Calendrier du mois de mars 2019
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 28/03/2019 de 15:45 à 17:00
PSE - 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-01
MONGEY Simon (University of Chicago)
Labor Market Power
écrit avec David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff
What are the welfare implications of labor market power? We provide an answer to this
question in two steps: (1) develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony
model of the labor market, (2) estimate key parameters using within-firm-states, acrossmarket
differences in wage and employment responses to state corporate tax changes in U.S.
Census data. We validate the model against recent evidence on productivity-wage passthrough,
and new measurements of the distribution of market concentration. The model
implies welfare losses from labor market power range from 2.9 to 8.0 percent of lifetime
consumption. However, despite large contemporaneous losses, labor market power has not
contributed to the declining labor share. Finally, we show that minimum wages can deliver
moderate welfare gains by reallocating workers from smaller to larger, more productive
firms.
Texte intégral
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 28/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:45
PELLIZZARI Michele (University of Geneva)
Distance Learning in Higher Education: Evidence from a Randomised Experiment
écrit avec Co-authors: P. Cacault, C. Hildebrand, and J. Laurent-Lucchetti
Using a randomised experiment at the University of Geneva, we study the impact of on-line live streaming of lectures on achievement and attendance. We find that (i) students use the streaming technology only punctually, seemingly when attending in class is too costly; (ii) attending lectures via live streaming lowers achievement for low ability students and improves it for high ability ones and (iii) offering this service reduces in-class attendance only mildly.
Behavior seminar
Du 28/03/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
salle R2-21, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
HERZ Holger (Universität Freiburg)
Clarity in Relational Contracts: Rules vs. Principles
Recent work in organizational economics stresses the importance of clarity in relational contracts as a reason behind the persistent performance differences that we observe between seemingly similar enterprises. Even though the conditions necessary to establish cooperation through relational contracts are straightforward in theory, in practice establishing a relational contract poses a number of difficult challenges. Specifically, trading parties face the clarity problem: they need to establish mutual understanding about the content of the relational contract and they need to succeed in adapting this mutual understanding to new situations when the environment changes. We hypothesize that building the relational contract on general principles, rather than relying on specific but narrow rules, helps achieve clarity and improves performance in repeated games with uncertainty about the future, and report results from an experiment assessing this hypothesis.
Development Economics Seminar
Du 27/03/2019 de 16:30 à 18:00
Salle R2.01 Campus Jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
RAVALLION Martin (Georgetown University)
Ethnic Inequality and Poverty in Malaysia Since 1969
Ethnic riots broke out in Malaysia in 1969, prompting a national effort at affirmative action
favoring the poorer (majority) of “Bumiputera” (mainly Malays). Since then, Malaysia’s official
poverty measures indicate one of the fastest long-term rates of poverty reduction in the world,
due to both economic growth and falling inequality. Did ethnic inequality fall since 1969 and was
that a key factor in the country’s success in reducing poverty and in managing inequality? New
measures in this paper indicate a substantial decline in relative ethnic inequality. This brought
down national relative inequality, though not enough to prevent rising absolute inequality, given
the initial disparities. A new analytic decomposition of the rate of poverty reduction reveals that
ethnic redistribution helped reduce poverty, although it was not as important as the overall rate of
growth in household incomes. Despite past progress in reducing ethnic inequality, the
responsiveness of the national poverty rate to ethnic redistribution remains high even today.
Economic History Seminar
Du 27/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
CERRETANO Valerio (University of Glasgow) *TBA;
La séance est annulée
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 26/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:00
MARTíNEZ-TOLEDANO Clara (Imperial College London)
Behavioral Responses to Wealth Tax Incentives. Evidence from Spain
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 26/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
TURATI Riccardo (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)
SKILL OF THE IMMIGRANTS AND VOTE OF THE NATIVES: IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALISM IN EUROPEAN ELECTIONS 2007-2016
écrit avec Simone Moriconi, Giovanni Peri
In this paper we document the impact of immigration at the regional level on Europeans’ political
preferences as expressed by voting behavior in parliamentary or presidential elections between
2007 and 2016. We combine individual data on party voting with a classification of each party's
political agenda on a scale of their "nationalistic" attitudes over 28 elections across 126 parties in
12 countries. To reduce immigrant selection and omitted variable bias, we use immigrant
settlements in 2005 and the skill composition of recent immigrant flows as instruments. OLS and
IV estimates show that larger inflows of highly educated immigrants were associated with a
change in the vote of citizens away from nationalism. However the inflow of less educated
immigrants was positively associated with a vote shift towards nationalist positions. These effects
were stronger for non-tertiary educated voters and in response to non-European immigrants. We
also show that they are consistent with the impact of immigration on individual political
preferences, which we estimate using longitudinal data, and on opinions about immigrants.
Conversely, immigration did not affect electoral turnout. Simulations based on the estimated
coefficients show that immigration policies balancing the number of high-skilled and low-skilled
immigrants from outside the EU would be associated with a shift in votes away from nationalist
parties in almost all European regions.
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 25/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
FRICK Mira (Yale)
Misinterpreting Others and the Fragility of Social Learning
écrit avec Ryota lijima and Yuhta Ishii
We study to what extent information aggregation in social learning environments is robust to slight misperceptions of others' characteristics (e.g., tastes or risk attitudes). We consider a population of agents who obtain information about the state of the world both from initial private signals and by observing a random sample of other agents' actions over time, where agents' actions depend not only on their beliefs about the state but also on their idiosyncratic types. When agents are correct about the type distribution in the population, they learn the true state in the long run. By contrast, our first main result shows that even arbitrarily small amounts of misperception can generate extreme breakdowns of information aggregation, where in the long run all agents incorrectly assign probability 1 to some fixed state of the world, regardless of the true underlying state. This stark discontinuous departure from the correctly specified benchmark motivates independent analysis of information aggregation under misperception. Our second main result shows that any misperception of the type distribution gives rise to a specific failure of information aggregation where agents' long-run beliefs and behavior vary only coarsely with the state, and we provide systematic predictions for how the nature of misperception shapes these coarse long-run outcomes. Finally, we show that how sensitive information aggregation is to misperception depends on how rich agents' payoff-relevant uncertainty is. A design implication is that information aggregation can be improved through interventions aimed at simplifying the agents' learning environment.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 25/03/2019 de 13:00 à 14:00
Campus MSE - Room 19
EL MALLAKH Nevine (Paris 1)
The effect of FDI liberalization on manufacturing firms’ technology upgrading
écrit avec Maria Bas
Régulation et Environnement
Du 25/03/2019 de 12:00 à 13:00
salle R1-13, campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MARTINEZ-ZARZOSO Inma (University of Göttingen)
Searching for Grouped Patterns of Heterogeneity in the Climate-Migration Link
This paper investigates the extent to which international migration can be explained by climate change and whether this relationship varies systematically between groups of countries. The primary focus is to further investigate the differential effect found for countries with different income levels using a high-frequency migration dataset and allowing the country-grouping to be data-driven. For this purpose, the main results of this paper are based on the group-mean fixed-effects (GFE) estimator proposed by Bonhomme and Manresa (2015), which allows us to group the countries of origin according to the data generating process. The results indicate that on average, increasing average temperatures are associated with an increase in emigration rates, but that the pattern differs between groups. The relationship is driven by a group of countries mainly located in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. No statistically significant association is found between average local precipitation and emigration.
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 22/03/2019 de 12:45 à 13:45
Salle R2.01, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
CRESPIN-BOUCAUD Juliette (PSE)
Interethnic marriages in Kenya
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 21/03/2019 de 15:45 à 17:00
PSE - 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-01
MATSUYAMA Kiminori (Northwestern university)
Engel’s Law in the Global Economy: Demand-Induced Patterns of Structural Change, Innovation, and Trade
Endogenous demand composition across sectors due to income elasticity differences, or Engel’s Law for the brevity, affects i) sectoral compositions in employment and in value-added, ii) variations in innovation rates and in productivity change across sectors, iii) intersectoral patterns of trade across countries; and iv) product cycles from rich to poor countries. Using a two-country model of directed technical change with a continuum of sectors under nonhomothetic preferences, which is rich enough to capture all these effects as well as their interactions, this paper offers a unifying perspective on how economic growth and globalization affects the patterns of structural change, innovation and trade across countries and across sectors in the presence of Engel’s Law. Among the main messages is that globalization amplifies, instead of reducing, the power of endogenous domestic demand composition differences as a driver of structural change.
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 21/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:45
GARROUSTE Manon (University of Lille)
When education and urban policies overlap: Effect on academic achievement
In this paper, we study the effect on academic achievement of the overlap between urban and education placed-based policies in France. The identification challenge comes from two potential bias due to individual location choices and school choices. To analyze causal effects, we propose to use regression discontinuities at the boundaries of treated zones. We use very precise geocoded data at the neighborhood, school, and individual levels in the Paris municipality to investigate the net effect of each type of programs, as well as potential interaction effects. Preliminary results suggest that the net effect on academic achievement of urban policies is negative and that there is no advantage of benefiting from both types of programs.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 21/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
salle R2-01 capus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
GLEYZE Simon (PSE)
Informationally Simple Implementation
écrit avec Agathe Pernoud (Stanford University)
Development Economics Seminar
Du 21/03/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
Salle R2.21 Campus Jourdan, 48 bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
SCHOFIELD Heather (University of Pennsylvania)
*
Behavior seminar
Du 21/03/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
Salle R2-21, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
SCHOFIELD Heather (The University of Pennsylvania)
Sleepless in Chennai: The Consequences of Improving Sleep among the Urban Poor
Sleep deprivation is common around the world. While sleep medicine has established that inducing acute sleep deprivation substantially worsens cognition, we know little about the real-world impacts of improving sleep. We hire 450 individuals in urban India as data-entry workers and offer a random subset different interventions to increase their sleep: (i) devices to improve their home-sleep environment, (ii) additional financial incentives to increase sleep, and (iii) the opportunity to take a short nap in the afternoon. We present three sets of results. First, the interventions increase night sleep duration by 20 to 40 minutes (on a base of 5.5 hours per night in the control group) with no detectable changes in sleep efficiency. Individuals assigned to the nap treatment sleep on average about 12 minutes during their naps. Second, contrary to predictions by most sleep experts and economists, improved night sleep lowers labor supply slightly (6.5 minutes) and does not significantly improve productivity or earnings. In contrast, naps increase productivity by about 2-3 percent, although the increase is insufficient to fully counteract the associated reduction in labor supply relative to working through that time. Third, increased night sleep improves health as measured by a composite health index by 0.1 units, and naps improve an index of well-being by a similar amount. Taken together, we find little evidence of increased sleep causing impacts on short- and medium-run economic outcomes that could be easily discernible by individuals, thus providing a possible explanation for the persistence of widespread sleep deprivation found in many settings.
Behavior Working Group
Du 21/03/2019 de 10:00 à 10:45
Jourdan R1-14
MUN Soffia (PSE)
Risk and Ambiguity Preferences: Attitudes of the Self and Beliefs About Others
Development Economics Seminar
Du 20/03/2019 de 16:30 à 18:00
CAI Jing (University of Maryland) TBA;
La séance est annulée
Football et sciences sociales : les footballeurs entre institutions et marchés
Du 20/03/2019 de 16:00 à 17:00
salle R1-11 campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
DIALLO Alexandre(EHESS)
RANC David(ESSCA)
Football : recherche & idées reçues
Football et sciences sociales : les footballeurs entre institutions et marchés
Du 20/03/2019 de 14:30 à 15:30
salle R1-11 campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
DIALLO Alexandre(EHESS)
RANC David(ESSCA)
Les rémunérations des footballeurs professionnelles sont-elles justes socialement ?
Economic History Seminar
Du 20/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1.09 Campus Jourdan 48 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
GAY Victor (TSE)
Shocking Culture: World War I and Attitudes toward Gender Role throughout a Century
World War I in France induced many women to enter the labor force after the war, a shock to female labor that persisted over the long run. I rely on this historical shock to women's working behaviors to explore mechanisms that underlie the process of cultural change. I attempt to build a measure of attitudes that is consistent across time and space by using legislative behaviors of French deputies on gender-issues bills throughout the twentieth century. Preliminary results indicate that the war had enduring implications for attitudes toward gender roles across society.
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 19/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:00
LEROUTIER Marion (PSE)
Carbon pricing and power sector decarbonisation: the impact of the UK Carbon Price Floor
Paris Trade Seminar
Du 19/03/2019 de 14:30 à 16:00
PSE, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014, Paris - salle R2-21
BUSTOS Paula (CEMFI)
Capital Accumulation and Structural Transformation
écrit avec Jacopo Ponticelli and Gabriel Garber
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 19/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MACOURS Karen (PSE & CEPR)
Education, Income and Mobility: Experimental Impacts of Childhood Exposure to Progresa after 20 Years
écrit avec Caridad Araujo
In 1997 the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. Since then, a large literature has documented the short and medium-term impacts of the Mexican program and its successors in other countries. Using Progresa’s experimental evaluation design originally rolled out in 1997-2000, and a tracking survey conducted 20 years later, this paper studies the differential long-term impacts of exposure to Progresa at critical moments in childhood. To do so, we focus on two cohorts of children: i) those that during the period of differential exposure were in-utero or in the early years of life, and ii) those who during the period of differential exposure were transitioning from primary to secondary school. Results for the older cohort, in their early 30s at endline, show that the short-term impacts of differential exposure to Progresa on schooling are sustained in the long-run and manifest themselves in larger labor incomes, more international migration, and delayed fertility. The younger cohort, 17-20 shows similar differential impacts to those of the older cohort on schooling and a positive effect of differential exposure to Progresa on labor income expectations, pointing to the importance of exposure in very early childhood.
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 19/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Sciences Po - 28 rue des Saints-Pères, 75007 Paris
ALBERTO Alesina ()
*
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 18/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
FLECKINGER Pierre (Ecole des Mines de Paris)
The Incentive Properties of Collective Reputation
écrit avec Wanda Mimra and Angelo Zago
Collective Reputation is often viewed as creating free-riding and impeding quality provision. It is however a widespread and often deliberate choice of producers. We provide new explanations for this based on group incentives. Heterogeneous producers whose costs are imperfectly known need to provide effort to produce high quality. The demand side a priori does not observe the true quality, but high quality can be detected with some probability, reflecting e.g. expert inspections, awards, labeling and the regulatory framework. Unidentified products are otherwise pooled together according to the collective reputation structure, i.e. grouping of producers. In the unique equilibrium, each group is subject to internal free-riding by their higher-cost members. We find however that grouping producers can also increase incentives and yield higher quality and welfare than individual reputation, because free-riding under collective reputation might be less severe than own-reputation milking under individual reputations. We also show that admission thresholds with a small elite always improves upon full collective reputation. Despite potentially higher producers' surplus, any group with collective reputation however unravels in absence of transfers. Nevertheless, we exhibit simple type-independent and budget-balanced contracts under collective reputation that implement the first best.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 18/03/2019 de 12:00 à 13:00
salle R1-13, campus Jourdan, 75014 Paris
BECERRA VALBUENA Luis ()
Do local ENSO events affect air quality and health in Bogotá ?
écrit avec Professor Jorge
We aim to analyze if, for the case of Bogota, the ENSO events (El Niño and la Niña) have an effect on health via weather and air quality. To our knowledge, no one seems to have investigated further the ENSO events on weather, how this relates with the concentration of air pollutants and the impact it could have on health outcomes. The question seems more relevant now as an increase in intensity and frequency of El Niño phenomena are expected in the coming years (see chapter 3 of last report Global Warming of 1.5 Celsius degrees the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change). The paper is purely empirical and uses a large database for a period running from 1997 to 2015 for different stations measuring pollutants as well as meteorological and weather variables along the city. The data are rich (by day and hour in many cases) and allow to do a unique analysis. Information of health outcomes come from a data-set of health centers along the city, with information of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases between 2012 to 2015. Information of births and deaths (weight at birth, height at birth, weeks of gestation, etc) is available from 1997 to 2015. Information of the ENSO events is publicly available by month since 1950.
As a first step, we have estimated the effects of ENSO events on weather and on pollutants hour by hour, using those phenomena as a quasi-experiment; this has allowed us to understand better at which time of the day, weather and pollutant factors are highly or less affected by ENSO events. In terms of weather, the effect goes in the expected direction, with higher temperature in El Niño and higher rain in La Niña. However, the effects on weather variables tend to be higher during La Niña than during El Niño, and in both cases, the maximum effects happen during the afternoon peak, in comparison with the morning. In terms of pollution, El Niño brings higher temperatures, and pollutants such as particulate matter and CO increase during these events, in peak hours. However, La Niña brings more rain which could help to clean those contaminants. Importantly, peak hours of transport matter to increase pollution, and ENSO events are more relevant during this time. The hours of the day when the effects are more important should be considered in the health equation. The step to follow will be to test the potential effects this could have on health costs, and to estimate the economic cost of these phenomena (on QUALYS-DALYS).
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 15/03/2019 de 12:45 à 13:45
Salle R2.01, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
DESCHENES Sarah (PSE)
Should we use list experiments to measure domestic violence? Evidence from rural Burkina Faso
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 14/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
salle R2-01 campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
LEDUC Mathieu (PSE)
Endogenous fragility in complex economic systems
écrit avec Matt Elliott (Cambridge University) and Ben Golub (Harvard University)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 14/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
BATUT Cyprien (Paris School of Economics)
From Ultima Ratio to Mutual Consent: The Effects of Changing Employment Protection Doctrine
écrit avec Co-author: Eric Maurin
In many countries, the termination of employment contracts has to be either on employer initiative or on employee initiative, there is little alternative. Furthermore, the cost of the procedure is borne mainly by the contracting party who takes the initiative and there is very little room for sharing costs and responsibilities. The implicit doctrine is that employment termination has to be the last resort, the ultima ratio. In 2008, the French government initiated a change in doctrine: it became possible to terminate employment contracts by mutual consent, at lower costs. Building on firm-level administrative data, we develop an event analysis which reveals that the reform was followed by a decline in dismissals for non-economic reasons (i.e., the contract terminations associated with the highest litigation risks) as well as by a very significant rise in overall separation rates. By promoting separation by mutual consent, the reform reduced labor litigation risks, boosted workers’ flows, but, eventually, we do not detect any significant effects on firms’ demand for labor and employment levels.
Behavior seminar
Du 14/03/2019 de 11:00 à 12:00
salle R2-21, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
QUINN Simon (University of Oxford)
When Nudge Comes to Shove: Demand for Commitment in Microfinance Contracts
We conduct a field experiment to test the demand for flexibility and for soft and hard commitment among clients of a microfinance institution. We offer a commitment contract inspired by the rotating structure of a ROSCA. We find substantial demand for both saving and credit contracts, with many respondents willing to take up either — suggesting that many microfinance clients borrow to save. Additional treatments test ex ante demand for soft commitment (e.g., reminders), hard commitment (e.g., penalty for missing an instalment), and flexibility (e.g., option to postpone an instalment). We find no demand for any of these features, in isolation or in combination: individuals
appear to actively dislike them all. These findings complement a literature showing that commitment devices induce financial discipline. Our results suggest that many commitment devices used in practice may be seen as overly restrictive ex ante, even for a population with a demonstrated demand for commitment products.
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 14/03/2019 de 09:30 à 10:45
PSE - 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
BROER Tobias (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & PSE)
Heterogenous Information Choice in General Equilibrium
écrit avec Alexandre Kohlhas, Kurt Mitman, Kathrin Schlafmann
Economic History Seminar
Du 13/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MONSON Andrew (New York University)
Constitutions, Credible Commitments, and Public Finance in Ancient Greece
The ancient Greek city-states developed strikingly modern methods of taxation and public debt. The ability to tax property and trade effectively as well as borrow money gave democratic city-states advantages in interstate competition. Apart from the well-known case of Athens, the literary and epigraphical evidence suggests a convergence of political and fiscal institutions from the fourth to first centuries BC across the Greek world and beyond. This paper relates the high fiscal capacity in democratic Greek states to constitutional rules, enabling them to commit credibly to policies that benefited taxpayers and creditors, prevent arbitrary expropriation, and thereby increase compliance. The conclusions are strengthened by comparison with oligarchical and monarchical regimes that tried to implement similar fiscal institutions.
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 12/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:00
GETHIN Amory (PSE)
Political Cleavages and Inequality: An International Comparison (joint with Clara Martinez-Toledano T. and Thomas Piketty)
Paris Migration Seminar
Du 12/03/2019 de 16:30 à 19:00
PSE, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris, Salle R1-09
OREFICE Gianluca(CEPII)
ANELLI Massimo(Bocconi University)
Youth Drain, Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 12/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
PITON Sophie (PSE)
Revisiting the Global Decline of the Labor Share
écrit avec Germán Gutiérrez (NYU Stern)
We study the evolution of labor shares in the United States and Europe since 1950. Contrary to common wisdom, we show that the non-housing gross labor share remained stable in Europe, and declined only in the US. The divergence with prior research is due to the treatment of Residential Real Estate in sector accounts. While US accounts exclude all housing income from the nonfinancial corporate sector, European accounts include some rental activities. In fact, 19% of the capital stock of EU nonfinancial corporations are dwellings. The inclusion of housing income substantially biases the corporate labor share. Controlling for these differences, the labor share has remained stable in Europe and declined only in the US.
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 11/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
EROL Selman (CMU)
Network Hazard and Bailouts
This paper characterizes strongly stable networks under general threshold contagion. Among other applications, the theory is applied to interbank lending and financial contagion wherein a government can intervene to stop contagion. In the absence of intervention, banks form disjoined clusters to minimize contagion. In the presence of intervention, banks become less concerned with the counterparties of their counterparties, which we dub network hazard. Network hazard allows some banks to become systemically important and gives the network a core-periphery structure. The counterparty risk of a large part of the economy becomes correlated through the core banks’ solvency. Core banks serve as a buffer against contagion when solvent and an amplifier of contagion when insolvent. As such, bailouts create welfare volatility and increase systemic risk via network hazard. It is shown that network hazard is a novel force distinct from moral hazard. Results are historically relevant to the pyramiding of reserves and the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 11/03/2019 de 13:00 à 14:00
KOENIG Pamina (PSE)
*
Régulation et Environnement
Du 11/03/2019 de 12:00 à 13:00
salle R1-13, campus Jourdan - 75014 Paris
VONA Francesco (University of Milan)
The Impact of Energy Prices on Employment and Environmental
This paper evaluates the influence of energy prices on employment and environmental performance of French manufacturing establishments over the period of 1997-2015. To identify price effects, we construct a shift-share instrument that captures only the exogenous variation in establishment-specifi c energy prices. Our results highlight a trade-off between environmental and economic goals: an increase in energy prices brings about not only substantial reductions in energy consumption and CO2 emissions, but also modestly negative impacts on employment and productivity. This trade-off will be ampli fied by a carbon tax, especially in trade-intensive and energy-intensive sectors. Finally, employment effects are not biased against unskilled workers and are mitigated by labor reallocation across establishments within the same company.
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 08/03/2019 de 12:45 à 13:45
Salle R2.01, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
SINGH Manpreet (PSE)
Endogenous Institutions: a network experiment in Nepal
écrit avec Giulio Iacobelli
Development Economics Seminar
Du 06/03/2019 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2.01 Campus jourdan, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
JACK Kelsey (UC Santa Barbara )
Poverty, Seasonal Scarcity and Exchange Asymmetries: Evidence from Small-Scale Farmers in Rural Zambia
écrit avec Dietmar Fehr, Günther Finkz
A growing literature associates resource scarcity with biases in decision-making. We investigate this link in a sample of over 3,000 small-scale farmers in Zambia, who completed a total of 5,842 decision experiments involving the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. We observe large exchange asymmetries– the so-called endowment effect – with an average trading probability of 34 percent, 16 percentage points below the trading rate predicted by neoclassical theory. Consistent with both increased attention and larger potential trading losses with higher value items, exchange asymmetries are smallest when the value of the traded items is high and when participants are relatively resource constrained. In our sample, both cross-sectional and seasonal scarcity improves the quality of decision-making, moving behavior closer to standard economic predictions. We find no corresponding systematic relationship between scarcity and performance on cognitive tasks.
Economic History Seminar
Du 06/03/2019 de 12:30 à 14:00
R1.09 Campus Jourdan 48 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
WOLF Christian (MIT)
Was Marx Right? Market Concentration, Income Inequality, and Voting in late 19th Century Germany
The recent debate on the causes and consequences of income inequality shows striking similarities to the debate in many parts of Europe before 1914. Today and back then the focus was on the role of capital share and market concentration as a cause for rising inequality. In this study we analyze the drivers and consequences of income inequality exploiting a newly constructed regional panel based on detailed income tax statistics for the German Empire, 1874-1913. Our data features large variation in terms of inequality across 30 Prussian districts (Regierungsbezirke) and dynamic changes over time, within the common institutional framework of the German Empire. Both, capital share and inequality are strongly associated with rising market concentration. Further, inequality had a strong effect on political polarization. However, in seeming contrast to modern results but in line with simple models of political economy, income inequality in 19th century Germany was mainly linked to support for the political left, while the relationship with the political right is much weaker.
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 05/03/2019 de 17:00 à 18:00
GHOSH Rajarshi (ESSEC)
Uncertainty and Decision Making over Time: An Alternative Approach to study Procrastination
I consider an agent that has the possibility of finishing a one-stage task over a discrete time interval, while at every point in time he is confronted with an outside option. The one-stage task has an uncertain cost of completion. I assume that the agent knows the distribution of the outside options, but only learns the value of each outside option after its realization. Therefore, the agent is faced with the difficulty of finding the optimal timing of when to exert effort in order to finish the task, while also being uncertain about how many trials he will need to complete it. I consider families of decision rules where the agent sets thresholds, such that for all realizations of the outside option below the threshold the agent chooses to try to finish the task. From the optimal solution it follows that a fully rational agent sets thresholds that are a continuous, convex and increasing function of time, where the threshold at the last period is equal to the expected value of the task. The optimal solution therefore shows that a certain degree of delay is optimal, caused by the decreasing option value of waiting over time. The paper continues with a hypothetical analysis of the conditions under which agents depart from rationality by analyzing the effects of various biases and forms of bounded rationality. These results shed light on novel mechanisms that cause procrastination.
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 05/03/2019 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MEHMOOD Sultan (PSL)
The Dictator, the Imam and the Judge: Tracing the impact of religion on the courts
How does religion impact the courts? In this paper, we document a substantial impact of religious leaders on judicial decision making in Pakistan. Utilizing a unique dataset on the holy Muslims shrines across Pakistan, we show that districts where historically the shrine density was high, a military coup in 1999 induced a large decline in judicial independence and quality of judicial decisions. We present evidence consistent with the mechanism that increased political power of religious leaders allowed them to influence the courts. The analysis of the type of cases driving the results show that more favourable rulings for the government in land expropriation and human rights cases explain these results. We also show a judicial selection reform that changed the appointment procedure to select judges from presidential appointment to selection by a judicial commission consisting of peer judges mitigates the effect of historical shrine density on judicial outcomes.
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 01/03/2019 de 12:45 à 13:45
Salle R2.01, 48 Bd Jourdan 75014 Paris
FERNANDEZ-SANCHEZ Martin (PSE)
Mass Migration and Education over a Century: Evidence from the Galician Diaspora in Latin America
This paper analyzes the impact of mass migration on human capital accumulation at origin over a century. I examine one of the largest migration episodes in the XX century, the Galician diaspora in Latin America. Using data from different historical sources I build a unique database of all Galician villages from 1860 to today with information on migration, literacy rates, migrants' associations and their investments at origin. The identification relies on exogenous variation provided by pull and push factors in combination with a proxy of migrant networks. The results show that in the period 1900-1930, migration significantly increased literacy rates due to the selection of illiterate individuals into migration and an increase in the stock of literate ones. I provide suggestive evidence that literate migrants were more likely to return. Historical migration (1900-1930) is associated with more schools per capita and higher enrolment rates in the 1970s as well as higher schooling levels over 1981-2011. These findings are largely explained by the construction of schools by migrants' associations in 1910-1940 and by a change in perceptions about the value of education.