Calendrier du 14 novembre 2019
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 14/11/2019 de 15:45 à 17:00
PSE - 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
REPULLO Rafael (CEMFI)
Interest Rates, Market Power, and Financial Stability
écrit avec David Martinez-Miera
This paper analyzes the effects of safe rates on financial intermediaries' risk-taking decisions. We consider an economy where (i) intermediaries have market power in granting loans, (ii) intermediaries monitor borrowers which lowers their probability of default, and (iii) monitoring is not observable which creates a moral hazard problem. We show that lower safe rates lead to lower intermediation margins and higher risk-taking when intermediaries have low market power, but the result reverses for high market power. We examine the robustness of this result to introducing non-monitored market finance, heterogeneity in monitoring costs, and entry and exit of intermediaries. We also consider replacing uninsured by insured deposits, market power in raising deposits, and funding with both deposits and capital.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 14/11/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
salle R2-20, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
OZKES Ali (WU Vienna)
The effects of strategic environment and communication on cooperation
écrit avec Nobuyuki Hanaki (ISER, Osaka)
We study the interaction of the effects of the strategic environment and communication on the levels of cooperation observed in lab experiments on two-person finitely repeated games with a Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibrium. We replicate previous findings that point to higher levels of cooperation under complementarity compared to substitution. We demonstrate that this effect is not due to differences in levels of reciprocity or strategic thinking. Through a simple reinforcement learning model, we find that slow or insensitive learning might drive this effect. We then show that when subjects are allowed to communicate in free-form before making choices, cooperation levels increase significantly but the strategic environment effect disappears. We investigate how communication works towards cooperation with a novel content analysis. In particular, we employ a machine-learning based natural language processing approach to identify how the effect of communication is dependent on the strategic environment.
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 14/11/2019 de 12:30 à 13:45
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-14
BAGGER Jesper (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Income Taxation and Labor Allocation
We study how income taxation affect workers’ job search behaviour and thereby the allocation of labor across firms. Using comprehensive administrative data from Denmark, the mobility-based long run compensated elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net-of-tax rate is estimated to be 0.17, and we show that this elasticity-estimate is to a large extent driven by a reduction in firms’ monopsony power. When evaluating a series of Danish income tax reforms implemented in the 1990s and 2000s, we find that the reforms reduced long run unemployment by 6-17% and increased long run aggregate productivity by 2-6%, with larger effects at the bottom of the skill distribution.
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 14/11/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1.09 Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
LABONNE Julien (Oxford)
Making policies matter: Voter responses to campaign promises
écrit avec C. Cruz, P. Keefer and F. Trebbi
Do campaign promises matter? Despite pathbreaking work on information and voting, there is still uncertainty about how voters interpret and respond to campaign information, especially in consolidating democracies where policy promises are rarely the currency of electoral competition. We use a novel approach combining a structural model with a large-scale field experiment to disentangle the effects of information through learning and psychological channels. We elicit multidimensional policy platforms from political candidates in consecutive mayoral elections in the Philippines and show that voters who are randomly informed about these promises rationally update their beliefs about candidates, along both policy and valence dimensions. Those who receive information about current campaign promises are more likely to vote for candidates with policy promises closer to their own preferences. Those informed about current and past campaign promises reward incumbents who fulfilled their past promises, as they perceive them to be more honest and competent. The structural model shows that effects operate through both learning and psychological mechanisms. Treated voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates and increase the weight on policy issues in their utility function. Counterfactual exercises also demonstrate that policy and valence play a significant quantitative role in explaining vote shares and can attenuate the importance of vote buying. At the same time, although these campaign promises have a significant impact, we also show that vote buying is more cost effective than information campaigns, establishing a rationale for why candidates in these environments do not use them in practice.
Behavior seminar
Du 14/11/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
salle R1-09, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
DI FALCO Salvatore (GSEM)
Economic Adversity and the Intergenerational Transmission of Personality
This paper shows that psychological attitude towards oneself is affected by recent and past random negative economic shocks. Combining individual panel data with rainfall variations during the growing season in Ethiopia, we find that experiencing a severe drought lowers individuals self-esteem by almost half a standard deviation. Furthermore, past similar droughts experienced during early childhood and adolescence have a persistent effect on adulthood self-esteem. We also find that children of low self-esteem individuals also report low level of self esteem. The economic implications are discussed.