Calendrier du 07 mars 2024
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.
Texte intégral
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.
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.
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.
Behavior seminar
Du 07/03/2024 de 11:00 à 12:00
ZOOM
ALMåS Ingvild (Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES), Stockholm 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.