Calendrier du 24 mai 2023
Development Economics Seminar
Du 24/05/2023 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan
BERGQUIST Lauren (Yale University)
Search Costs, Intermediation, and Trade: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Agricultural Markets (joint with Craig McIntosh and Meredith Startz)
Search costs may be a barrier to market integration in developing countries, harming both producers and consumers. We present evidence from the large-scale experimental rollout of a mobile phone-based marketplace intended to reduce search costs for agricultural commodities in Uganda. We find that market integration improves substantially: trade increases and excess price dispersion falls. This reflects price convergence across relative surplus and deficit markets, with no change on average. Using our experimental results to calibrate a trade model we can correct our reduced form estimates for the spillovers on the control, as well as simulating the impact that the intervention would have had if it were universally implemented. Our results suggest that the intervention reduced fixed trade costs by 10% and increased overall welfare in the study area by 1%. Contrary to the stated goals of the marketplace, but consistent with the existence of economies of scale in search or other trade costs, almost all activity on the platform is among larger traders, with very little use by smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, the benefits of improved arbitrage by traders appears to pass through to farmers in the form of higher revenues in surplus markets, as trader entry increases and measured trader profits decrease in response to falling search costs.
Histoire des entreprises et de la finance
Du 24/05/2023 de 16:00 à 17:00
R1-14
HOšMAN Mirek Tobiáš (Université Paris Cité)
The Most Important Research Project”: The World Bank and the Problem of Stabilizing International Commodity Prices in the 1960s
By the early 1960s, the commodity problem of international development became a well-known and eagerly debated issue. Countries of the Global South depended on exports of a limited range of primary commodities to earn foreign exchange revenues. These commodities often suffered from sluggish global demand growth and highly volatile prices. Exchange earnings of developing countries with export portfolios heavily concentrated in only a few of such commodities thus rose slowly and were highly unstable, which created pressures on the countries’ balance of payments. Counting in the often limited foreign exchange reserves, a commodity price fluctuation posed a significant challenge (and sometimes an outright disaster) for the financial position and investment plans of Global South countries.
The issue was not a new one. It was repeatedly debated at meetings of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and United Nations Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This paper tells the story of two large-scale studies prepared in the 1960s on the commodity prices stabilization, both of them having substantial consequences on global attempts to mitigate the issue. The first study was prepared by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund with the aim of examining the extent of the commodity issue, analyzing the behavior and structural changes of specific commodity markets, and discussing possible mechanisms for stabilizing international commodity prices, such as individual commodity agreements, export and import quotas, buffer stocks, or even political organization of the whole commodity trade. The second study was prepared by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the International Coffee Organization (ICO) to specifically look into coffee – the second most internationally traded commodity after petroleum.
Relying on previously untapped archival documents, this paper explores the evolving understanding of commodity markets and of different mechanisms for stabilizing commodity prices at the World Bank in the 1960s. It reconstructs debates among international organizations on regulating the global economy and demonstrates the relationship between economic research conducted by international organizations and its connection to global policy making processes
Behavior seminar
Du 24/05/2023 de 14:00 à 15:00
Online
BERNHEIM Douglas (Stanford University)
The Challenges of Behavioral Welfare Economics
In addition to offering many insights concerning public policy, Behavioral Economics challenges the premises of standard Welfare Economics. Behavioral Welfare Economics seeks to either modify the standard choice-based methods for measuring economic well-being so that they accommodate the issues that arise in Behavioral Economics, or to replace them with something else, such as hedonic measurement. This talk will provide a broad conceptual overview of the challenges that arise in Behavioral Welfare Economics, as well as the potential solutions that have emerged over the past twenty years, along with new developments.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 24/05/2023 de 14:00 à 15:15
Salle R2-21, Campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
BERNHEIM Douglas (Stanford)
*The Challenges of Behavioral Welfare Economics
ONLINE - joint with seminar Behaviour
Economic History Seminar
Du 24/05/2023 de 12:00 à 13:30
Salle R1.09, Campus Jourdan
RASTER Tom ()
Breaking the ice: The persistent effect of export pioneers on trade relationships
Trade theory holds that export pioneers - creators of new trade links - can substantially alter trade flows and lead exporters to discover their comparative advantage. I offer a first causal test of this theory, drawing on millions of captain voyages between the Baltic and North Sea between 1500 and 1855. For identification, I rely on drastic year-to-year variation in sea ice, which exogenously re-routes captains to towns they or their peers had not visited previously. I find that once (quasi-randomly) exposed to a new port, captains and their townspeople are very likely to return to this town and that trade flows and even the export mix are lastingly altered. This finding highlights the importance of pioneers and policies, such as export promotion, that foster them.