Mehrdad Moharrami will present “A Policy Gradient Algorithm for the Risk-Sensitive Exponential Cost MDP."

Join us to hear from Josh Lerner, Harvard University. His presentation is titled, "What Do Impact Investors Do Differently?" Abstract: In recent years, impact investors—private investors who seek to generate simultaneously financial and social returns—have attracted intense interest and controversy. We analyze a novel, comprehensive data set of impact and traditional investors to assess how the non-financial characteristics of impact portfolios differ from their traditional counterparts.

Join us to hear from Colin Ward, University of Minnesota. His presentation is titled, "Appropriated Growth".  Abstract: We assess how labor mobility affects intangible investment through the lens of a structural model that features knowledge spillovers and an agency conflict between investors and key employees. Our calibration to US data targets responses of employee turnover and firms’ intangible investment to variation in workers’ outside option values that are identified by state-level changes in degrees of non-compete enforcement. Counterfactual analysis finds that the current degree of restrictions on labor mobility across states is close to being optimal for both investors and workers. The Clarence Tow Lectures in Finance Series brings high-profile researchers to Tippie College of Business to present to an audience of faculty, PhD students, and researchers from around the University of Iowa.

Professor Gruber will discuss how health care reform never ends, how we got to where we are on health care policy, and the central issues facing the U.S. in the coming decade.

Join us to hear from Tarun Sabarwal, University of Kansas, presenting, "General Theory of Equilibrium in Models with Complementarities". Abstract: We unify and generalize the equilibrium theory of foundational models of complementarities used widely in economics and other disciplines. Widely used results for existence of extremal equilibrium, nonempty complete lattice structure of the equilibrium set, and monotone comparative statics (MCS) of extremal equilibria are unified and generalized, subsuming the results for standard and neostandard models as special cases and allowing for new situations. Structure theorems due to Tarski (1955) and Zhou (1994) are generalized without using the strong set order or subcompleteness. Defining new set orders, we formulate new theories for structural comparisons of equilibrium sets, and prove new theorems for MCS of the infimum equilibrium set, the supremum equilibrium set, and the full equilibrium set. Order comparability of equilibrium sets provides a new theory of order approximation of equilibria as well. Our off-the-shelf theorems apply regardless of the manner in which individual choices are made as long as they satisfy our weak conditions, which are proved to hold in standard and neostandard models. The Clarence Tow Lectures in Economics Series brings high-profile researchers to Tippie College of Business to present to an audience of faculty, PhD students, and researchers from around the University of Iowa.

Jake Harrison is a PhD student in Management and Entrepreneurship at the Tippie College of Business. The subject of his presentation is "The Influence of Applicant Job-Hopping Behavior on Hiring Decisions."