Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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“Bad” Oil, “Worse” Oil, and Carbon Misallocation
No full textInternational audienceNot all barrels of oil are created equal: their extraction varies in both private cost and carbon intensity. Leveraging a comprehensive micro-dataset on world oil fields, alongside detailed estimates of carbon intensities and private extraction costs, this study quantifies the additional emissions and costs from having extracted the “wrong” deposits. We do so by comparing historical deposit-level supplies to counterfactuals that factor in pollution costs, while keeping annual global consumption unchanged. Between 1992 and 2018, carbon misallocation amounted to at least 11.00 gigatons of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2eq), incurring an environmental cost evaluated at 2018). This translates into a significant supply-side ecological debt for major producers of high-carbon oil. Looking forward, we estimate the gains from making deposit-level extraction socially optimal at about 9.30 GtCO2eq, valued at $1.9 trillion, along a future aggregate demand pathway coherent with the objective of net-zero emissions in 2050, and document unequal reserve stranding across oil nations
Le Capital d'une capitale
No full textInternational audienceA travers l'exemple de Paris, ce livre propose une lecture renouvelée de l'histoire de la richesse. Grâce à une documentation exceptionnelle, l'analyse de l'évolution de la richesse parisienne au cours des deux derniers siècles permet en effet d'éclairer des processus rarement identifiables ailleurs. Dans la capitale, autant l'importance et la composition de la richesse varient, autant sa distribution reste stable. Les données individuelles portant sur l'ensemble de la population montrent que la richesse et ceux qui la détiennent connaissent un renouvellement continu, y compris au sein des plus riches, alors même qu'une part toujours considérable de la richesse est héritée. Si les Parisiens sont nombreux à épargner, leurs efforts sont épuisés par les incertitudes de la vie de sorte que, jusque dans les années 1920, deux tiers d'entre eux n'ont aucune richesse au décès. Il faut attendre la diffusion des systèmes de retraite pour que cette proportion diminue. Seule l'intervention publique permet alors de réduire la part très élevée des personnes qui meurent sans richesse ainsi que les écarts d'espérance de vie, de santé et d'éducation. Ces dimensions essentielles, longtemps presque figées en dépit de la longue croissance de la richesse jusqu'à la Première Guerre mondiale, n'ont sensiblement progressé qu'ensuite, notamment lorsque l'Etat social a transformé les conditions d'accumulation et de transmission du capital. L'histoire de la richesse ouvre ainsi sur une histoire des choix politiques, des aspirations sociales et des inégalités que les sociétés acceptent - ou refusent - de tolérer
Switching Macroeconomic Growth and Volatility: Evidence from a Mean-Variance Markov-Switching Dynamic Factor Model
No full textAs illustrated by the Great Recession, the COVID-19 pandemic and the global decline in GDP growth since the mid-2000s, economists need to account for sudden and deep recessions, shifts in macroeconomic volatility, and longer-term fluctuations in GDP growth. This paper puts forward a Mean-Variance Markov-Switching Dynamic Factor Model (MV-MS-DFM) that accounts for these stylised facts by allowing the mean and the volatility of macroeconomic variables to switch abruptly, and trend GDP growth to vary smoothly over time. We show that allowing for different volatility regimes improves the detection of turning points in the US business cycle, that the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic only ledto temporary increases in volatility, and that US trend GDP growth has declined by around 1 percentage point since the early 2000s. Information criteria and marginal likelihood comparisons support our model specification. The model also provides a unified framework connecting the literature on turning-point detection to the more recent literature on Growth-at-Risk in macroeconomic forecasting. While tightening financial conditions are shown to increase the probability of falling into recession, the model can generate left-skewed density forecasts without including any financial variable in the information set. The paper finally discusses how to deal with the COVID-19 period when estimating the model
Reassessing the benefits of European integration and the European Union's ability to achieve strategic autonomy
No full textEuropean integration is now faced with the question of strategic autonomy. Against this backdrop, this paper has three objectives. First, it uses disaggregated trade data and established empirical methods to assess the benefits of European integration on trade among the members of the European Union (EU) as well as on trade between EU members and non-member countries, including non-members that are part of the Single Market. Second, it evaluates the costs of EU strategic autonomy -implying not trading with "riskier" partners. Third, it asks whether deeper integration within the EU can alleviate these costs. The paper shows that the gains from European integration are substantial, albeit heterogeneous across Member States, non-members, and sectors, and that the costs of strategic autonomy can be offset by deeper, but comparatively more modest, integration efforts within the European Union
Fathers have embraced longer and more flexible paternity leave
No full textInternational audienceReformed in 2021, paternity leave in France was extended and made more flexible. The proportion of fathers taking this leave continues to grow, particularly among those that used to claim it least, such as self-employed workers, those on fixed-term contracts, and the least-educated fathers. Fathers’ presence at the birth of their child and beyond is becoming the norm. However, occupational and financial pressures remain an obstacle to the use of paternity leave. Only a minority of fathers take a “solo” paternity leave after the mother’s return to work, but these numbers are increasing.La réforme du congé de paternité en 2021 a allongé sa durée et assoupli ses modalités. La part de pères prenant ce congé continue à augmenter, notamment chez ceux qui y avaient le moins recours comme les indépendants, les salariés en contrat à durée déterminée, les pères moins diplômés. La présence des pères au moment de la naissance se généralise et dure plus longtemps. Cependant, les contraintes professionnelles et financières restent un frein à la prise du congé. Même s’ils restent minoritaires, les pères qui prennent le congé « en solo », alors que la mère a repris le travail, sont de plus en plus nombreux
Au moins aussi inquiétant que la perspective d’un conflit ouvert avec les Etats-Unis, la soumission tranquille du Canada et de certains Européens à la Chine
No full textInternational audienceLa reconfiguration du monde sur le plan stratégique, l'avenir de la France face à la Chine et les Etats-Uni
Efficacité économique de la réduction de la taille des classes
No full textLa réduction de la taille des classes constitue un levier bien documenté pour améliorer les apprentissages des élèves, en particulier dans l'enseignement primaire. Ce Focus applique le cadre méthodologique de l'indice d'efficacité des dépenses publiques (EDP) à cette politique, afin d'en évaluer le rapport bénéfice-coût pour la collectivité. L'analyse porte sur le dédoublement des classes dans l'éducation prioritaire, tout en considérant les effets potentiels d'une diminution générale de la taille des classes dans les premier et second degrés. L'indice EDP permet de mesurer la rentabilité sociale d'une politique publique en rapportant les gains qu'elle génère à son coût net pour les finances publiques. Dans le cas de la taille des classes, il repose sur une chaîne de transmission reliant la réduction du nombre d'élèves par classe à l'amélioration des compétences scolaires, puis à l'augmentation des revenus futurs. Les paramètres utilisés sont issus d'évaluations rigoureuses mobilisant des variations expérimentales ou quasi expérimentales, ainsi que des données administratives françaises sur les trajectoires scolaires et salariales. Les résultats mettent en évidence une forte rentabilité de la politique dans l'enseignement primaire, où l'indice EDP indique que le dédoublement est autofinancé à long terme. Au collège, l'effet estimé sur les apprentissages est plus incertain, mais l'indice reste largement supérieur à 1, traduisant un gain social net pour chaque euro investi. Ces résultats confortent la pertinence de poursuivre les efforts engagés dans le premier degré, tout en appelant à des expérimentations ciblées pour mieux documenter les effets dans le second degré
Endogenous growth, spatial dynamics and convergence: A refinement
No full textThe dynamics of capital distribution across space are an important topic in economic geography and, more recently, in growth theory. In particular, the spatial AK model has been intensively studied in the latter stream. It turns out that the positivity of optimal capital stocks over time and space for any initial capital spatial distribution has not been entirely settled even in the simple linear AK case. We use Ekeland’s variational principle together with Pontrya-gin’s maximum principle to solve an optimal spatiotemporal AK model with a state constraint (non-negative capital stock), where the capital law of motion follows a diffusion equation. We derive the necessary optimality conditions to ensure the solution satisfies the state constraints for all times and locations. The maximum principle enables the reduction of the infinite-horizon optimal control problem to a finite-horizon problem, ultimately proving the uniqueness of the optimal solution with positive capital and the non-existence of such a solution when the time discount rate is either too large or too small
Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures
No full textInternational audienceWhether individuals feel confident about their own actions, choices, or statements being correct, and how these confidence levels differ between individuals are two key primitives for countless behavioral theories and phenomena. In cognitive tasks, individual confidence is typically measured as the average of reports about choice accuracy, but how reliable is the resulting characterization of within- and between-individual confidence remains surprisingly undocumented. Here, we perform a large-scale resampling exercise in the Confidence Database (103 studies, 6000 participants) to investigate the reliability of individual confidence estimates, and of comparisons across individuals’ confidence levels. Our results show that confidence estimates are more stable than their choice-accuracy counterpart, reaching a reliability plateau after roughly 50 trials, regardless of a number of task design characteristics. While constituting a reliability upper-bound for task-based confidence measures, and thereby leaving open the question of the reliability of the construct itself, these results characterize the robustness of past and future task designs
Unleashing the transformative power of deliberation with contextual citizens
No full textInternational audienceIn this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens endowed with contextual opinions can reach consensus in a binary collective decision problem with no improvement in their information. A necessary condition is that they are willing to (mentally) experience their fellow citizens’ way of thinking. The diversity of thinking frames is what makes it possible to overcome initial disagreement. Consensus does not emerge spontaneously from deliberations: it requires facilitation.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Quantum theory and topology in models of decision making (Part 1)’