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POPP. An OCR-Generated Database of the Population Censuses of Paris (1926–1936)
No full textEmpirical research in historical demography is usually time-consuming and labour-intensive. Recent developments in machine learning offer new possibilities for building very large databases with reduced time and costs, though these new methods raise new challenges as well. This article describes the process of constructing the POPP database, a data collection project based on the exploitation of the nominative lists of the Parisian population censuses of 1926, 1931, and 1936. This database provides a host of information for almost 9 million individuals: their name and surname, year and location of birth, nationality, relation to the household head, and occupation. The article discusses the digitisation of archival sources — several hundred thousand handwritten pages — their transformation into a database by computer scientists using machine learning techniques, and the work required on the part of social scientists to correct and adapt the resulting data for statistical purposes. Beyond its methodological contribution, this article also discusses the various ways in which the POPP database will improve our knowledge of the economic, social, and demographic evolution of an important European urban population
Sale temps pour le modèle de franchise participative: le franchiseur sacrifié pour les besoins du plan de sauvegarde (sous Cass. com., 10 sept. 2025, n°24-12.698; n°24-12.699; n°24-12.700).
No full textPar trois arrêts rendus le 10 septembre 2025 , la Cour de cassation confirme, en la martelant, la restriction drastique du droit de contestation de l’associé minoritaire privé de sa minorité de blocage à l’occasion de l’arrêté d’un plan de sauvegarde. Si cette solution semble désormais acquise , elle contrevient en tous points à la logique du modèle dit de la franchise participative qui vise à confier au franchiseur, ou à l’une de ses filiales, une minorité de blocage au sein du capital de la société franchisée, afin de garantir que toute modification statutaire, notamment un changement d’enseigne, ne puisse être décidée sans ses voix
Colluding against Environmental Regulation
No full textWe study collusion among firms against imperfectly monitored environmental regulation. Firms increase variable profits by violating regulation and reduce expected noncompliance penalties by violating jointly. We consider a case of three German automakers colluding to reduce the effectiveness of emissions control technology. By estimating a structural model of the European automobile industry from 2007 to 2018, we find that collusion lowers expected noncompliance penalties substantially and increases buyer and producer surplus. Due to increased pollution, welfare decreases by €1.57–5.57 billion. We show how environmental policy design and antitrust play complementary roles in preventing noncompliance
Peacebuilding Strategy: Lessons from Some Misconceived Interventions
No full textThis chapter tries to bridge the gap between peace and conflict theory, on the one hand, and the practice of professional Peacebuilders in post-conflicts settings, on the other hand. It first highlights some of the main insights brought about by the theorists, linking the latter to standard bargaining theory, institutional economics, as well as to the theory of voting. This brief overview shows that the key issue in peace theory is how credible commitments can be made by the negotiators. This is not the way the main peacebuilding institutions understand their mission, and international bureaucracies tend to implement fairly different protocols. The chapter then discusses two prominent themes in the standard peacebuilding strategy that call for second thoughts, namely disarmament and the jump to democracy, as embedded in elections organized as soon as possible. Three fairly successful post-conflict cases are then presented, showing that their successes were based on innovative solutions aimed at enabling the new governments to make credible commitments about their policies, sidestepping the standard protocols
Laws and Norms
No full textWe analyze how private decisions and optimal public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences, material incentives, and social norms. We show how honor and stigma interact with incentives and derive optimal taxation. We then analyze the expressive role of law as embodying society’s values and identify when it calls for a weakening or a strengthening of incentives. The law should be softened when it signals agents’ general willingness to contribute to the public good and toughened when it signals social externalities. We also shed light on norms-based interventions, societies’ resistance to economists’ messages, and the avoidance of cruel and unusual punishments
The Incentive Virtues of Performance-Based Trade Allowances and Loss Leading
Full text linkA retailer may boost demand for a manufacturer’s product through unobservable promotional efforts. Fixed fees cannot be used to freely allocate profit within the vertical structure. When manufacturers have market power, the equilibrium wholesale contract features a retail price below cost together with a rebate for incremental units bought by the retailer when effort has succeeded in boosting sales. Loss leading emerges as an incentive device in such an incomplete contracting scenario. A ban on below-cost pricing leads to a higher retail price and a lower promotional effort
Fears about Artificial Intelligence across 20 countries and six domains of application
No full textThe frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) is constantly moving, raising fears and concerns whenever AI is deployed in a new occupation. Some of these fears are legitimate and should be addressed by AI developers—but others may result from psychological barriers, suppressing the uptake of a beneficial technology. Here, we show that country-level variations across occupations can be predicted by a psychological model at the individual level. Individual fears of AI in a given occupation are associated with the mismatch between psychological traits people deem necessary for an occupation and perceived potential of AI to possess these traits. Country-level variations can then be predicted by the joint cultural variations in psychological requirements and AI potential. We validated this preregistered prediction for six occupations (doctors, judges, managers, care workers, religious workers, and journalists) on a representative sample of 500 participants from each of 20 countries (total N = 10,000). Our findings may help develop best practices for designing and communicating about AI in a principled yet culturally sensitive way, avoiding one-size-fits-all approaches centered on Western values and perceptions
An Evaluation of Protected Area Policies in the European Union
No full textThe European Union designates 26% of its landmass as protected areas, limiting economic development for biodiversity. We use the staggered introduction of protected areas between 1985 and 2019 to study the selection of protected land and the causal effect of protection on vegetation cover and nightlights. We find no meaningful impacts on either outcome across four decades, countries, protection cohorts, or land characteristics. These null effects are consistent with the political economy of EU land protection: weak incentives to internalize biodiversity gains, green-glow motives, and area-based targets shape local siting and stringency choices. In practice, strict protection is applied where development pressure is low–so that protection has little bite—while in high-pressure regions, protection is typically weak, imposing only limited constraints on economic activity
One-Sided Enforcement in a Model with Persistent Adverse Selection
No full textWe study a repeated buyer-seller relationship with persistent adverse selection and one-sided enforcement, where a prepaid seller can breach by taking the money and running. The optimal stationary contract depends on enforcement strength and the discount factor. Three regimes arise. With a strong legal system, penalties deter breach and the optimal static contract can be repeated. With a weak system, the penalty caps transfers, forcing bunching among efficient (low-cost) types. With a very weak system, compliance relies on relational rents, causing large downward distortions. Strengthening public enforcement relaxes both incentive and enforcement constraints, reducing allocative inefficiency