Calendrier du mois de septembre 2024
Programme de la semaine précédente | Programme de la semaine | Programme de la semaine suivante | |
(du 2024-06-24 au 2024-07-01) | (du 2024-07-01 au 2024-07-07) | (du 2024-07-07 au 2024-07-14) |
Semaine du 2024-07-01 au 2024-07-07 |
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 04/07/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
CHAMPALAUNE Pascale (PSE)
Wages, City Structure and Air Pollution
Compact, dense cities are more productive and offer higher wages, through agglomeration externalities. They also tend to be seen as more environmentally friendly, as they have lower CO2 emissions per capita. But urban density may also bring about higher local pollution. It can be either be compensated for via higher wages (as a consumption disamenity), or have negative productivity effects, leading to lower wages (as a production disamenity). As such, this paper asks: does local air pollution enhance the urban wage premium, or does it attenuate it? In a first step, I expose a simple cross-city spatial equilibrium, and exploit its structure to provide measures of city-level productivity and amenities. I use French panel data over the 2002-2018 period and a double instrumental variable strategy to tackle endogeneity of urban features and air pollution to estimate the parameters of interest. I find that density does foster fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentration, and that the latter is indeed a consumption disamenity, but an even stronger production disamenity. I show that this triggers a loss in the wage gains from agglomeration on average. Cities with higher wages offer a larger compensation for air pollution, and as they are also the most populated, the compensation effect dominates at the worker level. There is also marked heterogeneity by skill, as high-skill workers receive larger compensation for air pollution than low-skill ones. All in all, the results suggest that while local air pollution reduces productivity even at low levels, compensation kicks in at higher levels, thus generating spatial wage disparities.
Economic History Seminar
Du 03/07/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
ROUANET Louis (University of Texas at El Paso in the Department of Economics and Finance.)
Long live the Republic: The political consequences of revolutionary land redistribution
To be politically viable, a Revolution needs the support of key interest groups that benefit from the survival of the new regime. The redistribution of clergy property during the French Revolution created a group –the new owners of clergy assets- whose wealth depended on the Revolution’s fate, thus increasing political support for the Revolution. This land redistribution policy had long-run consequences on political support for republicanism. Using data on elections during the beginning of the Third Republic, we show that the sale of clergy assets during the French Revolution substantially reduced support for anti-Republican candidates. Our results suggest that Republicans may not have prevailed in the 1870s without the liquidation of the Church's wealth 80 years earlier. The sale of Church assets reduced Catholic worship and increased Protestant worship. We use the presence of monasteries prior to the Reformation and the Commercial Revolution as instruments to suggest our findings are causal. Finally, we rule out a reduction in landed inequality as the main channel explaining the effect of this revolutionary land redistribution on politics and ideology.