Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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Late Growth and Maturity Patterns at the turn of the 20th-Century Corrèze
No full textInternational audienceThe height of conscripts around the age of 20 is widely used as a proxy for well-being in historical periods, under the assumption that it reflects nutritional and health conditions during growth years. This approach may be problematic if individuals are not yet fully grown at conscription age. This paper addresses this concern by constructing an individual-level panel of 2,916 men born in 1887 in Corrèze, using two nineteenth-century French conscription records. The data show that, for most men, height increases by only 0.3 to 0.4 cm in the year following their 20th birthday. However, the subset of the 20% of men identified as the most physically vulnerable continues to exhibit significant growth, gaining an additional 1.5 cm before reaching adult height around age 27. These findings suggest that relying on height at age 20, rather than adult stature, can lead to underestimation of available resources and an overstatement of inequality in their distribution
Nowcasting Economic Activity with Fat tails and Outliers
No full textThis paper extends dynamic factor models by explicitly incorporating outliers, moving beyond conventional data screening practices. The methodological contribution includes introducing fat tails and outliers multiplicatively into innovation volatility, and two distinct approaches for modelling outliers are presented to address large jumps. Empirical findings demonstrate that outlier-augmented models consistently outperform benchmark models in point and density forecasting, with the most significant improvements observed in nowcasting horizons. Incorporating outliers becomes particularly crucial during major crises, enhancing forecasting accuracy by 44% compared to the benchmark. The uniform-mixture approach is found to be more robust than the student-t models, as it targets extreme variations without disrupting the smoothness of the stochastic volatility process
International trade and the allocation of capital within firms
No full textInternational audienceThis paper introduces an internal capital market into a two-factor model of multi-segment firms. It features empire building by managers and informational frictions within the organization. The headquarters knows less about a segment’s true cost than its divisional managers do, so managers can over-report their costs and receive more capital than optimal. Our novel theory, which enables us to endogenize the cost structure of multi-segment firms, shows that international trade imposes discipline on divisional managers and improves the capital allocation between divisions, thereby lowering the conglomerate discount. The theory can explain why exporters exhibit a lower conglomerate discount than non-exporters. We exploit the China shock as an exogenous change to competition to confirm the model’s predictions with data on US companies
The Cost of Air Pollution for Workers and Firms
No full textThis paper shows that even moderate air pollution levels, such as those in Europe, harm the economy by reducing firm performance. Using monthly firm-level data from France, we estimate the causal impact of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) on sales and worker absenteeism. Leveraging exogenous pollution shocks from local wind direction changes, we find that a 10 percent increase in monthly PM 2.5 exposure reduces firm sales by 0.4 percent on average over the next two months, with sector-specific variation.Simultaneously, sick leave rises by 1 percent. However, this labor supply reduction explains only a small part of the sales decline. Our evidence suggests that air pollution also reduces worker productivity and dampens local demand. Aligning air quality with WHO guidelines would yield economic benefits on par with the costs of regulation or the health benefits from reduced mortality.</p
Learning About Opportunity: Spillovers of Elite School Admissions in Peru
No full textInternational audienceLearning About Opportunity: Spillovers of Elite School Admissions in Per
Explaining gender differences in migrant sorting: Evidence from Canada-US migration
No full textThis paper uses newly digitized Canada-Vermont border crossing records from the early twentieth century to document substantial differences in how female and male migrants sorted across US destination counties by earnings potential. Income maximization largely explains sorting patterns among men. For single women, gender-based labor market constraints were important, with locations offering more work opportunities attracting women with higher earnings capacity. Among married women, destination choices were much less influenced by labor market characteristics. These findings reveal how labor market constraints based on gender and marriage influence the allocation of migrant talent across destinations
Aid allocation with optimal monitoring: Theory and policy
No full textInternational audienceWe explore the implications of allowing a poverty-averse donor to monitor aid use within the familiar context of the needs vs. aid effectiveness tradeoff. The paper focuses on the optimal aid allocation between two countries when the donor simultaneously decides about aid shares and country-specific monitoring effort aimed at increasing the amount reaching the poor. Endogenizing aid effectiveness is shown to raise the poor’s income in the worse-governed country, yet not necessarily in the better-governed one, whereas the effect on country aid shares is essentially ambiguous. Those results still hold when the basic model is extended in various directions. Conventional aid allocation rules should be re-examined in their light
Insider Imitation
No full textInternational audienceWe study how regulating data usage impacts innovation in digital markets. Platforms commonly use proprietary data about third-party sellers to inform their own competing offerings, dampening incentives for innovation. We model this interaction and characterize how data usage restrictions reshape these incentives. An outright ban on data usage may boost or curtail innovation, depending upon the thickness of the right tail of demand for new products. More flexible rules controlling when and what data is made available can always improve the effectiveness of regulation. Our results contribute to an ongoing policy discussion regarding competition in digital markets
Les trois âges de l'histoire quantitative
No full textInternational audienceWe emphasize an important point in the transformation of sources into data that affects economists and historians alike in every era: the theoretical framework they share. On a broad scale, three major moments can be distinguished during the twentieth century in terms of the general conceptual framework for economic data, which we shall call the price era, the quantity era and the individual era. In the first, economic activity is observed primarily through prices, which is justified by the preponderance of price theory. In the second, the organized measurement of quantities is produced by national accounting systems within the framework of Keynesian macroeconomic theory, and then of growth theory. Criticism of these earlier frameworks is now leading to experimentation with a very large number of measures, characterized by the sheer volume of information analyzed, greater vagueness between sources and data, and a multiplicity of conceptual frameworks. While each of these three stages represents a break with the previous ones, they nonetheless retain much of what has already been achieved.Nous voudrions ici souligner un point important de la transformation des sources en données qui, à chaque époque, affecte les économistes mais aussi les historiens : le cadre théorique qu'ils partagent. A large échelle, trois grands moments peuvent être distingués au cours du XXe siècle en ce qui concerne le cadre conceptuel général en matière de données économiques, moments que nous appellerons l'ère des prix, l'ère des quantités et l'ère des individus. Dans la première, l'activité économique est observée principalement à travers les prix, ce qui est justifié par la prépondérance de la théorie des prix. Dans la seconde, la mesure organisée des quantités est produite par les comptabilités nationales dans le cadre de la théorie macroéconomique dite keynésienne, puis de la théorie de la croissance. La critique de ces cadres antérieurs conduit aujourd'hui à l'expérimentation d'un très grand nombre de mesures se caractérisant par les masses d'information analysées, un flou plus grand entre sources et données, et une multiplicité de cadres conceptuels. Ces trois étapes, si elles veulent rompre chacun avec les précédentes, n'en conservent pas moins une grande partie de leurs acquis
Staying put in the face of risk? Perceptions, experiences and migration responses in global perspective
No full textThis paper investigates how perceived and experienced risks shape both long-term aspirations to migrate internationally and short-term intentions to move, using matched data from the Gallup World Poll and World Risk Poll run in 2019 across 42 countries. Both risk perceptions and direct experiences are associated with migration responses. Worries about food insecurity, water scarcity, and violent crime are consistently linked to higher migration aspirations and intentions, while climate-related concerns appear to influence aspirations only indirectly, primarily through their connection to food and water insecurity. Direct experiences of food insecurity, violent crime, and mental health problems also predict a greater desire or likelihood to move. These relationships are markedly stronger in high-income countries – particularly for international aspirations – and largely absent in lower-income settings. At the same time, risks trigger short-term intentions to move among lower-educated individuals in low-income countries. This contradiction suggests that internal mobility may remain a more feasible response to adversity in resource-constrained contexts