Closing out conference season

Conference season ended last week at Chicago Booth. The PREDOC Summer Research Conference ran July 30 and 31 in the Harper Center, and it was the last thing on the calendar before the fall.

Six conference attendees outside the Charles M. Harper Center at the University of Chicago — Outside the Harper Center after the last session.

Gabriel and I brought Tipping the Tax. For months we had wanted to do something in urban economics with New York’s open data, and the taxi records are where we landed. Most papers that use them study demand responses. We went at something else. When you pay a fare by card, the screen suggests tips as percentages of the fee-inclusive total, so every government charge on the meter sits inside the base those percentages are computed on, and a dollar of surcharge costs the rider more than a dollar. The surcharges are also what make the thing estimable. They switch on and off at fixed clock times, move with the holiday calendar, and stop at the boundary of the congestion zone — several sources of quasi-experimental variation, which we exploit in a difference-in-discontinuities design to identify the pass-through of a legislated dollar into tips. Eleven cents, about four-fifths of the rate at which riders tip the fare itself, and it holds from fifty-cent charges up to five-dollar ones and in both directions. The question I got most at the poster was whether riders eventually notice and adjust. In the data, they don’t.

Tyler Sotomayor and Gabriel Uceda-Sosa beside the Tipping the Tax poster under the Chicago Booth sign — Left: our poster, with coauthor Gabriel. Right: Diego, on whether newer language models cooperate less in a repeated prisoner's dilemma.

Diego beside his poster on cooperation among large language models — Left: our poster, with coauthor Gabriel. Right: Diego, on whether newer language models cooperate less in a repeated prisoner's dilemma.

The better half of a poster session is who else is standing in the room. A good number of people there I already knew. Some from last year’s PREDOC at the World Bank, where I presented When the Message Meets the Moment, and a few more from the Princeton pre-doctoral conference in May of last year. A couple I had already run into earlier this year, at the Cleveland Fed and at Williams. Good to see familiar faces at the last stop.

Ann beside her poster on the Green Revolution and child marriage in India — Ann, on agricultural productivity and child marriage in India.

I enjoyed having dinner with the Chicago Fed pre-docs, where some of us geeked out over our fondness for select macroeconometrics papers until the late hours of the night.

The PREDOC Summer Research Conference cohort under the Chicago Booth sign — The cohort, Harper Center lobby.

The University of Chicago campus is quite nice. I hope to be returning to Chicago soon.