Mityakov: New findings for studies on household production

Sergey Mityakov is the Truist Associate Professor of Finance in the Department of Finance at FSU's College of Business.
smityakov@business.fsu.edu

College officials hail associate professor Sergey Mityakov for his new study on household production, its groundbreaking findings and August acceptance into the prestigious Journal of Political Economy.

Mityakov’s paper, “Unobserved Inputs in Household Production,” contends that almost all existing empirical studies of health, child development and job-training programs fail to account for “unobserved” actions that people commonly undertake – “rendering the conclusions of those studies incomplete and resulting in possibly misleading policy recommendations,” he says.

Mityakov, FSU’s Truist Associate Professor of Finance, said he and his coauthor showed that researchers in those areas can improve their findings through additional information that is likely available in their surveys.

“With data you are likely to have already in place, you can come up with a proper economic interpretation of empirical estimates of household production, which you didn’t have before our paper,” he said.

To illustrate the effects of his research, Mityakov says, consider this scenario: A high school decreases class sizes, then measures the benefit to students. But it does not take into account other possible effects of the move, such as less parental involvement or reduced tutoring.

“People take attenuating actions in response to changes, resulting often in a smaller measured benefit, and the literature for the most part has not properly accounted for these effects,” he said.

Recent publications or presentations:

Sergey Mityakov, Margarita Portnykh, Kevin K Tsui, International politics and oil trade: evidence from Russian oil exports, The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Volume 39, Issue 3, November 2023, Pages 642–681, https://doi.org/10.1093/jleo/ewad005

Lucy Chernykh, Sergey Mityakov (2022) Behavior of Corporate Depositors During a Bank Panic. Management Science 68(12):9129-9151. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4304

Raymond Fisman, April Knill, Sergey Mityakov, Margarita Portnykh, Political Beta, Review of Finance, Volume 26, Issue 5, September 2022, Pages 1179-1215,  https://doi.org/10.1093/rof/rfac012

Lucy Chernykh, Sergey Mityakov, Do Ex-Bankers Benefit Nonfinancial Firms? Evidence from Job Transitions, The Review of Corporate Finance Studies, Volume 11, Issue 2, May 2022, Pages 364–413, https://doi.org/10.1093/rcfs/cfac006