Asia Business Conference: The Berkeley-Haas Asia Business Conference is the largest student-run Asian conference in the West Coast. This year, the conference took place on March 6, 2015 at the San Francisco Marriot in Union Square.
Conferences
San Francisco Marriot Union Square
Mar 6, 2015
Please join us for the inaugural talk in
The Egon and Joan von Kaschnitz Lecture Series
Christian Gollier (Toulouse School of Economics)
Evaluation of Long-Dated Investments Under Uncertain Growth Trend, Volatility and Catastrophes
Monday, November 10, 2014
10:30am—noon, Cheit Hall, C320
Fall 2014: Mega-FTAs and the Global Economy: This conference will examine the origins, evolution, and impact of mega-FTAs, focusing on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). More specifically, paper writers will explore both the political and economic dynamics of these accords, the implications for the WTO and other trade arrangements, the security implications of mega-FTAs, and the implications for Taiwan.
by Meredith Fowlie (Department of agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley) and Catherine Wolfram (Berkeley Haas)
See the USAID report on this project.
Nearly all of the growth in energy demand, fossil fuel use, associated local pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions is forecast to come from the developing world, yet we know very little about how energy is used in developing countries. The Berkeley professors doing this project are involved with a Berkeley-based startup, Gram Power, which provides solar power to rural villages in India using a smart microgrid technology that includes prepaid smart meters and grid monitoring devices. Because the provider is using smart meters and because and the team includes engineers, it is possible to analyze minute-by-minute electricity usage and infer the type of appliance the household is using at the time .The project will fund appliances (e.g., light bulbs) to the newly connected households. Households will be randomly selected to receive either a low efficiency version (e.g., compact fluorescent) or a high efficiency version (e.g., LED). The project will analyze households’ decisions about how much to use the different appliances. If households randomly selected to receive the high efficiency versions use them for more hours per week, this would be concrete, experimentally derived evidence of a rebound effect. Debates about how large the rebound effect is likely to be are central to policy discussions about the role of energy efficiency in mitigating climate change. To date, there is very little empirical evidence on the rebound effect, and none from the developing world.
Photo source: https://flic.kr/p/Deit6
Development
International Trade & Development
by Ross Levine, Chen Lin and Beibei Shen
For draft of the paper, see here.
Do labor regulations influence the reaction of stock markets and firm profitability to cross-border acquisitions? Levine, Lin and Shen discover that acquiring firms enjoy smaller abnormal stock returns and profits when target firms are in countries with stronger labor protection regulations, i.e., in countries where laws, regulations, and policies increase the costs to firms of adjusting their workforces. These effects are especially pronounced when the target firm is in a labor-intensive or high labor-volatility industry. Consistent with labor regulations shaping the success of cross-border deals, Levine, Lin and Shen find that firms make fewer and smaller cross-border acquisitions into countries with strong labor regulations.
See poster.
Capital flows
Financial Globalization