Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques

International audience

International audience

The Oxford Handbook of Regulation provides a clear and authoritative discussion of the major trends and issues in regulation over the last thirty years, together with an outline of prospective developments. Regulation is often thought of as an activity that restricts behaviour and prevents the occurrence of certain undesirable activities, but the influence of regulation can also be enabling or facilitative, as in the circumstances when a market could potentially be chaotic if uncontrolled. Each article offers a broad overview of key current issues and provides an analysis of different perspectives on those issues. Experiences in different jurisdictions and insights from various disciplines are drawn upon, and particular attention is paid to the challenges that are encountered when specific approaches are applied in practice. The articles illustrate distinctive arguments relating to the central issues.

Using 50,000 tests published in the AER, JPE, and QJE, we identify a residual in the distribution of tests that cannot be explained solely by journals favoring rejection of the null hypothesis. We observe a two-humped camel shape with missing p-values between 0.25 and 0.10 that can be retrieved just after the 0.05 threshold and represent 10–20 percent of marginally rejected tests. Our interpretation is that researchers inflate the value of just-rejected tests by choosing “significant” specifications. We propose a method to measure this residual and describe how it varies by article and author characteristics. (JEL A11, C13)

We document a negative correlation, at business cycle frequencies, between the net job creation rate of large employers and the level of aggregate unemployment that is much stronger than for small employers. The differential growth rate of employment between initially large and small employers has an unconditional correlation of —0.5 with the unemployment rate, and varies by about 5 percent over the business cycle. We exploit several datasets from the United States, Denmark, and France, both repeated cross sections and job flows with employer longitudinal information, spanning the last four decades and several business cycles. We discuss implications for theories of factor demand. (JEL D22, E23, E32, J23, L25)

To what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early colonial investments had large and persistent effects on current outcomes. The nature of investments also matters. Current educational outcomes have been more specifically determined by colonial investments in education rather than health and infrastructures, and vice versa. I show that a major channel for this historical dependency is a strong persistence of investments; regions that got more at the early colonial times continued to get more. (JEL H41, H54, N37, N47, 016)

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, started in the late 1990s in Latin America, have become the antipoverty program of choice in many developing countries in the region and beyond. This paper reviews the literature on their long-term impacts on human capital and related outcomes observed after children have reached a later stage of their life cycle, focusing on two life-cycle transitions. The first includes children exposed to CCTs in utero or during early childhood who have reached school ages. The second includes children exposed to CCTs during school ages who have reached young adulthood. Most studies find positive long-term effects on schooling, but fewer find positive impacts on cognitive skills, learning, or socio-emotional skills. Impacts on employment and earnings are mixed, possibly because former beneficiaries were often still too young. A number of studies find estimates that are not statistically different from zero, but for which it is often not possible to be confident that this is due to an actual lack of impact rather than to the methodological challenges facing all long-term evaluations. Developing further opportunities for analyses with rigorous identification strategies for the measurement of long-term impacts should be high on the research agenda. As original beneficiaries age, this should also be increasingly possible, and indeed important before concluding whether or not CCTs lead to sustainable poverty reduction.

International audience

We review evidence regarding the size and evolution of the "land rush" in the wake of the 2007–8 boom in agricultural commodity prices, and we study the determinants of foreign land acquisition for large-scale agricultural investment. The use of data on bilateral investment relationships to estimate gravity models of transnational land-intensive investments confirms the central role of agro-ecological potential as a pull factor. However, this finding contrasts the standard literature insofar as the quality of the destination country's business climate is insignificant, and weak tenure security is associated with increased interest for investors to acquire land in the country. Policy implications are discussed.

We present a model of technologically interconnected countries that benefit and potentially contribute to advances in the world technology frontier. Greater inequality between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs increases entrepreneurial effort and a country’s contribution to that frontier. Under plausible assumptions, the world equilibrium is asymmetric, involving different economic institutions and technology levels for different countries. Some countries become technology leaders and opt for a type of “cutthroat” capitalism with greater inequality and innovations, while others free ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more “cuddly” form of capitalism with greater social insurance for entrepreneurs.

Since Oct 31, 2017, a front-of-pack labelling system named Nutri-Score (a synthetic information system based on colours and letters from green/A to red/E), allowing consumers to see and compare at a glance the nutritional value of pre-packaged foods is being implemented, on a voluntary basis, in France.1 Although some experts warned that the Nutri-Score might constitute an obstacle to EU trade,2 the measure appeared justified on public health grounds. The adoption of the Nutri-Score label was made after a lengthy 4 year process, during which intense lobbying by agro-industry opposed scientific evidence.

In the COVID-19 pandemic many countries required COVID certificates, proving vaccination, recovery, or a recent negative test, to access public and private venues. We estimate their effect on vaccine uptake for France, Germany, and Italy using counterfactuals constructed via innovation diffusion theory. The announcement of COVID certificates during summer 2021 were associated - although causality cannot be directly inferred - with increased vaccine uptake in France of 13.0 (95% CI 9.7-14.9) percentage points (p.p.) of the total population until the end of the year, in Germany 6.2 (2.6-6.9) p.p., and in Italy 9.7 (5.4-12.3) p.p. Based on these estimates, an additional 3979 (3453-4298) deaths in France, 1133 (-312-1358) in Germany, and 1331 (502-1794) in Italy were averted; and gross domestic product (GDP) losses of €6.0 (5.9-6.1) billion in France, €1.4 (1.3-1.5) billion in Germany, and €2.1 (2.0-2.2) billion in Italy were prevented. Notably, in France, the application of COVID certificates averted high intensive care unit occupancy levels where prior lockdowns were instated.

International audience

This paper proposes an axiomatic foundation for new measures of polarization that can be applied to ordinal distributions such as self-assessed health (SAH) data. This is an improvement over the existing measures of polarization that can be used only for cardinal variables. The new measures of polarization avoid one difficulty that the related measures for evaluating health inequalities face. Indeed, inequality measures are mean based, and since only cardinal variables have a mean, SAH has to be cardinalized to compute a mean, which can then be used to calculate an inequality measure. In contrast, the new polarization measures are median based and hence do not require to impose cardinal scaling on the categories. After deriving the properties of these new polarization measures, we provide an empirical illustration using data from the British Household Panel Survey that demonstrates that SAH polarization is also a relevant question on empirical grounds, and that the polarization measures are adequate to evaluate polarization phenomena whereas inequality measures are not adequate in these cases.

This paper investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities and employment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECD countries. For countries close to the technological frontier, education and rigidities are significantly related to TFP growth. The contribution of the interaction between product market regulation and labour market rigidity seems particularly substantial.

International audience

Consider an investor who fears ruin when facing investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing he can purchase information about the state of nature as an information structure. Given his prior, information structure α investment dominates information structure β if, whenever he is willing to buy β at some price, he is also willing to buy α at that price. We show that this informativeness ordering is complete and is represented by the decrease in entropy of his beliefs, regardless of his preferences, initial wealth, or investment problem. We also show that no prior-independent informativeness ordering based on similar premises exists. (JEL D14, D81, D83, G11)

We use harmonized survey data from the Luxembourg Income Study to assess the redistributive impact of taxes and transfers across 22 OECD countries over the 1999–2016 period. After imputing missing tax data (employer social‐security contributions), we measure the reduction in income inequality from four key levers of tax and transfer systems: the average tax rate, tax progressivity, the average transfer rate, and transfer targeting. Our methodological improvements produce the following results. First, tax redistribution dominates transfer redistribution (excluding pensions) in most countries. Second, targeting explains very little of the cross‐country variation in inequality reduction. In contrast, both tax progressivity and the average tax rate have large impacts on redistribution. Last, there seem to be political tradeoffs: high average tax rates are not found together with highly progressive tax systems.

This article asks when communication with certifiable information leads to complete information revelation. We consider Bayesian games augmented by a pre-play communication phase in which announcements are made publicly. We first characterize the augmented games in which there exists a fully revealing sequential equilibrium with extremal beliefs (i.e., any deviation is attributed to a single type of the deviator). Next, we define a class of games for which existence of a fully revealing equilibrium is equivalent to a richness property of the evidence structure. This characterization enables us to provide different sets of sufficient conditions for full information disclosure that encompass and extend all known results in the literature, and are easily applicable. We use these conditions to obtain new insights in games with strategic complementarities, voting with deliberation, and persuasion games with multidimensional types.

One of the reasons for setting up an unemployment insurance scheme is to allow job losers to smooth consumption. We test for the impact of unemployment benefits on changes in household food expenditure of individuals who have recently experienced a job loss. We also study the relationship between unemployment benefits and the financial wealth of the unemployed. From our empirical analysis we conclude that, for households without financial wealth at the time of job loss, unemployment benefits help to smooth food consumption. For households running debt before job loss, there is evidence that lower replacement rates lead to a postponement of debt repayment.