Calendrier du 09 mars 2023
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 09/03/2023 de 16:00 à 17:15
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
DOUENNE Thomas (Sciences Po)
Optimal Fiscal Policy in a Climate-Economy Model with Heterogeneous Households
écrit avec Albert Jan Hummel and Marcelo Pedroni
We study optimal fiscal policy to address climate change and inequality. We theoretically characterize optimal carbon and income taxes, and quantify them for the U.S. economy with the climate model calibrated to DICE. In contrast to the representative-agent setting, we find that (i) the optimal carbon tax is on average equal to the Pigouvian level, and hardly ever deviates from it; (ii) inequality reduces the Pigouvian level, by 4% in our baseline calibration; (iii) the revenue from carbon taxes is optimally split halfway between reducing tax distortions and increasing transfers. Introducing optimal carbon taxation has progressive welfare effects and low-income households benefit even in the short run.
Du 09/03/2023 de 14:30 à 16:00
PSE, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-01
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 09/03/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
ASAI Kentaro (PSE)
Working Hour Reform, Labor Demand and Productivity: Evidence from 1996 Portuguese Reform
This paper examines the employment and productivity effects of the working hour reform in Portugal that reduced the standard hours from 44h to 40h in 1996-7. Using the variation across establishments in the intensity of treatment, I find that the establishments that were more treated experienced lower post-reform employment growth, although to a modest degree. Despite the large reduction in the labor hour input, there is no statistically significant negative effect on sales, leading to a large improvement in labor efficiency measured by sales per hour. However, these overall effects mask substantial heterogeneity in responses: establishments in capital intensive sectors reduced employment without decline in sales, while those in labor intensive sectors rather attempted to maintain employment, but their sales were negatively affected. These results provide indirect evidence consistent with the theories that highlight the role of scale effects and capital substitution effects.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 09/03/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1-14, Campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
TINE Vinicius (UFPE)
*Campaign Spending, Media Capture, and Political Accountability (co-author : Rafael Coutinho Costa Lima)
Campaign spending and media influence are well-known instruments which are intensely utilized by special interest groups to affect political decisions, and the joint utilization of those instruments has been documented and discussed. However, both literatures on campaign spending and on media capture in political economy have developed independently, possibly missing important interconnections and therefore a broader understanding of the behavior of interest groups and their influence on democracy. In that context, we develop a theoretical analysis of the strategical relationship between campaign spending and media influence, as a step towards connecting those literatures. We develop a political agency framework which describes how special interest groups utilize campaign finance and the media to influence voters' information on the political process, in order to extract political rents. We show that when the marginal cost of political campaigns increase, campaign effort and media influence are strategical substitutes, and higher voter welfare is obtained. On the other hand, when the marginal cost of media influence increases, those instruments exhibit complementarity. In that case, higher voter welfare is not necessarily attained, and it might decrease if information levels are already too high. Finally, we analyse the effects of tighter campaign spending caps in the model, showing that higher voter welfare is obtained even when illegal campaign funds are used.
Behavior seminar
Du 09/03/2023 de 11:00 à 12:00
Online
FABIAN Mark (University of Tasmania, Institute for Social Change)
What Do Responses to Life Satisfaction Scale Questions Mean? Evidence from Cognitive Interviewing
Statistical analysis of life satisfaction data relies on three fundamental assumptions about the properties of such data:
(1) Individuals perceive the scale as being linear (“cardinality”).
(2) All individuals use the scale in the same way (“interpersonal comparability”).
(3) The way that individuals use the scale does not change over time (“intertemporal comparability”).
Sceptics of life satisfaction scales question the credibility of these assumptions. Advocates respond with evidence of psychometrics validity. For example, that life satisfaction declined markedly during the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic. Yet while this attests to the useability of life satisfaction scale data, it does not clarify the precision of the associated metrics and thus the extent of that useability. Some applications, such as cost-effectiveness analysis using life satisfaction data, may be compromised by especially severe violations of the three assumptions above. We need to better understand these issues of degrees if we are to responsibly apply life satisfaction scale data in policy.
Assessing the credibility of these assumptions requires understanding the life satisfaction ‘reporting function’. This is an affective, cognitive, and linguistic process that subjectively assesses life satisfaction and then maps that assessment to a response category on a life satisfaction scale question. This study explores the reporting function using cognitive interviews: essentially asking respondents to ‘think out loud’ while answering life satisfaction scale and follow up questions. The resulting qualitative data is analysed to explicate the reporting function and evaluate the three assumptions above.
Behavior Working Group
Du 09/03/2023 de 10:00 à 11:00
ANLLO Hernan (ENS)
Outcome context-dependence is not WEIRD: Comparing reinforcement- and description-based economic preferences worldwide