Calendrier du mois de septembre 2024
| Programme de la semaine précédente | Programme de la semaine | Programme de la semaine suivante | |
| (du 2024-02-26 au 2024-03-04) | (du 2024-03-04 au 2024-03-10) | (du 2024-03-10 au 2024-03-17) |
Semaine du 2024-03-04 au 2024-03-10 |
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 08/03/2024 de 13:00 à 14:00
MONTOYA María (PSE)
Moral Force: Leaders’ Actions, Within-City Social Distancing and COVID-19
PSE Internal Seminar
Du 08/03/2024 de 12:00 à 13:00
BOYER Marcel (Université de Montréal)
Pour une réforme majeure de la social-démocratie et du capitalisme
There is a fundamental complementarity between social democracy and competition. A true social democracy is based on a clear definition of the respective roles of the public (governmental) and competitive (private) sectors in the provision of public and social goods and services (PSGS), such as education, health care, social security, and infrastructure. The main roles of the public or government sector are to define the basket of PSGS in quantity and quality and to manage performance incentive contracts with the (competitive) private sector responsible for producing and distributing these PSGS. Companies (capitalist, cooperative, NFP, social economy, etc.) then compete to obtain PSGS supply contracts and the public sector no longer needs to directly manage schools, hospitals and numerous other institutions serving the citizens.
Other proposed reforms include: the abolition or auctioning of subsidies and aid programs for businesses; the strengthening of pro-competition control of anti-competitive practices as well as business mergers and acquisitions; the determination of a significant and universal carbon price to encourage individuals and companies to internalize the environmental impacts of their strategies; the development of extended liability rules aimed at increasing the incentives of companies and their partners to prevent industrial and environmental accidents and to protect collateral victims; the elimination of taxes on corporate profits in order to thwart tax competition between states and to encourage companies to focus on their essential missions of wealth creation and investment in R&D and productivity. In fine, the proposed models of social democracy and capitalism arise from a conception of social sciences and economics in particular as the study of mechanisms of coordination, motivation, specialization, regulation and rules of exchange that conditions the development of collective intelligence, through the interconnexion of brains, in human society, of which the ability to exchange, particularly with strangers and across time, is a distinctive characteristic.
Social Democracy, Capitalism, and Competition: A Manifesto, McGill-Queen’s University Press, October 2023,
Texte intégral
Macroeconomics Seminar
Du 07/03/2024 de 16:00 à 17:15
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, salle R2-21
BLOMHOFF HOLM Martin (U of Oslo )
Asset-Price Redistribution
Over the last several decades, there has been a large increase in asset valuations across many asset classes. While these rising valuations had important effects on the distribution of wealth, little is known regarding their effect on the distribution of welfare. To make progress on this question, we develop a sufficient statistic for the money-metric welfare effect of deviations in asset valuations (i.e., changes in asset prices keeping cash flows fixed). This welfare effect depends on the present value of an individual’s net asset sales rather than asset holdings: higher asset valuations benefit prospective sellers and harm prospective buyers. We estimate this quantity using panel microdata covering the universe of financial transactions in Norway from 1994 to 2019. We find that the rise in asset valuations had large redistributive effects: it redistributed from the young towards the old and from the poor towards the wealthy.
Du 07/03/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
GIUPPONI Giulia (Bocconi University)
Company Wage Policy in a Low-Wage Labor Market
écrit avec S. J. Machin
We study how firms set wages for their employees when they can legally age-discriminate across workers. We exploit an age-specific minimum wage change in the UK, which raised the minimum applying to workers aged 25 and over, leaving unchanged the minima for younger workers. Using matched employer-employee data on a low-paying sector, we
show large, positive wage spillovers on workers aged under 25, which arise within firms from company wage policy. Fairness norms offer the most plausible explanation for the emergence of spillovers. The effects that we document also operate in other low-paying sectors of the UK labor market.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 07/03/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
R2-21
BI Wei (European University Institute)
Selling Incremental Products Optimally
This paper studies the intricacies of optimal selling mechanisms for incremental products, with a particular emphasis on scenarios where agents' private information profoundly influences their preferences across periods. To mitigate their intertemporal information rent, the manufacturer encourages upgrades through refunds rather than payments, introducing inefficiencies but maximizing profits. Our findings reveal that even without commitments, the manufacturer prefers innovative upgrades in the iterated products. Importantly, consumers bear all efficiency loss due to innovative upgrades. Additionally, we reveal that per-consumer information disclosure allows the manufacturer to strategically tailor disclosures about innovation, enhancing incentives for truthful reporting and extracting more surplus from specific consumer segments.
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 07/03/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
BREDA Thomas (PSE)
Intensive use of social media is associated with more body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls in two large cross-cultural surveys
We provide a large-scale investigation of the relationship between social media usage and body dissatisfaction in two distinct surveys covering respectively 50,000 teenagers between 15 and 16 y.o. in 8 countries and 200,000 teenagers between 11 and 17 y.o. in 33 countries. This relation is positive and large for girls—higher use of social networks is associated with higher dissatisfaction about their body—and negative or inexistent for boys. The positive relation for girls is observed in all 8 countries included in the first study, and 30 of the countries in the second study (statistically significant in 26 of them), covering very different cultural contexts (e.g., Georgia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Panama or Hong Kong). It concerns all girls, no matter their body mass index (BMI), their academic performance, their socioeconomic background, and their age. It is driven by girls being more likely to find themselves too fat (rather than too thin). Instrumenting social networks consumption by students’ or students’ peers’ internet access at home while controlling finely for other students’ or students’ peers’ household characteristics finally suggests that the relationship between social media usage and girls' body dissatisfaction could be causal.
PEPES (Paris Empirical Political Economics) Working Group
Du 07/03/2024 de 12:30 à 14:00
Room H405 at Sciences Po
LE PENNEC Caroline (HEC Montréal)
KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER: STRATEGIC PLATFORM ADJUSTMENTS DURING U.S.
écrit avec Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Vincent Pons
A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians' discourse and policies should follow voters' preferences. In the median voter theorem, this outcome emerges as candidates strategically adjust their platform to get closer to their opponent. Despite its importance in political economy, we lack direct tests of this mechanism. In this paper, we show that candidates converge to each other both in ideology and rhetorical complexity. We build a novel dataset including the content of 9,000 primary and general election websites of candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, 2002-2016, as well as 57,000 campaign manifestos issued by candidates running in the first and second round of French parliamentary and local elections, 1958-2022. We first show that candidates tend to converge to the center of the ideology and complexity scales and to diversify the set of topics they cover, between the first and second round, reflecting the broadening of their electorate. Second, we exploit cases in which the identity of candidates qualified for the second round is quasi-random, by focusing on elections in which they narrowly win their primary (in the U.S.) or narrowly qualify for the runoff (in France). Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that second-round candidates converge to the platform of their actual opponent, as compared to the platform of the runner-up who did not qualify for the last round. We conclude that politicians behave strategically and that the convergence mechanism underlying the median voter theorem is powerful.
Behavior seminar
Du 07/03/2024 de 11:00 à 12:00
ZOOM
ALMåS Ingvild (Monash University)
Fairness Across the World
The paper reports from a large-scale study of people’s fairness preferences and beliefs, where 65 000 individuals from 60 countries make real distributive choices. We establish causal evidence on the role of the source of inequality and efficiency considerations for inequality acceptance, and we provide a rich description of people’s beliefs about the main sources of inequality and the cost of redistribution. We find large heterogeneities in both preferences and beliefs and show that they are strongly associated with people’s policy views on redistribution. The paper also studies how people’s fairness views relate to various country characteristics. In particular, we show that there are striking differences between the developed and developing countries in both fairness preferences and beliefs.
Development Economics Seminar
Du 06/03/2024 de 16:30 à 18:00
R2.01
DE WALQUE Damien (World Bank)
Early Education, Preferences, and Decision-Making Abilities
écrit avec Joana Cardim (Education Policy Institute) Pedro Carneiro (University College of London, IFS, CEMMAP, FAIR-NHH) Leandro S. Carvalho (University of Southern California) Damien de Walque (Development Research Group, The World Bank)[
One way to advance our understanding of individual differences in decision-making is to study the development of children’s decision-making. This paper studies the causal effects of daycare attendance on children’s economic preferences and decision-making abilities, exploiting a lottery system that randomized admissions into oversubscribed daycare centers in Rio de Janeiro. Overall, daycare attendance had no effect on either economic preferences or decision-making abilities. It did increase, however, aversion to disadvantageous inequality (i.e., having less than one’s peer). This increase is driven mostly by girls, a result that reproduces in a different study that randomized admissions into preschool education.
Economic History Seminar
Du 06/03/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
PAREDES CASTRO Héctor (PSE)
Land Without Masters: local political competition since the Peruvian Land Reform (1969-1980)
Can the historical exposure to redistribution spur local political competition and electoral participation in later elections? This study analyzes the massive land expropriation process executed under military rule in Peru from 1969 to 1980 and its effects over local politics with the return to democracy. The implementation of the reform was based on the creation of Agrarian Reform Zones (ARZ) and the use of regional offices for local execution located in high-priority reform areas within each ARZ. These zones were conceived and delimited for entirely different purposes a decade prior to the reform. Using the distance from a district to an ARZ office as an instrument, I show changes towards a more politically competitive local environment in land reform affected districts. In line with strategic responses to political competition, post-reform elections boost the participation of candidates with specific attributes: more educated, older and with indigenous background. Furthermore, candidates report more partisan experience but are also less associated with traditional politics. Evidence on driving mechanisms such as a dampened capacity of local elites for political capture, the growth of peasant-based social organization, and changes in voters’ preferences towards redistribution go in line with this interpretation.
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 05/03/2024 de 17:00 à 18:00
R1-10
ROUX Baptiste (PSE)
In Search of Working Time? Determinants of Hours Constraints
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 05/03/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2.21
RAPOPORT Hillel ()
From Paris With Love: Cultural Remittances and Modern Fertility
écrit avec Mickael Melki, Enrico Spolaore, Romain Wacziarg
We argue that migrants played a significant role in the diffusion of the demographic transition from France to the rest of Europe in the late 19th century. Employing novel data on French immigration from other European regions from 1850 to 1930, we find that higher immigration to France translated into lower fertility in the region of origin after a few decades - both in crossregion regressions for various periods, and in a panel setting with region fixed-effects. These results are robust to the inclusion of a variety of controls, and across multiple specifications. We also find that immigrants who themselves became French citizens achieved lower fertility, particularly those who moved to French regions with the lowest fertility levels. We interpret these findings in terms of cultural remittances, consistent with insights from a theoretical framework where migrants act as vectors of cultural diffusion, spreading new information, social norms and preferences pertaining to modern fertility to their regions of origin.
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 04/03/2024 de 17:00 à 18:30
R1-09
GILBOA Itzhak (Tel-Aviv and HEC)
Likelihood Regions: An Axiomatic Approach
écrit avec Fan Wang and Stefania Minardi
We consider a reasoner who selects a set of distributions given a database of observations. A likelihood region is monotonic with respect to the likelihood function. We provide axiomatic foundations for such a selection rule. Starting with an abstract set of theories, we propose conditions on choice functions (across different databases) for which there exists a statistical model such that the choice function is a likelihood region relative to that model, for the general case and for the case of a fixed likelihood-ratio threshold. We interpret the results as supporting the notion of likelihood regions for the selection of theories.
Paris Migration Economics Seminar
Du 04/03/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
R1-14
BRISELLI Giulia (ESCP)
One bed, two dreams: Female migration, conservative norms and foreign brides in South Korea
Migration affects a country’s social and demographic outcomes, such as marriage and fertility. However, the effects of internal migration on family formation are still not well documented. In this paper, I study how internal migration affects the marriage market and fertility rates. In particular, I use the setting of South Korea to analyze how female internal mobility affects the demand for marriages between local men and immigrant brides. I then investigate the implications of both female internal mobility and foreign brides for fertility rates. To obtain causal identification, I estimate these effects using a two-way fixed effect model and an enclave instrument based on past internal migration. I find that an increase in out-migration of local women raises the demand for immigrant brides, particularly in rural areas. I also find a negative effect of female out-migration on fertility, which is partially offset by the arrival of foreign brides. Further, I demonstrate that the gap in gender attitudes between younger generations of Korean men and women in part explains both female internal mobility and the demand for foreign brides. I empirically show that the "import" of brides from different countries is the response to a marriage squeeze brought by female internal migration.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 04/03/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1-09
CHRISTENSEN Peter (university od Illinois)
* Incentive-Based Pay and Building Decarbonization: Experimental Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program
Abstract: Building energy efficiency is a cornerstone of greenhouse gas mitigation strategies with billions of dollars set aside for extensive upgrades in the coming years. However, impact evaluations have revealed actual energy savings from home upgrade programs often fall short of projections, in part due to contractor underperformance. Using field experiment results, we show refining one program design element—offering performance bonuses to contractors--increased natural gas savings by 24% and generated $5.39-$14.53 in social benefits per dollar invested. Hence, how money is allocated within government programs may be as important as choosing among programs for maximizing returns to public spending