REStud NA Tour 2025

17 - 22 Oct
Calgary, Notre Dame, Duke

About REStud North-American Tours

The REStud North American Tour recognizes the most promising graduating doctoral students in economics and finance from European universities, and introduces them and their research to audiences in North America. Each year, 5-6 students are selected by a designated committee in line with the REStud’s tradition of encouraging the work of young economists. The tour consists of 3 conference-style meetings at economics departments or research centers across North America, and draw audiences from local universities, government institutions and think tanks. The REStud NA Tour has been held annually in October since 2021, and is the counterpart to the REStud European Tour which introduces top graduating students from North American universities to European audiences.

Hosts (2025)

University of Calgary

The Department of Economics at the University of Calgary is a vibrant research community nestled at the foot of the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Our faculty are dedicated to advancing knowledge in areas such as energy and environmental economics, public economics and public finance, data science, trade, and more. REStud tourists will have the opportunity to hike in the great outdoors while discussing big economic ideas.

Calgary Dept. of Economics


University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame's Department of Economics is home to more than 50 full-time faculty with wide-ranging research and teaching interests. Our faculty and graduate students conduct, disseminate, and publish cutting-edge research in all fields of economics. We study everything from domestic poverty to economic development in low-income countries, from family dynamics to urban housing, from international taxation to sovereign debt, and from charitable giving to monetary policy, to name a few areas of focus.

Notre Dame Dept. of Economics


Duke University

Duke University’s Department of Economics is a hub for innovative economic research, fostering collaboration among scholars across diverse fields. Faculty and students engage in both theoretical and empirical work, addressing pressing global and policy-relevant questions. With a vibrant academic community and strong interdisciplinary connections, the department is recognized for advancing knowledge that shapes economic thinking and informs real-world decision-making.

Duke Dept. of Economics


Tourists (2025)


Juan Antolin-Diaz
London Business School
Personal Website →
Canishk Naik
London School of Economics
Personal Website →
Amalia Repele
Bocconi University
Personal Website →
Víctor Sancibrián
CEMFI
Personal Website →
Linda Wu
University College London
Personal Website →

Tour Agenda (2025)

9:00-9:40

Coffee & Light Breakfast

Mathison Hall Event Centre

9:40-9:45

Opening Remarks

Mathison Hall Event Centre
Terri Kneeland

9:45 - 11:00

Canishk Naik

Mental Health and the Targeting of Social Assistance

Mathison Hall Event Centre
People living with mental disorders are at a higher risk of needing income-support programs but face greater difficulty overcoming barriers to access. This paper investigates whether social assistance effectively reaches people with poor mental health. I measure mental health and social assistance take-up using Dutch administrative data and develop a theoretical framework to show how take-up responses can identify the marginal value of benefits (need) and the cost of barriers. These are key components for evaluating targeting effectiveness. I find that a policy increasing barriers disproportionately screens-out those with poor mental health, indicating a 64% higher cost of these barriers. Despite their higher cost, people with poor mental health have the same average take-up levels as those with good mental health, conditional on eligibility, which suggests greater need. To assess this, I show that individuals with poor mental health are more responsive to plausibly exogenous variation in benefits than those with good mental health, demonstrating that their need is twice as high. These estimates imply that people with poor mental health are inefficiently excluded from low-income welfare assistance by barriers. Consequently, reducing barriers to take-up would be twice as effective as increasing benefits.
Discussant: Charlie Rafkin (UBC)

11:00 - 12:15

Linda Wu

Behavioral Responses to Estate Taxation: Evidence from Taiwan

Mathison Hall Event Centre
We quantify behavioral responses to estate taxation by exploiting two large reforms in Taiwan. Using comprehensive administrative data and a difference-in-difference design, we show that the response of reported estates to the reforms is quick, persistent, and exhibits an asymmetry. We estimate elasticities of reported estates with respect to the net-of-tax rate of 2.76 (s.e. 0.39) for the tax increase and 1.31 (s.e. 0.16) for the tax cut. The asymmetry arises because liquid items such as financial assets, deposit savings, and charitable exemptions respond significantly more to a tax increase. The quick adjustments in reported estates, combined with a null effect on labor supply behavior among both donors and heirs, suggest the responses are likely driven by tax avoidance. The observed asymmetry can be explained by tax avoidance with sunk costs: taxpayers increase avoidance during a tax increase but are less responsive to a tax cut due to previously incurred avoidance costs. We set up a tax avoidance model and derive sufficient statistics, characterized by our estimated elasticities, to assess the welfare impact of tax reforms. Our analysis shows that using the tax cut elasticity, which is attenuated due to sunk costs, would underestimate the welfare cost and overestimate the net welfare effect of a tax increase by 61%.
Discussant: Terry Moon (UBC)

12:15 - 1:30

Lunch Break

Mathison Hall Event Centre

1:30 - 2:45

Víctor Sancibrián

Estimation Uncertainty in Repeated Finite Populations

Mathison Hall Event Centre
Standard errors need to be adjusted down when the sample is a large fraction of the population of interest (a finite population setup). I consider the empirically relevant case where a finite population coexists with a measurement problem, in that the features of interest are not necessarily observable even if the entire population is sampled. I show that conventional standard errors remain generally conservative in this context and propose Finite Population Corrections (FPCs) that guarantee non-conservative inference when repeated measurements are available. FPCs rely on weak dependence across measurements and are very simple to implement. I apply these methods to two empirical settings where uncertainty has been previously understood in different ways: predicting lethal encounters with police using data on all U.S. police departments, and studying firm misallocation with a census of large Indonesian firms. Finite-population inference leads to confidence intervals that are up to 50% shorter in the former and illustrates the need to account for measurement uncertainty in the latter.
Discussant: Brendan Kline (UTAustin)

2:45 - 4:00

Amalia Repele

Wealth Sorting and Cyclical Employment Risk

Mathison Hall Event Centre
I present empirical evidence that U.S. workers with low liquid wealth face significantly higher cyclical employment risk. This finding cannot be fully explained by skills, socio-demographics, or past income. I propose a framework that generates a negative correlation between wealth and employment risk in equilibrium, through job sorting based on wealth. Job search provides an insurance mechanism for liquidity constrained and risk-averse unemployed workers. Asset-poor unemployed sort into relatively lower wage and lower security jobs, because these jobs offer a relatively higher job finding probability. I build a quantitative model to study the implications of wealth sorting for wages and job transitions over the business cycle, as well as its consequence for long-term inequalities. The interaction between employment risk and wealth accumulation generates a "poverty trap" which is amplified in bad times. The cost of entering unemployment during a recession amounts to 3% of lifetime consumption for the poorest, more than twice that of the wealthiest.
Discussant: Shouyong Shi (Queens)

4:00 - 4:30

Coffee Break

Mathison Hall Event Centre

4:30 - 5:45

Juan Antolin-Diaz

How Did Government Bonds Become Safe?

Mathison Hall Event Centre
Government bonds in advanced economies shifted from moving in sync with stocks to acting as "safe" hedges in the late 1990s, then reverted to being "risky" after 2022. An analysis of twelve countries over the postwar period shows these shifts occurred simultaneously and aren't fully explained by changes in output and inflation. Using a Dynamic Factor Model and a novel identification strategy, I find that financial shocks, driving flight-to-safety dynamics post-1998, better explain the shifts. A model of financial intermediaries in the stock and bond market shows how leveraged funds constrained by risk limits propagate these shocks, altering return comovement and the safety of government bonds.
Discussant: Alexander David (UCalgary)

6:30

Dinner

Model Citizen - 300 17th Avenue SW Upstairs
* by invitation only

Local Organizers: Terri Kneeland and Lucija Muehlenbachs

8:00-9:00

Check-in & light continental breakfast

McKenna Hall 205/206/207

9:00 - 10:15

Linda Wu

Behavioral Responses to Estate Taxation: Evidence from Taiwan

McKenna Hall 205/206/207
We quantify behavioral responses to estate taxation by exploiting two large reforms in Taiwan. Using comprehensive administrative data and a difference-in-difference design, we show that the response of reported estates to the reforms is quick, persistent, and exhibits an asymmetry. We estimate elasticities of reported estates with respect to the net-of-tax rate of 2.76 (s.e. 0.39) for the tax increase and 1.31 (s.e. 0.16) for the tax cut. The asymmetry arises because liquid items such as financial assets, deposit savings, and charitable exemptions respond significantly more to a tax increase. The quick adjustments in reported estates, combined with a null effect on labor supply behavior among both donors and heirs, suggest the responses are likely driven by tax avoidance. The observed asymmetry can be explained by tax avoidance with sunk costs: taxpayers increase avoidance during a tax increase but are less responsive to a tax cut due to previously incurred avoidance costs. We set up a tax avoidance model and derive sufficient statistics, characterized by our estimated elasticities, to assess the welfare impact of tax reforms. Our analysis shows that using the tax cut elasticity, which is attenuated due to sunk costs, would underestimate the welfare cost and overestimate the net welfare effect of a tax increase by 61%.

10:15-10:30

Break

McKenna Hall

10:30 - 11:45

Víctor Sancibrián

Estimation Uncertainty in Repeated Finite Populations

McKenna Hall 205/206/207
Standard errors need to be adjusted down when the sample is a large fraction of the population of interest (a finite population setup). I consider the empirically relevant case where a finite population coexists with a measurement problem, in that the features of interest are not necessarily observable even if the entire population is sampled. I show that conventional standard errors remain generally conservative in this context and propose Finite Population Corrections (FPCs) that guarantee non-conservative inference when repeated measurements are available. FPCs rely on weak dependence across measurements and are very simple to implement. I apply these methods to two empirical settings where uncertainty has been previously understood in different ways: predicting lethal encounters with police using data on all U.S. police departments, and studying firm misallocation with a census of large Indonesian firms. Finite-population inference leads to confidence intervals that are up to 50% shorter in the former and illustrates the need to account for measurement uncertainty in the latter.

12:00-1:15

Lunch

McKenna Hall

1:15 - 2:30

Amalia Repele

Wealth Sorting and Cyclical Employment Risk

McKenna Hall 205/206/207
I present empirical evidence that U.S. workers with low liquid wealth face significantly higher cyclical employment risk. This finding cannot be fully explained by skills, socio-demographics, or past income. I propose a framework that generates a negative correlation between wealth and employment risk in equilibrium, through job sorting based on wealth. Job search provides an insurance mechanism for liquidity constrained and risk-averse unemployed workers. Asset-poor unemployed sort into relatively lower wage and lower security jobs, because these jobs offer a relatively higher job finding probability. I build a quantitative model to study the implications of wealth sorting for wages and job transitions over the business cycle, as well as its consequence for long-term inequalities. The interaction between employment risk and wealth accumulation generates a "poverty trap" which is amplified in bad times. The cost of entering unemployment during a recession amounts to 3% of lifetime consumption for the poorest, more than twice that of the wealthiest.

2:30 - 3:45

Canishk Naik

Mental Health and the Targeting of Social Assistance

McKenna Hall 205/206/207
People living with mental disorders are at a higher risk of needing income-support programs but face greater difficulty overcoming barriers to access. This paper investigates whether social assistance effectively reaches people with poor mental health. I measure mental health and social assistance take-up using Dutch administrative data and develop a theoretical framework to show how take-up responses can identify the marginal value of benefits (need) and the cost of barriers. These are key components for evaluating targeting effectiveness. I find that a policy increasing barriers disproportionately screens-out those with poor mental health, indicating a 64% higher cost of these barriers. Despite their higher cost, people with poor mental health have the same average take-up levels as those with good mental health, conditional on eligibility, which suggests greater need. To assess this, I show that individuals with poor mental health are more responsive to plausibly exogenous variation in benefits than those with good mental health, demonstrating that their need is twice as high. These estimates imply that people with poor mental health are inefficiently excluded from low-income welfare assistance by barriers. Consequently, reducing barriers to take-up would be twice as effective as increasing benefits.

3:45-4:00

Break

McKenna Hall 205/206/207

4:00 - 5:15

Juan Antolin-Diaz

How Did Government Bonds Become Safe?

McKenna Hall 205/206/207
Government bonds in advanced economies shifted from moving in sync with stocks to acting as "safe" hedges in the late 1990s, then reverted to being "risky" after 2022. An analysis of twelve countries over the postwar period shows these shifts occurred simultaneously and aren't fully explained by changes in output and inflation. Using a Dynamic Factor Model and a novel identification strategy, I find that financial shocks, driving flight-to-safety dynamics post-1998, better explain the shifts. A model of financial intermediaries in the stock and bond market shows how leveraged funds constrained by risk limits propagate these shocks, altering return comovement and the safety of government bonds.

6:00

Dinner

Rohrs, Morris Inn, University of Notre Dame
* by invitation only

8:45-9:25

Breakfast

Broadhead Center Multi-Purpose Room 068

9:25

Opening Remarks

Broadhead Center

9:30 - 10:30

Juan Antolin-Diaz

How Did Government Bonds Become Safe?

Broadhead Center
Government bonds in advanced economies shifted from moving in sync with stocks to acting as "safe" hedges in the late 1990s, then reverted to being "risky" after 2022. An analysis of twelve countries over the postwar period shows these shifts occurred simultaneously and aren't fully explained by changes in output and inflation. Using a Dynamic Factor Model and a novel identification strategy, I find that financial shocks, driving flight-to-safety dynamics post-1998, better explain the shifts. A model of financial intermediaries in the stock and bond market shows how leveraged funds constrained by risk limits propagate these shocks, altering return comovement and the safety of government bonds.

10:30-10:50

Break

Broadhead Center

10:50 - 11:50

Linda Wu

Behavioral Responses to Estate Taxation: Evidence from Taiwan

Broadhead Center
We quantify behavioral responses to estate taxation by exploiting two large reforms in Taiwan. Using comprehensive administrative data and a difference-in-difference design, we show that the response of reported estates to the reforms is quick, persistent, and exhibits an asymmetry. We estimate elasticities of reported estates with respect to the net-of-tax rate of 2.76 (s.e. 0.39) for the tax increase and 1.31 (s.e. 0.16) for the tax cut. The asymmetry arises because liquid items such as financial assets, deposit savings, and charitable exemptions respond significantly more to a tax increase. The quick adjustments in reported estates, combined with a null effect on labor supply behavior among both donors and heirs, suggest the responses are likely driven by tax avoidance. The observed asymmetry can be explained by tax avoidance with sunk costs: taxpayers increase avoidance during a tax increase but are less responsive to a tax cut due to previously incurred avoidance costs. We set up a tax avoidance model and derive sufficient statistics, characterized by our estimated elasticities, to assess the welfare impact of tax reforms. Our analysis shows that using the tax cut elasticity, which is attenuated due to sunk costs, would underestimate the welfare cost and overestimate the net welfare effect of a tax increase by 61%.

12:00-1:30

Lunch

Broadhead Center

1:30 - 2:30

Víctor Sancibrián

Estimation Uncertainty in Repeated Finite Populations

Broadhead Center
Standard errors need to be adjusted down when the sample is a large fraction of the population of interest (a finite population setup). I consider the empirically relevant case where a finite population coexists with a measurement problem, in that the features of interest are not necessarily observable even if the entire population is sampled. I show that conventional standard errors remain generally conservative in this context and propose Finite Population Corrections (FPCs) that guarantee non-conservative inference when repeated measurements are available. FPCs rely on weak dependence across measurements and are very simple to implement. I apply these methods to two empirical settings where uncertainty has been previously understood in different ways: predicting lethal encounters with police using data on all U.S. police departments, and studying firm misallocation with a census of large Indonesian firms. Finite-population inference leads to confidence intervals that are up to 50% shorter in the former and illustrates the need to account for measurement uncertainty in the latter.

2:30-2:50

Break

Broadhead Center

2:50 - 3:50

Amalia Repele

Wealth Sorting and Cyclical Employment Risk

Broadhead Center
I present empirical evidence that U.S. workers with low liquid wealth face significantly higher cyclical employment risk. This finding cannot be fully explained by skills, socio-demographics, or past income. I propose a framework that generates a negative correlation between wealth and employment risk in equilibrium, through job sorting based on wealth. Job search provides an insurance mechanism for liquidity constrained and risk-averse unemployed workers. Asset-poor unemployed sort into relatively lower wage and lower security jobs, because these jobs offer a relatively higher job finding probability. I build a quantitative model to study the implications of wealth sorting for wages and job transitions over the business cycle, as well as its consequence for long-term inequalities. The interaction between employment risk and wealth accumulation generates a "poverty trap" which is amplified in bad times. The cost of entering unemployment during a recession amounts to 3% of lifetime consumption for the poorest, more than twice that of the wealthiest.

3:50-4:20

Break

Broadhead Center

4:20 - 5:20

Canishk Naik

Mental Health and the Targeting of Social Assistance

Broadhead Center
People living with mental disorders are at a higher risk of needing income-support programs but face greater difficulty overcoming barriers to access. This paper investigates whether social assistance effectively reaches people with poor mental health. I measure mental health and social assistance take-up using Dutch administrative data and develop a theoretical framework to show how take-up responses can identify the marginal value of benefits (need) and the cost of barriers. These are key components for evaluating targeting effectiveness. I find that a policy increasing barriers disproportionately screens-out those with poor mental health, indicating a 64% higher cost of these barriers. Despite their higher cost, people with poor mental health have the same average take-up levels as those with good mental health, conditional on eligibility, which suggests greater need. To assess this, I show that individuals with poor mental health are more responsive to plausibly exogenous variation in benefits than those with good mental health, demonstrating that their need is twice as high. These estimates imply that people with poor mental health are inefficiently excluded from low-income welfare assistance by barriers. Consequently, reducing barriers to take-up would be twice as effective as increasing benefits.

5:20

Closing Remarks

Broadhead Center

5:40

Transportation from Duke to JuJu.

6:00

Dinner

739 9th Street # 210, Durham, NC 27705
* by invitation only

Local Organizers: Arnaud Maurel and Daniel Yi Xu


Past REStud NA Tours


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