CIVICA ESR
COURSE CATALOGUE

Seminar offered by Dondena Research Center (Spring 2024 seminar series) ----- May 20th 2024 17:00-18:00pm (UTC+1) ------ CIVICA ESR can attend ONLINE only. Zoom meetings link will be available upon registration. ------ SEMINAR DESCRIPTION: PAPER 1 - “Municipal-level Gender Norms: Measurement and Effects on Women in Politics”: we study the implications of traditional gender norms for legislators' engagement with women's issues. We leverage rich data from Facebook on the popularity of gender-related interests (processed using machine learning algorithms) to develop a granular Gender Norms Index (GNI) at the municipal level within Italy, a geographical resolution that would otherwise be unavailable. After validating our index, we leverage this local variation in norms to isolate their impact on legislators' policy activity in the Italian Parliament. We show that while female legislators generally sponsor more gender-related bills than their male counterparts, their engagement is substantially smaller if they were born in a gender-conservative town. This result persists even when comparing legislators within the same party, constituency or with similar characteristics. The absence of such a systematic impact on non-gender legislation further reinforces the causal interpretation of our estimates. Supplementary evidence on voting behavior suggests that gender norms also affect the passage of pro-equality legislation. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social norms and sexist culture in lawmaking, thereby slowing down reform for the expansion of women's rights. ----- BIO: Luisa Carrer is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Dondena Research Center at Bocconi University, under the supervision of Alessandra Casarico. She is also a PhD candidate in Economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, with expected completion in June 2024. Her research lies at the intersection of Public Economics and Political Economy, with a focus on gender-relevant topics. In particular, she is interested in studying how social norms interact with the design and implementation of government policy. ----- PAPER 2 - “It is never too late. Televised classes and adult skill acquisition”: this paper compares literacy rates in 1960s Italy among municipalities with differential access to televised classes specifically geared to adult workers. Exploiting Census data and TV signal exposure differences due to an expanding national TV system and geographical constraints in a continuous difference in differences setting, preliminary results show that going from 0% to 100% of the population within a municipality being served by TV signal, and hence being able to watch the educational TV program, leads to a 1 percentage point increase in literacy rates. This explains 18% of the average literacy rate increase around the educational TV program airing years. While this estimate increases to 1.4 percentage points if we consider men only, estimates are not statistically different from zero if we only consider women, likely due to gender norms preventing access to communal TVs for women. ----- BIO: Ilaria Malisan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Social Inclusion Lab (Dondena) about to obtain her PhD in Economics from the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto. Her work focuses on the impact of education, training and human capital on labor market outcomes and inequalities.
Teachers:

• Luisa Carrer (Bocconi University)
• Ilaria Malisan (Bocconi University)

This seminar presents the building blocks of a forthcoming book by Professors Petit and Schrepel. The book proposes a new formula for competition law and policy. There are today enough empirical observations showing that established models of competition policy do not apprehend the modern complexity of competition across firms, markets and industries. The lost diagnosis accuracy is a source of legal and policy error; an update in our understanding of how economic agents compete in a technology-driven environment is needed. Grounded in empirics and in a review of the legal, economic, and technical literature on industrial change and innovation, the book proposes a “renaissance” of competition policy around several key propositions. In particular, Petit and Schrepel suggest that uncertainty, as much as rivalry, is key to competition, that innovation is an input equally important to competition as industry structure, or that firm and industry level evolution is a good metric for assessing the impact of antitrust law and policy. Finally, the seminar discusses adaptations to current antitrust institutions and procedures, and the appropriate scope of a complexity-minded antitrust policy This intensive course seeks to lay the ground for the development of a more explicit theory of antitrust law. It studies antitrust laws’ principles of action (firm size, economic concentration, market power, etc.), function (rivalry, uncertainty), limits (error costs and division of labor), methods (facts and principles), metaphysics (a priori knowledge), epistemology (economics schools of thoughts), ontology (firm, market, coordinated and unilateral conduct, etc.), mobilization (private and public), legitimacy (expert and popular), norms (welfare, choice, justice), and remediation (prevention and restoration). The course’s ambition is mostly descriptive. The point is to describe the anatomy, biology and behavior of our antitrust laws. The course assumes that it is intellectually useful to break down antitrust laws in ways that describe their structure and parts, mechanics and chemistry, and actual operation. In so doing, this intensive course seeks to show many versions of antitrust laws are possible, in ways far more diversified than the binary policy reform options often vindicated in the public conversation. The focus is on US and EU antitrust laws.
Teachers:

• Thibault Schrepel ()
• Nicolas Petit (European University Institute)

This course seeks to understand the use and power of economic discourse in modern economic life. To do so, it bases itself on a deeply sociological understanding of the rise of the economics profession, its relationship to the state as well as the sociological notion of expertise. Students in this class will read the classics on the matter, as well as more recent work. This will enable them not only to appropriate crucial concepts, such as “hinge”, “avatars”, or actor networks but also to formulate their own research projects. Dates: 21 May (from 10:15 to 12:15); 13, 14, 17, 18 June (from 10 to 12 and 15 to 17)
Teachers:

• Matthias THIEMANN (Sciences Po)

Assessment: reaction memos, presentation, essay

Applying for Fellowships, writing grant applications and bidding for project funding is an essential part of academic life. This workshop will help you identify and investigate a wide range of funding sources as well as developing a targeted research statement.

The aim of this course is to provide students with the tools they need to use experimental human sciences, and more specifically behavioral sciences, in their research work and professional practice. Students will be given the keys to efficiently finding relevant articles from the behavioral science literature and critically analyzing research in this field. They will also get the fundamental knowledge to building their own experimental protocols, enabling them to enrich their thinking on the articulation between experimental methods and other methods in the human sciences. Dates: 22, 24, 27, 29, and 31 Mai from 10 to 12 and 3 and 5 June from 10 to 12. Course in English and French.
Teachers:

• Lou Safra (Sciences Po)

The workshop looks at blogging as a tool for knowledge exchange. Students should come away from this training confident in their ability to articulate ideas clearly to a range of audiences, formally and informally, through a variety of techniques.

This is a short hands-on workshop to acquire skills to harness media data in the programming language R. We will focus on techniques to gather data from the web and analyze text. Emphasis will be adjusted to the group’s needs, i.e. the below structure is tentative. Some familiarity with R is required. If you are unsure about your level, feel free to get in touch with me beforehand. Day 1: Patching gaps in your skills/knowledge - This course requires some prior knowledge in R. We will fill in gaps in your R skills relevant to the course. We will finish by focusing on data formats encountered online and through APIs (JSON, XML, HTML). Day 2: Automating data collection - We will learn automating data collection from the web, archives, and through application programming interfaces. We will focus on the problems you may encounter in doing so. Days 3 and 4: Handling and analyzing text data - We will dive into pattern matching in manipulating text and exemplify how to prepare and analyze such data. Depending on the group’s needs/interests, we will pick a few specific techniques (dictionary analysis, scaling, scoring, POS-tagging, etc.). We will especially also talk about issues that arise with large-scale text data. Dates: May 27-30 (Mo 13:00-16:00; Tue 09:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00; We 09:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00; Th 09:00-12:00, 13:00-16:00)
Teachers:

• Achim Edelmann (Sciences Po)

Entry requirements: Some familiarity with R is required.

Webinar / Professional development for junior teaching professionals, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers from across the CIVICA alliance who are preparing to enter the teaching profession This professional development event is part of the Teacher Development Programme and explores the principles and methods for authentic assessment. This type of assessment goes beyond traditional testing methods to evaluate students' real-world knowledge, skills, and competencies. Participants will explore the learning and assessment environment, the role of assessment and several methods including portfolios, case studies, and project-based assessment. Scheduled: May, 28, 2024, starting at 16.00 (EET)
Teachers:

• Simona Velea (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration)
• Mirela Alexandru (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration)

We explore the broad principles underlying academic writing – what makes academic writing distinctive, how to situate your argument within a broader literature, and how to structure a coherent argument. In this 90-minute session, the trainer will walk you through the five steps to writing a killer introduction and how to think about - and write - literature reviews.

Sensitive interviews include interviews about emotionally difficult topics or deeply personal issues, interviews with vulnerable populations or research that could have negative consequences for participants. The session will address a range of questions and is designed to equip researchers conducting sensitive research with the understanding, tools and strategies they will need in the field. Participants are invited to bring their own research projects and examples, experiences, questions, and concerns to the session. Note: Students attending this session are expected to have a solid understanding of the principles of informed consent and are strongly urged to attend the session on Informed consent on 9 May.

This intensive course, part of the ‘math+econ+code’ series, is focused on models of demand, matching models, and optimal transport methods, with various applications pertaining to labor markets, economics of marriage, industrial organization, matching platforms, networks, and international trade, from the crossed perspectives of theory, empirics, and computation. It will introduce tools from economic theory, mathematics, econometrics and computing, on a need’s basis, without any particular prerequisite other than the equivalent of a first-year graduate sequence in econ or in applied math.This second part focuses on the estimation of the models, and the "inverse optimal transport problem". Because it aims at providing a bridge between theory and practice, the teaching format is somewhat unusual: each teaching “block” will be made of a mix of theory and coding (in Python), based on an empirical application related to the theory just seen. Students will have the opportunity to write their own code, which is expected to be operational at the end of each block. This course is therefore closer to cooking lessons than to traditional lectures. Dates: 6 and 7 June from 14:30 to 18:00.
Teachers:

• Alfred Galichon (Sciences Po)

Entry requirements: the equivalent of a first-year graduate sequence in econ or in applied math.

Texts — organized and stylized collections of words exchanged between people in social contexts — are one of the main forms of evidence in the social sciences. Historically, text analysis involved lengthy and painstaking manual coding procedures over modestly sized collections of text. However, over the last three decades, novel algorithms for processing and representing large amounts of text have become very powerful, and the standard workflow for text analysis has become dramatically more technical in a short period of time. This course is designed for doctoral students and advanced master’s students who have some practical experience applying modern statistical text analysis methods to research questions in the social sciences and wish to deepen their knowledge of the logic, design, and mechanics underlying these tools. In particular, the main goal of the course is to help you develop an intuitive grasp of the general word association model (i.e. “word embeddings”). We will (1) collectively discuss the conceptual and theoretical problems inherent to studying meaning quantitatively; (2) survey the mathematical knowledge needed to make the leap from classical quantitative methods in the social sciences (linear regression/GLMs) to language modeling; and (3) gain hands-on experience inspecting the internal workings of language models. Couse on site, open to exchange or visiting CIVICA early stage researchers. Dates; from 24 to 28 June, from 9:30am to 12:30pm and 2:00 to 4:00pm.
Teachers:

• Alex Kindel (Sciences Po)

Entry requirements: Prior introductory coursework in quantitative methodology (probability theory, correlation, ordinary least squares, generalized linear models) is expected. Some prior experience working with text data would be helpful, but is not required.
Assessment: Project-based (individual or team).