Sherry Li, University of Texas-Dallas, will present Monday's Department Seminar entitled "Who’s in Charge? Donor Targeting of Voluntary Taxes Enhances Giving to Government," starting at 4:10 PM in 368A Heady Hall.

Dr. Sherry Li is a behavioral and experimental economist at the University of Texas-Dallas. Her research draws on theories and designs from psychology and uses the experimental approach in field or laboratory to study issues in areas of broadly defined public economics, labor economics, and development economics. Li’s research has been published in top economics journals including American Economic Review, Games and Economic Behavior, and Journal of Public Economics. Her research on social identity has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Li currently serves as an associate editor for Economic Inquiry and Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. She received her Ph.D. degree in economics from the University of Michigan in 2006.

Abstract: This paper investigates the potential effect of donor targeted giving to specific government organizations in the form of voluntary taxes. We design a ‘real donation’ lab experiment to compare giving to general revenue funds with donor targeted giving to specific causes. Results show that granting donors control over the use of their funds more than doubles giving to government, and its impact is significantly larger than giving to private charities. We argue that creating new mechanisms to facilitate voluntary taxation has the potential to enhance revenue during fiscal crisis, especially when donations can be targeted for specific programs.

Kaivan Munshi, Brown University, will present Friday's Department Seminar,"Black Networks After Emancipation: Evidence from Reconstruction and the Great Migration," starting at 3:40 PM in 368A Heady Hall.

Kaivan Munshi’s research career has been devoted almost exclusively to the analysis of social networks. His early research, supported in part by the NIH, focused on social learning in the adoption of agricultural and contraceptive technology, and the identification of migrant labor market networks. Within this line of research, Munshi (QJE 2003) was the first paper to credibly identify network effects – among Mexican migrants in the U.S. -- in the economics literature. This heavily cited paper spawned a new literature on networks in migration and development that continues to be a rapidly growing research area within economics. Munshi’s subsequent research, supported by the NIH and the NSF, has examined the effect of networks on education, health, and mobility, which are key determinants of growth and development. Much of this research has been situated in India, where caste is a natural social domain around which networks are organized (eg. Munshi and Rosenzweig, AER 2006, and Munshi, REStud 2011). However, other work has been situated in diverse locales, including Kenya, Bangladesh, and the United States.

Munshi’s ongoing research in rural India, supported by the NIH, builds on the research described above to assess whether the scope of caste networks can be extended beyond private economic activity to the public sphere. In particular, this large-scale multi-year project will test whether these informal institutions can be used to improve the detection and treatment of tuberculosis, a major public health problem. A second multi-year ongoing project (joint with Kenneth Chay) will extend Munshi’s research program in another direction, to identify and quantify the role played by networks in African-American development, starting in the postbellum south and moving forward in time to study the formation and evolution of black communities in northern cities after the Great Migration.

Abstract: We find that African-Americans in the South responded collectively to political and economic opportunities after the Civil War, but only in places where strong social ties emerged as an unintended consequence of the antebellum organization of production. We examine political participation during and just after Reconstruction and the movement to northern cities during the Great Migration. In contrast to most empirical work on social networks and social capital, we analyze the process of group formation from its inception (Emancipation) and utilize a plausibly exogenous source of variation in social ties among members -- the share of land allocated to labor-intensive plantation crops (plantation share) in each southern county. Our theoretical model implies that cooperation cannot be supported at plantation shares below a threshold but that the size of the collaborating group is monotonically increasing in plantation share above that threshold. Voting and migration patterns across counties are consistent with the theory - there is no association with plantation share up to a threshold point at which a steep, monotonic relationship begins. This finding is robust to rigorous testing, and these tests show that competing hypotheses do not exhibit similar nonlinear patterns. Blacks from southern counties with high plantation shares accounted for a majority of the northern migrants, and these migrants appear to have benefited from network externalities, as they moved to the same destination cities.