Calendrier du mois de septembre 2017
Casual Friday Development Seminar - Brown Bag Seminar
Du 29/09/2017 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
ESTRADA Ricardo ()
*
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.
Texte intégral
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.
Economic History Seminar
Du 27/09/2017 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-20, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
ZHURAVSKAYA Ekaterina (PSE)
Middleman, Minorities and Ethnic Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in the Russian Empire
écrit avec Irena Grosfeld and Seyhun Orcan Sakalli
Paris Trade Seminar
Du 26/09/2017 de 14:45 à 16:15
ScPo, 28 rue des Saints Pères, 75007 Paris, salle H405
TREFLER DAN (Toronto)
*Trade and Innovation: The Role of Scale and Competition Effects
écrit avec Kevin Lim & Miaojie Yu
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 26/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
ZHU Yinchu (Brandeis University)
Earnings, Income, and Wealth Distributions in China: Facts from the 2011 China Household Finance Survey
écrit avec Jijun Tan, Ting Zeng
We use 2011 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data to describe inequality of earnings, income, and wealth in China. We finnd high inequality of labor earnings, income, and wealth in China. We also find that the business income comprises a large share of incomes among top groups. Households with young heads tend to be rich in earnings and incomes, and their incomes are largely generated from businesses. We find that the top 1 percent income share in China in 2010 is comparable to that in the United States in 1928. In 1928 the social security system was still absent in the United States. This comparison gives us hints that the high inequality level in current China is probably due to the ine§ectiveness of redistribution policies in China.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 25/09/2017 de 13:00 à 14:00
Salle S/3, MSE, 106 boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013 Paris
KAZAKOVA Ekaterina (Mannheim)
Export Platforms and Multinational Demand Risk Diversification
This paper analyzes the effects of correlated aggregate demand shocks on multinational firms’ structure. Accordingly, we build a structural model featuring global production and demand risk in which heterogeneously risk averse managers decide on the location of production plants, the set of countries to serve from these plants, and the volume of sales. These decisions hinge on the expected market demand, and the variance-covariance of the demand shocks in destination markets. The identification of firm-specific risk aversion coefficients follows from existence and uniqueness of the firm’s optimal sales portfolio. The empirical analysis uses firm-level data on German multinational companies. Our results support the existence of MNE’s diversification strategies when producing and selling abroad.
Régulation et Environnement
Du 25/09/2017 de 12:00 à 14:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
LISKI Matti (Aalto University)
Carbon leakage: a mechanism design approach
écrit avec co-author: Lassi Ahlvik (NHH, Bergen)
TOM (Théorie, Organisation et Marchés) Lunch Seminar
Du 21/09/2017 de 12:00 à 13:00
salle R1-13, campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan - 750145 Paris
BOBTCHEFF Catherine (PSE)
Insurance Pools for Undiversifiable Risks
écrit avec David Alary (TSE) and Carole Haritchabalet (Université de Pau)
Abstract : This paper discusses the decision of the European Commission not to renew the antitrust exemption for the setting up of syndicates in the insurance industry. Pools are constituted to provide insurance for undiversifiable and/or new risks for which insurers with private expertise are capacity constrained. Our objective is to study if such syndicates improve insurance supply. Organizing this supply amounts to sharing a common value divisible good between capacity constrained and privately informed agents with a reserve price. Pools turn out to operate as a uniform price auction with an “exit/re-entry” option that we compare to a discriminatory auction where no specific agreements are needed. Both auction formats lead to different coverage/premium tradeoffs. If at least one insurer provides an optimistic expertise, the pool offers both lower premiums and higher coverage. This result is reversed when all insurers are pessimistic about the risk. Static comparative results with respect to capacity constraints and reserve price are provided
Behavior seminar
Du 21/09/2017 de 11:00 à 12:00
PSE 48, bld Jourdan 75014 PARIS Salle R2-21
LAPORTE Audrey (PSE)
Why Should Rational Smokers Find it Difficult to Quit? Introducing Uncertainty into the Rational Addiction Model
One problem with the Becker-Murphy model of Rational Addiction, at least in the eyes of many public health specialists, is that it does not explain why so many rational, forward looking, smokers should apparently find it so hard to quit, especially since the terminal conditions are part of an intertemporal optimization problem. In this paper we apply techniques of stochastic control theory to introduce uncertainty into the individual’s perception of how her stock of addiction will accumulate over time as a consequence of her time path of smoking. We assume that addiction capital is basically unobservable, so she cannot adjust her smoking behaviour according to a feedback policy rule but instead builds uncertainty into her consumption plan from the beginning. We discuss the differences between the equation explaining her lifetime smoking trajectory in the deterministic and stochastic cases, and find that the quadratic utility function which underlies the familiar lead-lag consumption form of rational addiction equation is not, in fact, capable of allowing for the type of uncertainty which we consider here.
Behavior Working Group
Du 21/09/2017 de 09:30 à 10:30
Development Economics Seminar
Du 20/09/2017 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
SUKHTANTAR Sandip (University of Virginia )
General Equilibrium Effects of (Improving) Public Employment Programs: Experimental Evidence from India
écrit avec Karthik Muralidharany and Paul Niehausz
Abstract
Public employment programs play a large role in many developing countries' anti-poverty
strategies, but their impact on poverty reduction will depend on both direct program effects
as well as indirect effects through changes induced in market wages and employment. We
estimate both e ects, exploiting a large-scale experiment that improved the implementation of
India's rural employment guarantee scheme. Despite constant scal outlays, the earnings of lowincome
households rose 13.3%, driven overwhelmingly by market (90%) as opposed to program
earnings (10%). Low-skilled wages increased by 6.1% and days without paid work fell 7.1%,
while migration, land utilization and prices were una ected. The market effects on wages,
employment, and income also spilled over into neighboring sub-districts, and estimates that
adjust for these spillovers are substantially larger, typically double the unadjusted magnitudes.
These results highlight the importance of general equilibrium e ects in program evaluation, and
the feasibility of studying them using large-scale experiments.
Economic History Seminar
Du 20/09/2017 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-20, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
ASANTE Kofi (IAAST)
Fiscal Imperative and Colonial Power in the 19th Century Gold Coast
PSI-PSE (Petit Séminaire Informel de la Paris School of Economics) Seminar
Du 19/09/2017 de 17:00 à 18:00
GUILLOT Malka (PSE)
The 75% tax on wages above 1 million in France: what behavioural responses?
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 19/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
SOLOW Ben ()
Labor Market Effects of the Affordable Care Act: Evidence from Tax Notches
écrit avec Kavan Kucko & Kevin Rinz
States that declined to raise their Medicaid income eligibility cutoffs to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) created a “coverage gap” between their existing, often much lower Medicaid eligibility cutoffs and the FPL, the lowest level of income at which the ACA provides refundable, advanceable “premium tax credits” to subsidize the purchase of private insurance. Lacking access to any form of subsidized health insurance, residents of those states with income in that range face a strong incentive, in the form of a large, discrete increase in post-tax income (i.e. an upward notch) at the FPL, to increase their earnings and obtain the premium tax credit. We investigate the extent to which they respond to that incentive. Using the universe of tax returns, we document excess mass, or bunching, in the income distribution surrounding this notch. Consistent with Saez (2010), we find that bunching occurs only among filers with self-employment income. Specifically, filers without children and married filers with three or fewer children exhibit significant bunching. Analysis of tax data linked to labor supply measures from the American Community Survey, however, suggests that this bunching likely reflects a change in reported income rather than a change in true labor supply. We find no evidence that wage and salary workers adjust their labor supply in response to increased availability of directly purchased health insurance.
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 18/09/2017 de 17:00 à 18:30
Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MYLOVANOV Tymofiy (University Pittsburgh) *;
La séance est annulée
Régulation et Environnement
Du 18/09/2017 de 12:00 à 14:00
Salle R1-14, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
TOEWS Gerhard(New Economic School)
MAVI Can Askan(Univ. Paris I - PSE)
Resource discoveries and FDI bonanzas: An illustration from Mozambique
écrit avec Pierre-Louis Vézina, King's College London
Paris Migration Seminar
Du 18/09/2017 de 09:30 à 20:00
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris Jourdan
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Du 14/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Campus Jourdan - Salle R1-09
CAROLI Eve (Université Paris Dauphine)
Escaping Social Pressure on Dismissals: the Role of Fixed-Term Contracts
Development Economics Seminar
Du 13/09/2017 de 16:30 à 18:00
salle R2-01, campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris
WILLIS Jack (Columbia University )
Time vs. State in Insurance: Experimental Evidence from Contract Farming in Kenya
écrit avec Lorenzo Casaburi
The gains from insurance arise from the transfer of income across states. Yet, by requiring that the premium be paid upfront, standard insurance products also transfer income across time. We show that this intertemporal transfer can help explain low insurance demand, especially among the poor, and in a randomized control trial in Kenya we test a crop insurance product which removes it. The product is interlinked with a contract farming scheme: as with other inputs, the buyer of the crop offers the insurance and deducts the premium from farmer revenues at harvest time. The take-up rate for pay-at-harvest insurance is 72%, compared to 5% for the standard pay-upfront contract, and take-up is highest among poorer farmers. Additional experiments and outcomes provide evidence on the role of liquidity constraints, present bias, and counterparty risk. Finally, evidence from a natural experiment in the United States, exploiting a change in the timing of the premium payment for Federal Crop Insurance, shows that the transfer across time also affects insurance adoption in developed countries.
Economic History Seminar
Du 13/09/2017 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-20, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
MILHAUD Cyril (PSE)
Fragmentation of capital markets in early modern Spain? Composite monarchies and their jurisdictions
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 12/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
GUYON Nina (ENS-PSL and PSE)
Is Desegregation Possible? Evidence from Social Housing Demolitions in France
Behavior seminar
Du 07/09/2017 de 11:00 à 12:00
PSE 48, bld JOURDAN salle R2-21
ESPINOSA Romain (CNRS)
Laws and Norms: Experimental Evidence with Liability Rules?
We conduct an experiment where participants choose between actions that provide private benefits but may also impose losses on strangers. Three legal environments are compared: no law, strict liability for the harm caused to others, and an efficiently designed negligence rule where damages are paid only when the harmful action causes a net social loss. Legal obligations are either perfectly enforced (Severe Law) or only weakly so (Mild Law), i.e., material incentives are then nondeterrent. We investigate how legal obligations and social norms interact. Our results show that liability rules strengthen pro-social behavior and suggest that strict liability has a greater effect than the negligence rule.
Applied Economics Lunch Seminar
Du 05/09/2017 de 12:30 à 13:30
Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
TEYSSIER Geoffrey ()
Inequality of Opportunity: New Measurement Methodology and Impact on Growth
Behavior Working Group
Du 01/09/2017
Campus jourdan, Bâtiment G, Rez de chaussée, Salle F (réunion)
This paper analyzes the incentives that arise within an organization when communication is restricted to a particular network structure (e.g., a hierarchy). We show that restricting communication between the principal and agents may create incentives for the agents to misbehave when transmitting information and tasks throughout the organization. Such incentives can render the principal's most preferred outcome infeasible and therefore introduces a trade off between the cost of communication borne by the principal and the benefit of curbing incentives to deviate induced by the communication structure. To remedy this issue, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the topology of the network of communication such that restricting communication to a particular network does not restrict the set of outcomes that the principal could otherwise achieve. In this sense, we show that for any underlying incentives and any outcome available when communication is unrestricted, there exists a (finite) communication scheme restricted to a particular network that implements this outcome (i.e., does not induce agents to misbehave in the communication phase) if and only if that network satisfies our conditions.