Calendrier du 28 septembre 2017
EPCI (Economie politique du changement institutionnel) Seminar
Du 28/09/2017 de 17:00 à 18:30
MSE-PARIS 1, Room 116
AVRAM Silvia (ISER, U. Essex)
The role of taxes and benefits in smoothing income shocks
écrit avec Mike Brewer
We examine the extent to which the tax benefit system in the UK smooths income shocks across the life cycle between 1991 and 2008. Using the BHPS, we first estimate six different income concepts ranging from individual gross earnings to net household (equivalised) disposable income. For each income concept, we then decompose its variance into three components-heterogeneous growth, permanent shocks and transitory shocks. We then quantify the extent to which variance in income due to heterogeneity, permanent and transitory shocks is affected by four types of policy instruments, namely taxes, contributory benefits, means-tested benefits and other (mainly disability) benefits. Preliminary results show that the UK tax benefit does play an important role in reducing income variance, especially the portions attributable to heterogeneity and to a (lesser extent) permanent shocks. Contributory benefits have the strongest effects, more than halving the variance attributable to heterogeneity and permanent shocks; other benefits and means-tested benefits also reduce considerably the variance due heterogeneity but appear to have a minimal effect on the variance of shocks, either permanent or transitory. Taxes play no role in the reduction of income variance.
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 28/09/2017 de 13:00 à 14:00
salle R1-11, campus Jourdan - 48 bd Jourdan, 75014 Paris
RIVERA Thomas (HEC)
Robust Mechanisms for the Regulation of Bank Risk
This paper aims at designing mechanisms for the regulation of bank risk (probability of default) that can guarantee robustness to large misspecifications of the regulators information regarding the bank's assets. Assuming banks can (on average) discern the true level of risk of the other regulated banks, I construct a robust mechanism that allows the regulator to bound the worst case probability of bank failure by any arbitrary amount. In doing so, I show that any informationally robust mechanism must necessarily require banks to issue subordinated debt to other regulated banks and must provide a way to guarantee a minimal probability of joint bank failure between at least two of the banks. We show how the regulator can achieve the latter objective by providing a single bank with an explicit guarantee against losses in the event that another bank fails and how, when coupled with a minimum subordinated debt requirement and interest rate ceiling, such a guarantee can ensure an arbitrarily low probability of any regulated bank's failure. Finally, I discuss how the results are affected when banks have biased estimations of other banks' risks and the best bound on bank risk that the regulator can achieve given such biases.
Travail et économie publique externe
Du 28/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:45
Campus Jourdan - Salle R1-09
HANDBURY Jessie (Wharton - University of Pennsylvania)
Is the focus on food deserts fruitless? Retail access and food purchases across the socioeconomic spectrum
Using comprehensive data describing the healthfulness of household food purchases and the retail landscapes consumers face, we ask whether spatial differences in access are to blame for socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption. We find that differences in access, though significant, are small relative to differences in the nutritional content of sales. Household consumption responds minimally to improvements in local retail environments in the short run, and socioeconomic disparities persist among households with equivalent access. Our results indicate that even in the long run, access-improving policies alone can eliminate at most one fifth of existing disparities in nutritional consumption.
Behavior seminar
Du 28/09/2017 de 11:00 à 12:00
PSE 48, boulevard Jourdan 75014 PARIS Salle R2-21
SINGH Manpreet (PSE)
Understanding choices under coarse feedback: a lab experiment
This paper studies the long- run impact of learning via coarse feedback when a similarly labeled action may have consequences that depend on the state of the economy. The decision maker is only informed about the payoff obtained in the past by fellow decision makers who had chosen this action, with no specification of the state of the world when the choice was made.This nature of feedback suggests that decision makers face an ambiguous environment even when a lot of data has been accumulated. We consider a lab experiment with two binary choice problems in which one action is subject to coarse feedback but not the other and we allow for the possibility that the action associated to the coarse feedback would be subject to an ambiguity discount. Estimating such a noisy best-response model, we find that there is no ambiguity discount, thereby suggesting that subjects behave in a noisy-best response way as in the valuation equilibrium introduced in Jehiel and Samet (2007). We suggest how our findings can be applied to technology adoption, discrimination and investment problems.