Calendrier du 09 décembre 2015
Football et sciences sociales : les footballeurs entre institutions et marchés
Du 09/12/2015 de 18:00 à 19:30
Campus jourdan,Bâtiment A, Rez de chaussée, Salle 2
ROCABOY Yvon (UNIVERSITé DE RENNES)
Compétition entre ligues nationales de football: Existe t-elle ? Devrait-on la réguler ?
It is often supposed that the stakeholders of a national football league draw more satisfaction
from their sport if the league is balanced. This is the so-called Competitive balance
hypothesis. If there exists an international competition like the European champions league,
this hypothesis can be challenged however. The utility of national leagues’ stakeholders
could be higher, the higher the probability of winning of their representative club at the
international level. If it is correct, a league’s governing body intending to maximise the
quality of the national league by making use of redistributive schemes would face a tradeoff
between national competitive balance and international performance of the national
representative club. We propose a simple microeconomic framework to model this tradeoff.
If there exists a non-cooperative game among the national league governing bodies,
whether it is a Nash or a Stackelberg one, this game would result in inefficient redistributive
policies. We find soft empirical evidences suggesting that such a competition occurs
among the big 5 football leagues in Europe. This result supports the idea of the creation
of an international regulatory body. We derive the conditions under which the international
regulatory body should ensure that the leagues’ governing bodies implement redistributive
schemes guaranteeing the respect of the national competitive balance. We also emphasize
the risk of experiencing a drop in the quality of leagues if one
Development Economics Seminar
Du 09/12/2015 de 17:00 à 18:30
Campus jourdan,Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle 8
NAIDU Sureh (Columbia University)
Social Origins of Dictatorships: Elite Networks and Political Transitions in Haiti
écrit avec James A. Robinson and Lauren E. Young
Existing theories of coups against democracy emphasize that elite incentives to mount a
coup depend on the threat that democracy represents to them and what they stand to gain from
dictatorship. But holding interests constant, some potential plotters, by the nature of their
social networks, have much more influence over whether or not a coup succeeds. We develop
a model of elite social networks and show that coup participation of an elite is increasing in
their network centrality and results in rents during a dictatorship. We empirically explore
the model using an original dataset of Haitian elite social networks which we linked to
firm-level data on importing firms. We show that highly central families are more likely to
participate in the 1991 coup against the democratic Aristide government. We then find that
the retail prices of the staple goods imported by coup participators differentially increase
during subsequent periods of non-democracy. Finally, we find that urban children born
during periods of non-democracy are more likely to experience adverse health outcomes.
Economic History Seminar
Du 09/12/2015 de 12:30 à 14:00
SALEH Mohamed (LSE)
The Cotton Boom and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Rural Egypt
The “staples thesis” argues that institutions in a given region could be explained by the nature of production of its prevailing staples, whereby slavery is likely to emerge in “slave-conducive” crops, such as cotton, rice, and sugarcane. This paper evaluates the thesis using a unique natural experiment from nineteenth-century rural Egypt, the cotton boom that occurred because of the American Civil War in 1861-1865. Historical evidence suggests that the cotton boom marked the emergence of the short-lived institution of large-scale agricultural slavery in Egypt’s Nile Delta, where all slaves were imported from East Africa, before the abolition of slavery in 1877. Employing the newly digitized Egyptian individual-level population census samples from 1848 and 1868, I find that cotton-favorable districts witnessed greater increases in household’s slaveholdings and the share of slave-owning households between 1848 and 1868 than less favorable districts. Those districts also witnessed greater increase in the population share of free local immigrants. I examine several potential mechanisms of these effects, namely, cross-district differences in the relative scarcity of free local labor and inter-crop differences in economies of scale and skill-intensity (results on mechanisms are not complete).
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