Calendrier du 17 mai 2022
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 17/05/2022 de 17:00 à 18:00
R1-13
ABOYA Nakita (PSE)
Fiscal policies, Inequality, and Poverty in Cameroon
Development Economics Seminar
Du 17/05/2022 de 16:30 à 17:45
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
STARTZ Meredith (Dartmouth College)
Cutting out the middleman: The structure of chains of intermediation
écrit avec with Matthew Grant
Distribution of goods often involves chains of multiple intermediaries engaged in sequential buying and reselling. Why do such chains arise, and how will changes in their structure due to changes in policy or trade costs affect consumers? We show that internal economies of scale in trade costs naturally generate chains with multiple intermediaries, and that this suggests developing country markets are more likely to be served via long chains. Contrary to common wisdom, cutting middlemen out can, but does not necessarily, benefit consumers. Instead, there is a fundamental tradeoff between costs and entry that means even pure reductions in trade costs can have perverse effects. The proposed mechanism is simple, but can account for empirical patterns in wholesale firm size, prices and markups that we document using original survey data on imported consumer goods in Nigeria. We estimate a structural version of the model for distribution of Chinese-made apparel in Nigeria, and describe endogenous restructuring of chains and the resulting impacts on consumer welfare in response to counterfactual changes in regulation and e-commerce technologies. We find that cutting out middlemen has heterogeneous impacts across locations, but often harms more remote consumers.
Texte intégral
Paris Trade Seminar
Du 17/05/2022 de 14:30 à 16:00
PSE, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
BLANCHARD Emily (Dartmouth)
ANNULE/CANCELLED
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 17/05/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30
R2.01 PSE
BENVENISTE Stéphane (INED-AMSE)
Like Father, Like Child: Social Reproduction in the French Grandes Ecoles throughout the 20th Century
Educational systems expanded over the 20th century in developed countries, and
while most scholars found that it promoted social mobility, some argue that the top of
the social hierarchy remains shielded over generations. In France, the most prestigious
Grandes Ecoles are elite institutions for higher education. They constitute the main
pathway to top positions in the public and private sectors. The present work provides
the first results on intergenerational social reproduction in these schools over more than
a century. We construct an exhaustive nominative dataset of 224,264 graduate students
from ten of the leading Grandes Ecoles, spanning over five cohorts born between 1866
and 1995. We develop a new methodology within the literature using surnames to
track lineages and find that families from ancient aristocratic lineage, Parisians, as
well as descendants of graduates are highly over-represented in the top Grandes Ecoles,
throughout the 20th century. Across cohorts, children of Grandes Ecoles’ graduates are
72 to 154 times more likely to be admitted, and up to 450 times to the exact same
school than their father. This advantage appears remarkably stable for all cohorts
born since 1916 and persists across multiple generations, emphasizing the existence of
a “glass floor” for the French elites.