individuals are exposed to all genetic variants. We illustrate the method in a two-sample Mendelian Randomization analysis of the causal effect of educational attainment on smoking participation. Our results confirm a negative causal effect of education on smoking that remains robust under pleiotropy-robust estimators, while revealing substantial heterogeneity across instrument-defined margins that is masked by pooled IV approaches. The framework provides a unified way to interpret and validate high-dimensional instruments in the presence of both treatment effect heterogeneity and potential violations of exclusion.
  
   
  
  

• April

  April 21,
  Presenter: Paul Glewwe, University of Minnesota

• May

  May 5,
  Presenter: Julien Senn, Paris 1, Sorbonne

  May 19,
  Presenter: Catherine Roux, University of Basel