1,720,984 research outputs found
Rivoluzionario o riformista? Victor Schoelcher e l'abolizione della schiavitù
No full textThe article concerns the life and work of Victor Schoelcher (1804-1893), architect of the abolition of slavery in the French Antilles (1848), beginning with his Alsatian origins which sharpened his sensitivity to the often dramatic problems of ethnically mixed territories, and going on to analyze both the «cult of Schoelcher», liberator and revolutionary, and the radicai accusations of his being no more than a moderate reformer and an instrument of assimilation. His fight against slavery - in the context of the European abolitionary movement at large - is examined from his initial concept of graduai abolition to his later championing of immediate abolition, in contrast to the precisely opposite development of another prominent abolitionist, Cyrille Bis-sette. The article concentrates on such basic aspects of the Antillean reality as the frequent conflict between blacks and mulattos, and the difference in attitude between the receptiveness of the plantation owners and the strong opposition of «small-time» whites fearful of black competition. Finally, the article describes Schoelchers last years -his opposition to the coup detatofDecember 21, 1851, his exile in London, and his engagement in many progressive struggles for, among other causes, women's rights, social assistance, and the abolition of usury and of the death penalty. It concludes by pointing out that though «Schoelcherism» was on the wane until briefly revived at the time ofMitterand, it nevertheless remained very much alive in the Antilles
Indeterminacy and multiple steady states with sector-specific externalities
No full textThis paper studies a two-sector model with aggregate and sector-specific external effects in production and inelastic labor supply. We first characterize the existence, uniqueness and multiplicity of the steady states as well as their welfare properties. We particularly focus on the CES production functions and show that the steady state is generically either unique or there are exactly two. A simple geometrical methodology enables us to characterize the local dynamics of the steady state. We show that in order to get indeterminacy, the presence of both aggregate and sector-specific external effects is needed, along with low capital–labor elasticities of substitution and high, but bounded from above, elasticities in intertemporal consumption. We perform a sensitivity analysis and show that indeterminacy emerges for parameter values in line with those used in calibrations of standard RBC models, that is for unitary elasticities of input substitution and of intertemporal substitution in consumption
Frontiers Openness and the Optimal Migration Duration
No full textDocument de Travail DELTA, Paris 2001-12
Plausibility of Indeterminacy and Complex Dynamics
No full textWe study a pure exchange economy with infinite-lived agents, in which a share of consumption purchases must be paid cash. The economy may exhibit multiple equilibria, no matter what the fundamental specification, the only requirement being a share of consumption to be paid cash sufficiently low. Complex dynamics, such as chaos and cycles of eny periodicity, can emerge under gross substitutability, a condition usually known for eliminating such phenomena
voting on mass immigration restriction
No full textWe study how immigration policies are determined under voting in a two-country model where immigration redistributes income from wages to capital. Migration decisions are endogenous, there exist border enforcement costs and preference for home-country consumption. We model the migration policy as a pure entry rationing rather than a necessarily porous screening system. Unlike the existing results of polarization, our findings show that preferences over frontier closure are distributed on a continuum, going from total closure to total openness. Thus, the Condorcet winning immigration policy may well be an interior solution. Our results fit the real-life observation that both perfect closure and perfect openness are rare events. We also study the case of a referendum over two alternative policies and show that its outcome depends upon the location of the median voter with respect to the individual indifferent between the two alternatives
Animal spirits in cash-in-advance economies
No full textThe possibility of indeterminacy and sunspot fluctuations in dynamic rational expectations models has been often questioned on empirical grounds, for such models are widely believed to rely on implausibly high degrees of increasing returns to scale and/or other controversial calibrations of economic fundamentals. In this paper, we study the occurrence of such phenomena in a standard (one-sector) optimal growth model with endogenous labor supply and a partial cash-in-ad vanee constraint on consumption purchases. We show that, under standard preferences and constant returns to scale in production, indeterminacy typically prevails for an arbitrarily small amplitude of the liquidity constraint. We also analyze the cyclical properties of the model submitted to technological and beliefs disturbances and observe that it performs as well as comparable indeterminate models in the literature
Competitive equilibrium cycles with endogenous labor
No full textIn this paper, we study a two-sector optimal growth model with elastic labor supply. We show that the modified golden rule is saddle-point stable when the investment good is capital intensive. To characterize stability with a capital intensive consumption good, we focus on either additively separable or homothetic preferences. In the first specification, we show that optimal oscillations require the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption to be high enough while the elasticity of labor needs to be low enough. At the same time, we prove that with a linear utility in leisure the modified golden rule is always saddle-point stable. In the second specification for preferences, we show that the local dynamic properties of the optimal path depend instead on the shares of consumption and leisure into total utility. We prove that endogenous fluctuations are even more likely with homothetic preferences
Sunspot Fluctuations in Two-sector Economies with Heterogeneous Agents
No full textHeterogeneous agents, Borrowing constraint, Two-sector model, Indeterminacy, C61, E32, E41,
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