Calendrier du 21 juin 2018
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 21/06/2018 de 12:30 à 13:45
RAUTE Anna (Queen Mary University London)
Can financial incentives reduce the baby gap? Evidence from a reform in maternity leave benefits; IMPORTANT: ROOM CHANGE - R2-01
In this paper, I assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between high educated (high earning) and low educated (low earning) women. I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increased the financial incentives for higher educated and higher earning women to have a child, by up to 21,000 EUR. Using the large differential changes in maternity leave benefits for the child yet to be born across education and income groups in a differences-in-differences design, I estimate the causal impact of the reform on fertility up to 5 years post reform. In addition to demonstrating an up to 22% increase in the fertility of tertiary educated versus low educated women, I find a positive, statistically significant effect of increased benefits on fertility, driven mainly by women at the middle and upper end of the education and income distributions. Overall, the results suggest that earnings-dependent maternity leave benefits, which compensate women commensurate with their opportunity cost of childbearing, could successfully reduce the fertility rate disparity related to mothers' education and earnings.
Behavior seminar
Du 21/06/2018 de 11:00 à 12:00
PSE 48, bld Jourdan PARIS (75014) salle R2-01
VAN DER STRAETEN Karine (Toulouse School of Economics)
Voting corrupt politicians out of office: Evidence from an Experiment in Paraguay
écrit avec Rumilda Canete, Pepita Miquel (Toulouse School of Economics & IAST) and Stephane Straub (Toulouse School of Economics & IAST).
Corruption is a major threat to economic and social development. Democracy in itself is not necessarily conducive to less corruption. Voters may lack information on politicians' wrongdoings, and electoral institutions may make it hard for them to remove corrupt politicians from office. From these premises, one might expect that more information and more open electoral systems, that is, systems giving voters more freedom to express their preferences over individual candidates, should help remove corrupt politicians from office. We propose a simple theoretical model describing voters' behavior under closed list and open list proportional representation systems, and derive predictions regarding the impact of electoral rules and information on candidates' electoral prospects. We test these hypotheses in a survey experiment performed in Paraguay taking advantage of a rare social uprising following a corruption scandal. We find that under the more open system, supporters of the incumbent party -the most corrupt party- do actually exhibit a preference for corrupt politicians, and that this is not due to a lack of information. Besides, under the open system, vote shares for the big political parties increase, especially so for the incumbent. Based on this evidence, we challenge the conventional view that more open electoral systems are necessarily good at fighting corruption.