Calendrier du 09 décembre 2019
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 09/12/2019 de 17:00 à 18:30
salle R2-21, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
WOLTON Stephane (LSE)
A Political Economy of Social Discrimination
écrit avec Torun Dewan
From burqa ban to minaret ban, from right to detain suspected illegal immigrants to restricting the help to migrants, the number of social laws specifically targeting a tiny proportion of citizens has raised in recent years across Western democracies. These symbolic policies, we show, are far from being innocuous: they can have far reaching consequences for large parts of the population. By raising the salience of certain social traits (e.g., Muslim identity) these laws can create a labour market loaded in favor of the majority (e.g., the non-Muslims), yielding higher unemployment rates and spells for minority citizens. These deleterious effects arise even absent any form of bias against, or uncertainty about, minority workers. Instead they are fully driven by social expectations about behavior and are best understood as a form of social discrimination. Importantly, we establish conditions under which a plurality of the citizenry demands the implementation of symbolic policies anticipating their labor market consequences. We further highlight that the implementation of symbolic policies is always associated with less redistribution and can be coupled with lower tax rates. We discuss several policy recommendations to limit the possibility of social discrimination arising.
Texte intégral
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 09/12/2019 de 13:00 à 14:00
IODICE Irène (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna - Paris 1 - EMbeDS)
The Sound of Silence. Nontransparent technical requirements as obstacles to trade
Exporters mostly encounter trade obstacles due to unclear procedures to comply with foreign regulations,
while the implementation itself is less of a burden. In this work we investigate the protective
nature of newly introduced regulations that are not properly disclosed at the international level. We
begin by building a novel database which identifies the process of adoption of those Technical Barriers
to Trade (TBTs) that have been contested to the WTO through a Specific Trade Concern (STC).
We then cross-reference this database with a firm-level panel of French exporters and we carry out an
event study. We find that in more than 1/3 of the studied cases countries have adopted the underlying
regulations without previously announcing the change to other members. Only in these cases, the
newly introduced regulation hampers the exporting activity of firms by reducing firms’ trade value.
This effect is however temporary, ranging from one to two semesters, and it lasts less if
the content of the TBT is eventually disclosed by governments. Finally, only those exporters who are
relatively new to the destination market are hit by these unexpected changes. This evidence suggests
that, by rising procedural obstacles, countries can effectively deploy regulations that hinders imports.
Paris Game Theory Seminar
Du 09/12/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
Institut Henri Poincaré, 11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 5ème
CORREA José (Universidad de Chile)
On the Price of Anarchy for flows over time
écrit avec Andres Cristi and Tim Oosterwijk
Dynamic network flows, or network flows over time, constitute an important model for real-world situations where steady states are unusual, such as urban traffic and the Internet. These applications immediately raise the issue of analyzing dynamic network flows from a game-theoretic perspective. In this paper we study dynamic equilibria in the deterministic fluid queuing model in single-source single-sink networks, arguably the most basic model for flows over time. In the last decade we have witnessed significant developments in the theoretical understanding of the model. However, several fundamental questions remain open. One of the most prominent ones concerns the Price of Anarchy, measured as the worst case ratio between the minimum
time required to route a given amount of flow from the source to the sink, and the time a dynamic equilibrium takes to perform the same task. Our main result states that if we could reduce the inflow of the network in a dynamic equilibrium, then the Price of Anarchy is exactly e/(e ? 1) ? 1.582. This significantly extends a result by Bhaskar, Fleischer, and Anshelevich (SODA 2011). Furthermore, our methods allow to determine that the Price of Anarchy in parallel-link networks is exactly 4/3. Finally, we argue that if a certain very natural monotonicity conjecture holds, the Price of Anarchy in the general case is exactly e/(e ? 1).