VILLANOVA DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES

This seminar series extends our department's curriculum by welcoming renowned scholars and experts to engage with our faculty and students on cutting-edge research across a wide array of topics related to economics. Through conversations and stimulating presentations, our seminar series exposes students to the advanced knowledge and insights needed to navigate the complexities of today's economic landscape, and reflects and supports Villanova’s teacher-scholar model.

FALL 2026 SEMINAR SERIES

Alex Eble presents: The Persistence of Human Capital: Evidence from Two RCTs in Rural West Africa 

Abstract: Human capital is a key engine for the generation of prosperity and its transmission across generations. In pockets of extreme poverty in the developing world, even its most basic ingredients, such as foundational literacy and numeracy, are often out of reach for most children. In this paper we study whether very large learning literacy and numeracy gains reaped in childhood in two such contexts persist, fade out, or grow when these children are seen in late adolescence. Two RCTs in West Africa showed that an intervention model combining teacher coaching and structured pedagogy raised literacy levels at the end of third grade in rural areas from zero to between 25 and 60%. We find that these original skill gains both grew over time and gave rise to accelerated acquisition of higher-level skills. At ages 16-18, we observe 60% to 85% literacy rates among study participants in intervention villages, compared to 20% in controls. Our ITT estimates indicate 0.81 to 1.45 SD higher test score differences overall, including large gains on 5th-10th grade reading and math skills not taught in the original interventions. We also observe impacts on aspirations and some evidence of impacts on gender norms. Our results show that even in extremely disadvantaged settings, sufficiently large investments in human capital can generate lasting benefits that compound over time.  

 Nune Hovhannisyan presents: Do Sanctions Inhibit Innovation? The Case of the U.S. (joint with Anna Miromanova) 

Abstract: This study contributes to the growing literature on the intersection of sanctions and innovation by examining how U.S. economic sanctions affect patenting activity. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) covering the period of 2000-2022, we analyze how patenting by inventors from sanctioned countries within the United States responds to the imposition of U.S. sanctions. We combine these data with the Global Sanctions Database (GSDB), which provides detailed information on sanctioning episodes by sender, target, type, and objective, allowing us to explore heterogeneity in sanctions design. Our findings show that more stringent sanctions reduce patenting activity by inventors from targeted countries in the United States. Joint patents are especially sensitive to sanctions, suggesting that collaborative innovation is disproportionally affected. We further document substantial heterogeneity in these effects across sanction characteristics, including type, objective, duration, and repetition. 

Jason Huh presents: Health IT Diffusion and Physician Density 

Abstract: This paper examines how the diffusion of advanced health information technology (HIT) affects the density of hospital-based (HB) physicians. Leveraging sharp county-level increases in HIT adoption driven by federal incentives, we compare physician density per 100k population in counties with rapid diffusion (treatment group) to those with slower or no uptake during our sample period (control group). Using an event-study framework, we find that HIT diffusion led to an increase in the HB physician rate in treated counties relative to control counties, with medical and surgical specialties accounting for most of the increase. Moreover, this growth holds independent of major consolidation activity and contributes to overall growth in total physicians. This growth is concentrated among early-career physicians and in physician shortage areas. Mechanism tests suggest that physicians benefit financially from practicing in treated counties, as reflected in higher Medicare reimbursement, productivity, and hospital profits. Non-physician clinicians also change in line with the new schedule. Outpatient surgeries rise the most in counties with moderate pre-period care utilization. Various robustness checks across methods, estimators, specifications, and samples support our results. Our findings suggest that strategic HIT investments can attract physicians, expand care capacity, and reduce geographic disparities in health care access.  

Menglong Guan presents: From Signals to Beliefs: How People Value and Use Statistical Features 

Abstract: The same underlying data can be communicated or perceived in different formats. A natural question is whether people prefer the formats that serve them best. We study five different summary reports of a series of binary signals in the canonical belief updating setting: Majority (which signal type appeared more often), Percentage (the percentage of each signal type), Difference (how many more of the dominant type), Count (the number of each type), and Sequence (the raw sequence of the signals). These reports differ in two key dimensions: instrumental value (IV) and information richness (IR). In an online experiment (N=200), we elicit subjects’ preference for the reports and measure their belief-updating performance across the reports. Our central finding is a systematic misalignment between preference and performance. Preference strengthens with both IV and IR, although the standard economic theory predicts only IV should matter. Performance, in contrast, improves with IV but deteriorates with IR conditional on IV, that is, participants perform worse with the very reports they prefer more. There is heterogeneity in preference, but the misalignment between preference and performance is robust across subgroups. Together, these results indicate that demand for information is shaped by features that go beyond instrumental value, and that people have imperfect meta-cognition about their own belief-updating behavior.  

Allison Schertzer presents: Electrified Transit and the Transformation of the American Downtown (joint with Prottoy Akbar and Rene Livas) 

Abstract: Did the transportation innovations of the late 19th century transform the American downtown? We study the impact of electrified transit in Philadelphia on the specialization of economic activity within the city beginning with the first subway and elevated railway in 1907. To measure worker place of residence, workplace locations, and commuting patterns, we construct a panel dataset of roughly one million entries from Philadelphia's city directories over the 1887-1930 period. Using a market access approach, we find that electrified transit caused blocks near the central business district to specialize as workplaces while blocks further away specialized as residences. This effect was especially pronounced for workers in professional services, whose jobs remained in the downtown while their places of residence shifted to the urban periphery. Our preliminary results suggest that electrified transit led to increasing specialization in land use.  

Michele Andreolli presents: Bonds, Not Budgets: Government Supply Shocks and Financial Crowding Out 

Abstract: This paper studies how government bond supply affects asset prices. I exploit a timing separation in the UK fiscal framework together with high-frequency identification. The identification is based on movements in long gilt futures around UK Debt Management Office announcements, especially those released immediately after Budget speeches by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. These speeches disclose fiscal news about spending, taxes, deficits, and consolidated public debt, but not the exact quantity of gilts to be issued. The subsequent DMO announcement therefore reveals large marketable gilt-supply news that is plausibly separated from fiscal-policy news. A shock that increases gilt issuance by one percent of GDP raises the 10-year government bond yield by about 9 basis points and widens the corporate bond risk spread by about 2 basis points. The results support a preferred-habitat view in which constrained arbitrageurs intermediate both government and corporate bond markets. Fiscal policy therefore transmits not only through standard demand and tax channels, but also through financial crowding out in debt markets.  

Sherry Li presents: Intergroup Preferences of Large Language Models (with Yan Chen, Qiaozhu Mei, Axel Ockenfels, and Jingyi Qiu) 

Abstract: We investigate whether large language models exhibit human-like intergroup preferences in strategic environments by comparing choices from DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT-5 with those of human participants from five economic experiments involving minimal groups, religious and political identities, sectarian identities in Lebanon, North versus South Korean identities, and left-behind children in rural China.  Compared to their human counterparts, LLMs are: (1) overly responsive to economic incentives; (2) too groupish along political identity lines, exhibiting more extreme in-group favoritism than humans; and (3) excessively responsive to debiasing interventions. We also observe systematic differences in different foundation models. These results demonstrate that LLMs operate with distinct and predictable group-contingent social preferences. Their amplification of political biases and inability to grasp nuanced cultural contexts pose significant risks if deployed for policy simulation or in real-world applications.