Conferences: Winter, 2014

International Social Security

An NBER Conference on "International Social Security" organized by NBER Aging Program Director David Wise of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government took place in Madrid, Spain, on September 26‒28, 2013. These papers were discussed:

• Alain Jousten, University of Liège, IZA, and Netspar, and Mathieu Lefebvre and Sergio Perelman, University of Liege, "Health Status, Disability and Retirement Incentives in Belgium"
• Kevin Milligan, University of British Columbia and NBER, and Tammy Schirle, Wilfrid Laurier University, "Option Value of Disability Insurance in Canada"
• Paul Bingley and Michael Jørgensen, Danish National Centre for Social Research, and Nabanita Datta Gupta and Peder Pedersen, Aarhus University, "Health, Disability Insurance and Retirement in Denmark"
• Luc Behaghel, Paris School of Economics-INRA; Didier Blanchet, INSEE-CREST; and Muriel Roger, Banque de France, Paris School of Economics-INRA, and INSEE D2E, "Retirement, Early Retirement and Disability: Explaining Labor Force Participation after 55 in France"
• Axel Börsch-Supan, Munich Center for the Economics of Aging and NBER; Hendrik Jürges and Lars Thiel, University of Wuppertal; and Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Johannes Rausch, and Morten Schuth, Munich Center for the Economics of Aging, "Health, Financial Incentives, and Early Retirement: Micro-Simulation Evidence for Germany" (NBER Working Paper No. 19889)
• Agar Brugiavini, Ca'Foscari University of Venice and Venice International University, and Franco Peracchi, University of Rome Tor Vergata and Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, "Health Status, Disability Insurance and Incentives to Exit the Labor Force in Italy: Evidence from SHARE"
• Mayu Fujii and Takashi Oshio, Hitotsubashi University, and Satoshi Shimizutani, Gender Equality Bureau, "Option Value of Work, Health Status, and Retirement Decisions in Japan: Evidence from the Japanese Study on Aging and Retirement (JSTAR)"
• Adriaan Kalwij, Universiteit Utrecht; Klaas de Vos, Universiteit van Tilburg; and Arie Kapteyn, University of Southern California and NBER, "Health, Disability Insurance and Labor Force Exit of Older Workers in the Netherlands"
• Pilar García-Gómez, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Sergi Jiménez-Martín, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona GSE and FEDEA; and Judit Vall Castelló, Universitat de Girona and CRES at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, "Financial Incentives, Health and Retirement in Spain"
• Per Johansson and Lisa Laun, Institute for Evaluation of Labor Market and Education Policy, and Mårten Palme, Stockholm University, "Pathways to Retirement, Stringency in Disability Insurance Acceptance and the Role of Financial Incentives in Sweden"
• James Banks, University of Manchester and Institute for Fiscal Studies; Carl Emmerson, Institute for Fiscal Studies; and Gemma Tetlow, Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London, "Effect of Pensions and Disability Benefits on Retirement in the UK"

India Conference

On December 13-15, 2013 the NBER, along with India's National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) and the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), sponsored a meeting in New Delhi and Neemrana, India that included NBER researchers as well as economists from Indian universities, research institutions, and government departments. NBER Research Associates Abhijit Banerjee of MIT and Gita Gopinath of Harvard University organized the conference jointly with Sanjana Joshi and Rajat Kathuria of ICRIER.

The NBER participants, in addition to the organizers, were: Janet Currie, Princeton University; Oliver Hart and Nathan Nunn, Harvard University; Anne Krueger, Johns Hopkins University; Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago; Atif Mian, Princeton University; Karthik Muralidharan, University of California, San Diego; Romain Wacziarg, University of California, Los Angeles; and Shang-Jin Wei, Columbia University. Raghuram Rajan, who is on leave from the University of Chicago and the NBER while serving as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, also participated. The topics discussed included the efficient design of social policy and transfer programs, the measurement of gains from trade, the importance of liquidity shocks in triggering recessions, the role of economic institutions in affecting the growth of manufacturing and trade, the economics of urbanization, and the economics of innovation and competitiveness.

The Economics of Environmental Protection in China

An NBER Conference on "The Economics of Environmental Protection in China" took place in Cambridge on February 14 and 15, 2014. Joseph Fan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and NBER Research Associates Matthew Kahn of the University of California, Los Angeles and Randall Morck of the University of Alberta, organized the program. These papers were discussed:

• Maoyong Fan, Ball State University; Guojun He, Harvard School of Public Health; and Maigeng Zhou, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "The Effect of Air Pollution on Cardiovascular Mortality: Evidence from the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games"
• Dalia Ghanem, University of California, Davis, and Junjie Zhang, University of California,San Diego, " 'Effortless Perfection': Do Chinese Cities Manipulate Air Pollution Data?"
• Ruixue Jia, University California, San Diego, "Pollution for Promotion"
• Jing Wu, Tsinghua University; Yongheng Deng and Bernard Yeung, National University of Singapore; Jun Huang, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics; and Randall Morck, "Incentives and Outcomes: China's Environmental Policy" (NBER Working Paper No. 18754)
• Junhong Chu and Ivan Png, National University of Singapore, and Yehning Chen, National Taiwan University, "Climate Change in China: Communism is Cooler"
• Shanjun Li, Cornell University, "Better Lucky Than Rich? Welfare Analysis of Automobile License Allocations in Beijing and Shanghai"
• Inês Azevedo and Long Lam, Carnegie Mellon University, and Lee Branstetter, Carnegie Mellon University and NBER, "The Unsustainable Rise of the Chinese Wind Turbine Manufacturing Industry"
• Douglas Almond, Columbia University and NBER; Shuang Zhang, University of Colorado Boulder; and Maigeng Zhou, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Air Pollution and Short-Term Mortality in Beijing"
• Siqi Zheng and Cong Sun, Tsinghua University, and Ming Lu, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Fudan University, "Congestion and Pollution as the Consequences of Cross-Zone Schooling in Beijing"

Economics of Digitization

An NBER Conference on "Economics of Digitization" took place in Palo Alto on February 21, 2014. NBER Research Associates Shane Greenstein of Northwestern University, Josh Lerner of Harvard Business School, and Scott Stern of MIT organized the program. These papers were discussed:

• Jin-Hyuk Kim, University of Colorado, and Tin Cheuk Leung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, "Quantifying the Impacts of Digital Rights Management and E-Book Pricing on the E-Book Reader Market"
• Yongdong Liu, Denis Nekipelov, and Minjung Park, University of California, Berkeley, "Timely versus Quality Innovation: The Case of Mobile Applications on iTunes and Google Play"
• Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT and NBER; Tomer Geva, Tel Aviv University; and Shachar Reichman, MIT, "Crowd-Squared: Amplifying the Predictive Power of Large-Scale Crowd-Based Data"
• Glenn Ellison, MIT and NBER, and Sara Fisher Ellison, MIT, "Match Quality, Search, and the Internet Market for Used Books"
• Aleksi Aaltonen, London School of Economics, and Stephan Seiler, Stanford University, "Cumulative Knowledge and Open Source Content Growth: The Case of Wikipedia"
• Timothy Bresnahan, Stanford University and NBER, and Joseph Orsiniand Pai-Ling Yin, Stanford University, "Platform Choice by Mobile App Developers"
• Luis Aguiar, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, and Joel Waldfogel, University of Minnesota and NBER, "Digitization, Copyright, and the Welfare Effects of Music Trade"