Georgian Economic Association held its first workshop with ISET's support on July 24th. The program can be downloaded here.

Synopsis

The 1st GEA Workshop in Economics was held at ISET, Tbilisi, on July 24th, 2023. The event featured eight presentations by Georgian researchers from different countries and gathered a lively audience of local faculty, researchers, and students.

Nikoloz Pkhakadze (ISET) commenced the conference by presenting his joint work with A. Anderson titled “Polarizing Persuasion.” He explained a Bayesian persuasion model with one sender and two receivers and explored the incentives and abilities of the sender to polarize receivers. Next, “Asset Prices, Wealth Inequality, and Taxation,” a joint work with S. Basak, was presented by Georgy Chabakauri (LSE). Georgy talked about the interplay between the valuation of assets and wealth inequality and argued that taxation alleviates wealth inequality but does not address the extreme concentration of wealth. Nino Kodua (Johns Hopkins University) presented her work “Inflation Targeting in Emerging Markets: Breaking the Inflation Spell or a Statistical Fallacy of Regression to the Mean?” She discussed the mixed empirical evidence on the effectiveness of inflation targeting and proposed a new empirical setting to estimate the relationship between the adoption of inflation targeting and subsequent inflation. Givi Melkadze (Georgia State University) concluded the morning sessions by shifting the audience’s attention to climate policies. He presented “Carbon Taxes and Tariffs, Financial Frictions, and International Spillovers,” – a joint study with S. Carattini, G. Kim, and A. Pommeret, that explores climate policy-related financial stability risks and their implications for the design of the macroprudential policy. Givi emphasized that properly designed macroprudential policies can mitigate such risks paving the way for ambitious climate policy action.

The afternoon sessions were concurred by Nino Abashidze (University of Wyoming), who shifted gears towards understanding the environmental consequences of farming. She discussed the potential adverse effects of the large-scale farming industry on public health by presenting “Seasonal Airborne Exposure Shape Birth Outcomes Near Hog Farms,”—a work coauthored with J. Hochard and L. Taylor. In her research, Nino employed a novel methodology to identify and measure the impact of hog farms on child health outcomes through air exposure. Oliko Vardishvili (the University of California, Irvine) discussed her study with F. Wang titled “Education Affordability and Income Inequality.” The study investigates the specific governmental policies that contribute to rising income inequality. The findings reveal that costly postsecondary education is a key factor in increasing income inequality by reducing the supply of college-educated individuals and subsequently driving up college wage premium. In the last session, Sandro Shelegia (Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona GSE) spoke about his joint work with H. Bar-Isaac titled “Monetizing Steering.” He discussed the choice online marketplaces make between algorithmic steering and auction-based steering and how this choice affects consumers and sellers. Finally, Salome Baslandze (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta) concluded by discussing the product market implications of the recent rise in digital advertising based on “The Expansion of Varieties in the New Age of Advertising” – a work coauthored with J. Greenwood, R. Marto, and S. Moreira. She argued that the rise in digital advertising and improvements in consumer targeting by firms led to an increase in product varieties and economic welfare.