Calendrier du 26 février 2020
Development Economics Seminar
Du 26/02/2020 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014
DI GIORGI Giacomo (University of Geneva)
Farmers to Entrepreneurs
Non farming enterprise might constitute an ex-post income smoothing device for uninsured households. So that the decision to initiate an enterprise is led by necessity rather than skills. We test such hypothesis and find that farmers become entrepreneurs in response to negative productivity shocks to farming, while credit constraints do not seem to play a substantial role. Importantly, and consistently with irreversible investment or learning-by-doing, these reluctant entrepreneurs do not revert to full farming following new positive productivity shocks. These reluctant entrepreneurs are typically “bad” entrepreneurs while they were above average farmers. This selection might contribute to the understanding of the dual phenomenon of low-productivity firms and farms coexisting in developing countries while speaking to the structural transformation of the economy.
Economic History Seminar
Du 26/02/2020 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1.09, Campus Jourdan 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
RAPOPORT Hillel()
BARSBAI Toman(University of Bristol)
Exit and Voice:Germany,1848-1933
Albert Hirschman hypothesized that more exit leads to less voice. We test this conjecture in the context of Germany. In the five years that followed the failed revolutions of 1848, more than one million Germans emigrated to the United States. We explore the political consequences of this exodus. We show that differently from earlier and later emigration waves -- which were economically rather than politically motivated – the intensity of emigration during the revolutionary period significantly affected political outcomes within Germany over the course of eighty years, culminating in the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Specifically, a one-standard deviation in emigration rates between 1848 and 1854 is associated with an increase in the share of votes for the Nazi Party between 0.1 to 0.3 standard deviations. We show that both the emigration of ordinary citizens and of prominent political leaders mattered, and that selective entry and exit of local newspapers on ideological grounds as well as the presence and composition of social clubs are likely mechanisms behind our results. Overall, our results suggest that the well-documented contribution of the Forty-eighters to democracy building in the US (Dipple and Helblich, 2018) came at the price of less democracy in Germany.