Calendrier du 06 mai 2021
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 06/05/2021 de 16:00 à 17:30
Using Zoom
NDIAYE Abdoulaye (NYU Stern)
Redistribution with Performance Pay
écrit avec Paweª Doligalski, Nicolas Werquin
Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear in-come taxation in a model where such labor contracts arise as a result of moral hazardfrictions within rms. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlin-ear reforms of a given tax code on both average earnings and their sensitivity to outputrisk. We show theoretically and quantitatively that, following an increase in tax pro-gressivity, the higher sensitivity of earnings to performance caused by the crowding-outof private insurance is almost fully oset by a countervailing performance-pay eectdriven by labor supply responses. As a result, earnings risk is hardly aected by pol-icy. We then turn to the normative analysis of a government that levies taxes andtransfers to redistribute income across workers with dierent levels of uninsurable pro-ductivity. We nd that setting taxes without accounting for the endogeneity of privateinsurance is close to optimal. Thus, the common concern that standard models of tax-ation underestimate the cost of redistribution is, in the context of performance-basedcompensation, overblown.
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Travail et économie publique externe
Du 06/05/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30
Using Zoom
DRACA Mirko (Warwick)
How Polarised are Citizens? Measuring Ideology from the Ground Up
écrit avec Carlo Schwarz
Strong evidence has been emerging that major democracies have become more politically polarised, at least according to measures based on the ideological positions of political elites. We investigate whether the general public (`citizens') followed the same pattern. To this end, we propose a novel methodology to identify the underlying ideologies of citizens by applying Latent Dirichlet Allocation (an unsupervised machine learning algorithm) to political survey data. This approach indicates that in addition to a left-right scale, confidence in institutions defines another major ideological dimension. Using this framework, we are able to decompose the shift in ideological positions across the population over time and create measures of `citizen slant' and polarisation. Specifically, we find evidence of a `disappearing centre' in a sub-group of countries with citizens shifting away from centrist ideologies into anti-establishment `anarchist' ideologies over time. This trend is especially pronounced for the US.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 06/05/2021 de 12:30 à 13:30
online
COMPTE Olivier (PSE)
On belief formation and the persistence of superstitions
We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and possibly rare) confirming evidence and weak (and frequent) disconfirming evidence. In our model, limitations on information processing provide incentives to censor weak evidence, with the consequence that for some discrimination problems, evidence may become mostly one-sided. Sophisticated agents who know the characteristics of the censored data-generating process are not lured by this accumulation of evidence, but less sophisticated ones end up with incorrect beliefs.
Behavior seminar
Du 06/05/2021 de 11:00 à 12:00
online
VON HINKE Stéphanie (University of Bristol)
Dynamic complementarity in skill production: Evidence from genetic endowments and birth order
écrit avec Dilnoza Muslimova, Hans van Kippersluis, Niels Rietveld, Fleur Meddens
On average, firstborns complete more education than their laterborn siblings. We study whether this effect is amplified by genetic endowments. Our family-fixed effects approach allows us to exploit exogenous variation in birth order and genetic endowments among 15,019 siblings in the UK Biobank. We find that those with higher genetic endowments benefit disproportionally more from being firstborn compared to those with lower genetic endowments, providing a clean example of how nature and nurture interact in producing skills. Moreover, since parental investments are a dominant channel driving birth order effects, our results are consistent with dynamic complementarity in skill formation.