Calendrier du 15 juin 2023
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 15/06/2023 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-15
KENEDI Gustave ()
The Persistence of Higher Education Choices
Many studies have investigated the factors that might explain students' higher education application behavior. These can broadly be categorised as financial factors (e.g., cost of tuition / financial aid, geographic distance, etc.) and behavioral factors (e.g., perceptions about the returns of education, lack of information, low aspirations, inaccurate perception about ability, etc.). In this paper we want to contribute to our understanding of behavioral factors by studying the extent to which, within the same high school, the higher education choices made by a given cohort of students affect the choices made by the following cohort. As such, a shock to the type of institutions to which a cohort is admitted could have lasting effects on the application behavior of subsequent cohorts (within the same high school) through increased awareness or raised aspirations. Our preliminary results suggest that higher education choices are highly persistent across cohorts within the same school. We thus attempt to investigate the causal effect of having a student admitted to a specific degree in the previous cohort on one's own application to such selective institutions. In the spirit of Estrada et al. (2022), our identification strategy compares high schools where a student was marginally admitted to a degree versus high schools where a student was marginally not admitted.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 15/06/2023 de 12:00 à 13:15
Salle R1-14, Campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
LETROUIT Lucie (Université Gustave Eiffel)
*"Innate rewards and decision making"
In the present paper, I propose a dual-self model in which decision utility relies on two fundamental sources of value, namely innate rewards (which humans experience innately, because they used to be evolutionarily useful, e.g. rewards linked with eating sugary or fatty food that signal a high calorie content...) and constructed values (which rely on a complex cognitive model of the world and of the individual’s personal objectives). Typically, humans rely more on their innate rewards when their needs are depleted or their emotions high. The specificity of this model with respect to classical self-control models resides in the fact that both innate rewards and the weight of innate rewards in the decision utility are considered endogenous. I argue that it (1) allows to shed new light on various economic behaviors and (2) to identify new sources of economic inefficiency, linked with the nowadays wide discrepancy between the innate rewards elicited by actions and these actions' constructed values (e.g. too sugary food that turns out to be bad for health…). (3) I argue that it calls for new types of policy measures aimed at (3.a) shaping the innate rewards associated with goods and purchase situations, so that behaviors maximizing the decision utility also maximize the (real) underlying utility and (3.b) reducing the role of innate rewards with respect to constructed values in typical day-to-day economic decisions. (4) I briefly discuss how such policy measures could be operationalized in practice.