Simon Galle is Associate Professor at BI Norwegian Business School. His research focuses on questions in Development & Growth and International Trade. Simon earned his PhD at UC Berkeley and holds a Master in Economics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and undergraduate degrees in Economics and Philosophy from KULeuven.
We develop a multi-sector gravity model with heterogeneous workers to quantify the aggregate and group-level welfare effects of trade. The model generalizes the specific-factors intuition to a setting with labor reallocation, leads to a parsimonious formula for the group-level welfare effects from trade, and nests the aggregate results in Arkolakis et al. (2012). We estimate the model using the structural relationship between China-shock driven changes in manufacturing employment and average earnings across US groups defined as commuting zones. We find that the China shock increases average welfare but some groups experience losses as high as four times the average gain. However, adjusting for plausible measures of inequality aversion barely affects the welfare gains. We also develop and estimate an extension of the model that endogenizes labor force participation and unemployment, finding similar welfare effects from the China shock.
Bjorvatn, Kjetil; Galle, Simon, Berge, Lars Ivar Oppedal, Miguel, Edward, Posner, Daniel, Tungodden, Bertil & Zhang, Kelly (2021)
Elections affect the division of resources in society and are occasions for political elites to make appeals rooted in voters' self-interest. Hence, elections may erode altruistic norms and cause people to behave more selfishly. We test this intuition using Dictator Games in a lab-in-the-field experiment involving a sample of more than 1000 individuals in Kenya and Tanzania. We adopt two approaches. First, we experimentally prime participants to think about the upcoming or most recent elections and find that this priming treatment reduces how much money participants are willing to give to other players. Second, we compare results obtained across lab rounds in Kenya taking place right before the country's 2013 national elections and eight months prior, and find that selfishness is greater in the lab round more proximate to the election. Our results suggest that elections may affect social behavior in important—and previously unrecognized—ways.
Berge, Lars Ivar Oppedal; Bjorvatn, Kjetil, Galle, Simon, Miguel, Edward, Posner, Daniel, Tungodden, Bertil & Zhang, Kelly (2020)
Ethnically Biased? Experimental Evidence from Kenya
Ethnicity has been shown to shape political, social, and economic behavior in Africa, but the underlying mechanisms remain contested. We utilize lab experiments to isolate one mechanism—an individual’s bias in favor of coethnics and against non-coethnics—that has been central in both theory and in the conventional wisdom about the impact of ethnicity. We employ an unusually rich research design involving a large sample of 1,300 participants from Nairobi, Kenya; the collection of multiple rounds of experimental data with varying proximity to national elections; within-lab priming conditions; both standard and novel experimental measures of coethnic bias; and an implicit association test (IAT). We find very little evidence of an ethnic bias in the behavioral games, which runs against the common presumption of extensive coethnic bias among ordinary Africans and suggests that mechanisms other than a coethnic bias in preferences must account for the associations we see in the region between ethnicity and political, social and economic outcomes.
Carpena, Fenella & Galle, Simon (2023)
Aarhus presentation of: "The Labor Market Effects of Technical Change: A Simple Model."
[Academic lecture]. FIND Seminar.
Galle, Simon & Lorentzen, Linnea (2022)
SETC Presentation of: "The Unequal Effects of Trade and Automation across Local Labor Markets."