Calendrier du 09 novembre 2022
Development Economics Seminar
Du 09/11/2022 de 16:30 à 18:00
Seminar cancelled and postponed
BALBONI Clare (MIT)
Firm adaptation in production networks: Evidence from extreme weather events in Pakistan
écrit avec Johannes Boehm, Mazhar Waseem
How will private adaptation reduce future vulnerability to climate change? We study this
question in the context of Pakistani manufacturing firms, which are exposed to increasingly
frequent and severe floods as the global climate changes. Using detailed georeferenced data on
monthly firm-to-firm transactions for the near-universe of formal sector manufacturing firms
over 2011-2018 as well as flood exposure and underlying flood risk, we document that these
shocks have both direct impacts on firms and effects through their position in the production
network. We also harness more than six billion observations from commercial trucks traveling on
Pakistan’s road network to document the importance of supply chain disruptions from flooding
disrupting roads. We find that firm behavior in the aftermath of major floods is consistent with
firms undertaking adaptation in order to reduce their vulnerability to future natural disasters.
Flood-affected firms relocate to less flood-prone areas, diversify their supplier base, and shift the
composition of their suppliers towards suppliers located in less flood-prone regions and reached
via less flood-prone roads. Responses are persistent even where the flood disruptions are short-lived,
and consistent with Bayesian firms affected by floods updating their priors over flood risk.
Economic History Seminar
Du 09/11/2022 de 12:00 à 13:30
Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan
GIEROK Victoria (Oxford University)
Taxation, Credit and Public Expenditure in Urban Germany, 1400-1800
How did urban revenues and expenditure evolve in pre-industrial Germany? Trends in public wealth are crucial to understanding economic growth, public goods provision and inequality. This paper presents first trends in urban revenues and expenditure from 1350 to 1800. It is based on a novel city-level dataset comprising 22 cities. City selection is shown to be representative of the urban Empire at large. The data reveal the following trends: German cities financed themselves mostly through taxation and to a lesser extent through credit. While income from wealth taxes declined until 1550, income from consumption taxes and credit made up the shortfall. Together, this likely led to an increase in inequality. From 1550, this trend reversed and wealth taxes provided for a large share of income during and after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). Prior to the war, cities spent most of their revenues on construction and debt servicing. Construction was focused on administrative buildings. After the war, military expenses and debt servicing dominated city expenditure.
EU Tax Observatory Seminar
Du 09/11/2022 de 12:00 à 13:00
PSE, Campus Jourdan, R1.13.
LOPEZ-FORERO Margarita (Université d’Evry, Paris-Saclay)
Aggregate Labor Share and Tax Havens: Things are not always what they seem
We use French firm-level data to study the role of multinational enterprises' (MNEs) presence in tax havens in determining the dynamics of the aggregate labor share and therefore, income inequalities between workers and capitalists. Given these firms’ weight in the economy, we find that tax haven presence of MNEs accounts for a 5% of the observed increase in the aggregate share of labor in France between 1997-2014. Implementing a difference-in-differences we analyze the effect firm entry in a tax haven on firms' labor share of value added and each of its components. We find that average firm labor share in France experiences an increase by 2.2% over the immediate years following the establishment in a tax haven. We argue that the labor share of MNEs with presence in tax havens is overestimated given that tax optimization partly consists in artificially shifting profits to low tax jurisdictions, thus underestimating domestic value added, which experiences an average drop by 11.1%. Indeed, the labor share increases even if its numerator, total wage bill, decreases on average by 8.8% when MNEs enter a tax haven. Additionally, the total wage bill drop is explained by a strong decline in employment (-8.6%) rather than a decline on average firm wages, on which there is no statistically significant effect. This means that the effect of firms' usage of tax havens on workers goes beyond the underestimation of their share of income. Finally, we implement a panel event study design to show that our estimates capture the tax haven entry effect and not differential trends between treated and control units.