Calendrier du 14 décembre 2023
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 14/12/2023 de 16:00 à 17:15
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
MITMAN Kurt (IIES)
Consumer Bankruptcy as Aggregate Demand Management
écrit avec Adrien Auclert
We study the role of consumer bankruptcy policy in macroeconomic stabilization. Our economy features nominal rigidities, incomplete financial markets, and heterogeneous households with access to unsecured defaultable debt. We derive sufficient statistics for quantifying the contribution of automatic stabilizers to dampening output fluctuations. Bankruptcy is an automatic stabilizer if the average consumption effect of default, or "ACED" (the causal effect of default on consumption) is larger than the marginal propensity to consume of savers. Quantitatively, for the United States, we show that the current bankruptcy code reduces the amplitude of output fluctuations by 6%, and that bankruptcy rules that systematically respond to the business cycle could increase this number to 13%. By comparison, countercyclical government spending and deficits reduce output fluctuations by 19% and 11%, respectively.
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 14/12/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
FIZE Etienne (IPP)
Five Facts about MPCs: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
écrit avec Johannes Boehm (SciencesPo & CEPR) and Xavier Jaravel (LSE & CEPR)
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the consumption response of French households to unanticipated one-time money transfers of 300 Euros. Using prepaid debit cards, we consider three implementation designs: (i) a transfer without restrictions; (ii) a transfer where any unspent value expires after three weeks; (iii) a transfer subject to a 10% negative interest rate every week. We observe participants' main bank accounts, such that we can compute the impact of the transfer on their overall spending. We establish five facts about MPCs in this setting. First, we find that participants in the baseline treatment group have an average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 22 percent over one month. Second, we find that implementation design matters: the one-month MPC is substantially higher for treatment groups where any remaining balance becomes unusable after three weeks (60%) or where remaining balances are subject to the 10% negative interest rate every week (36%). Third, we document that the cumulative consumption responses are concentrated in the first weeks following the transfer and are flat thereafter. Fourth, we find that there is significant MPC heterogeneity by observed household characteristics, including by liquid wealth, current income, proxies for permanent income, gender, and age; the MPC remains high even for agents with liquid wealth exceeding twice their monthly income. Fifth, we estimate the unconditional distribution of MPCs across households and find that a large fraction of households have high MPCs. These facts are difficult to reconcile with the consumption response in standard Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian models, which is long-lived and driven by a small set of illiquid households at their borrowing constraints. Furthermore, we observe that households in the treatment groups with a short expiry date or a negative interest rate frequently use other means of payment while still having a sufficient balance on the prepaid card to cover their expenses, indicating that participants see money as non-fungible. Our finding that households consume more when presented with an urgent spending need lends support to theories where the salience of treatments affects economic choices. We conclude that implementation design and the targeting of transfers can greatly alter the effectiveness of stimulus policies
Du 14/12/2023 de 11:00 à 12:00
R2.21
Behavior seminar
Du 14/12/2023 de 11:00 à 12:00
PSE/ P004
BOL Damien (KCL(UK))
Renewing Democracy: How Past Exposures to Electoral Turnovers Reinforce Citizen Support
A prevailing narrative suggests that citizens who live under democratic rule take it for granted, potentially leading to democratic backsliding. This paper advances a more optimistic perspective: electoral turnovers—elections displacing the head of government—can rejuvenate democratic support among citizens, as they signal political elites’ commitment to democratic ideals and their willingness to relinquish power upon defeat. To test this argument, I aggregated data from multiple international surveys, covering approximately 500,000 respondents whom I then matched with a century’s worth of electoral data. This dataset allows me to identify the electoral turnovers to which each respondent has been exposed throughout their lives. I show that past exposures to turnovers, especially the first one, bolster support for democracy for about 15 years. In line with the proposed mechanism, the effect is stronger in new and imperfect democracies where the commitment of political elites to democratic ideals is uncertain.
Behavior Working Group
Du 14/12/2023 de 10:00 à 11:00
R1-14
LAGO RODRíGUEZ Manuel Estevo ()
Unraveling Gender Norms: The power of information provision on the preferential promotion of women
In this paper, we study whether variations in gender norms and, significantly, separating the effects of 1st and 2nd order beliefs can affect attitudes towards the preferential promotion of women to senior-level positions. We examine whether providing information on what others believe to be socially acceptable (2nd order) and information that may change personal beliefs (1st order) impacts attitudes towards promoting women. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that aims to disentangle the causal effect of 1st and 2nd order beliefs separately in the context of gender norms