Portail HAL Paris School of Economics (PSE)
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Does Identity Affect Labor Supply?
No full textInternational audienceHow does identity influence economic behavior in the labor market? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on job-specific labor supply. In a field experiment, laborers choose whether to take up various job offers, which differ in associations with specific castes. Workers are less willing to accept offers that are linked to castes other than their own, especially when those castes rank lower in the social hierarchy. Workers forgo large payments to avoid job offers that conflict with their caste identity, even when these decisions are made in private
Time-Use and Subjective Well-Being: Is Diversity Really the Spice of Life?
No full textInternational audienceUsing the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that they experience greater well-being when their time schedule contains many different activities rather than is concentrated on a very small number. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for goods consumption, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. With returns to specialization, people would then face a trade-off between efficiency and diversity in choosing how to allocate time. We examine these issues and investigate potential gender differences, considering both instantaneous feelings and life satisfaction
The Rigor Revolution: New Standards of Evidence for Impact Assessment of International Agricultural Research
No full textInternational audienceWe take stock of the major changes in methodology for studying the impacts of international agricultural research, focusing on the period 2006–2020. Impact assessment of agricultural research has a long and recognized tradition. Until the mid-2000s, such assessments were dominated by a model of demand for and supply of agricultural products in partial equilibrium. The basic ideas for this approach were sketched out by Griliches more than half a century ago. We describe the implications of heightened standards of evidence for good practice in three domains of research design: causal inference, valid measurement, and statistical representativeness. We document advances in each of these domains and review recent evidence that demonstrates the lessons that can be learned from adopting these practices, emphasizing the importance of evidence at-scale, the need to consider portfolios of innovations at a national level, and the challenges of accounting for innovations that are promoted as bundles
From Pink-Collar to Lab Coat. Cultural Persistence and Diffusion of Socialist Gender Norms
No full textThis paper documents the persistence and diffusion of Soviet gender-equal norms, exploiting the 1990’s mass migration from the Former Soviet Union to Israel as a natural experiment. We track educational achievement and choices of an entire cohort, comparing gender gaps among Native students versus immigrants from FSU and other countries. We find evidence of vertical and horizontal diffusion of Soviet norms with respect to tertiary study field choice, especially those directly related to labor market occupations. In both traditionally male-dominated STEM fields and traditionally female “pink collar” jobs, such as education and social work, gender gaps are smallest among FSU immigrants. We show that these specific preferences are not explained by comparative advantages, as measured by early achievement.Finally, we show that among Natives the gender gap in field choice narrows with the presence of FSU immigrants, reflecting a shift in choice patterns of native women shift towards STEM and away from Pink collar study fields
Money is Justice: Experimental Evidence on Non-meritocratic Redistributive Preferences in China
No full textThis paper explores the factors that influence redistributive preferences in the context of sustained economic expansion, focusing on luck and growth. Using an online survey experiment with a nationally representative sample from China, we find that priming getting rich by non-meritocratic means reduces redistributive support, specifically for policies that aim to take from the rich and the belief in the government’s duty to redistribute, indicating the presence of non-meritocratic fairness views in China. Heterogeneous treatment effects analysis reveals that such non-meritocratic fairness views are a general phenomenon and self-interest in the form of subjective economic pressure only seems to serve as a secondary concern.While people feel that the rich are more deserving and demand less redistribution after being primed with stories of getting rich by luck regardless of subjective economic pressure, only those under less economic pressure exhibit decreased support for policies that aim to help the poor. Priming China’s growth story does not result in statistically significant changes in redistributive support. Additionally, we rule out the influence of three relevant confounders: low tax salience, preference falsification under authoritarianism, and misperceptions about relative income positions and intergenerational occupational mobility. We argue that non-meritocratic fairness views are rooted in a high-growth economic environment, where economic fortunes are abundant and random
Experiential values are underweighted in decisions involving symbolic options
No full textInternational audienceStandard models of decision-making assume each option is associated with subjective value, regardless of whether this value is inferred from experience (experiential) or explicitly instructed probabilistic outcomes (symbolic). In this study, we present results that challenge the assumption of unified representation of experiential and symbolic value. Across nine experiments, we presented participants with hybrid decisions between experiential and symbolic options. Participants’ choices exhibited a pattern consistent with a systematic neglect of the experiential values. This normatively irrational decision strategy held after accounting for alternative explanations, and persisted even when it bore an economic cost. Overall, our results demonstrate that experiential and symbolic values are not symmetrically considered in hybrid decisions, suggesting they recruit different representational systems that may be assigned different priority levels in the decision process. These findings challenge the dominant models commonly used in value-based decision-making research
Trading ambiguity: a tale of two heterogeneities
No full textInternational audienceWe consider nancial markets with heterogeneously ambiguous assets and heterogeneously ambiguity averse investors. Investors' preferences, a version of the smooth ambiguity model, are a parsimonious extension of the standard mean-variance framework. We consider, in a uni ed setting, portfolio choice, and trade upon arrival of public information, and show, in both cases, there are systematic departures from the predictions of standard theory. These departures are of signi cance as they occur in the direction of empirical regularities that belie the standard theory. In particular, our theory speaks to several puzzling phenomena in a uni ed fashion: the asset allocation puzzle, the observation that earnings announcements are often followed by signi cant trading volume with small price change, and that increases in uncertainty are positively associated with increased trading activity and portfolio rebalancing toward safer assets by individual (retail) investor
Income inequality in Africa, 1990–2019: Measurement, patterns, determinants
No full textInternational audienceThis article estimates the evolution of income inequality in Africa from 1990 to 2019 by combining surveys, tax data, and national accounts. Inequality in Africa is very high: the regional top 10% income share nears 55%, on par with regions characterized by extreme inequality, such as Latin America and India. Most of continent-wide income inequality comes from the within-country component rather than from average income differences between countries. Inequality is highest in Southern Africa and lowest in Northern and Western Africa. It remained fairly stable from 1990 to 2019, with the exception of Southern Africa, where it increased significantly. Among historical determinants, this geographical pattern seems to reveal the long shadow of settler colonialism, at least in Sub-Saharan Africa; the spread of Islam stands out as another robust correlate. The poor quality of the raw data calls for great caution, in particular when analyzing country-level dynamics
Measuring well-being and lives worth living
No full textInternational audienceWe study the measurement of well-being when individuals have heterogeneous preferences, including dierent conceptions of a life worth living. When individuals dier in the conception of a life worth living, the equivalent income can regard an individual whose life is not worth living as being better o than an individual whose life is worth living. In order to avoid this paradoxical result, we reexamine the ethical foundations of well-being measures in such a way as to take into account heterogeneity in the conception of a life worth living. We derive, from simple axioms, an alternative measure of well-being, which is an equivalent income net of the income threshold making lifetime neutral. That new well-being index always ranks an individual whose life is not worth living as worse-o than an individual with a life worth living