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Dividend Taxes and the Allocation of Capital: Comment
No full textInternational audienceBoissel and Matray (2022) find that investment increased after 2013 in French firms facing higher dividend taxes. We identify an alteration in the code plotting the event study of the effect of this reform on investment. Using identical data and removing this alteration, we find differential pre-trends between treated and control firms. We also establish that the controls referred to as “size growth,” used in all the difference-in-difference specifications, effectively are controls for lagged investment, i.e., the main outcome variable. Removing such controls attenuates differential pre-trends but leaves no clear event study evidence of a positive effect of dividend taxation on investment
The international diffusion of food innovations and the nutrition transition: retrospective longitudinal evidence from country-level data, 1970–2010
No full textInternational audienceIntroduction There is a lack of quantitative evidence on the role of food innovations—new food ingredients and processing techniques—in the nutrition transition. Objective Document the distribution of food innovations across 67 high-income (HIC) and middle-income (MIC) countries between 1970 and 2010, and its association with the nutritional composition of food supply. Methods We used all available data on food patents, as compiled by the European Patent Office, to measure food innovations. We considered innovations directly received by countries from inventors seeking protection in their territories, and those embedded in processed food imports. Food and Agricultural Organization data were used to estimate the associations between international diffusion of food innovations and trends in total food supply and its macronutrient composition, after adjusting for confounding trends in demand-side factors. We identified the role of trade by simulating the changes in average diet due to innovations embedded in food imports. Results Trends in food innovations were positively and significantly associated with changes in daily per capita calorie supply available for human consumption in MIC between 1990 and 2010 (elasticity of 0.027, 95% CI 0.019 to 0.036). Food innovations were positively correlated with the share of animal and free fats in total food supply (elasticities of 0.044, 95% CI 0.030 to 0.058 for MIC between 1970 and 1989 and 0.023, 95% CI 0.003 to 0.043 for HIC between 1990 and 2010). Food innovations were associated with substitutions from complex carbohydrates towards sugars in total food supply for MIC after 1990 (elasticities of −0.037, 95% CI −0.045 to −0.029 for complex carbs, 0.082, 95% CI 0.066 to 0.098 for sugars). For these countries, the trade channel capturing access to innovations through imports of processed food played a key role. Conclusion Policy-makers should consider the impacts of the international diffusion of food innovations in assessing the costs and benefits of international trade regulations
Dynamic (Mis)allocation of Investments in Solar Energy
No full textBecause they differ in terms of technology, size and location, solar photovoltaic installations exhibit very heterogeneous levelized costs of producing electricity. Therefore, the present value cost of meeting a given trajectory of annual solar energy production depends on which projects are commissioned when: the observed sequence of investment decisions need not be cost-efficient. We propose a methodology to assess dynamic misallocation by comparing the present value cost of realized investments to a counterfactual optimal sequence of investments. Applying our methodology to France between 2005 and 2021, we find that the observed trajectory of annual solar production could have been obtained at a present value cost almost 30% lower than its realized value. Our optimized counterfactual suggests that investments in residential solar should have on average been postponed by 7 years, while investments in medium and large-scale installations should have occurred 2 to 4 years earlier
The striatum in time production: The model of Huntington's disease in longitudinal study
No full textInternational audienceThe unified model of time processing suggests that the striatum is a central structure involved in all tasks that require the processing of temporal durations. Patients with Huntington's disease exhibit striatal degeneration and a deficit in time perception in interval timing tasks (i.e. for duration ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to minutes), but whether this deficit extends to time production remains unclear. In this study, we investigated whether symptomatic patients (HD, N = 101) or presymptomatic gene carriers (Pre-HD, N = 31) of Huntington's disease had a deficit in time production for durations between 4 and 10 s compared to healthy controls and whether this deficit developed over a year for patients. We found a clear deficit in temporal production for HD patients, whereas Pre-HD performed similarly to Controls. For HD patients and Pre-HD participants, task performance was correlated with grey matter volume in the amygdala and caudate, bilaterally. These results confirm that the striatum is involved in interval timing not only in perception but also in production, in accordance with the unified model of time processing. Furthermore, exploratory factor analyses on our data indicated that temporal production was associated with clinical assessments of psychomotor and executive functions. Finally, when retested twelve months later, the deficit of HD patients remained stable, although striatal degeneration was more pronounced. Thus, the simple, short and language-independent temporal production task may be a useful clinical tool to detect striatal degeneration in patients in early stages of Huntington's disease. However, its usefulness to detect presymptomatic stages or for monitoring the evolution of HD over a year seems limite
From Tweets to the Streets: Twitter and Extremist Protests in the United States
No full textHow does social media affect the composition of political protests in the United States? Using early adoption of Twitter at the 2007 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival as a plausibly exogenous source of variation in county-level Twitter penetration (Müller & Schwarz, 2023), and comprehensive data on protest events, this paper finds that Twitter penetration increases the frequency of protests overall, but also radicalizes them. Twitter disproportionately fuels protests with participation of "extreme" groups-groups that are particularly militant, radical, or hateful. These effects do not depend on the topic of the protest nor political leaning. I also present survey evidence suggesting that coordination is not the only mechanism driving these results: An increase in county-level Twitter penetration implies an increase in respondent's willingness to justify violence against other people, normalizing the participation in extreme groups and extreme protests
Évaluation de l'Index de l'égalité professionnelle
No full textEnjeux :En septembre 2018, le gouvernement français a pris un ensemble de mesures visant à réduire les inégalités femmes-hommes, parmi lesquelles la mise en place de l’Index de l’égalité professionnelle. Depuis 2019, toutes les entreprises privées de plus de 50 salariés doivent calculer cet indicateur et obtenir une valeur minimale à cet Index, à défaut de quoi elles s’exposent à des sanctions. Cet Index introduit, pour la première fois dans les politiques de lutte contres les inégalités liées au sexe, une obligation de résultat pour les entreprises et non seulement une obligation de moyens.Présentation :Cette étude a évalué l’impact de la mise en place de l’Index de l’égalité professionnelle sur les inégalités entre femmes et hommes dans l’entreprise. Pour ce faire, elle s’appuie sur les données déclarées par les entreprises et les données administratives détaillées concernant les rémunérations et heures travaillées par l’ensemble des salariés du secteur privé.Enseignements clés :1. La couverture de l’Index est très imparfaiteSeulement 50 % des entreprises (44 % des PME-PMI et 93 % des entreprises de plus de 1 000 salariés) normalement assujetties déclarent une note sur 100 points.Seul un quart des salariés du secteur privé sont concernés par le calcul de l’indicateur d’écart salarial de l’Index.2. La mise en place de l’Index n’a pas d’effet détectable sur les inégalités femmes-hommes dans les entreprises concernéesLes entreprises de moins de 50 salariés (non assujetties à l’Index) et celles de plus de 50 salariés (assujetties à l’Index) ont des trajectoires remarquablement parallèles en termes d’inégalités femmes-hommes entre 2010 et 2020. On n’observe pas de changement de tendance pour les entreprises assujetties après la mise en place de l’Index en 2018.3. L’Index tend à invisibiliser les inégalités réelles entre femmes et hommesLes bons résultats obtenus par les entreprises pour les écarts de rémunération sont liés à deux choix méthodologiques discutables faits pour le calcul de l’indicateur d’écart de salaire de l’Index : l’application d’un seuil de tolérance (tous les écarts inférieurs à 5 % sont ramenés à 0) l’utilisation des hommes comme catégorie de référence pour normaliser les écarts (les écarts dans chaque groupe sont divisés par le salaire moyen des hommes, ce qui les réduit quand les femmes sont moins bien payées que les hommes mais les augmentent dans le cas inverse).4. Les entreprises qui déclarent leur Index ne sont pas plus vertueuses – au sens de leur performance en matière d’égalité professionnelle – que celles qui ne déclarent pasLes données administratives utilisées dans l’étude permettent de mesurer les inégalités femmes-hommes à la fois pour les entreprises qui déclarent un Index et celles qui ne le déclarent pas : les entreprises qui ne déclarent pas leur Index ou déclarent ne pas pouvoir le calculer ne sont pas plus inégalitaires que les autres. Elles reportent en revanche des notes à l’indicateur d’écart salarial supérieures à celles recalculées à partir des données administratives.On observe que pour l’indicateur simple et transparent que constitue la part des femmes parmi les dix plus hautes rémunérations, les déclarations des entreprises concordent avec leurs résultats reconstruits alors que cela n’est plus vrai pour l’indicateur complexe et ajustable d’écart salarial. Cela suggère que l’utilisation d’indicateurs complexes et peu transparents peut permettre aux entreprises d’invisibiliser leurs inégalités réelles
The Democratic Challenge of Central Bank Credit Policies
No full textInternational audienceThis article provides a framework for understanding the economic role of central banks and their democratic legitimacy. I argue that thinking about the democratic challenges of central banking requires considering central banks’ insurance role and how their actions are part of credit policy . The contract between the central bank and the sovereign is incomplete because it cannot integrate all unforeseen contingencies, distributive consequences and interactions with other policies. This opens the door to viewing the legitimacy of central bank decisions through a process of deliberation, coordination and reflexivity, rather than only a delegation of power. I discuss a proposal for a European Credit Council, which would be a deliberative body aimed at strengthening Parliamentary power on monetary and credit policies, the democratic legitimacy of central bank policy in the Euro Area as well as its coordination with other European policies. More coordination, Parliamentary power and deliberation are consistent with central bank independence and aim to delimit more precisely the action of central banks within the macroeconomic and credit policies of the State
Social tension order: A new approach to inequality reduction
No full textInternational audienceWe introduce a new order on income distributions that we call “social tension” order, based on the concepts of absolute satisfaction and absolute deprivation, as introduced by Chakravarty (1997) (see also Chateauneuf and Moyes, 2006). Our order postulates that antagonist groups of individuals behave differently when comparing welfare: each “poor” individual compares herself with richer individuals, while each “rich” individual compares herself with poorer ones. We prove that reducing social tension corresponds to fair taxation and provide an explicit algorithm that allows for transitioning from a dominated distribution to a dominating one through a sequence of elementary transfers that respect our order. Additionally, we construct a new index from the “social tension” order, which may better capture the various sources of inequality compared to the Gini index. Lastly, we characterize those expected utility functions that respect our order
Dynamic of the Disablement Process in Ageing Populations
No full textInternational audienceThis paper aims at projecting the disabled population aged 60 or more, and at identifying the factors that impact those projections. To this aim, we develop a novel methodological approach which allows identifying the role of different parameters (e.g. a change in the probability to remain autonomous, a change in the distribution of survival gains across disability levels) in the forecast of morbidity. This paper focuses on the methodological aspect of this new method. It also provides, as an illustration, a projection of the French elderly disabled population in 2060, relying on the French CARE‑M data and on the European data SHARE. It shows, among other results, that matching the past evolution of the disability‑free life expectancy ratio to the total life expectancy requires optimistic assumptions regarding the evolution of the probability to remain autonomous.Le présent article vise à effectuer des projections de la population dépendante âgée de 60 ans ou plus et à identifier les facteurs qui influencent ces projections. À ces fins, nous développons une nouvelle approche méthodologique permettant d’identifier le rôle de différents paramètres (par exemple, le changement de la probabilité de rester autonome, le changement de la répartition des gains de survie entre différents niveaux de dépendance) dans la prévision de la morbidité. Cet article se concentre sur l’aspect méthodologique de cette nouvelle méthode. Il fournit également, à titre d’illustration, une projection de la population de personnes âgées en situation de dépendance ou de handicap en France en 2060, à partir des données de l’enquête française CARE‑M et de l’enquête européenne SHARE. Il montre notamment que conserver un ratio entre l’espérance de vie sans incapacité et l’espérance de vie totale similaire à celui observé dans le passé nécessite de formuler des hypothèses optimistes quant à l’évolution de la probabilité de rester autonome
Le plafonnement de l'impôt sur la fortune
No full textPrésentationDepuis la création de l’impôt sur les grandes fortunes (IGF) en 1982, l’imposition du patrimoine a toujours été assortie d’un mécanisme de plafonnement. Celui-ci visait à limiter le montant d’impôt payé lorsque la somme des impositions sur le revenu et le patrimoine dont les ménages étaient redevables dépassait une certaine part de leur revenu. Ce rapport vise à mieux comprendre qui étaient les ménages plafonnés, quels étaient leur niveau et leur composition de patrimoine et de revenus. Il propose une description approfondie de ces ménages, et étudie leurs réactions à deux réformes du plafonnement : son annulation ponctuelle en 2012, et la forte variation de son application avec la transformation de l’ISF en IFI