Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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The Double-Edged Sword of Role Models: A Systematic Narrative Review of the Unintended Effects of Role Model Interventions on Support for the Status Quo
No full textInternational audienceRole model interventions are often designed to foster students' pursuit of specific careers and are commonly employed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).Here, we drew on social-psychological theories of intergroup relations to hypothesize that role model interventions might also unintentionally shape students' beliefs and preferences concerning the broader social system-their ideologies. Specifically, role model interventions may lead students to view the (inequitable) status quo in STEM as natural and acceptable. A systematic narrative review (35 articles, 42 studies) examined these hypothesized side effects. This review indicated that the ideological side effects of role model interventions were rarely considered in the literature on role models. Although limited, the few relevant findings revealed both undesirable side effects of role model interventions on students' ideologies (e.g., greater endorsement of the status quo) and effects that are-from our perspectivedesirable (e.g., greater awareness of gender bias in STEM). This review demonstrates that role models can be a double-edged sword and serves as a call to evaluate role model interventions based on criteria beyond motivation.</div
Measuring sex-selective abortion: How many women abort?
No full textInternational audienceThis paper demonstrates that sex-selective abortion induces a correlation between birth interval length and the sex of the next-born child. Using a statistical model, we show that shorter birth intervals for next-born girls indicate repeated sex-selective abortions between consecutive births. Analyzing data from India, we find evidence of repeated sex-selective abortions at birth order 2 when the first child is a girl, and strong evidence at birth order 3 when the first two children are girls. To quantify the extent of repeated abortions, we propose a maximum likelihood estimator that provides the number of women who abort and their likelihood of performing repeated abortions. Our estimation results reveal significant heterogeneity across birth orders, sibling compositions, and socio-demographic and geographic groups. Notably, literate and urban women who first had a girl rarely abort a second time, whereas women in northern India who first had two girls show a 13% likelihood of repeated sex-selective abortion. In this group, the estimated number of aborted female fetuses-the standard measure of sex-selective abortion-is 50% higher than the number of women who abort
Currency internationalization with Chinese characteristics: Is capital‐account convertibility required for the renminbi to acquire reserve‐currency status?
No full textInternational audienceIt is widely assumed that the renminbi (RMB) cannot acquire a meaningful place in central bank reserve portfolios without full liberalization of China's capital account. We argue that the RMB can in fact develop into an international reserve currency in the absence of capital‐account convertibility. Trade and investment links can drive use despite limited access to Chinese financial markets. But this route to currency internationalization requires policy support. China must provide access to RMB through loans and the People's Bank of China (PBoC) currency swaps. It must ensure the convertibility of RMB into US dollars in offshore markets. It must provide RMB services at a stable and predictable price. Currency internationalization without full capital‐account liberalization thus requires the RMB to be backed by dollar reserves, which the PBoC consequently will continue to hold and use. Hence, we do not foresee RMB internationalization as supplanting dollar dominance
Coordinating monetary and fiscal policies in Britain during the French Wars (1793–1821)
No full textInternational audienceRelying on new quantitative and qualitative data, we analyze how the United Kingdom financed the French Wars (1793–1821). We show that policy makers adjusted monetary and fiscal policies in four regimes. 1) tax-smoothing; 2) suspending the gold standard, real bills, war taxation; 3) the Bank of England's price support of government securities; 4) return to the old order. Under the price support regime, the Bank of England maintained the market value of public short-term debt by purchasing large amounts of it. Our findings suggest that in this context fiscal news shocks rather than fluctuations in the money supply caused inflation
A model of growth with living capital
No full textInternational audienceAcknowledging the economic role of knowledge, education, training and health, can preserve and make them thrive without assuming that preferences depend on any of them. In this paper we will define living capital as the aggregate of all these factors, and then, total capital as the sum of physical and living capital.In a planned economy, we find that the optimal sequence of total capital is always monotonic. Depending on the productivity of total capital, three different regimes hold: bounded growth; asymptotically balanced unbounded growth or unbalanced unbounded growth.At the early stages of development the economy optimally devotes all its investment effort to increase the stock of physical capital and only physical capital. As the economy develops, it will start involving living capital in production. In the first regime, total capital converges to a steady state with a positive stock of total capital, which is larger than the one without living capital. In the second regime, growth becomes unbounded, and consumption grows at a constant rate. Total capital grows at the same rate but only asymptotically. In the third case, living capital is used increasingly from the beginning. Once the economy is sufficiently rich, physical capital starts growing faster than living capital.To close, we consider a market economy with externalities from the living. In this scenario, if the government levies taxes to finance the accumulation of living capital and implements exactly the optimal sequence of living capital as in the planner’s program, then the equilibrium market prices exactly decentralize the planner’s solution
The Heterogeneous Impact of Market Size on Innovation: Evidence from French Firm-Level Exports
No full textInternational audienceWe analyze how demand conditions faced by a firm in its export markets affect its innovation decisions. We exploit exogenous firm-level export demand shocks and find that firms respond by patenting more; furthermore, this response is driven by the subset of initially more productive firms. The patent response arises two to five years after the shock, highlighting the time required to innovate. In contrast, the demand shock raises contemporaneous sales and employment for all firms regardless of their productivity. This skewed innovation response to common demand shocks arises naturally from a model of endogenous innovation and competition with firm heterogeneity
Stroke but no hospital admission: Lost opportunity for whom?
No full textInternational audienceTo counter the spread of COVID-19, the French government imposed several stringent social and political measures across its entire population. We hereto assess the impact of these political decisions on healthcare access in 2020, focusing on patients who suffered from an ischemic stroke. We divide our analysis into four distinct periods: the pre-COVID-19 pandemic period, the lockdown period, the “in-between” or transitional period, and the shutdown period. Our methodology involves utilizing a retrospective dataset spanning 2019–2020, an exhaustive French national hospital discharge diagnosis database for stroke inpatients, integrated with income information from the reference year of 2019. The results reveal that the most affluent were more likely to forgo medical care, particularly in heavily affected areas. Moreover, the most disadvantaged exhibited even greater reluctance to seek care, especially in the most severely impacted regions. The data suggest a loss of opportunity for less severely affected patients to benefit from healthcares during this lockdown period, regardless of demographic, location, and socioeconomic determinants. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a notable discrepancy in healthcare-seeking behavior, with less affluent patients and seniors (over 75 years old) experiencing slower rates of return to healthcare access compared to pre-pandemic levels. This highlights a persistent gap in healthcare accessibility, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, despite the easing of COVID-19 restrictions
Compter les voix et « optimiser » la démocratie ?
No full textL’article est consacré à l’organisation des scrutins et au comptage des voix dans trois cas de complexité croissante : La répartition des sièges entre pays (exemple du Parlement Européen), la répartition des sièges entre partis politiques, et le choix des projets dans le cas d’un budget participatif. Ces questions techniques mettent en œuvre des concepts fondamentaux de philosophie morale et politique à la manière de la philosophie économique, en particulier les arbitrages entre efficacité et égalité
Balance sheet policies and Central Bank losses in a HANK model
No full textWhat are the effects of central bank balance sheet expansion, and should we worry about central bank losses? Using a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model incorporating money in utility and an endogenous zero lower bound (ZLB), we study the fiscal-monetary interaction of central bank balance sheet policies. We find that the overall efficiency of QE and QT policies depends on the combination of the expected future size of the balance sheet and the fiscal transmission of central bank losses. First, permanent balance sheet expansions stimulate the economy in the long-run and, by anticipation, increase inflation and output during the ZLB episode, as they interact with distortionary taxes and imperfect capital markets. Second, at the end of the ZLB, the central bank incurs losses: issuing securities to offset these losses is more welfare-enhancing than raising taxes
Extended maternity leave and children's long‐term development
No full textInternational audienceCountries around the world are increasingly expanding legal maternity leaves, with the dual objective of protecting mothers' jobs during their recovery after childbirth and enhancing child development. Using exhaustive census data, we find that a three‐year paid leave in France had zero average effects on children's long‐term schooling achievement, and no detectable impact heterogeneity. The lack of positive effects on children adds to the case against a policy that has strong adverse effects on mothers' careers