Dr. Ulrike Malmendier, CWEC/CFEC's IWD Speaker on March 4th 2026 presented

"Human Finance: Incorporating Insights from the Life Sciences on Life Experiences and Other Determinants of Decision-Making"

Abstract: Behavioral economics has improved the psychological realism of theoretical models and empirical predictions in economics by allowing for biased beliefs, non-standard preferences, and cognitive limitations. Yet, humans are typically still assumed to invariably follow the same (biased or unbiased) model of belief updating and maximize (perfectly or imperfectly) the same set of preferences throughout their lives. I show that, in a wide range of decision-making realms, we obtain significantly better predictions if we account for humans to be shaped by their prior life-time experiences and by stress and emotions. I argue that, in order to move from the idealized homo œconomicus to modeling a true human (homo), economic theory and empirics need to account for both their minds and bodies to be shaped by past lived experience. To do so, I leverage data from a custom survey about inflation expectations, recall, and inflation narratives, combined with retrospective information on features of people's lived inflation experiences (such as their stress level and their perceived control over the effects of inflation) to show how concepts from biology, neuropsychiatry, and medicine offer novel testable implications that can guide our model of human decision-making.

Slides of Ulrike's talk

Nava Ashraf

Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Inspire Inclusion - CWEC/CFEC'S IWD Lecture 2024

Watch the video of the talk here

About the Presenter: 

Professor Ashraf’s research combines psychology and economics, using both lab and field experiments to test insights from behavioural economics in the context of global development in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. She also conducts research on questions of intra-household decision making and gender norms in the areas of finance, fertility, and labor force participation. Her papers are published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Her field experiments on health services delivery and educational investment have been carried out jointly with the Ministries of Health and Education in Zambia, using a model of co-generation of knowledge, reaching national and global scale.

CWEC/CFEC wants to share work by Canadian Women Economists and/or on gender-related topics in Economics. Please fill in this form to get your work listed on our website - we update submissions at the end of the month starting January 31 2025. 

By Canadian Woman economist we mean the following. The word ‘woman’ is interpreted quite broadly to include those who identify as a woman and those whose gender expression may be perceived by society as being associated with being a woman or female. "Canadian" means that you are either a Canadian working abroad or a person working in Canada. Canadian citizenship is not required if you work in Canada.

Work listed in alphabetical order of first author; any new additions in a given month are marked as NEW

NEW Paule Olivia Akotto, Université de Sherbrooke, "Can the Internet Reduce Child Labor? Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa"

This paper evaluates the effects of high-speed Internet on child labor in Sub-Saharan Africa. I use a difference-in-differences strategy leveraging the staggered arrival of submarine Internet cables between 2010 and 2012. I find that Internet expansion reduces child labor, mainly through declines along the extensive margin among girls and among children in urban and non-agricultural households. These effects appear to operate through reallocation of labor toward adults and improvements in household wealth, rather than through substitution between schooling and work.

NEW Paule Olivia Akotto, Université de Sherbrooke, "Relative Income, Social Norms, Beliefs, and Intimate Partner Violence"

This paper investigates how relative labor market outcomes affect intimate partner violence in Senegal, and how social norms regarding wife-beating shape this relationship. Using Demographic and Health Survey data, I find that women who earn more than their partner are more likely to experience physical and sexual violence, but less likely to face economic abuse. Male unemployment reduces domestic violence, while female unemployment has no effect on average. Social norms, but not individual attitudes, moderate these associations, sometimes attenuating and occasionally reversing their direction.

Paule Olivia Akotto, Université de Sherbrooke, "When the Bits Bite: Internet Access and Domestic Violence — Evidence from a Geographic Regression Discontinuity"

This paper studies how Internet access affects domestic violence against women in Africa using a regression discontinuity design. In coastal African countries, Internet access drops sharply on average around 10–11 kilometers from backbone infrastructure, generating quasi-experimental variation in exposure. Women with greater Internet access are more likely to experience physical and psychological abuse but less likely to face economic violence. These effects are larger for women in polygamous and urban households. Differences in victimization risks appear to be driven by mistrust and suspicions of infidelity, negative perceptions of economic prospects, and the use of formal financial services.

Christina Caron (Independent) "The Dog that didn't Bark: The Role of Natural Capital in Explaining the Rise and Fall of Global Productivity Growth "

This report examines the role of natural capital in economic and productivity growth. It proposes that natural capital should be considered a pivotal explanatory variable in the rise and subsequent decline of global productivity growth over the past five centuries, and presents extensive supporting evidence. Labour productivity and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth rates have been declining in advanced economies for several decades, with significant implications for living standards; the decline in labour productivity growth has extended to emerging economies over the past fifteen years. Global MFP growth has flatlined since 2007 in both advanced and emerging economies. While many explanations for these trends have been advanced, no clear consensus has yet emerged. However, the pervasive and persistent nature of the declines signals that factors of global scope and extended duration are likely implicated. Thisreport presents an alternative explanation for the secular decline in global productivity growth: that erosion of natural capital has been occurring on a sufficiently large scale as to exert significant and growing downward pressure on productivity growth. Accordingly, a fundamental transformation in the economic role of natural capital has taken place, from productivity accelerator from the 16th century through the mid-20th century, to productivity decelerator subsequently. This role has been obscured due to the absence of natural capital from conventional economic frameworks and production functions.

Christina Caron (Independent) "Eroding Natural Capital: An Alternative Explanation for the Secular Decline in Productivity Growth"

Labour productivity and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth rates have been declining in advanced economies for several decades, and the decline in labour productivity growth has extended to emerging economies over the past fifteen years. Global MFP growth has flatlined since 2007 in both advanced and emerging economies. While many explanations for these trends have been advanced, no clear consensus has yet emerged. However, the pervasive and persistent nature of the declines signals that factors of global scope and extended duration are likely implicated. This article presents an alternative explanation for declining productivity growth: that the erosion of natural capital has been occurring on a sufficiently large scale globally to exert significant and growing downward pressure on productivity growth. Accordingly, a fundamental transformation in the economic role of natural capital has taken place, from productivity accelerator to productivity decelerator. These effects have been obscured due to the absence of natural capital from conventional economic frameworks and production functions.

Mahdiyeh Entezarkheir (Huron at Western University) and Saeed Moshiri (University of Saskatchewan) "Does employee’s diversity help innovation?: Evidence from Canadian firms"

Labour is commonly perceived as a uniform input within the literature on knowledge

production. Nevertheless, the ethnic diversity of employees can also exert an influence

on knowledge generation. Organisational behaviour (OB) theories have identified decision-

making and social categorisation as two fundamental processes that can shape the

effects of diversity on innovation. Ethnically diverse employees may contribute to

innovation through their distinct ideas rooted in their diverse cultural backgrounds.

Conversely, they might impede innovation due to potential conflicts in behaviour. In this

research, we explore the impact of ethnic diversity among employees on both product

and process innovations, using data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee

Surveys (WES). Our mixed logit model estimation outcomes substantiate the positive

contribution of ethnic diversity on innovation, even after controlling for employee and

firm characteristics. These results remain robust when we account for potential endogeneity issues. Furthermore, our findings suggest that ethnically diverse employees are particularly effective in fostering innovation within firms that possess substantial organizational capital and offer comprehensive training programs. Across various industries, it appears that manufacturing, transportation, and select service sectors have

reaped the greatest benefits from ethnic diversity to innovation.

Mahdiyeh Entezarkheir (Huron at Western University) and Saeed Moshiri (University of Saskatchewan) "Innovation Effects of Information and Communication Technologies: Evidence from Canadian Firms"

The productivity effects of information and communication technology (ICT) as a general-purpose technology, have been extensively researched, but evidence on the impact of ICT on innovation in the economy is limited. ICT can drive innovation through direct and indirect channels. Directly, ICT can deepen capital investment in the knowledge-creation process by lowering its relative prices, leading to complementary investments in innovation. Indirectly, ICT can create spillover effects due to its network characteristics and interactions with other factors that influence innovation, such as human capital and organizational structure. In this study, we investigate the direct and indirect impacts of ICT on product and process innovations using a panel of Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) data from 1999 to 2005, a period during which ICT was booming. We also examine the impacts of various characteristics of employers and employees, such as training, size, market, gender, education, and experience, on innovation. Our mixed logit model estimation results support the positive effects of ICT on four types of product and process innovations in different industries. Furthermore, the results suggest that ICT has an indirect impact on innovation through its interactions with organizational changes. To address potential endogeneity issue, we also estimate the average treatment effect on treated using the propensity score-matching method.

Ana Ferrer and Allison Mascella, University of Waterloo, "Immigrant Gaps in Parental Time Investments into Children’s Human Capital Activities"

Current and future well-being and economic prosperity of children depend in large part on the nuances of decisions made by parents with respect to familial resources, an important part of which regard the time spent in the company of children. We estimate differences in the time that immigrant and Canadian-born parents allocate to child-care activities relative to other activities using the time diaries from the General Social Survey. We find that mothers born abroad spend more time at work and less time in leisure but there is no significant difference in time devoted to household production or child service between them and Canadian-born mothers. Despite not finding differences by immigration status in the total care-time parents provide for their children, we do find significant differences - by immigrant status - in time specifically devoted to human capital investment activities with children: African, Asian, European and South-Central American mothers spend up to 30 more minutes daily in these activities than the Canadian born. We further assess the patterns of time use of second-generation young adults and find that they spend more time on education and homework compared to third generation or higher young adults. This supports a plausible effect of the time invested in children’s human capital generating activities by immigrant parents on their Canadian-born children.

Bhargav Gopal, Queen's University, "How Do Firms Respond to Gender Quotas? Evidence from California's Senate Bill 826"

This study examines the impact of California’s SB826, enacted in 2018 and requiring at least one female director on corporate boards by 2019, on financial performance and corporate governance. The quota reduced the share of all-male boards by 24 percentage points without harming financial performance from 2018 to 2021. Governance measures remained stable. Firms responded with both tokenism and meaningful integration, with tokenism more common in larger boards and those in male-dominated industries. I find that SB826 reduced firms’ reliance on existing networks, suggesting that network barriers may have previously prevented some qualified women from joining boards.

Doriane Intungane, McEwan University, "Macroprudential Policies and Global Banking"

This paper examines the ability of macroprudential policies to dampen the procyclicality of credit market cycles and to enhance the macroeconomic stability in countries open to cross-border banking activities. For the analysis, we develop a two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with collateral constrained investors and global banks. The existence of cross-border lending activities is the source of the transmission of shocks across countries. The macroprudential policies analyzed are loan-to-value ratios and capital requirements, also known as the capital adequacy ratio, which are formulated as Taylor-type rules. Our results show that the effectiveness of capital requirement financial regulations is undermined if borrowers can increase credit from foreign banks originating from a country with more relaxed financial restrictions. When cross-border lending is permitted, national financial regulators can improve the financial stability of credit growth and management of credit by complementing the capital adequacy ratios with loan-to-value ratios.

Laura Lasio, McGill University, "Collusion in the US Generic Drug Industry" (with Robert Clark and Christopher Fabiilli)

We study cartels that operated in the US generic drug industry, leveraging quarterly Medicaid data for the period 2011-2018 and a difference-in-differences approach comparing the evolution of prices of allegedly collusive drugs with a group of competitive control drugs. Our analysis highlights (i) the difficulty of establishing a suitable control group when collusion is pervasive,(ii) the importance of accounting for market structure changes when defining the control period,and (iii) the existence of across- and within-drug heterogeneity. We focus on six drug markets that were part of the expanded initial complaint and where there was no entry in the same class during the collusive period, permitting a clean measure of the causal impact of collusion on prices. Our most conservative estimates suggest that collusion led to price increases of be-tween 0% and 166% for each of the six drugs, and damages of between $0 and $3 million for the Medicaid market. 

We report the results of a field experiment that randomly placed unemployed young people as apprentices with small firms in Ghana, and included no cash subsidy to firms (or workers) beyond in-kind recruitment services. Treated firms experienced increases in firm size of approximately half a worker and firm profits of approximately 10% for each apprentice placement offered, documenting frictions to novice hiring. We interpret the program as providing a novel worker screening technology to firms, as (voluntary) worker participation included non-monetary application costs, echoing the widespread use of an entrance fee mechanism for hiring apprentices in the existing labor market. 

Jiawei Lyu, University of Pittsburgh, "The Costs of Affirmative Action: Evidence from a Male-Favoring Quota"

Hiring quotas can reshape who enters the workforce and how organizations perform. Such policies are often intended to redress disparities arising from past discrimination. I study a gender quota that instead preserves the representation of a historically dominant group: men in China's civil service. After merit-based hiring boosted women’s share of new recruits, some county tax bureaus introduced one-to-one gender quotas mandating equal hires by sex. Using a new dataset I built through web-scraping and digitizing position-level civil service exam records and county tax revenues, I show that counties with more recent female hires were more likely to adopt quotas, especially in tax-collection roles. Exploiting variation in the timing and intensity of adoption across counties, I use a matched staggered difference-in-differences and event-study framework to show that quotas decrease female representation, lower candidate quality, and reduce worker productivity: tax revenue falls by 4.7%, or about $4 million per county per year. Evidence on mechanisms suggests these effects stem from reduced personnel ability and gendered institutional practices. These findings show that “reverse” affirmative action can be costly when institutions that serve advantaged groups persist.

Jingjing Xu, Western University, "The Welfare Effects of Social Insurance Reform in the Presence of Intergenerational Transfers"

Family support in the form of intergenerational transfers could serve as a substitute for the public transfer system, especially when the public safety net is weak. These intergenerational transfers could be impacted by changes in public insurance. Conversely, induced changes in family transfers could also impact the effectiveness of a public insurance program. What is the impact of social insurance reform on household welfare in the context of intergenerational transfers? This paper investigates this question by using an overlapping generations general equilibrium model where parents and their children are linked by intergenerational transfers. In the model, individuals differ in earnings ability and face idiosyncratic uninsurable income risk, health risk, and mortality risk. This paper calibrates the model to key features in the urban Chinese economy. Using this calibrated model, this paper finds that households on average experience a welfare gain from an increase in the social insurance benefits but that this effect differs across households conditional on their economic status. This paper then provides a decomposition of these welfare changes into three channels: a direct policy channel, an intergenerational-transfers channel, and a general equilibrium channel. 

Jiangnan Zeng (University of Guelph), Claire Duquennois (University of Pittsburgh), "Casting roles, casting votes: Lessons from Sesame Street on media representation, racial biases, and voting"

Evidence on the media’s potential to reduce prejudice is limited. Sesame Street’s positive representation of minority characters and working women was distinctive in the media landscape of 1969. Using age and technological variation in broadcast reception, we show that Sesame Street reduced prejudice decades later and impacted voting, a consequential outcome. Exposed cohorts in high coverage counties are 4.2 ppts more likely to vote, have lower measures of racial biases, and report more votes for minority and women candidates to the U.S. House by 8.1 and 5.8 ppts respectively. On ballots featuring white men, turnout gains are split between parties.

Yishu Zeng, York University, "Derandomization of Persuasion Mechanisms"

We consider a setting where one sender can communicate with several privately informed receivers through a persuasion mechanism before the receivers play a game. We show that for any potentially randomized persuasion mechanism, under certain conditions, there is an effectively equivalent deterministic persuasion mechanism, and these two mechanisms have the same set of equilibria. We exhibit the usefulness of our result in two applications, where we apply our techniques to derandomize the mechanisms involved. Overall, this paper provides a rationale for the fact that persuasion mechanisms are often deterministic in practice. 

Brownbag Lunchtime Series Presentations January 2026 - present

Bisma Khan, University of Toronto, Public Transit, Residential Sorting and Labor Supply: Theory and Evidence from Lahore Bus Rapid Transit System

Abstract: Public transit can transform how people live and work, yet its distributional effects remain unclear, particularly in developing cities where most households rely on low-quality transit. This paper studies the establishment of the Lahore Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system to examine how mass transit reshapes residential sorting and household labor supply. Using a novel geo-spatial dataset,and exploiting the staggered roll-out of the planned BRT lines, I show that younger, nuclear, non-college-educated households relocate closer to BRT corridors, with greater labor force participation of men in these households. Women’s labor market participation, however, remains largely unchanged—consistent with tied-mover dynamics. To interpret these patterns, I build a spatial model that incorporates gender specific constraints, age-based mobility, and endogenous amenities and provides a framework for evaluating the distributional welfare consequences of transit infrastructure in developing-country contexts.

Josephine Gantois, Univeristy of British Columbia, The Efficacy of Conservation Expenditures: Evidence From Local Ballot Measures

Abstract: What should we expect if we increase biodiversity financing, as global treaties are calling for, by $200 billion a year? To better inform conservation expenditure policies, we estimate the effect of conservation expenditures on local biodiversity and land cover using voting data on local ballots that allocate funding towards a variety of conservation purposes. Our analysis compares ballots that narrowly passed or failed using a dynamic regression discontinuity design. We estimate that following a conservation ballot passing, bird abundance increases by 0.3 standard deviation, and green vegetation cover increases by five percent. In dollar terms, we estimate that increasing conservation expenditures by $25 million leads to approximately 0.2 standard deviations higher bird abundance and three percent higher green vegetation. Further analysis reveals that one state, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of the ballots, is solely driving this result: New Jersey. Our findings highlight that conservation spending can have meaningful impacts on biodiversity, however, context and institutional details are highly important.

Andrea Craig, University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Rapid Transportation and Dwelling Prices: Proximity and Market Access, with Ian Herzog (University of Guelph)

Rapid transportation infrastructure projects are major government expenditures. Economic theory and empirical evidence suggest that the benefits of transportation improvements are capitalized into dwelling prices. The literature focuses on how proximity to new stations affects dwelling prices, but this combines effect of falling travel times with the effects of transit-oriented development and neighbourhood change. We separate these effects using changes in commuter market access, which grows when new rapid transit speeds up trips to employment centres. Data from Vancouver identify changes in market access both near and far from rail stations and highlight the role of feeder busses. Combining this data with housing transactions from BC Assessment, we analyze the impact of changes in market access and station proximity from Vancouver’s Canada Line on dwelling prices. Parsing these effects can improve our understanding of rapid transit's value and accessibility's effect on housing markets.

Epio Odette Bayala, Université de Sherbrooke, Environmental Shock and Children’s health: The Case of Toxic Waste Dumping in Ivory Coast

We analyze the persistent health consequences of the illegal dumping of toxic waste that occurred in Ivory Coast in 2006. By linking geospatial data on the locations of dumping sites with GPS coordinates of household clusters from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we measure exposure based on distance to the nearest contaminated site. Our estimates, based on spatial variation in proximity to the sites, show that each 10 kilometers increase in distance is associated with an improvement of 0.11 and 0.10 standard deviations in weight-for-age-for-age and weight-for-height scores, as well as a 3 and 2 percentage point reduction in the probability of underweight and wasting among children aged 0 to 5 years. Analysis of potential mechanisms suggests that adverse birth health conditions and deteriorating local economic activity are possible transmission channels. Overall, the results reveal the long-lasting health impacts of cross border pollution and highlight the substantial public health and environmental justice challenges posed by hazardous waste flows in developing countries.

Yin Shi, University of Victoria, Forecasting Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Canada: An Empirical Macroeconomic Framework

This study examines the short-term macroeconomic and emissions impacts of climate policy in Canada. Canada's climate policy increasingly relies on production-side measures, including carbon pricing and the potential use of carbon capture and storage. A key challenge for policymakers is assessing the short-term (5-10 years) macroeconomic and emissions impacts of these policies using public data. 
We address this challenge by constructing an empirical macroeconomic framework that allows short-term forecasting of economic activity and CO2 emissions for Canada under alternative policy scenarios. To run the model, we develop an open-source R package that directly interfaces with publicly accessible data sources, including Statistics Canada and Trade Data Online. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source empirical macroeconomic framework designed to jointly forecast economic activity and Carbon Dioxide emissions for Canada using exclusively public data.
Building on the Open Source Empirical Macroeconomic (OSEM) modelling framework, our model supports policy scenario analysis specifically in Canada. Using data prior to 2024 when the federal consumer carbon tax was still in place, preliminary results indicate that Canadian CO2 emissions decline in a baseline scenario without further increases in producer-carbon pricing and without the implementation of large-scale carbon capture and storage policies.

Nwakego Eyisi, University of Nigeria and Telfer School of Management, Measuring Front-End Innovation in Data-Constrained Economies: A New Index and Its Application to the FEI–Trade Nexus in Emerging Markets

This study investigates the institutional mechanisms through which innovation emerges using a newly constructed front-end innovation (FEI) index for fifty-one emerging markets from 1996 to 2023. The results show that the FEI index is more responsive to health care financing structures than to disease incidence or statistical capacity. Moreover, FEI is significantly more sensitive to institutional mechanisms in frontier markets, suggesting that demand-driven early-stage experimentation is more salient in environments characterized by weaker state capacity. Together, these findings challenge dominant models that treat innovation primarily as a function of formal R&D investment or patents. They instead support a broader view of innovation as an adaptive response to institutional environments, particularly under conditions of uncertainty and constraint. Methodologically, the findings highlight the value of reduced-form approaches grounded in institutional credibility rather than shock-based identification strategies for analyzing FEI in data-constrained developing countries.

Justine Guillochon, Laval University, Green Tax Pass-Through to Retail Fuel Prices and Firm Heterogeneity: Evidence from France

Combining a natural experiment and high-frequency information on retail fuel prices, we investigate the level, dynamic, heterogeneity, and dependence of the pass-through of a green tax. The green tax’s economic incidence passes largely to consumers but with significant heterogeneity across gas stations. The magnitudeand speed of pass-through vary between 84% and 100%, and two and eleven days. The frequency of price changes shapes the tax’s incidence. Firms frequently adjusting prices pass through the tax, whereas those that do not, adjust their high markups due to strategic complementarities that slow down the pass-through according to a heterogeneous-firm model.

Apoorva Babbar, University of Calgari, Generative AI in Corporate Settings: Does Gender Matter?

What is the impact of firms’ responses to Generative AI on investor behaviour? This paper studies this question by analyzing gender differences in executive communication about AI during earnings calls of U.S. publicly traded firms. Using earnings call transcripts combined with stock return data, I study how investors react to AI-related discussions by male and female executives specifically around the ChatGPT launch. The results show that markets respond differently to AI communication depending on the gender of the speaker. Mentions of AI by female executives are associated with lower short-run abnormal returns, while AI mentions by male executives do not significantly affect market reactions. However, expressions of certainty about AI by female executives generate positive market responses, suggesting that tone of communication play an important role in how investors interpret AI-related discussions.