Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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How large is "large enough" ? Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures
No full textWhether 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 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
Limited factors and why optimal growth has led to destruction
No full textWe revisit the classical Ramsey (1928) model with time discounting and a linear production function, explicitly accounting for the inevitable limitations of tangible production factors, which must remain both finite and positive. By employing Pontryagin's (1962) maximum principle, we transform state constraints into control constraints and provide a complete solution for all impatience rates under the linear production framework. While we classify the levels of impatience as established in the existing literature, we show that the behaviors associated with this threshold fundamentally differ when input limitations are considered -a factor previously overlooked. Our analysis extends beyond the literature's traditional focus on agents with mild impatience, encompassing the entire spectrum of impatience. For highly patient agents, the policymaker prioritizes investment over consumption, ensuring the economy reaches its maximum capital level in finite time. Once this level is attained, consumption stabilizes indefinitely, achieving the golden rule trajectory -an outcome previously deemed unattainable under time discounting. Conversely, beyond the classical impatience threshold, capital and consumption decline over time. For agents with extreme impatience, we identify a second threshold where investment ceases entirely, leading to rapid depletion of capital and output
The Making of Civic Virtues: A School-Based Experiment in Three Countries †
No full textInternational audienceThis paper shows that schools can foster the transmission of civic virtues by helping students to develop concrete, democratically chosen, collective projects. We draw on an RCT implemented in 200 middle schools in three countries. The program leads students to conduct citizenship projects in their communities under the supervision of teachers trained in the intervention. The intervention caused a decline in absenteeism and disciplinary sanctions at school, alongside improved academic achievement. It also led students to diversify their friendship network. The program has stronger effects when implemented by teachers who are initially more involved in the life of the school
Allocating Students to Schools: Theory, Methods, and Empirical Insights
No full textInternational audienceThis chapter surveys the application of matching theory to school choice, motivated by the shift from neighborhood assignment systems to choice-based models. Since educational choice is not mediated by price, the design of allocation mechanisms is critical. The chapter first reviews theoretical contributions, exploring the fundamental trade-offs between efficiency, stability, and strategyproofness, and covers design challenges such as tie-breaking, cardinal welfare, and affirmative action. It then transitions to the empirical landscape, focusing on the central challenge of inferring student preferences from application data, especially under strategic mechanisms. We review various estimation approaches and discuss key insights on parental preferences, market design trade-offs, and the effectiveness of school choice policies
The Distributional Effects of Oil Shocks
No full textInternational audienceNegative oil supply shocks since the 1980s have increased German inflation and reduced aggregate economic activity and prompted moderate monetary tightening to counter these inflationary effects. Using 45 years of high-frequency German administrative data, we find that these shocks disproportionally harm low-income individuals: their earnings growth falls by two percentage points two years after a 10-percent exogenous oil price rise, while high-income individuals are largely unaffected. Job-finding probabilities for low-income workers also decline significantly. This contrasts with the distributional effects of monetary policy shocks, which, while also stronger at the bottom, primarily impact job-separation probabilities. To understand the role of monetary policy in shaping these outcomes, we analyze counterfactual scenarios of policy non-response. Because the actual policy response to oil shocks involves an initial rate rise followed by a fall, a fully anticipated non-response (estimated following McKay and Wolf 2023) leaves the oil shock’s aggregate and distributional effects little changed. When monetary policy repeatedly surprises by not reacting (following Sims and Zha 2006), in contrast, the implied initial monetary loosening dominates, boosting activity, inflation, and particularly employment prospects for low-income individuals
Variants of violence: Classifying conflict types and policies for peace
No full textInternational audienceThis paper studies how heterogeneity in conflict determinants and types calls for different policy responses. For this purpose, we propose a novel, data-driven classification of country contexts and corresponding conflict types. We discuss several major conflict-related themes and policy-relevant recipes for curbing fighting
Du crédit dispersé à la financiarisation
No full textInternational audienceThis chapter presents the transformations of French financial organizations and institutions since the early XIXth century. It aims at synthetizing the existing litterature and providing a broad interpretation fo the transformations observed, building on research in economics, history and sociology
Resolutions in a system of financially linked firms: relying on coarse information
No full textIn a financial system, firms hold debts both within and outside the system.To limit miscoordination and cascades of defaults, an orderly resolution must be conducted at the system level and simultaneously liquidate all debts. This paper analyzes such resolutions under two main assumptions. First, a default on external creditors, say on banks' customers, triggers bankruptcy and should be avoided as much as possible because of large negative externalities. Second, resolutions are coarse, as they specify the payments between each firm and its external creditors and the system without specifying the reimbursement of each bilateral liability. I present properties that determine which firms become bankrupt and how much each non-bankrupt firm reimburses to and receives from the system. The main properties rely on the priority of external creditors at the system level, which reflects the policy recommendations after the 2018 financial crisis, and the proportionality principle
Reallocating Wasted Votes in Proportional Parliamentary Elections with Thresholds
No full textInternational audienceIn many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result in a significant number of "wasted votes" cast for parties that fail to meet the threshold, which reduces representativeness. One proposal is to allow voters to specify replacement votes, by either indicating a second choice party or by ranking a subset of the parties, but there are several ways of deciding on the scores of the parties (and thus the composition of the parliament) given those votes. We introduce a formal model of party voting with thresholds, and compare a variety of party selection rules axiomatically, and experimentally using a dataset we collected during the 2024 European election in France. We identify three particularly attractive rules, called Direct Winners Only (DO), Single Transferable Vote (STV) and Greedy Plurality (GP)