Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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Persistent effects of empires: Evidence from the partitions of Poland
No full textWe use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires--Russia, Austria‐Hungary, and Prussia--has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the main difference in voting across Polish territories attributed by many observers to the legacy of empires is driven by omitted variables. However, empires do have a significant causal effect. The lands that belonged to Prussia (compared with those that belonged to Russia) vote more for anticommunist (post‐Solidarity) parties. This difference is largely explained by the persistent effect of infrastructure built by Prussians at the time of industrialization. The former Austrian lands (compared with former Russian lands) votes more for religious conservatives and for liberals. The difference in the vote for religious conservatives is explained by persistent differences in church attendance driven by vastly different policies of the two empires toward the Catholic Church. Higher support for liberals on the Austrian side is partly explained by a persistent belief in democracy, which is a legacy of decentralized democratic governance of the Austrian empire
Targeting in social networks with anonymized information
No full textInternational audienceThis paper studies optimal targeting when the planner knows the architecture of the network but not the identities of agents occupying different positions in the network. We show that the planner's ability to discriminate among agents depends on the balance between in- and out-neighborhoods in the social network. When influence is reciprocal, the knowledge of the network architecture is sufficient for the planner to implement the first-best actions. When in- and out-neighborhoods are imbalanced, pairs of players have an incentive to jointly misreport their identities. This situation arises when one agent influences all other agents, or when one agent is being influenced by all other agents. It also arises in hierarchical structures with nested neighborhoods where agents at lower tiers of the network are influenced by the same agents as agents at upper tiers who influence them
Inequality and identity salience
No full textInternational audienceThis paper provides a simple model of identity salience that is applied to the phenomenon of the recent rise in right-wing populism in the Western world. Trade and capital flows, skill-biased technological change, and migration have led to declining employment and wages in these economies and a parallel rise in economic and cultural populism, tapping into nativist sentiments. We argue that when long-term income stagnation for most of the population and decline for some go together with high rates of income growth at the very top, one has zero-sum economics and that naturally raises the possibility of using various kinds of social identities to claim a bigger share of a fixed sized pie. We show that in ethnically or racially polarized societies this naturally leads to the salience of social identities that enable majority ethnic groups to vote for policies that exclude minority groups so that they get a greater share of a dwindling surplus. In contrast, in more ethnically and racially homogeneous societies, this would instead lead to the demand for more pro-redistribution policies that involve greater provision of public goods
A shared brain system forming confidence judgment across cognitive domains
No full textInternational audienceConfidence is typically defined as a subjective judgment about whether a decision is right. Decisions are based on sources of information that come from various cognitive domains and are processed in different brain systems. An unsettled question is whether the brain computes confidence in a similar manner whatever the domain or in a manner that would be idiosyncratic to each domain. To address this issue, human participants performed two tasks probing confidence in decisions made about the same material (history and geography statements), but based on different cognitive processes: semantic memory for deciding whether the statement was true or false, and duration perception for deciding whether the statement display was long or short. At the behavioral level, we found that the same factors (difficulty, accuracy, response time, and confidence in the preceding decision) predicted confidence judgments in both tasks. At the neural level, we observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging that confidence judgments in both tasks were associated to activity in the same brain regions: positively in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and negatively in a prefronto-parietal network. Together, these findings suggest the existence of a shared brain system that generates confidence judgments in a similar manner across cognitive domains
Avancées de la recherche en économie de la santé à l’occasion des 43es journées des économistes de la santé français (JESF)
No full textVariants of Gender Bias and Sexual-Orientation Discrimination in Career Development
No full textInternational audienceWe use a nationally-representative dataset that includes a large sample of sexual-orientation minorities to investigate gender bias and sexual-orientation discrimination in career progression. Our results are consistent with persistent gender bias findings and non-heterosexual identity-based employment discrimination. Our findings are consistent with previous work noting that protective legislation for gay and lesbian sexual identities have increased the cost of discrimination and contribute to the improved socioeconomic status of a substantial number of people in these minority groups. However, these gains have not been shared with other minority groups in the LGB+ community, which still have some of the lowest probabilities of holding managerial jobs, and higher probabilities of appearing in lower socioeconomic classes
An α -MaxMin utility representation for close and distant future preferences with temporal biases
No full textInternational audienceThis paper provides a framework for understanding preferences over utility streams across different time periods. We analyze preferences for the close future, for the distant future, and a synthesis of both, establishing a representation involving weights over time periods. Examining scenarios where two utility streams cannot be robustly compared to each other, we introduce notions in which one has more “potential” to be preferred over another, which lead to MaxMin, MaxMax, and -MaxMin representations. Finally, we consider temporal bias in the form of violations of stationarity. For close future preferences, we obtain a generalization of quasi-hyperbolic discounting. For distant future preferences, we obtain Banach limits and discuss the relationship with exponential discounting
Choosing an electoral rule: Values and self-interest in the lab
No full textInternational audienceWe study the choice of multi-person bargaining protocols in the context of politics. In politics, citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic rules, for instance via referendums. If they support the rule that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment, in which 252 subjects participated. In the first stage, these subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second stage, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. We find that egalitarian values that subjects hold outside of the lab shape their choice of electoral rule in the second stage when a rule led to a fairer distribution of payoffs compared to the other one in the first stage. The implication is that people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for decision rules
Dette, taxe et politique environnementale
No full textInternational audienceThis article examines the relationship between environmental policy and budgetary and fiscal policy. An undeniable obstacle to the implementation of environmental policies is their financing. First, the effectiveness of standard environmental instruments is assessed according to public economics criteria, notably distortions, externalities, welfare and macroeconomic aggregates. Limitations regarding acceptability and inequalities are also considered. Compared to quotas and standards, taxation offers significant advantages in incentivising more virtuous behaviour, but also in raising revenue for the State. If the objective of the tax is limited to pollution control, the recycling of revenues is a powerful tool for the correction of its undesirable effects. However, in the case of excessive debt, the revenue from the tax can also be used for the repayment of public debt. The interaction between environmental taxes and public debt is then examined. Repaying the debt using the revenue from the environmental tax restores budgetary room for manoeuvre. Symmetrically, if the debt level is acceptable, financing pollution policies through debt without increasing the tax burden is an interesting option. Debt should, however, be used sparingly and only in cases where the technology used to reduce pollution is highly effective. Finally, the environmental vulnerability of transition and climate-change related countries leads to a risk premium on their sovereign debt, thus increasing the cost of public debt and making the poorest countries even more vulnerable. By reconciling budgetary and environmental objectives, debt relief for developing countries could be an aid to these countries in their fight against pollution.Cet article examine l’articulation entre les politiques environnementales et les politiques budgétaires et fiscales. Le financement des politiques environnementales représente un obstacle indéniable à leur mise en œuvre. Tout d’abord, l’efficacité des instruments standards de la politique environnementale est évaluée selon les critères de l’économie publique, notamment en termes de distorsions, externalités, bien-être et agrégats macroéconomiques. Les limites de ces instruments, quant à l’acceptabilité et aux inégalités, sont également envisagées. Par rapport aux quotas et aux normes, la taxe présente des avantages significatifs en termes d’incitations à des comportements plus vertueux, mais également en termes de revenus pour l’État. En limitant l’objectif de la taxe à la lutte contre les pollutions, le recyclage des recettes est un outil puissant de correction de ses effets indésirables. Néanmoins, face à un endettement excessif, les recettes de la taxe peuvent également servir au remboursement de la dette publique. Nous étudions ensuite les interactions entre la taxe environnementale et la dette publique. Le remboursement de la dette par les recettes de la taxe environnementale redonne des marges de manœuvre budgétaire. Symétriquement, en présence d’un niveau de dette acceptable, le financement des politiques publiques de lutte contre la pollution par l’émission de dette, sans augmentation de la pression fiscale, constitue une option intéressante. Néanmoins, le recours à la dette doit se faire avec parcimonie, seulement si la technologie de dépollution est significativement efficace. Enfin, la vulnérabilité environnementale des pays exposés au risque de transition ou climatique se traduit par le paiement d’une prime de risque sur leur dette souveraine, et donc par un surcoût de la dette publique, fragilisant d’autant plus les pays les plus pauvres. En conciliant les objectifs budgétaires et environnementaux, une remise de dette pour les pays en développement pourrait aider ces pays dans leur lutte contre la pollution
Health accidents and wealth decline in old age
No full textThis paper explores the impact of a health shock and changes in survival probability on the savings and portfolio choices of older individuals. Using a theoretical framework featuring a portfolio choice that incorporates imperfect annuity markets, we analyze how elderly individuals, whose survival probability has been altered by a health shock, allocate their resources. A difference-indifferences approach complements the theoretical approach by taking into account the effect of age and cohort, and controlling for selection bias related to health events at older ages. Our analysis utilizes a panel of 5570 observations from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, 2011 and 2017). Both theoretical and empirical findings converge, indicating that experiencing a health accident such as a stroke or heart attack leads to a decrease in safe savings. Consequently, investing in annuities becomes crucial in enabling individuals to mitigate the consequences of poor health in aging economies