Growth and Human Capital Mini Conference

The “Growth and Human Capital Mini Conference” was a third in the series of half-day conferences held at the Faculty of Economics in the 20/21 academic year, supported by the Faculty of Economics, Cambridge INET and the Centre for Macroeconomics. The conference brought together participants from 20 universities and world leading researchers in the field of growth and development. In a series of three presentations, the speakers have covered the subjects of fertility, inequality, human capital accumulation and the general equilibrium effects of electrification. Each presentation was followed by an open discussion with all participants.

The first speaker, Paula Gobbi (Université Libre de Bruxelles), shared her work on how dynastic preferences shape fertility choices and inheritance contracts of the economic elites, thereby perpetuating wealth inequality. Her presentation was followed by that of David Lagakos (Boston University), arguing that the long term and general equilibrium effects of improvements in the provision of electricity on aggregate output in the developing world are of an order of magnitude larger than the short term effects typically reported in the empirical literature. The conference was concluded by Ananth Seshadri (UW-Madison), who presented a study measuring the contribution of the redistributive policies to the TFP growth in the 20th century USA.

Organised by: Dr Tiago Cavalcanti and Lidia Smitkova

Event Date: Tuesday 2nd February 2021

Time: 03:00pm - 06:15pm

Event Contact: Marion Reusch - inet@econ.cam.ac.uk

See programme for full details

Speakers:

Ananth Seshadri (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
"Can Redistribution Lead to Economic Development?" (joint with H. Holter and T. Lee)

Paula Gobbi (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
"Childless Aristocrats. Inheritance and the extensive margin of fertility" (joint with Marc Goñi) - Slides | Paper

David Lagakos (Boston University)
"Electricity and Firm Productivity: A General Equilibrium Approach" (joint with Stephie Fried) - Slides | Paper