Calendrier du 06 mars 2019
Development Economics Seminar
Du 06/03/2019 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2.01 Campus jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
JACK Kelsey (UC Santa Barbara )
Poverty, Seasonal Scarcity and Exchange Asymmetries: Evidence from Small-Scale Farmers in Rural Zambia
écrit avec Dietmar Fehr, Günther Finkz
A growing literature associates resource scarcity with biases in decision-making. We investigate this link in a sample of over 3,000 small-scale farmers in Zambia, who completed a total of 5,842 decision experiments involving the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. We observe large exchange asymmetries– the so-called endowment effect – with an average trading probability of 34 percent, 16 percentage points below the trading rate predicted by neoclassical theory. Consistent with both increased attention and larger potential trading losses with higher value items, exchange asymmetries are smallest when the value of the traded items is high and when participants are relatively resource constrained. In our sample, both cross-sectional and seasonal scarcity improves the quality of decision-making, moving behavior closer to standard economic predictions. We find no corresponding systematic relationship between scarcity and performance on cognitive tasks.
Economic History Seminar
Du 06/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
R1.09 Campus Jourdan 48 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
WOLF Christian (MIT)
Was Marx Right? Market Concentration, Income Inequality, and Voting in late 19th Century Germany
The recent debate on the causes and consequences of income inequality shows striking similarities to the debate in many parts of Europe before 1914. Today and back then the focus was on the role of capital share and market concentration as a cause for rising inequality. In this study we analyze the drivers and consequences of income inequality exploiting a newly constructed regional panel based on detailed income tax statistics for the German Empire, 1874-1913. Our data features large variation in terms of inequality across 30 Prussian districts (Regierungsbezirke) and dynamic changes over time, within the common institutional framework of the German Empire. Both, capital share and inequality are strongly associated with rising market concentration. Further, inequality had a strong effect on political polarization. However, in seeming contrast to modern results but in line with simple models of political economy, income inequality in 19th century Germany was mainly linked to support for the political left, while the relationship with the political right is much weaker.