现代产业经济学系列讲座第270期

时间：2024年7月5日（周五）15:30-17:00

地点：管理学院史带楼303室

题目：Ability Sorting, Human Capital, and Sheepskin: Evidence from an Interactive Fixed Effects Approach & Welfare Implications of Fair and Accountable Insurance Pricing

主讲人：李筱潇助理教授, Villanova University (15:30-16:30)

Hajime Shimao, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University (16:30-17:00)

主持人：俞学文青年副研究员

摘要：The financial return to education can be ascribed to two distinct sources: first, the prestige and opportunities associated with having a formal degree, and second, the tangible skills and knowledge acquired during the educational process. Both these factors have been shown to significantly influence one's earning potential. Building upon the insights from our previous two papers, we are now embarking on the third paper in this series to disentangle and quantify the impacts of degree attainment, actual human capital accumulation through learning, and ability bias. Using NLSY79 dataset, our preliminary results suggest that, after adjusting for ability sorting, the returns from human capital accumulation are no longer noteworthy.

This paper introduces an empirical framework to assess the welfare implications of different fair and accountable insurance pricing policies. This approach extends the existing literature on fair insurance pricing, which has predominantly focused on cost modeling (technical pricing), to encompass the entire pricing process and explore the welfare-fairness trade-off. Utilizing a French auto insurance dataset and demand assumptions from the existing literature, we show that: (1) there is a conflict between fairness in price and fairness in markup; (2) fair and accountable pricing policies can incur significant welfare costs for both firms and consumers for voluntary insurance in a monopolistic market; (3) a ban on price optimization and an accountable pricing policy can yield welfare gains for compulsory insurance in a competitive market; (4) as market competitiveness increases, consumer welfare increases, firm profit decreases, and the impact of pricing regulations diminishes.

个人简介：Xiaoxiao Li obtained her Ph.D. in Economics from Purdue University in 2017. Her research interests include economics of education, labor economics, public economics, and applied econometrics. Her papers have been published in Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, etc.

Hajime Shimao obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Purdue University in 2018. His research interests cover broad range of interdisciplinary social science, including economics, management, finance and history. His papers have been published in Nature Communications, ICML, Artificial Intelligence and Law, etc. He also has multiple papers under R&R at Information Systems Research, Management Science, Journal of Human Resources, etc.