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March 27, 2023 | Announcement

Three Cowles Lunch Talks in April

Mushfiq Mubarak, Myrto Kalouptsidi and Christopher Neilson
by Luke Strathmann

The Cowles Foundation is excited to announce three Cowles Lunch Talks that will take place in April 2023:

  • On April 5, Mushfiq Mobarak (Yale University) will speak about seasonal poverty and its relationship to internal migration. 
  • On April 12, Myrto Kalouptsidi (Harvard University) will discuss three recent research papers that look at transportation, infrastructure investment, and international trade. 
  • On April 26, Christopher Neilson (Yale University) will talk about teacher compensation, and how to reduce inequality in the access to high-quality teachers.

The lunches will take place from 12:00-1:00pm at 87 Trumbull Street, in first floor classroom B120. Please see the Cowles Events Website for details, and below for descriptions of each talk.

April 5: Mushfiq Mobarak

In his talk, Professor Mobarak will present recent research on seasonal poverty and internal migration. The talk will explore the gap in productivity between urban and rural areas, while also addressing how seasonal unemployment and migration affect this gap. As part of his talk, he’ll address questions such as: Why do productivity gaps exist if there are no mobility restrictions within countries? Are developing countries poor because citizens are inefficiently spatially allocated within those countries? Could you generate welfare gains by relocating people from unproductive rural areas towards thriving urban areas? 

Mushfiq Mobarak is the Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Professor Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sierra Leone. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare-improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. 

April 12: Myrto Kalouptsidi 

In her talk, Professor Kalouptsidi will combine research from several recent projects to explore questions related to transportation, infrastructure, and international trade. Her talk will explore the role of the transportation sector in world trade broadly, and will look at the efficiency and optimal policy surrounding specific transport methods such as taxis, trucks, water vessels, and other means of bulk shipping. She will also present work in progress on the nature of port technology. The talk will draw on findings from the following research:

Myrto Kalouptsidi is the Paul Sack Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Economics at Harvard University. Professor Kalouptsidi specializes in applied microeconomics, with a particular emphasis on international trade. She is renowned for her work on protectionism in the shipping industry. Her current research focuses on the impact of protectionism, search frictions, geography, and trade costs on China’s international shipping.

April 26: Christopher Neilson

In his talk, Professor Neilson will present recent findings from his research paper titled “Teacher Compensation and Structural Inequality: Evidence from Centralized Teacher School Choice in Peru” (with coauthors Matteo Bobba, Tim Ederer, Gianmarco Leon, and Marco Nieddu). This work explores the inequities in schooling inputs and teacher quality in the context of Peru. He and his coauthors study a change in teacher compensation to show that increasing salaries at less desirable public schools attracts better quality applicants and improves subsequent student test scores. 

Christopher A. Neilson is a Professor of Economics and Global Affairs at the Yale Department of Economics and Jackson School of Global Affairs. He is an applied microeconomist whose research focuses on the study of education markets and policies that promote equitable opportunities for human capital accumulation. Professor Neilson studies how government policy affects students, families, and education providers, drawing on methods from industrial organization, labor economics, and development economics.