VILLANOVA DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES

This seminar series extends our department's curriculum by welcoming renowned scholars and experts to engage with our faculty and students on cutting-edge research across a wide array of topics related to economics. Through conversations and stimulating presentations, our seminar series exposes students to the advanced knowledge and insights needed to navigate the complexities of today's economic landscape, and reflects and supports Villanova’s teacher-scholar model.

SPRING 2025 SEMINAR SERIES

Jiyoon (June) Kim presents: Paid Leave and Mother’s Earnings Share within Family in the Long-Run: The Role of Spousal Income (with Pritha Aryal)
We explore the long-term effects of California’s Paid Family Leave (CA-PFL) on mothers’ earnings share and employment using data from the American Community Survey 2000-2013. Employing an event study analysis, we observe that CA-PFL led to a significant reduction of mothers’ labor force participation, employment, earnings share, and usual hours worked within a year after childbirth. Using alternative methods, we find the same story that mothers who gave birth just after CA-PFL show long-term declines in hours worked and earnings share compared to those who gave birth just before. However, we find a substantial heterogeneity by husband’s absolute and relative income within a family, highlighting the importance of spousal bargaining power on domestic and market labor allocation, to precisely study the impact of the policy.

 Xuan Jiang presents: Helping or Hurting? The Gendered Impact of NSF China Policies on Women in Academia
We examine the effects of a policy reform by the National Natural Science Foundation of China that extended eligibility for the Young Scientist Grant (YSG) to women up to age 40. Using a combination of Difference-in-Differences and Regression Discontinuity approaches, we find that the policy increased the probability of receiving the YSG for female scholars in the first batch of newly eligible cohorts. While the policy provided more opportunities for women, its impact on long-term career outcomes was limited. Additionally, we identify a significant crowding-out effect in younger cohorts, especially in more competitive fields, where male scholars accelerated their applications, securing grants and early academic resources. This increased competition reduced women’s access to crucial resources such as grants, promotion opportunities, and collaboration networks. Furthermore, we find that women in more competitive fields shifted towards more first-authored publications, suggesting a move away from leadership roles or senior collaborative positions, although the effect was not large. Our findings highlight the unintended consequences of gender-targeted policies and the importance of considering competitive dynamics in academic labor markets.

Arthur van Benthem presents: An Evaluation of Protected Area Policies in the European Union (with Tristan Grupp, Prakash Mishra, and Mathias Reynaert)
The European Union designates 26% of its landmass as a protected area, limiting economic development to favor biodiversity. We use the staggered introduction of protected areas between 1985 and 2020 to study the selection of land for protection and the causal effect of protection on vegetation cover and nightlights. Protection did not affect these outcomes in any meaningful way across four decades, countries, protection cohorts, population density, or land, soil, and climate characteristics. We conclude that European conservation efforts lack ambition because policymakers protect land not threatened by development or choose weak protection levels on lands that face development pressure.

John T. Giles presents: The Impact of Extending Maternity Leave on Fertility Decisions and Women’s Employment: Evidence from China (jointly with Rudai Bi and Yaohui Zhao)
With the aim of supporting families and easing burdens associated with having a child, significant extensions to maternity leave were introduced in some provinces in 2016. Women who have some history of wage employment and are between the age of 20 and 45 are 2.8 percentage points more likely to have a child if they are exposed to the maternity leave extension, and this effect is driven by a 5.8 percentage point effect among women employed in the public sector or state-owned enterprises. Employers react to the likelihood that they may lose women for longer periods of time to maternity leave: transitions to employment decline significantly for women and are driven by a decline in the hiring of women in the public and state sectors, while men in treatment provinces show increased transition to work in public and state sector employers. The findings of the paper suggest that policies aiming to support the family and raise fertility may have adverse effects on women’s employment.

Eoin Mcguirk presents: Development Mismatch? Evidence from Agricultural Policies in Pastoral Africa
We study the consequences of a clash between contemporary development initiatives and traditional economic practices in Africa. Crop agriculture has expanded considerably across the continent in recent years. Much of this expansion has occurred in traditionally pastoral areas, where land is typically managed according to customary arrangements. This is believed to be a major cause of conflict between pastoral and agricultural ethnic groups. We test this hypothesis using geocoded data on agricultural development projects across Africa from 1995-2014. We find that implementing agricultural projects in traditionally pastoral areas leads to an almost two-fold increase in the risk of conflict. We find no equivalent effect for agricultural projects implemented in traditionally agricultural areas, nor for non-agricultural projects implemented in either location. We also find that this mechanism contributes to the spread of extremist-religious conflict in the form of jihadist attacks. The effects are muted when agricultural projects are paired with pastoral projects. This is more likely to occur when pastoral groups have more political power. Despite these effects on conflict, we find that crop agriculture projects increase nighttime luminosity in both agricultural and pastoral areas. Evidence from survey data suggests that the gains in pastoral areas are concentrated in non-pastoral households. Our findings indicate that “development mismatch”—i.e., imposing projects that are misaligned with local populations—can be costly.

Olga Timoshenko presents: Demand Uncertainty, Selection, and Trade
This paper examines the effect of  idiosyncratic uncertainty on elasticities of trade flows with respect to variable trade costs in a canonical model of trade with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms. We identify two channels through which uncertainty impacts these elasticities. First, uncertainty lowers elasticities by lowering export participation thresholds (selection effect). Second, uncertainty alters the distribution and lowers the dispersion of   export selection shocks (the dispersion effect), which has an ambiguous effect on trade elasticities. We develop a novel methodology to quantify trade elasticities under uncertainty.  Applying methodology to Brazilian firm-level export data,  we find that the recovered elasticities are comparable to those in the Melitz-Pareto framework. Further, relative to a complete information framework, uncertainty amplifies trade elasticities, on average, emphasizing the dominating role of the dispersion effect - though the effect is heterogeneous across industries. The largest wedge in elasticity estimates between the two information environments is observed among highly substitutable products or those with high uncertainty. This  suggests that assuming a compete information framework could substantially understate the welfare gains from trade in such cases.