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1521. La Riqueza Escondida de Loreto: Análisis de Complejidad Económica y Oportunidades de Diversificación Productiva

Author:
Ricardo Hausmann and Miguel Angel Santos
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
El Laboratorio de Crecimiento de la Universidad de Harvard, bajo el auspicio de la Fundación Gordon and Betty Moore, ha desarrollado esta investigación para identificar las capacidades productivas existentes en Loreto y las actividades económicas con potencial para liderar la transformación estructural de su economía. Este reporte forma parte de una investigación más amplia – Transformación estructural y restricciones limitantes a la prosperidad en Loreto, Perú – que busca aportar insumos para el desarrollo de políticas públicas a escala nacional y regional que contribuyan a promover el desarrollo productivo y la prosperidad de la región, tomando en cuenta sus características particulares.
Topic:
Development, Economics, Diversification, and Economic Complexity
Political Geography:
Central America and Mexico

1522. Emerging Cities as Independent Engines of Growth: The Case of Buenos Aires

Author:
Ricardo Hausmann, Douglas Barrios, Daniela Muhaj, and Sehar Noor
Publication Date:
10-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
What does it take for a sub-national unit to become an autonomous engine of growth? This issue is particularly relevant to large cities, as they tend to display larger and more complex know-how agglomerations and may have access to a broader set of policy tools. To approximate an answer to this question, specific to the case of Buenos Aires, Harvard’s Growth Lab engaged in a research project from December 2018 to June 2019, collaborating with the Center for Evidence-based Evaluation of Policies (CEPE) of Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and the Development Unit of the Secretary of Finance of the City of Buenos Aires. Together, we have developed a research agenda that seeks to provide inputs for a policy plan aimed at decoupling Buenos Aires’s growth trajectory from the rest of Argentina’s.
Topic:
Development, Economic growth, and Cities
Political Geography:
Argentina

1523. Leading with Intentionality: The 4P Framework for Strategic Leadership

Author:
Robert Wilkinson and Kimberlyn Leary
Publication Date:
09-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
The year 2020 has brought one crisis after another, perhaps exacerbating a common belief that a “heroic leader” can save the day. But does this mythical figure really exist? Leadership, once we study it, isn’t one thing exercised at the top by one person, as our colleague and leadership expert Ron Heifetz has observed; it is an activity exerted by people at all levels, and by noticing certain less obvious aspects of leadership, anyone can improve at it. Leadership is possible at any time there is a collective problem. Each of us may have a role to play in mobilizing others to address community problems, and each of us can improve our skills to be more effective.
Topic:
Leadership and Crisis Management
Political Geography:
Global Focus

1524. Job Search and Hiring with Two-Sided Limited Information about Workseekers' Skills

Author:
Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
This paper presents field experimental evidence that limited information about workseekers’ skills distorts both firm and workseeker behavior. Assessing workseekers’ skills, giving workseekers their assessment results, and helping them to credibly share the results with firms increases workseekers’ employment and earnings. It also aligns their beliefs and search strategies more closely with their skills. Giving assessment results only to workseekers has similar effects on beliefs and search, but smaller effects on employment and earnings. Giving assessment results only to firms increases callbacks. These patterns are consistent with two-sided information frictions, a new finding that can inform the design of information-provision mechanisms.
Topic:
Labor Issues, Employment, Business, and Job Creation
Political Geography:
Global Focus

1525. Horrible Trade-offs in a Pandemic: Lockdowns, Transfers, Fiscal Space, and Compliance

Author:
Ricardo Hausmann and Ulrich Schetter
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
In this paper, we develop a heterogeneous agent general equilibrium framework to analyze optimal joint policies of a lockdown and transfer payments in times of a pandemic. In our model, the effectiveness of a lockdown in mitigating the pandemic depends on endogenous compliance. A more stringent lockdown deepens the recession which implies that poorer parts of society find it harder to subsist. This reduces their compliance with the lockdown, and may cause deprivation of the very poor, giving rise to an excruciating trade-off between saving lives from the pandemic and from deprivation. Lump-sum transfers help mitigate this trade-off. We identify and discuss key trade-offs involved and provide comparative statics for optimal policy. We show that, ceteris paribus, the optimal lockdown is stricter for more severe pandemics and in richer countries. We then consider a government borrowing constraint and show that limited fiscal space lowers the optimal lockdown and welfare, and increases the aggregate death burden during the pandemic. We finally discuss distributional consequences and the political economy of fighting a pandemic.
Topic:
Development, Government, Political Economy, Inequality, Economic growth, Fiscal Policy, Pandemic, and COVID-19
Political Geography:
Global Focus

1526. Labor Market Nationalization Policies and Firm Outcomes: Evidence from Saudi Arabia

Author:
Patricia Cortes, Semiray Kasoolu, and Carolina Pan
Publication Date:
07-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
Saudi Arabia is home to the world’s third largest migrant population. Under mounting pressure to increase the private sector employment of Saudis during the last decade, a series of nationalization policies on the labor force have been imposed since late 2011. In this paper, we study how the first nationalization policy, Nitaqat, affected the overall labor market and non-oil firms in the private sector, especially exporting firms. Our rich and novel data allow us to assess the effect of the policy on a wide set of outcomes: employment decisions by composition and size, the output and productivity of exporting firms, labor costs, and exit from the market. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, we compare the 2011 to 2012 change in outcomes between firms above and firms below the threshold required for the minimum share of Saudi workers in a firm. Our results suggest that the policy succeeded in encouraging firms to increase the share of Saudis in private firms. It also increased the share of Saudi women in the workforce, suggesting that the policy had a positive effect on increasing female labor force participation. However, these gains came at a very high cost to firms: our findings suggest that the policy led to a reduced firm size, reduced productivity and output of exporting firms, increased wage bill, increased share of low-skilled Saudi workers, and higher firm exit rates.
Topic:
Business, Labor Market, and Nationalization
Political Geography:
Saudi Arabia and Gulf Nations

1527. Countering Misinformation Via WhatsApp: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe

Author:
Jeremy Bowles, Horacio Larreguy, and Shelley Liu
Publication Date:
05-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
We examine how information from trusted social media sources can shape knowledge and behavior when misinformation and mistrust are widespread. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe, we partnered with a trusted civil society organization to randomize the timing of the dissemination of messages aimed at targeting misinformation about the COVID-19 virus to 27,000 newsletter WhatsApp subscribers. We examine how exposure to these messages affects individual beliefs about how to deal with the COVID-19 virus and preventative behavior. The results show that social media messaging from trusted sources may have substantively large effects on not only individual knowledge but also ultimately on related behavior.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Internet, Social Media, Pandemic, COVID-19, Misinformation, and WhatsApp
Political Geography:
Africa and Zimbabwe

1528. Specificity of Human Capital: An Occupation Space Based on Job-to-Job Transitions

Author:
Eduardo Levy Yeyati
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
Using job transition data from Argentina’s Household Survey, we document the extent to which human capital is specific to occupations and activities. Based on workers’ propensity to move between occupations/industries, we build Occupation and Industry Spaces to illustrate job similarities, and we compute an occupation and industry similarity measures that, in turn, we use to explain wage transition dynamics. We show that our similarity measures influence positively post-transition wages. Inasmuch as wages capture a worker's marginal productivity and this productivity reflects the degree to which a worker matches the job’s skill demand, our results indicate that a worker's human capital is specific to both occupation and activity: closer occupations share similar skill demands and task composition (in other words, demand similar workers) and imply a smaller human capital loss in the event of a transition.
Topic:
Employment, Business, Human Capital, and Productivity
Political Geography:
Argentina and South America

1529. Gender Differences in Professional Career Dynamics: New Evidence from a Global Law Firm

Author:
Ina Ganguli, Ricardo Hausmann, and Martina Viarengo
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
We examine gender gaps in career dynamics in the legal sector using rich panel data from one of the largest global law firms in the world. The law firm studied is representative of multinational law firms and operates in 23 countries. The sample includes countries at different stages of development. We document the cross-country variation in gender gaps and how these gaps have changed over time. We show that while there is gender parity at the entry level in most countries by the end of the period examined, there are persistent raw gender gaps at the top of the organization across all countries. We observe significant heterogeneity among countries in terms of gender gaps in promotions and wages, but the gaps that exist appear to be declining over the period studied. We also observe that women are more likely to report exiting the firm for family and work-life balance reasons, while men report leaving for career advancement. Finally, we show that various measures of national institutions and culture appear to play a role in the differential labor-market outcomes of men and women.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Labor Issues, Women, Employment, Inequality, Human Capital, and Legal Sector
Political Geography:
Global Focus

1530. Policy Decisions and Evidence Use among Civil Servants: A Group Decision Experiment in Pakistan

Author:
Laura Metzger, Theodore Svoronos, and Adnan Qadir Khan
Publication Date:
04-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
In a lab-in-field experiment with elite civil servants in Pakistan, we investigate whether groups outperform individuals in a two-staged task which requires effective use of data and evidence. We also study how efficiently groups harness their members’ individual knowledge for problem-solving. We do not find a significant difference in individual (first stage) and group performance (second stage). Yet, groups could have significantly improved their performance during the second stage of the task, had they more efficiently collaborated to retrieve their members’ respective knowledge. Carefully interpreted in the setting of our experiment, our data suggests that diversity in individual knowledge may hamper effective use of data and evidence for decision- making in small groups of policymakers.
Topic:
Education, Public Policy, and Civil Servants
Political Geography:
Pakistan and South Asia