About the Seminar
- Description:
- External speakers are invited to present their research on topics related to public economics. We strive for providing a constructive, respectful and interactive culture in line with the department's Code of Conduct.
- Audience:
- Faculty and PhD students from LMU and other institutions in Munich
- Organizers:
- Arthur Seibold, Federica Meluzzi
- Schedule:
- Thursdays, 10:30-11:45 am
- Location:
- Schackstr. 4, CES Seminar Room, Room 214
- Contact:
- henning.schatz@econ.lmu.de
Winter-Term 2026/27
| Date | Speaker(s) (Affiliation) | Title of Presentation |
|---|---|---|
| 15.10. | Ben Sprung-Keyser (Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) | The Radius of Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Migration and Local Labor Markets |
| 22.10. | Jonas Jessen (WZB Berlin) | Job Ads as Signals: Evidence from a Priced Amenity and Worker Beliefs |
| 29.10. | tbd | tbd |
| 05.11. | Roman Klimke (ifo) | tbd |
| 12.11. | Rafael Lalive (University of Lausanne) | tbd |
| 26.11. | tbd | tbd |
| 03.12. | Ana Costa Ramon (University of Zurich) | tbd |
| 10.12. | Eckhard Janeba (University of Mannheim) | tbd |
| 17.12. | Jakob Søgaard (University of Copenhagen) | tbd |
Abstracts
Ben Sprung-Keyser:
We examine the geographic incidence of local labor market growth across locations of childhood residence. We ask: when wages grow in a given US labor market, do the benefits flow to individuals growing up in nearby or distant locations? We begin by constructing new statistics on migration rates across labor markets between childhood and young adulthood. This migration matrix shows 80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low-income families. These migration patterns provide information on the first order geographic incidence of local wage growth. Next, we explore the responsiveness of location choices to changes in wage offers. We develop an approach to isolate those changes in wage offers from sorting-driven wage changes. We do so using AKM-style estimates to measure changes in location wage premia over time, decomposing wage variation across place. Applying this approach to variation induced by the recovery from the Great Recession, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to increases in local labor market wage growth. We find that higher wages lead to small changes in in- and out-migration and a partial capitalization of wage increases into local prices. The geographically concentrated nature of most migration and the small magnitude of these migration elasticities suggest that the incidence of labor market conditions across childhood residences is highly local. For many individuals, the "radius of economic opportunity'' is quite narrow.
Jonas Jessen:
Discrete choice experiments are widely used to estimate workers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for job amenities under the assumption that varying an attribute does not change workers’ beliefs about other job attributes. We test this assumption by embedding an amenity with a known market price—a popular monthly public transport pass—in a large- scale discrete choice experiment with German workers. Many workers, including public transport users, overvalue the ticket by more than 100%, despite WTP for other attributes aligning with the literature. A complementary belief-elicitation experiment shows that advertising an amenity, such as the pass but also common amenities like work from home, causally shifts beliefs about unlisted attributes of the job. Posted wages similarly signal unlisted attributes so that wage variation, the money metric for WTP calculation, is itself contaminated by belief spillovers—such as higher pay signaling heightened stress. These spillovers imply that discrete choice estimates capture perceived bundles rather than isolated attributes, and distort current estimates of non-wage compensation and monopsony power.
Link to Previous Terms