Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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The motivated memory of noise
No full textInternational audienceWe propose a two-stage experiment in which people receive feedback about their relative intelligence. This feedback is a noisy message reminded at every stage, so that subjects cannot forget this ego-relevant information. Instead, we exogenously vary whether the informativeness of the message is reminded in the second stage. We investigate how this treatment variation affects the informativeness reported by subjects, and their posterior beliefs about their intelligence. We show that subjects report informativeness in a self-serving way: subjects with negative messages report that these messages are significantly less informative in the absence of reminder than with it. We also show that the lack of reminder about message informativeness allows subjects to keep a better image of themselves. These results are confirmed by complementary treatments in which we decrease messages informativeness: subjects tend to inflate the informativeness of positive messages that should now be interpreted as bad news
Universal social welfare orderings and risk
No full textInternational audienceHow can social prospects be evaluated and compared when there may be a risk on i) the actual allocations that people will receive, ii) the existence of these future people, and iii) their preferences? This paper investigates this question, which can arise when considering policies, such as climate policy, that affect people who do not yet exist. We start from the observation that there is no social ordering that meets minimal requirements of fairness, social rationality, and respect for people's ex ante preferences. We explore three ways around this impossibility. First, if we drop the ex ante Pareto requirement, we can obtain fair ex post criteria that take an (arbitrary) expected utility of an equally-distributed equivalent level of well-being. Second, if the social ordering is not an expected utility, we can obtain fair ex ante criteria that evaluate uncertain individual prospects with a certaintyequivalent measure of well-being. Third, if we accept that interpersonal comparisons rely on VNM utility functions even in absence of risk, we can construct expected utility social orderings that satisfy of a version of Pareto ex ante
Is broader trading welfare improving for emission trading systems?
No full textInternational audienceEmission trading systems are cornerstone policies to reduce carbon emissions. Although economic intuition suggests that broader allowance trading should be welfare improving, this paper proves that view can be wrong. Under an increasingly popular type of emissions trading scheme — tradable performance standards (TPS), multiple narrow markets can decrease emissions relative to a single unified market, so that restricting trade does not always harm welfare. We show analytically that, when intensity benchmarks are heterogeneous within a sector, this result can hold even if the well-known “implicit output subsidy” does not impact total output. Finally, we provide evidence that this concern can be of high practical relevance. Using a general equilibrium model of China’s TPS for 2020–2030, we show that broader trading results in significantly higher emissions (up to 10%), and decreases welfare relative to narrower markets when the social cost of carbon exceeds $91/tCO
Mind the gap: the interplay between genes and neighbourhood context on educational achievement
No full textInternational audienceThis article expands on previous research on gene-environment (GxE) effects on socio-economic status, by stepping beyond the family dimension and exploring how the neighbourhood context interacts with education linked genes in influencing educational achievement. While some evidence suggests that genetic links to education are more fully expressed in high socio-economic status families, other findings indicate that individuals with lower genetic predisposition for education benefit more from high socio-economic contexts. We argue that the neighbourhood environment may also play a role on the relationship between genes and education-related outcomes. We find evidence that living in socioeconomically advantaged neighbourhoods contributes to closing the gap between individuals characterized by high and low genetic predispositions towards educational achievement, with this effect primarily driven by influences on academic motivation, rather than cognitive skills. These findings emphasize that environmental contexts can shape the unfolding of genetic endowment and point to an important role of the neighbourhood in compensating for pre-existing disadvantage, thus contributing to improve chances of upward social mobility and to limit the reproduction of social inequalities in education over time
How Do Immigrants Promote Exports?
No full textInternational audienceHow do immigrants promote exports? To answer this question we propose an empirical framework allowing to disentangle the role of migration networks that operate at a bilateral level from that of productivity channels (knowledge diffusion and increased workforce diversity) that operate at the aggregate level. We find evidence supporting both, at the extensive as well as at the intensive margin. The results are robust to using various IV strategies. While richer countries’ exports tend to benefit more from immigrants’ diversity (especially in sectors characterized by complex production processes), developing countries benefit from knowledge diffusion more
From macro to micro: Large exporters coping with global crises
No full textInternational audienceUsing monthly firm-level exports and imports over 1993–2020, we uncover four facts: (i) deviations of large exporters from the average growth rate explain a large share of aggregate fluctuations; (ii) an important source for these deviations is the top exporters’ higher loadings on common shocks; (iii) the stronger reaction of the top 1% exporters to the GFC and Covid crises contributed to the export collapses; (iv) a higher elasticity to large demand shocks, not a different exposure to global value chain shocks, contributes to this stronger reaction. The results show that idiosyncratic reactions of large firms to common shocks matter for aggregate export fluctuations, and are especially relevant for the trade collapses of the 2008/2009 crisis and the Pandemic
Lobbying for Globalisation
No full textInternational audienceUsing detailed information from lobbying reports filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we construct a unique dataset that allows us to identify which firms lobby on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) negotiated by the United States, their position (in favour or against) and their lobbying effort on the ratification of each trade agreement. Using this dataset, we show that lobbying on FTAs is dominated by large multinational firms, which are in favour of these agreements. On the intensive margin, we exploit exogenous variation across FTAs to show that individual firms put more effort supporting agreements that generate larger potential gains – larger improvements in their access to foreign consumers and suppliers and smaller increases in domestic competition – and that are more likely to be opposed by politicians. To rationalise these findings, we develop a new model of endogenous lobbying on trade agreements. In this model, heterogeneous firms select into trade and choose whether and how much to spend lobbying on the ratification of an FTA, and politicians may be biased in favour of or against the agreement
Does Tax-Benefit Linkage Matter for the Incidence of Payroll Taxes?
No full textWe analyse earnings responses to six large payroll tax and income tax reforms in France. Our findings indicate full pass-through to workers when there is a strong and transparent link between contributions and expected benefits. In contrast, employer payroll taxes with no tax-benefit linkage exhibit limited pass-through to workers, while income tax nominally borne by employees show nearly full pass-through. Together with a meta-analysis of the literature, we interpret these results as empirical support for the long-standing hypothesis that tax-benefit linkage matters for the incidence of payroll taxes. In the absence of such linkage, our findings suggest that the individual-level incidence of payroll taxes aligns with their statutory incidence
Modeling and evaluating the heterogeneous impacts of the COVID-19 on US unemployment
No full textInternational audienceDuring the COVID-19 lockdown, the labor market faced unprecedented disruptions, particularly in unemployment, job separation, and the job finding rate. These unprecedented economic disruptions challenge existing models for understanding and assessing government interventions. This paper shows that a general equilibrium model with matching frictions may explain the impact of this crisis on US unemployment, while accounting for the contrasted impacts across various job types. This model is calibrated on the subprime-crisis experience and then used to identify the job-specific lockdown shocks, allowing it to predict the observed worker flows by diploma. The unemployment persistence is lowered by the CARES Act, which acted as a damping mechanism against its sharp increase by slowing down the separation dynamics and increasing the rate of hirings
Normes internationales et compétitivité des filières agroalimentaires
No full textInternational audienceLes normes de qualité, notamment les mesures sanitaires et phytosanitaires (SPS) ainsi que les obstacles techniques au commerce (OTC), sont de plus en plus utilisées par les gouvernements nationaux et donnent lieu à un nombre croissant de différends commerciaux internationaux. 1 Une étude récente (Disdier, Gaigné and Herghelegiu, 2023), analyse l’impact des normes de qualité appliquées par un pays sur la qualité des produits échangés et la compétitivité des filières