Center for Public Policy Events
The Hobby School of Public Affairs invites you to attend the Center for Public Policy speaker events.
Upcoming Speakers
Department of Economics and Hobby School of Public Affairs
Political Economy Speaker Series
Raquel Fernandez, PhD., Silver Professor of Economics, New York University.
Date: Friday, September 13, 2024
Time: 2:00 pm-3:30 pm
Location: Bates 213
Paper title: Parental Leave: Economic Incentives and Cultural Change
Abstract: The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second “daddy month,” i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. This policy increased men’s parental leave uptake and decreased women’s, thereby increasing men’s share. To understand how various factors contributed to these outcomes, we develop and estimate a quantitative model of the household in which preferences towards parental leave respond to peer behavior.We distinguish households by the education of the parents and ask the model to match key features of the parental leave distribution before and after the reform by gender and household type (the parents’ education). We find that changed incentives and, especially, changed social norms played an important role in generating these outcomes whereas changed wage parameters, including the future wage penalty associated with different lengths of parental leave uptake, were minor contributors. We then use our
model to evaluate three counterfactual policies designed to increase men’s share of parental leave and conclude that giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave or only paying for the length of time equally taken by each parent would both dramatically increase men’s share whereas decreasing childcare costs has almost no effect.
Hobby School of Public AffairsCenter for Public Policy Speaker Series
Christopher Wlezien, PhD., Department of Government, UT Austin.
Date: Friday, October 18, 2024
Time: 11 am -12:30 pm
Location: TBD
Paper title: The US Presidential Election of 2024: How we Got Here, What to Expect, and Why?
Abstract: What explains that behavior? How did we get here (and there)? Christopher Wlezien provides some answers to these questions based on the history of presidential elections since 1952 as well as the particular circumstances of the 2024 cycle. He shows how the “fundamentals” that tend to matter on Election Day come into focus for voters and what this implies for the upcoming election.
About the speaker: Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government. He joined the University of Texas faculty in 2013 from Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously he taught at Oxford University, where he was Reader of Comparative Government and a Fellow of Nuffield College. While at Oxford, he co-founded the ESRC-funded Oxford Spring School in Quantitative Methods for Social Research. Before that, he taught at the University of Houston, where he was founding director of the Institute for the Study of Political Economy. His primary, ongoing research develops a “thermostatic” model of public opinion and policy and examines the dynamic interrelationships between preferences for spending and budgetary policy in various domains. His other major area of research addresses the evolution of voter preferences expressed in pre-election polls over the course of an election cycle.
Todd Elder, PhD, Professor, Department of Economics, Michigan State University.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Location: TBD
Paper title: TBD
About the speaker: Todd Elder is a Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University. His primary research interests lie in health economics and the economics of child development. He is currently studying skill formation and learning disability diagnoses among school-age children, with a focus on the influence of malleable school and classroom factors on the diagnoses of neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism and ADHD. Elder has also written extensively on the identification of the economic returns to private education and related measurement issues in the economics of education. Elder enjoys teaching courses that introduce students to measurement and identification issues, especially disentangling causal relationships from correlations found in observational data.