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Econometrics & Microeconomic Applications

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• Thursday 23 June 2016 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Insan TUNALI (Koç University)
  Rescaled Additively Non-Ignorable (RAN) Model of Generalized Attrition (with Emre EKINCI and Berk YAVUZOGLU)

  Abstract

  We augment the Additively Non-ignorable (AN) model of Hirano et. al. (2001) so that it is suitable for data collection efforts that have a short panel component. Our modification yields a convenient semi-parametric bias correction framework for handling selective non-response that can emerge when multiple visits to the same unit are planned. In such surveys, selective non-response can be due to attrition, when initial response followed by nonresponse (the commonly studied case), as well as a phenomenon we term reverse attrition, when initial nonresponse is followed by response. Accounting for reverse attrition creates an additional identification problem, which we circumvent by rescaling. We apply our methodology to data from the Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) in Turkey, which shares a key design feature (namely a rotating sample frame) of popular surveys such as the Current Population Survey and the European Union Labor Force Survey. The correction amounts to adjusting the observed joint distribution over the state space (non-participant, employed, unemployed in our example) using reflation factors expressed as parametric functions of the states occupied in the initial and subsequent rounds. For any given parameterization, our method produces a unique set of corrected joint probabilites that are consistent with unbiased marginal distributions (in our case published cross-section statistics). The linear additive version has a closed form solution, a feature which renders our method attractive. Our empirical results show that selective attrition/reverse attrition in HLFS is a statistically and substantially important concern.

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• Thursday 14 April 2016 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Lorenzo CAPPELLARI (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)
  “Family, Community and Long-Term Earnings Inequality” (with Paul Bingley and Konstantinos Tatsiramos)

  Abstract

  Correlations between the earnings of siblings reflect shared family and community background, but evidence is mixed on the relative magnitudes of these influences. Using administrative data on the Danish population we link brothers, schoolmates and teenage neighbors and estimate a model of multiple group earnings dynamics to measure jointly the relative importance of family, neighborhoods and schools for long-term earnings. We find that: (1) family is by far the most relevant factor; (2) the influence of neighborhoods and schools falls rapidly, becoming insignificant by age 30; and (3) community effects are persistent and upward biased by a factor of five if family effects are ignored.

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• Thursday 24 March 2016 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Rafael LALIVE (University of Lausanne)
  Treatment Versus Regime Effects of Carrots and Sticks (with Patrick ARNI and Gerard VAN DEN BERG)

  Abstract

  Public Employment Service (PES) agencies and caseworkers (CW) often have substantial leeway in the design and implementation of active labor market policies (ALMP) for the unemployed, resulting in variation of usage. This paper presents a novel framework in which this variation is used for the joint assessment of different ways in which ALMP effects can operate. We examine an additional layer of impacts - beyond the treatment effects on the treated job seekers - called regime effects, which potentially affect all job seekers and which are defined by the extent to which programs are intended to be used in a market. We propose a novel method to jointly estimate regime effects for two types of programs, supportive (carrots) and restrictive (sticks) programs. We apply this to contrast regime and treatment effects on unemployment durations, employment, and post-unemployment earnings using register data that contain PES and case-worker identifiers for about 130,000 job seekers. The results show that “carrots” and “sticks” treatments prolong unemployment, but carrots increase earnings whereas sticks decrease them. We find regime effects of a similar order of magnitude. Higher intended usage of carrots and sticks reduces unemployment durations, but carrots raise earnings whereas sticks decrease them. We also find interaction effects between carrots and sticks policies. Regime effects are economically substantial. Our comprehensive cost-benefits analyses show that modest increases in the intended usage of carrots and sticks reduce the total cost of an unemployed individual by up to 10%.

• Thursday 18 February 2016 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Jo VAN BIESEBROECK (KU Leuven)
  Productivity, exporting, and financial constraints of Chinese SMEs

  Abstract

  While many studies explain the correlation between firm-level productivity and export status entirely by better firms self-selecting into exporting, a few studies find evidence of reverse causation. Especially in developing or transition economies, exporters seem to improve performance after they start selling internationally. We provide evidence that the realization of scale economies is one possible explanation for such a learning-by-exporting effect. Exporting enables small firms to expand output and exploit all scale economies that the production technology allows. With access to finance problems and weak contract enforcement at home, domestic expansion of SMEs is constrained by the necessity of awarding trade credit to new clients. We show that small firms with a lot of outstanding trade credit expand sales the most following export market entry. This is especially true if they operate in industries with higher scale economies or if they are located in provinces with weaker institutions. The same type of firms also enjoy the largest productivity gains immediately following export market entry.

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• Thursday 21 January 2016 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Erwin OOGHE (KU Leuven)
  Wage policies, employment, and redistributive efficiency

  Abstract

  I analyze whether wage policies - like minimum wages and wage subsidies - can add value to an optimal non-linear earnings tax scheme in a perfectly competitive labour market. Jobs in the labour market differ along two margins: intensity (labour effort) and duration (labour hours). Three key results follow. First, even though minimum wages destroy low performance jobs, they increase employment if the minimum wage is binding, but not too high. Second, minimum wages - and wage and labour controls more generally - can enhance redistributive efficiency. The underlying mechanism is their potential to deter mimicking and thus to relax the self-selection constraints in the optimal income tax problem. Third, wage and labour controls become superfluous if a wage-contingent earnings tax scheme - a tax scheme that depends non-linearly on earnings and wages - can be optimally set. Instead, wage and labour subsidies can be optimal in a wage-contingent tax scheme.

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• Thursday 17 December 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Jackline WAHBA (University of Southampton)
  International Migration: Driver of political and social change? (with Michel Tuccio and Bachir Hamdouch)

  Abstract

  This paper focuses on the impact of international migration on the transfer of political and social norms. Exploiting recent and unique data on Morocco, it explores whether households with return and current migrants bear different political preferences and behaviours than non-migrant families. Once controlling for the double selection into emigration and return migration, findings suggest that having a returnee in the household increases the demand for political and social change, driven by returnees mostly from Western European countries, who have been exposed to more democratic norms at destination. However, we find a negative impact of having a current migrant on the willingness to change of the left-behind household, driven by migrants to non-West countries, where the quality of political and social institutions are lower. Finally, our findings suggest that migration not only affect political attitudes but also actual behaviour: regions with higher returnee shares have had greater participation rates in the 2011 political elections.

• Thursday 8 October 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Sangeeta PRATAP (Hunter College & Graduate Center - CUNY)
  An Estimated Structural Model of Entrepreneurial Behavior (with John Baily Jones)

  Abstract

  Using a rich panel dataset of New York dairy farms, we provide detailed new evidence on entrepreneurial behavior. We estimate a dynamic structural model of farms facing uninsured risks, borrowing limits and liquidation costs. The model also allows for occupational choice, renegotiation and retirement. We estimate the model via simulated minimum distance, matching both production and financial data. The model fits the data well in the aggregate and in the cross section. Policy experiments indicate that financial factors play an important role. Farms with high productivity appear to be more constrained than those whose productivity is low. Collateral constraints and short-term liquidity restrictions inhibit the accumulation of capital and assets. Debt renegotiation allows productive farms to continue operations despite temporary setbacks. Large non-pecuniary benefits to farming have significant effects on farm behavior.

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• Thursday 18 June 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Govert BIJWAARD (Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute)
  Intelligence and the Mortality Difference by Education: Selection or mediation? (with Andrew JONES)

  Abstract

  Large differences in mortality rates across those with different levels of education are a well-established fact. This association between mortality and education may partly be explained by confounding factors, including intelligence. Intelligence may also be affected by education so that it becomes a mediating factor in the causal chain. In this paper we estimate the impact of education on mortality using inverse probability weighted (IPW) estimator, using either intelligence as an selection variable or as a mediating variable. We develop an IPW estimator to analyse the mediating effect in the context of survival models. Our estimates are based on administrative data, on men born in 1944-1947 who were examined for military service in the Netherlands between 1961-1965, linked to national death records. For these men we distinguish four education levels and we make pairwise comparisons. From the empirical analyses we conclude that the mortality differences observed by education are only attributable to education effects for high educated individuals. For low educated individuals the observed mortality gain is mainly attributable to differences in intelligence.

• Thursday 21 May 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Henry FARBER (Princeton University)
  Why You Can’t Find a Taxi in the Rain and Other Labor Supply Lessons from Cab Drivers

  Abstract

  I replicate and extend the seminal work of Camerer, et al (QJE 1997), who find that the wage elasticity of daily hours of work for New York City (NYC) taxi drivers is negative and conclude that their labor supply behavior is consistent with reference dependence. In contrast, my analysis of the complete record of all trips taken in NYC taxi cabs from 2009-2013 shows that drivers tend to respond positively to unanticipated as well as anticipated increases in earnings opportunities. Additionally, using a discrete choice stopping model, the probability of a shift ending is strongly positively related to hours worked but at best weakly related to income earned. I find substantial heterogeneity across drivers in their elasticities, but the estimated elasticities are generally positive and rarely substantially negative. I find that new drivers with smaller elasticities are more likely to exit the industry while drivers who remain learn quickly to be better optimizers (have positive labor supply elasticities that grow with experience). These results are consistent with the neoclassical optimizing model of labor supply and suggest that consideration of gain-loss utility and income reference dependence is not an important factor in the daily labor supply decisions of taxi drivers.

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• Thursday 16 April 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Nicole GUERTZGEN (ZEW)
  Changing Fortunes during Economic Transition - Low-wage persistence before and after German Unification

  Abstract

  This paper studies whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy offers fundamentally new perspectives for those who, in economic terms, were relatively deprived under the old regime. Previous empirical research on this question has been limited by the availability of suitable representative longitudinal micro-data that track individuals’ labour market careers across different political and economic regimes. Our study seeks to fill this research gap by looking at the transition of Eastern Germany following German Unification. Using a unique large-scale German administrative data set, we measure individuals’ relative economic position by exploiting information on whether individuals were in the bottom of the pre-unification wage distribution. We then address the question of how workers’ low or high-wage status determines their wage and labour market status within and across different regimes. We first demonstrate that unobserved factors are the main drivers of low-wage persistence and are regime-dependent. We further document strong evidence of a dynamic selection process into low-wage employment after Unification. Consistent with a weak connection between individuals’ true productivity and their pre-unification low-wage status, the extent of across regime state dependence is found to be small in magnitude and appears to vanish over time. For males, the small extent of across regime dependence is found to be most pronounced among the medium and high-skilled, suggesting the depreciation of general human capital as a potential explanation.

• Thursday 19 March 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Yves ZENOU (Stockholm University)
  Network Structure and Education Outcomes: Evidence from a field experiment in Bangladesh (with Youjin HAHN, Asadul ISLAM and Eleonora PATACCHINI)

  Abstract

  We study the causal impact of network centrality on educational outcomes using field experiments in primary schools in Bangladesh. After obtaining information on friendship networks, we randomly allocate students into groups and give them individual and group assignments. We find that groups that perform best are those whose members have high Katz-Bonacich and key-player centralities. Leaders are mostly responsible for this effect, while bad apples have little influence. Own Katz-Bonacich centrality is associated with better individual performance only if it is above the average centrality of the group. Further experiments reveal that leadership, as measured by network centrality, mainly captures non-cognitive skills, especially patience and competitiveness.

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• Thursday 12 February 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Dorothea KÜBLER (WZB)
  College Admissions with Entrance Exams : Centralized versus Decentralized (with Isa E. Hafalir, Rustamdjan Hakimov and Morimitsu Kurino)

  Abstract

  We theoretically and experimentally study a college admissions problem in which colleges accept students by ranking students’ efforts in entrance exams. Students hold private information regarding their ability level that affects the cost of their efforts. We assume that student preferences are homogeneous over colleges. By modeling college admissions as contests, we solve and compare the equilibria of “centralized college admissions” (CCA) in which students apply to all colleges, and “decentralized college admissions” (DCA) in which students can only apply to one college. We show that lower ability students prefer DCA whereas higher ability students prefer CCA. The main qualitative predictions of the theory are supported by the experimental data, yet we find a number of behavioral differences between the mechanisms that render DCA less attractive than CCA compared to the equilibrium benchmark.

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• Thursday 22 January 2015 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Pieter GAUTIER (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
  The performance of school assignment mechanisms in practice (with Monique de Haan, Hessel Oosterbeek and Bas van der Klaauw)

  Abstract

  Theory predicts that different school assignment mechanisms result in different behavior and different allocations. Although the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism is strategy-proof and stable and the Boston mechanism is not, the Boston mechanism may generate higher welfare than the DA mechanism because it allows students to express the intensity of their preferences. This paper assesses the differences between these mechanisms in practice. We complemented the existing application procedure of students choosing a secondary school in Amsterdam with a questionnaire. The existing procedure gives information about behavior and assignment under the Boston mechanism. The questionnaire aims to elicit students’ true cardinal preferences, which we use to simulate assignments under truth-telling mechanisms. We have five main results: i) around 6% of the students disguise their true preferences under the Boston mechanism; ii) truth-telling is more likely among students with a strong preference for their most preferred school; iii) in spite of this, average welfare is higher under the DA mechanism than under the Boston mechanism; iv) allocations resulting from the Boston mechanism are dominated by allocations resulting from single tie-breaking DA; v) single tie-breaking DA and Boston get more students in their most preferred school than multiple tie-breaking DA, but fewer in one of their two (or more) most preferred schools.

• Thursday 18 December 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Robert POLLAK (Washington University in St. Louis)
  Cohabitation and the Uneven Retreat from Marriage in the U.S., 1950-2010 (with Shelley LUNDBERG)

  Abstract

  Since 1950 the sources of the gains from marriage have changed radically. As the educational attainment of women overtook and surpassed that of men and the ratio of men’s to women’s wage rates fell, traditional patterns of gender specialization in work weakened. The primary source of the gains to marriage shifted from the production of household services and commodities to investment in children. For some, these changes meant that marriage was no longer worth the costs of limited independence and potential mismatch.
  Cohabitation became an acceptable living arrangement for all groups, but cohabitation serves different functions among different groups. The poor and less educated are much more likely to rear children in cohabitating relationships. The college educated typically cohabit before marriage, but they marry before conceiving children and their marriages are relatively stable.
  We argue that different patterns of childrearing are the key to understanding class differences in marriage and parenthood, not an unintended by-product of it. Marriage is the commitment mechanism that supports high levels of investment in children and is hence more valuable for parents adopting a high-investment strategy for their children.

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• Thursday 20 November 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Xavier D’HAULTFOEUILLE (CREST)
  Extremal Quantile Regressions for Selection Models and the Black-White Wage Gap (with Arnaud MAUREL and Yichong ZHANG)

  Abstract

  We consider the estimation of a semiparametric location-scale model subject to endogenous selection, in the absence of an instrument or a large support regressor. Identification relies on the independence between the covariates and selection, for arbitrarily large values of the outcome. In this context, we propose a simple estimator, which combines extremal quantile regressions with minimum distance. We establish the asymptotic normality of this estimator by extending previous results on extremal quantile regressions to allow for selection. Finally, we apply our method to estimate the black-white wage gap among males from the NLSY79 and NLSY97. We find that premarket factors such as AFQT and family background characteristics play a key role in explaining the level and evolution of the black-white wage gap.

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• Thursday 16 October 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Matthew GENTRY (LSE)
  Simultaneous First-Price Auctions with Preferences over Combinations (with Tatiana KOMAROVA and Pasquale SCHIRALDI)

  Abstract

  Motivated by the empirical prevalence of simultaneous bidding across a wide range of auction markets, we develop and estimate a structural model of strategic interaction in simultaneous first-price auctions when objects are heterogeneous and bidders have preferences over combinations. We begin by proposing a general theoretical model of bidding in simultaneous first price auctions, exploring properties of best responses and existence of equilibrium within this environment. We then specialize this model to an empirical framework in which bidders have stochastic private valuations for each object and stable incremental preferences over combinations; this immediately reduces to the standard separable model when incremental preferences over combinations are zero. We establish nonparametric identification of the resulting model under standard exclusion restrictions, thereby providing a basis for both testing on and estimation of preferences over combinations. We then apply our model to data on Michigan Department of Transportation highway procurement auctions, with structural estimates suggesting that winning multiple projects substantially increases bidder costs.

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• Thursday 22 May 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Daniel HAMERMESH (University of Texas at Austin and Royal Holloway, University of London)
  Does Labor Legislation Benefit Workers? Well-Being after an Hours Reduction (with Daiji Kawaguchi and Jungmin Lee)

  Abstract

  Are workers in modern economies working “too hard” – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime penalty that had become effective with fewer weekly hours per worker. Using repeated cross sections we show that life satisfaction in both countries may have increased relatively among those workers most likely to have been affected by the legislation. The same finding is produced using Korean longitudinal data. In a household model estimated over the Korean cross-section data we find some weak evidence that a reduction in the husband’s work hours increased his wife’s well-being. Overall these results are consistent with the claim that legislated reductions in work hours can increase workers’ happiness.

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• Thursday 10 April 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Antonio CABRALES (University College London)
  What you know can’t hurt you (for long): A field experiment on relative feedback performance (with Ghazala Azmat, Manuel Bagues, and Nagore Iriberri)

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• Thursday 20 March 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Chiara CRISCUOLO (OECD)
  Randomly in, Randomly out: unemployment effects of an unforeseen change in policy

  Abstract

  Regional disparities are a main concern in many countries. Governments often use place based economic development programs to reduce such regional inequalities. The effectiveness of these policies is hard to assess, because of the challenging causal identification of their impact. Besides, most of the growing evidence focuses of the impact of becoming/being eligible for support. Estimates of the outlasting effects of the policy after the support has been withdrawn are rare. The paper contributes to the literature by building a simple search and matching model of unemployment with capital and investment subsidies, developing an identification strategy based on an accidental to estimate whether regional support is effective beyond the actual eligibility period. In line with the predictions of the model, the estimates suggest that place based policies are effective in reducing unemployment and that this positive impact declines once the policy is withdrawn.

• Thursday 13 February 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Michèle BELOT (University of Edinburg)
  Changing Dietary Choices: A Field Experiment in Primary Schools (with Jonathan James and Patrick Nolen)

  Abstract

  We conduct a field experiment in 31 primary schools in England to test whether temporary incentives are effective in increasing children’s choice and consumption of fruit and vegetables. The intervention consists of rewarding children with stickers and little gifts for a period of four weeks for choosing a portion of fruit or vegetables at lunch. We compare the effects of two incentive schemes (piece rate and competition) on choice and consumption over the course of the intervention. We also examine the effect of the interventions immediately after the incentives are removed and six months later to see if the temporary incentives had any lasting effect on dietary choices. We find that the two interventions, in general, had positive effects on choice and consumption and that the competition works better overall. However, we find that the treatment effects vary dramatically by age, gender and socio-economic background. We find little evidence of sustained long term effects, except for children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds.

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• Thursday 23 January 2014 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Lorenz GOETTE (University of Lausanne)
  Call of duty: The impact of reminders on pro-social motivations

  Abstract

  Important sectors of the economy depend on individuals’ prosocial motivations, such as volunteering, donating money to charitable causes, engaging in civic life, or donating blood. These activities have positive externalities for society, and thus there is a policy interest in understanding and furthering them. Yet, little is known about prosocial preferences in the field, and how they react to incentives or other policy interventions. Furthermore, lab experiments document strong heterogeneity across individuals. This presents a major empirical challenge in testing different model in the field. In this study, we examine how reminders to donate blood affect the donors’ motivation. We present evidence from a three-year randomized controlled trial with more than 40,000 blood donors from 2010 to 2013. The panel structure allows us to assess the immediate effect of the reminders on donor motivation, but also on how phone reminders affect subsequent motivation. We allow for heterogeneity by estimating a finite mixture model.
  Our results show that all donors are more likely to donate blood if they are reminded by phone of the upcoming blood drive: while the baseline donation rate is 30 percent in the control group, this can be increased by 7 percentage points with a phone reminder. However, there is strong heterogeneity in the long-run impact on the donors’ motivation: 25 percent of the donors have a very high baseline motivation, and phone reminders cause a permanent decrease of 2.3 percentage points in baseline motivation to all future invitations to donate blood. For this group, phone reminders are an ineffective tool, because they undermine the intrinsic motivation of these highly motivated donors and reduce overall contributions in the long-run. For 75 percent of the blood donors, with a much lower baseline motivation, phone reminders have a positive medium-run effect: baseline motivation is higher roughly 2.5 percentage points higher at the next invitation to donate blood. Thus for this group, there exists a “double dividend” in reminding them.
  Our study shows that important heterogeneity exists in field applications of prosocial motivations and that large gains can be achieved by taking them into account before applying policy interventions. We outline a simple procedure that allows a simple separation with little computational effort.

• Thursday 19 December 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Tatiana MELGUIZO (University of Southern California)
  Using a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of placement decisions in developmental math in Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) (with H. Bos and G. Prather)

  Abstract

  This study evaluates the effectiveness of math placement policies for entering community college students on these students’ academic success in math. We estimate the impact of placement decisions by using a discrete-time survival model within a regression discontinuity framework. The primary conclusion that emerges is that initial placement in a lower-level course increases the time until a student at the margin completes the higher-level course they were not assigned to by about a year on average but in most cases, after this time period, the penalty was small and not statistically significant. We found minor differences in terms of degree applicable and degree transferable credit accumulation between students placed initially in the lower-level course.

• Thursday 21 November 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Emmanuel FLACHAIRE (Université d’Aix-Marseille)
  Reliable inference for inequality measures with heavy-tailed distribution (with J.-M. Dufour and L. Khalaf)

  Abstract

  Asymptotic and bootstrap tests based on inequality measures are known to perform poorly in finite sample when the underlying distribution is heavy-tailed. We propose Monte-Carlo permutation and bootstrap methods for the problem of testing the equality of inequality measures between two samples. Results cover the Generalized Entropy class which includes Theil’s index, the Atkinson class of indices and the Gini index. We analyze finite and large sample conditions for the validity of proposed methods. Simulation results show that size correct inference can be obtained with our proposed methods despite heavy tails if underlying distributions are not overly different. Substantial reduction in size distortions is achieved more generally.

• Thursday 17 October 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Alessandro BALESTRINO (Università di Pisa)
  A normative justification of compulsory education (with Lisa Grazzini and Annalisa Luporini)

  Abstract

  Using a household production model of educational choices, we characterise a free market situation in which some agents (“high-wagers”) educate their children full-time and spend a sizable amount of resources on them, while others (“low-wagers”) educate them only partially. The free-market equilibrium is ineffcient and iniquitous. Public policy is thus called for: however, redistributive taxation alone is counter-productive, as it forces some agents to move away from full-time education for their kids, and educational price subsidies are only moderately effective, since they only work on the intensive margin. It is instead socially optimal to introduce a compulsory education package, using a redistributive tax system to finance it. Redistributive taxation and compulsory education are therefore best seen as complementary policies.

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• Thursday 20 June 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Steffen ANDERSEN (Copenhagen Business School)
  Fire Sales and House Prices: Evidence from Estate Sales due to Sudden Death (with Kasper Meisner Nielsen)

  Abstract

  We exploit a natural experiment in Denmark to investigate when forced sales lead to fire sale discounts. Forced sales result from sudden deaths of house owners in an institutional environment in which beneficiaries are forced to settle the estate, and hence sell the house, within 12 months. We identify 6,329 forced sales by suddenly deceased house owners, and find that forced sales bring in lower prices than do comparable houses as the deadline winds down: We find no discounts for sales long before the deadline, and discounts of 12.5% for sales shortly before the deadline. Market conditions and the urgency of the sale also affect the average discount: Discounts are larger when house prices contract, in thin markets where demand is lower, and when the sale is more likely to be a fire sale because of financial constraints. Late fire sales are more likely when the house price is in the loss domain suggesting that disposition effects play a role in explaining discounts. We establish these results using (i) a hedonic pricing model, and (ii) the tax authorities’ yearly assessments of value as benchmark for realized prices. Overall, our results characterize market conditions under which forced sales lead to fire sale discounts.

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• Thursday 18 April 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Philip MERRIGAN (UQAM)
  The distributional impacts of a universal school reform on mathematical achievements: a natural experiment from Canada

  Abstract

  We investigate the impact of an ambitious provincial school reform in Canada on students’ mathematical achievements. It is the first paper to exploit a universal school reform of this magnitude to identify the causal effect of a widely supported teaching approach on students’ math scores. Our data set allows us to differentiate impacts according to the number of years of treatment and the timing of treatment. Using the changes-in-changes model, we find that the reform had negative effects on students’ scores at all points on the skills distribution and that the effects were larger the longer the exposure to the reform.

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• Thursday 28 March 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Thomas LEMIEUX (University of British Columbia)
  Performance Pay and the Covariance Structure of Earnings and Hours (with W. Bentley MacLeod and Daniel Parent)

  Abstract

  Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we study how the aucovariance structure of wages and earnings differs under different contractual arrangements. We divide jobs on the basis of whether they pay for performance, and whether they are covered by collective bargaining agreements. While cross-sectional wage inequality is larger in performance-pay than non-performance-pay jobs, precisely the opposite happens in the case of annual earnings. This suggests that hours of work respond more to demand shocks when wages are inflexible (in non-performance-pay jobs) than when they are flexible because of performance-pay schemes. This result only holds, however, for purely cross-sectional measures of inequality. Since the variation in hours is mostly transitory, from a long-run perspective inequality remains larger in performance-pay than non-performance-pay jobs.

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• Thursday 21 February 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S17

  Philippe FEVRIER (CREST)
  Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium with Unobserved Price Discrimination (with Xavier D’Haultfoeuille and Isis Durrmeyer)

  Abstract

  This paper deals with the estimation of structural models of demand and supply with incomplete information on prices. When the seller is able to price discriminate, or the buyer to bargain, individuals pay different prices that are usually not collected in the data. This paper explores a method to estimate the supply and demand models jointly when only list prices are observed. We consider that heterogenous transaction prices occur due to price discrimination by firms on observable characteristics of consumers. Within this framework, the identification is secured by (i) supposing that at least one group of individuals does pay the list prices and (ii) assuming that the marginal costs of producing and selling the goods does not depend on the characteristics of the buyers. This methodology is applied to estimate the demand in the new automobile market in France. Results suggest that discounting arising from price discrimination is important. The average discount is estimated to be 8.9%, with large variation according to the buyers’ characteristics. Our results are in line with rebates observed in the automobile market in UK.

• Thursday 31 January 2013 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  David PEREZ-CASTRILLO (Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona)
  Innovation contests

  Abstract

  We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the innovation. We characterize the equilibrium behavior, outcomes and payoffs for both nondiscriminatory and discriminatory (where the reward is contestant-dependent) contests. We derive conditions under which the designer obtains a larger payoff when using a discriminatory contest and describe settings where these conditions are satisfied.

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 375.5 kb)

• Thursday 20 December 2012 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Rob ALESSIE (University of Gröningen)
  Pension wealth and household savings in Europe: evidence from SHARELIFE (with Viola Angelini and Peter van Santen)

  Abstract

  We use recently collected retrospective survey data to estimate the displacement effect of pension wealth on household savings. The third wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, SHARELIFE, collects information on the entire job history of the respondent, a feature missing in most previous studies. We show that addressing measurement error problems is crucial to estimate the displacement effect when using survey data. We find that each euro of pension wealth is associated with a 47 (61) cent decline in non–pension wealth using robust (median) regression. In the presence of biases from measurement errors and omitted (unobserved) variables, we estimate a lower bound to the true offset between 17% and 30%, significantly different from zero. Instrumental variables regression estimates, although less precise, suggest full displacement.

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 324.4 kb)

• Thursday 29 November 2012 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Ragui ASSAAD (University of Minnesota)
  Does Improved Local Supply of Schooling Enhance Intergenerational Mobility in Education: Evidence from Jordan? (with Mohamed SALEH)

  Abstract

  This paper examines the effect of increased local supply of schooling on intergenerational mobility in education in Jordan. We use a unique data set that links individual data on own schooling and parents’ schooling for adults, from a household survey, with the supply of schooling in the district of birth, from Ministry of Education data. We identify the effect by exploiting the variation in the supply of basic and secondary schools over time and across sub-districts in Jordan, controlling for both cohort and sub-district of birth fixed effects. School availability is determined based on the existence of a sex-appropriate school in the individual’s sub-district of birth at the time the individual was ready to start that schooling stage. Our findings show that the local availability of schools does in fact increase intergenerational mobility in schooling. For instance, a one standard deviation increase in the local supply of basic schooling reduces the association between father’s and son’s schooling by 5 percent. The effect is larger for an older generation (ages 40-70) whose schooling would have been more constrained by the supply of schooling than for a younger generation (ages 25-39). Moreover, the supply of basic schools appears to matter more for boys and the supply of secondary schools appears to matter more for girls.

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 543.9 kb)

• Thursday 4 October 2012 12:00-13:30

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, Salle S18

  Hermann GARTNER (Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany)
  Gender wage inequality in firms, occupations and job-cells (with Thomas Hinz (University of Konstanz, Germany))

  Abstract

  Whereas educational inequalities between women and men and differences in labor market participation shrank or even diminished during the last decades, the gender pay gap remained stable over time. This is remarkable because the pay gap has attracted much more attention as the main target of anti-discrimination policies. Using data from the IAB (Institute for Employment Research), we analyze whether the average pay gap between women and men working full-time can be explained by their employment in different industries, occupations, and firms. As the smallest level of analysis we focus on occupations within firms (job cells). This strategy of analysis yields the best possible approximation to the concept of “within-job wage gap”. The results show that women with equivalent training and occupational experience earn wages that are 12 percent less than the wages of men in such job cells. Even though the educational participation of women rose to that of their male counterpart, the gender composition of labor market participation changed and the pressure of equal employment policies grew, the gender wage gap does not decrease within our observation period (1993-2008).

• Monday 25 June 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Jean-Marc Fournier (OCDE)
  The Drivers of Labour Earnings Inequality – An Analysis Based on Conditional and Unconditional Quantile Regressions

  Abstract

  (with Isabell Koske)
  Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions are used to explore the determinants of labour earnings at different parts of the distribution and, hence, the determinants of overall labour earnings inequality. The analysis combines several household surveys to provide comparable estimates for 32 countries. The empirical work suggests that, in general, a rise in the share of workers with an upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary degree, a rise in trade union membership, a rise in the share of public employment and a rise in the share of workers on permanent contracts are associated with a narrowing of the earnings distribution. By contrast, a shift in the sector composition of the economy is not found to have a large impact on overall earnings inequality. As for tertiary education, the impact remains ambiguous as there are several offsetting forces.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (HTML, 21.5 kb)

• Monday 18 June 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Armin Schmutzler (University of Zurich)
  Auctions vs Negotiations in Public Procurement Which Works Better?

  Abstract

  (with Rafael Lalive)
  Public agencies rely on two key modes to procure goods and services: auctions and direct negotiations.
  The relative advantages of these two modes are still imperfectly understood. This paper therefore studies
  public procurement of regional passenger railway services in Germany, where regional agencies can use
  auctions and negotiations to procure regional passenger rail services. This offers the unique opportunity to
  assess the two procurement modes within the same institutional and legal framework. We first characterize
  the decisions of the agency in a simple reduced form framework of negotiations and auctions. This analysis
  suggests accounting for the endogeneity of the choice of procurement mode by estimating the mode of
  procurement, quantity and price simultaneously. We then test this framework using information on
  lines that were auctioned and lines that were directly negotiated with the former monopolist. Results
  indicate (i) endogeneity of procurement choice can be fully characterized by observed line characteristics;
  (ii) frequency of service is 16 percent higher on lines that were auctioned compared to lines that were
  negotiated, and (iii) the procurement price is 25 percent lower on auctioned lines than on those with direct
  negotiations. Taken together, these results indicate a significant efficiency enhancing effect of auctions.

• Monday 11 June 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Arthur Lewbel (Boston College)
  Generalized Random Coefficients with Equivalence Scale Applications

  Abstract

  (with Krishna Pendakur)
  We propose a generalization of random coefficients models, in which the regression model is additive (or additive with interactions) rather than linear, and each regressor is multiplied by an unobserved error. We show nonparametric identification of the model. In addition to providing a natural generalization of random coefficients, we provide economic motivations for the model based on demand system estimation. In these applications, the random coefficients can be interpreted as random utility parameters that take the form of Engel scales or Barten scales, which in the past were estimated as deterministic preference heterogeneity or household technology parameters. We apply these results to consumer surplus and related welfare calculations.

• Monday 4 June 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Arthur Van Soest (Tilburg University)
  Labor Supply Heterogeneity and Demand for Child Care of Mothers with Young Children

  Abstract

  (with atricia Apps, Jan Kabatek and Ray Rees)
  This paper introduces a static structural model of hours of market labor
  supply, time spent on child care and other domestic work, and bought in child
  care for married or cohabiting mothers with pre-school age children. The
  father’s behavior is taken as given. The main goal is to analyze the
  sensitivity of hours of market work, parental child care,
  other household production and formal child care to the wage rate, the price of
  child care, taxes, benefits and child care subsidies. To account for the
  non-convex nature of the budget sets and, possibly, the household technology, a
  discrete choice model is used. The model is estimated using the HILDA dataset,
  a rich household survey of the Australian population, which contains detailed
  information on time use, child care demands and the corresponding prices.
  Simulations based on the estimates show that the time allocations of women with
  pre-school children are highly sensitive to changes in wages and the costs of
  child care. A policy simulation suggests that labor force participation and
  hours of market work would increase substantially in a fiscal system based
  solely on individual rather than joint taxation.
  Available on SSRN

• Monday 21 May 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Jose Luis Moraga-Gonzalez (Groningen University)
  Search Costs, Demand-Side Economies and the Incentives to merge under Bertrand Competition

  Abstract

  (with Vaiva Petrikaite)
  This paper studies the incentives to merge in a Bertrand competition model where firms sell differentiated products and consumers search for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger symmetric equilibrium, the probability that a firm is the next one to be visited by a consumer is equal across firms not yet visited. However, in the short-run after a merger, because insiders raise their prices more than what the outsiders do, consumers start searching for good deals at the non-merging stores. Only when they do not find any product satisfactory enough, they continue searching at the merging stores. When search costs are suffi-ciently large, consumer tra-ffic from the non-merging firms to the merged ones is so small that mergers become unprofitable. This new merger paradox,which is more likely the higher the number of non-merging firms, can be overcome in the mediumto long-run if the merging firms choose to stock their shelves with all the products of the constituent firms, which generates sizable search economies. Such demand-side economies can confer the merging firms a prominent position in the marketplace, in which case their price may even be lower than the price of the outsiders. In that case, consumers visit first the merged entity and the firms outside the merger lose out. Search cost economies may render a merger beneficial for consumers and so overall welfare may increase.
  Available on Ideas

• Monday 14 May 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S3), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Marco Francesconi (University of Essex)
  Anatomy of Welfare Reform: Announcement and Implementation Effects

  Abstract

  (with Richard Blundell and Wilbert van der Klaauw)
  Adopting a simple model of female labor force decisions, we explore several mechanisms through which women
  can respond to the announcement and implementation of an in-work benefit reform, including intertemporal substitution,
  human capital accumulation, and labor market frictions. Using information of the precise timing of the announcement and
  implementation of a major UK in-work benefit reform, we then estimate its effects on single mothers’ behavior. We
  find important announcement effects on employment decisions that are consistent with short-run frictions in the labor
  market. Evaluations that ignore such effects produce impact estimates that are biased downwards by 15 to 35 percent.

• Monday 30 April 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Kouroche Vafai (Université Paris Descartes)
  Biased Supervision

• Monday 2 April 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Annie Cot (University Paris 1)
  Let there be no distinction between the sexes: Bentham on the rights of women

• Monday 26 March 2012 12:30-13:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Richard Friberg (Stockholm School of Economics)
  Ex-post merger review and divestitures

  Abstract

  (with André Romahn)
  We provide an ex-post analysis of the 2001 merger between the two largest
  brewers on the Swedish beer market. Di-erence-in-di-erence estimates suggest low
  price e-ects of the merger. This is well matched by a merger simulation, using a
  random coe-cient logit model, which predicts price increases of only 0.4 percent.
  Knowledge of the retailers markup rules allows us to discard retailer behavior as
  an explanation for the pricing patterns. We further establish that without the
  divestitures required by the competition authorities, the price increase would have
  more than doubled to 1 percent (even though still low in absolute terms).

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 426.7 kb)

• Monday 19 March 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Kjel Salvanes (Bergen Economics Department)
  A Flying Start? Long Term Consequences of Maternal Time Maternity Leave and Investments in Children During Their First Year of Life

  Abstract

  (with Katrine Løken and Pedro Carneiro)
  We study the impact on children of increasing the time that the mother spends with her child in the first year by exploiting a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway. The reform increased maternal leave on average by 4 months and family income was unaffected. The increased time with the child led to 2.7 percentage points decline in high school dropout. For mothers with low education we find a 5.2 percentage points decline. The effect is also especially large for children of mothers who prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid leave.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 1.5 Mb)

• Monday 12 March 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Pierre Dubois (TSE)
  Do Prices and Nutritional Characteristics Explain Food Purchase Differences Across the US, UK and France?

  Abstract

  (with Aviv Nevo and Rachel Griffith)
  Obesity rates and health outcomes di¤er across France, the UK and the US, in part
  due to di¤erences in food consumption. Using detailed household level data we docu-
  ment di¤erences in purchases of food for consumption at home in these three countries.
  We estimate a demand system for food and simulate choices if households face prices
  and nutritional characteristics from other countries. We …nd that changes in prices
  and characteristics would lead to substantial di¤erences in nutritional outcomes; for
  example, if US households faced UK prices and food attributes then calories purchased
  would fall by 14%, if faced with French prices and food attributes calories purchased
  would fall by 9%.

• Monday 5 March 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Dominique Meurs (University of Paris Ouest, Nanterre - La Défense)
  Testing for Discrimination Against Women and Immigrants Using Annonymous Exam Result as a Benchmark

  Abstract

  (joint with Patrick Puhani)
  To test for discrimination against women and immigrants in recruitment, we exploit a natural
  experiment in the hiring process of higher management staff in the French public sector, which is
  based on anonymous and non-anonymous nationwide entrance exams. The job applicants first have
  to pass an anonymous written exam and, if successful, an oral exam, which is not anonymous. The
  written test scores must by regulation not be known to the oral examiners, but they are known to us.
  The hiring contest exams turn out to be procedurally fair, that is, we do not find systematically worse
  oral exam results for women or immigrants once we hold the written test scores constant.
  Immigrants might even be positively discriminated.

• Monday 13 February 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Alex Gershkov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
  Bayesian and Dominant Strategy Implementation Revisited

  Abstract

  We consider a standard social choice environment with linear utility and one-dimensional types. We show by counterexample that, when there are at least three physical alternatives, Bayes-Nash Incentive Compatibility (BIC) and Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatibility (DIC) need no longer be equivalent. The example with three alternatives is minimal since we do obtain a general equivalence result for settings with only two social alternatives. Our negative result does not mathematically contradict the Manelli and Vincent (2010) equivalence obtained in a one-object auction setting, but it shows that BIC-DIC equivalence is only valid in restrictive environments. Our insights are based on mathematical results about the existence of monotone measures with given monotone marginals.

• Monday 6 February 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Daniel S. Hamermesh (Unversity of Texas at Austin)
  The Gift of Time

  Abstract

  How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers’ overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. Using time-diaries from before and after these shocks, we predict the likelihood that an individual would have been affected by the reform. The direct effect on a newly-constrained worker was a substantial reduction in market time, with the freed-up time reallocated mostly to leisure and personal maintenance, and very slightly to household production. Simulations using GMM estimates of a Stone-Geary utility function defined over time use suggest similar results. The economy-wide drop in market work time was reallocated solely to leisure and personal maintenance. In the absence of changing household technology a permanent time gift leads to no change in time spent in household production by the average individual.

  1 document to download

  • paper (PDF, 607.7 kb)

• Monday 30 January 2012 11:00-12:30

  TEMA

  Hans Bloemen (Free University Amsterdam)
  Language Proficiency of Migrants: Earnings, Job Suitability, and Job Satisfaction

  Abstract

  We empirically analyze the language proficiency of migrants in the Netherlands. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on the relation between earnings and indicators for language proficiency, motivated by the human capital theory. Here we analyze whether there is a relation between proficiency of the destination language and mismatch in the labour market. A lack of language skills may induce the migrant to work in jobs that require a lower education level than the level achieved by the migrant and/or may lead to a lower performance on the job. We use subjective survey information about job satisfaction and the fit between the migrant’s education and ability level on the one hand and the job on the other hand. We also use objective information on professional level. We find evidence for a positive relationship between job performance and language skills, and also some evidence for a positive effect on the fit between acquired education level and the required education level on the job. We also find that the age at migration (or the number of years since migration) often is a more important determinant of job satisfaction and suitability than language proficiency.

• Monday 23 January 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Tomaso Valetti (Unversity College of London)
  Unbundling the incumbent: Evidence from UK broadband

• Monday 16 January 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Thierry Laurent (Université Evry Val d’Essonne - UniverSud Paris)
  Orientation sexuelle et emploi en France : les gays plus exposés au chômage que les autres ?

  Abstract

  Ce travail a pour objectif de mesurer la discrimination d’accès à l’emploi liée à l’orientation sexuelle. Il s’agit d’une première, puisqu’au niveau international très peu d’études de ce type ont été réalisées et aucune dans le cas français. L’évaluation économétrique de la discrimination d’accès à l’emploi est réalisée en empilant les données de l’enquête Emploi sur la période 1996-2009 et en identifiant des couples de même sexe à l’aide d’un critère de cohabitation. La probabilité d’être en emploi est modélisée en tenant compte de l’orientation sexuelle et de la sélection endogène mesurée par une équation de participation au marché du travail. Les résultats montrent que le taux de chômage des travailleurs gays serait de 1,6% plus élevé que celui de leurs homologues hétérosexuels, toutes choses égales par ailleurs. Cette mesure de la discrimination d’accès à l’emploi est loin d’être négligeable puisqu’elle dépasse la pénalité subie par les individus nés hors de France ou encore celle subie par les séniors. Nous montrons aussi que cette discrimination affecte prioritairement les gays de moins de 40 ans, puisque la probabilité d’être au chômage excède de 2,4% celle de leurs homologues hétérosexuels. Ce dernier résultat suggère un processus de recherche du «bon emploi» bien plus long pour les travailleurs gays que pour leurs homologues hétérosexuels.

• Monday 9 January 2012 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Denis Beninger (Berlin School of Economics and Law)
  Estimating economic household models: Do we need better data?

  Abstract

  Which are the determinants of the allocation of the household resources between the family members? When investigating this question, detailed information on variables explaining the individual and household preferences as well as the intra-family decision process is crucial. However, these issues are very incompletely reported in the available data sets. In particular, expenditures for private goods are typically collected at household and not at individual level. Information on socio-demographic and socio-psychological characteristics potentially affecting the preferences or the bargaining balance inside the family is sparse too. When estimating a model of household behaviour, this lack of information leads to restrictive assumptions and limits the understanding of the family behaviour. The originality of this paper lies in the use of a new family panel for Germany PAIRFAM (Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics), in order to evaluate economic household models, in particular the intra-family bargaining process. PAIRFAM is collected yearly since 2009, and concentrates on younger cohorts. The panel includes a large set of variables describing the individual and household characteristics from a sociological and psychological point of view, and aims to collect information on individual time-use and the expenditure structure of the family. This unique combination of detailed economic, sociological and psychological information on family issues makes this data a world-wide novelty. For the purpose of our study, we use the first wave of PAIRFAM. We complete the data with simulations for the individual and public consumption in the household, based on the information for these variables available in the third wave of the pre-test panel. Using this semi-simulated data, we estimate a bargaining household decision model. Most striking results are: (i) The additional information on the family expenditures structure allows relaxing some of the restrictions which are assumed when estimating these models from a usual data (German Socio-Economic Panel, e.g.). In particular, the spouses are not more restricted to have egoistic preferences. (ii) Part of the heterogeneity in the household decision among couples is explained by other variables than those traditionally found in similar economic studies (i.e. wages, unearned income, age, education, etc.). In particular, satisfaction in the relationship and physical attractiveness turn out to be significant determinants of the sharing rule, supporting empirical and theoretical findings of the socio-psychological literature. Therefore, a data containing the household expenditures structure (for a few typical goods), individual time-use and variables describing precisely the sociologic, economic and psychological environment of the household allows investigating more precisely the intra-family issues, and gives a far better insight into the household decision process. A good understanding of how the family decides is crucial when evaluating the impact of family policies, for example.

• Wednesday 28 December 2011 11:00-12:30

  Christmas break

• Monday 19 December 2011 11:00-12:30

  Christmas break

• Monday 12 December 2011 11:00-12:30

  NOTE: takes place at Université Paris 2: ERMES, 295 Rue Saint-Jacques, Paris 5

  TEMA-IO

  Rabah Amir (University of Arizona)
  Network Effects, Market Structure and Industry Performance

  Abstract

  (with Natalia Lazzati)
  This paper provides a thorough analysis of oligopolistic markets with positive demand-side network externalities and perfect compatibility. The minimal structure imposed on the model primitives is such that industry output increases in a firmr’s rivals’ total output as well as in the expected network size. This leads to a generalized equilibrium existence treatment that includes guarantees for a nontrivial equilibrium, and some insight into possible multiplicity of equilibria. We formalize the concept of industry viability and show that it is always enhanced by having more firms in the market and/or by technological improvements. We also characterize the e¤ects of market structure on industry performance, with an emphasis on departures from standard markets. The approach relies on lattice-theoretic methods, which allow for a unified treatment of various general results in the literature on network goods. Several illustrative examples with closed-form solutions are also provided.
  Link to the paper

• Monday 5 December 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Mathilde Guergoat-Larivière (Paris 1 & CEE)
  Labour Market Regimes, Family Policies and Women’s Behaviour in the European Union

  Abstract

  (with Christine Erhel)
  This article develops a comparative perspective on women’s and mothers’ labour market situations in relation to some labour market institutions and policies (especially childcare and leave schemes), distinguishing between full-time and part-time employment, as well as non-employment. The diversity of employment regimes in the EU is examined, including the New Member States, on the basis of EU-SILC data (2007). Using PCA and then multi-level multinomial logit models, our results show the heterogeneity of national models of women’s labour market integration in Europe. The results also show the links between some policy variables and women’s behaviour, despite the fact that individual factors explain labour market situations the most. Women’s employment is positively related to formal childcare variables and negatively to informal childcare. For mothers of young children, the length of leave schemes is found to have a negative influence.

• Monday 28 November 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Fabian Gouret (Universitat de Barcelona)
  What can we learn from the fifties?

  Abstract

  Economists have increasingly elicited from survey respondents probabilistic expectations to understand how individuals form their expectations. A robust finding is an inappropriate heap at 50, suggesting that some of these 50s are uninformative. This paper uses a new tool aiming at identifying when an answer is informative or not. Applying the method to probabilistic expectations of equity returns in the Survey of Economic Expectations, I find that 70 percent of the 50s convey no information, but they represent only half of the uninformative answers. The other uninformative answers are multiple of ten other than (0,50,100) and multiple of five but not of ten. This last finding has various implications for survey design.
  Paper

• Monday 21 November 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  James Davidson (University of Essex)
  Consistent Model Specification Testing

  Abstract

  We generalize Bierens’ (1982, 1990) approach to a wider class of models and estimators. Bierens constructs consistent moment tests in the context of linear and nonlinear least squares but there are a number of mis-specifications, such as heteroskedastic errors, against which they will not typically have power. Our framework is independent of the form of the model, and covers all variants of maximum likelihood and quasi-maximum likelihood estimation and also the generalized method of moments. It has particular applications in new cases such as discrete data models, but the chief appeal of our approach is that it provides a “one size fits all” test. We specify a test based on a linear combination of individual components of the indicator vector that can be computed routinely, does not need to be tailored to the particular model, and is expected to have power against a wide class of alternatives. Although primarily envisaged as a test of functional form, this type of moment test can also be extended to testing for omitted variables.
  Full Paper

• Monday 14 November 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Hélène Latzer (Université de Strasbourg)
  A Schumpeterian model of growth and inequality

  Abstract

  This paper contributes to the analysis of the effects of demand structure on long- term growth. Introducing non-homothetic preferences in an otherwise standard quality- model, we first show that disparities in purchasing power generate positive R&D in- vestment by quality leaders. This result is obtained with complete equal treatment in the R&D field between the incumbent patentholder and the challengers as well as without any concavity in the R&D cost function: in our framework, the incentive for a leader to invest in R&D stems from the possibility for an incumbent having innovated twice in a row to efficiently discriminate between rich and poor consumers display- ing differences in their willingness to pay for quality. We hence exemplify a so far overlooked demand-driven rationale for innovation by incumbents. We then move to analyzing the impact of inequalities on long-term growth in our quality-ladder frame- work, and find that a lower level of wealth disparities always leads to an increase in the long-run growth rate. Finally, we show that beyond this negative impact on growth, inequalities also influence the allocation of the overall R&D effort between incumbents and challengers: a higher level of inequalities will in most cases lead to a bigger share of the overall R&D investment to be carried out by quality leaders.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 381.9 kb)

• Monday 7 November 2011 12:30-13:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Pascale Petit (Université d’Evry)
  Les effets du lieu de résidence sur l’accès à l’emploi : une expérience contrôlée sur des jeunes qualifiés en Ile-de-France

  Abstract

  Nous évaluons la discrimination à l’embauche à l’encontre des jeunes en Île-de-France à travers trois dimensions : l’effet de la réputation du lieu de résidence, l’effet du sexe et l’effet de l’origine (française ou marocaine). L’étude est réalisée sur données expérimentales selon un protocole permettant d’examiner les effets croisés de ces trois dimensions. On s’intéresse aux discriminations pour une profession qualifiée et en tension, les informaticiens de niveau Bac+5, pour laquelle les discriminations devraient a priori être très réduites. Pour cette profession, nous avons construit douze profils fictifs de candidats similaires en tous points, à l’exception de la caractéristique testée. Nous examinons la discrimination territoriale en localisant les candidats fictifs dans trois communes du Val-d’Oise : Enghien-les-Bains (réputée favorisée), Sarcelles (réputée défavorisée) et Villiers-le-Bel (réputée défavorisée et ayant connu des émeutes urbaines médiatisées en 2007). Entre mi-décembre 2008 et fin janvier 2009, nous avons envoyé 3 684 candidatures en réponse à 307 offres d’emploi. Nous trouvons trois résultats principaux. Premièrement, l’origine marocaine est discriminante surtout pour les femmes qui résident à Sarcelles. Deuxièmement, alors que les candidates d’origine française sont favorisées par rapport aux hommes quand elles résident à Enghien, les candidates d’origine marocaine sont défavorisées par rapport aux hommes d’origine marocaine quand elles résident à Sarcelles. Troisièmement, nous trouvons une discrimination territoriale qui affecte exclusivement les femmes. Résider dans une commune défavorisée (Villiers-le-Bel ou Sarcelles) plutôt que dans une commune favorisée (Enghienles- Bains) réduit la probabilité d’une candidate d’accéder à un entretien d’embauche, quelle que soit son origine.

  1 document to download

  • Papier (PDF, 217.4 kb)

• Monday 31 October 2011 11:00-12:30

  Fall break

• Monday 24 October 2011 11:00-12:30

  Fall break

• Monday 17 October 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA

  Arne Uhlendorff (University of Mannheim)
  Marginal Employment, Unemployment Duration and Job Match Quality

  Abstract

  In some countries like Germany unemployed workers can increase their income during job search by taking up ``marginal employment’’ up to a threshold without any benefit deduction. We analyze the impact of entering marginal employment on employment outcomes of unemployed individuals. Our results suggest that marginal employment has on average no significant impact on the probability of leaving unemployment for a regular job, leads to more stable employment spells and has no impact on wages. We find strong evidence for time varying treatment effects: while we do not find any significant impact for the first 12 months of unemployment, job finding probabilities clearly increase after one year and the impact on job stability is stronger if the jobs are taken up later in the unemployment spell.

• Monday 10 October 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-IO

  Nicolas Sahuguet (HEC Montréal)
  Decentralizing deterrence, with an application to labor tax auditing

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 377.3 kb)

• Monday 3 October 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  TEMA-Gender

  Ray Rees (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
  Optimal Piecewise Linear Income Taxation

  Abstract

  Given its significance in practice, the piecewise linear tax system seems to have received disproportionately little attention in the literature on optimal income taxation. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics.We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex and nonconvex respectively. A numerical analysis of a discrete version of the model shows the circumstances under which each of these cases will hold as a global optimum. We …find that, given plausible parameter values and wage distributions, the globally opti- mal tax system is convex, and marginal rate progressivity increases with rising inequality.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 601.4 kb)

• Monday 16 May 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  Bernard Fortin (Université Laval)
  Peer Effects, Fast Food Consumption and Adolescent Weight Gain

  Abstract

  This paper aims at opening the black box of peer effects in adolescent weight gain. Using Add Health data on secondary schools in the U.S., we investigate whether these effects partly flow through the eating habits channel. Adolescents are assumed to interact through a friendship social network. We first propose a social interaction model of fast food consumption using a generalized spatial autoregressive approach. We exploit results by Bramoullé, Djebbari and Fortin (2009) which show that intransitive links within a network (i.e., a friend of one of my friends is not my friend) help identify peer effects. The model is estimated using maximum likelihood and generalized 2SLS strategies. We also estimate a panel dynamic weight gain production function relating an adolescent’s Body Mass Index (BMI) to his current fast food consumption and his lagged BMI level. Results show that there are positive significant peer effects in fast food consumption among adolescents belonging to a same friendship school network. The estimated social multiplier is 1.59. Our results also suggest that, at the network level, an extra day of weekly fast food restaurant visits increases BMI by 2.4%, when peer effects are taken into account.
  Link to the paper

• Monday 25 April 2011 11:00-12:30

  Spring break - no seminar

• Monday 11 April 2011 11:00-12:30

  Spring break - no seminar

• Thursday 7 April 2011 12:30-13:30

  Job market talks - no seminar

• Monday 21 March 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S18), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  Ayako Kondo (Osaka University)
  Long-term effects of labor market conditions on family formation for Japanese youth
  Homepage

  Abstract

  (joint with Yuki Hashimoto).
  This study aims to examine how each cohort’s family formation is affected by labor market conditions experienced in youth in Japan. Although deterioration in youth employment opportunities has often been blamed for Japan’s declining marriage and fertility rates, the effects of slack labor market conditions on marriage and fertility are theoretically unclear. We estimate the effects of regional labor market conditions on marriage and fertility, controlling for nation-wide year effects and prefecture fixed effects, and find the following. First, the male unemployment rate is negatively correlated with marriage of women in the local labor market, although the correlation is weak and concentrated on the less educated group. Second, high school-educated women who experienced a recession while entering the labor market are less likely to have children and tend to marry later. In contrast, a recession at entry to the labor market rather increases fertility among college-educated women. The overall impact of labor market conditions experienced in youth on family formation is relatively weak, compared to the substantial losses in earnings and employment stability documented by the existing studies.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 491.4 kb)

• Monday 14 February 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  Arnaud Dupuy (Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market & Maastricht University)
  Personality traits and the marriage market

  Abstract

  (joint work with Alfred Galichon).
  Using a unique dataset of Dutch households containing information about the education, height, BMI, health, risk preference and personality traits of both spouses, we estimate a structural model of matching proposed by Galichon and Salanié (2010). Affinity indices for both men and women are constructed by performing a Singular Value Decomposition of the estimated surplus function. These indices are independent linear combinations of observed attributes of men and women respectively. The interaction of each pair of men and women indices generates a mutually exclusive share of the total surplus. Each index therefore provides, in a natural way and with a straightforward structural interpretation, an “index of attractiveness”. Results show that personality traits matter for attractiveness in the marriage market and different traits matter differently for men and for women.

• Monday 31 January 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  Steve Burks (University of Minnesota)
  Lab Measures of Other-Regarding Behavior Predict Some Choices in a Natural On-the-Job Social Dilemma: Evidence from Truckers
  Homepage
  Truckers & Turnover Project page

  Abstract

  (with Jon Anderson, Matthew Bombyk, Jeff Carpenter, Derek Ganzhorn, Lorenz Goette, Manjari Govada, Aldo Rustichini)
  Using field experiments and job data from 765 trainee truckers we test the ability of laboratory-style measurements of other-regarding behavior to predict behavior on the job under similar incentives. We find that other-regarding choices with respect to fellow drivers in the lab predict similar choices on the job, but do not predict costly kindness towards the firm. This suggests the lab measures a disposition that can appear on the job when the contexts are sufficiently similar.

• Monday 17 January 2011 11:00-12:30

  MSE (S17), 106 Bd de l’hopital, Paris 13

  Sébastien Lecoq (ALISS, INRA)
  Mandatory Labelling vs. Fat Tax: Evidence from the French Yogurt and Fromage Blanc Market

  Abstract

  (with Fabrice Etilé and Olivier Allais)
  A number of public health advocates and consumer associations urge policy makers to strengthen nutrient labelling rules, in order to help people to make healthier and better informed food choices. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of mandatoiry labelling. This research evaluates the impact of a mandatory fat label policy on consumer choices in the market for ‘Fromages Blancs’ and dessert yogurts. While fat labels are mandatory since 1988 for ‘Fromages Blancs’, this is not the case for yogurts. This is a natural source of variation to identify separately consumer preferences for labels and for fat. We use a mixed logit discrete choice model and household scanner data collected in 2007 to estimate the distributions of the Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) for fat labels and simulate various counterfactual policy scenarios in a sample of casual ‘Fromages Blancs’ and dessert yogurts consumers. The WTP is negative for about one third of this population, especially for consumers of full fat dessert yogurts. The _rst simulation results suggest that a mandatory labelling policy would make these individuals switch to full fat ‘Fromages Blancs’ or to the outside options, and mandatory labelling would have more impact than a fat tax on the consumption of full fat products. Hence, variations in labelling rules have been exploited by producers to increase market segmentation by the develop-ment of dessert yogurts. We plan to re_ne these results, by taking into consideration manufacturers’ and retailers’ startegic reactions to these policies.

• Monday 13 December 2010 11:00-12:30

  Amine Ouazad (INSAED)
  Mistrust in the classroom: Evidence from English Schools

  Abstract

  How do students perceive their teachers’ biases? Do they believe that some teachers give better grades to some students, based on gender, prior ability, race or ethnicity? This paper tests the self-fulfilling beliefs model in the classroom. We design a large-scale experiment involving 1200 students across 29 schools to test whether students of different ethnicities and genders have different perceptions of their teachers’ grading practices. Students are asked to bet on their own performance at a test where grading is partly subjective. Differences in the level of betting reveals differences in students’ expectations. The design of the experiment controls for risk aversion by looking at changes for a given student. Results reveal that students invest more when assessed by male teachers, nonwhite students invest less than white students, and more able pupils invest more than less able pupils. Thus, classroom dynamics are likely to reinforce educational inequalities.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 410.6 kb)

• Monday 15 November 2010 11:00-12:30

  Miriam Belbo (Berlin School of Economics and Law)
  The Life-Cycle Hypothesis Revisited: Evidence on Housing Consumption after Retirement

  Abstract

  (with Sven Schreiber)
  According to the life-cycle theory of consumption and saving, foreseeable retirement events should not reduce consumption. This argument applies especially to housing consumption, whereas other consumption expenditures may fall when home production substitutes them (given higher leisure after retirement). Using micro panel data for German tenants we find that income drops at entering retirement have a negative effect on housing expenditures. This effect is not significantly stronger than the one from other income drops. While this result suggests that the strict consumption-smoothing hypothesis is violated for the subgroup of non-home owners, the effect is quantitatively small.

  1 document to download

  • Article (PDF, 245 kb)

• Monday 11 October 2010 11:00-12:30

  Magne Mostad (University of Oslo)
  What Linear Estimators Miss: Re-Examining the Effects of Family Income on Child Outcomes

  Abstract

  (with Katrine V. Loken and Matthew Wiswall)
  This paper uses a rich Norwegian dataset to re-examine the causal relationship between family income and child outcomes. Motivated by theoretical predictions and OLS results that suggest a nonlinear relationship, we depart from previous studies in allowing the marginal effects on children’s outcomes of an increase in family income to vary across the income distribution. Our nonlinear IV and fixed-effect estimates show an increasing, concave relationship between family income and children’s educational attainment and IQ. The linear estimates, however, suggest small, if any, effect of family income, because they assign little weight to the large marginal effects at the lower part of the income distribution.

  1 document to download

  • Article (PDF, 349.3 kb)

• Monday 28 June 2010 16:30-18:00

  Sandy Tubeuf, University of Leeds - Leeds Institute of Health Sciences
  Effort or Circumstances: Does the Correlation Matter for Inequality of Opportunity in Health?
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  (with F. Jusot & A. Trannoy)
  This paper proposes a method to quantify the contribution of inequalities of opportunities and inequalities due to differences in effort to be in good health to overall health inequality. It examines three alternative specifications of legitimate and illegitimate inequalities drawing on Roemer, Barry and Swift’s considerations of circumstances and effort. The issue at stake is how to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort. Using a representative French health survey undertaken in 2006 and partly designed for this purpose, and the natural decomposition of the variance, the contribution of circumstances to inequalities in self-assessed health only differs of a few percentage points according to the approach. The same applies for the contribution of effort which represents at most 8%, while circumstances can account for up to 46%. The remaining part is due to the impact of age and sex.

  1 document to download

  • Papier (PDF, 737.1 kb)

• Monday 21 June 2010 16:30-18:00

  Moved to SIMA
  See the schedule

• Monday 31 May 2010 16:30-18:00

  Thierry Laurent (Université Paris-Evry)
  Moins égaux que les autres? Orientation sexuelle et discrimination salariale
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  L’article présente une évaluation économétrique, sur le marché du travail français, de la discrimination salariale fondée sur l’orientation sexuelle. Il s’agit de la première étude tentant d’évaluer l’ampleur de cette discrimination en France.
  Après avoir identifié les couples de même sexe à partir de l’enquête emploi de l’INSEE, on propose des estimations du rendement de l’orientation sexuelle, dans le secteur privé et dans le secteur public, de façon à déterminer si les lesbiennes et les gays subissent une pénalité salariale. Les résultats obtenus montrent l’existence d’un désavantage salarial des homosexuels hommes par rapport à leurs homologues hétérosexuels, aussi bien dans le secteur privé que dans le secteur public; cette discrimination varie de −6.5% environ dans le secteur privé à −5.5% dans le secteur public soit une ampleur comparable à la discrimination salariale hommes/femmes. Comme dans d’autres pays, on ne peut conclure à l’existence d’une discrimination salariale à l’encontre des lesbiennes.
  Le diplôme ne protège pas les gays de la discrimination : au contraire les salariés homosexuels masculins sont d’autant plus victimes de discrimination salariale, qu’ils occupent un emploi qualifié qui les rend « visibles » dans l’entreprise et permet, via le jeu des promotions, à une discrimination « potentielle » de s’exprimer. Le lent processus d’acquisition, par l’employeur, d’information sur l’orientation sexuelle de ses salariés, se traduit en outre par des pratiques discriminatoires d’autant plus marquées que le salarié homosexuel a de l’ancienneté dans l’entreprise et qu’il est âgé.
  Dans la mesure où l’ensemble des salariés homosexuels présents dans notre échantillon, ne sont pas identifiés comme tels par leurs employeurs, ceux qui le sont subissent certainement une discrimination plus forte que la discrimination « moyenne » que nous estimons. Ceci souligne l’importance des pratiques discriminatoires à l’encontre des gays sur le marché du travail français.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 406.8 kb)

• Monday 17 May 2010 16:30-18:00

  Victor Lavy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Differences Within and Across Countries in Instructional Time and Achievements in Math, Science and Reading: A Causal Link?
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  There are large differences across countries in instructional time in schooling institutions. Can these differences explain some of the differences across countries in pupils‘ achievements in different subjects? While research in recent years provides convincing evidence about the effect of several inputs in the education production function, there is limited evidence on the effect of classroom instructional time. Such evidence is of policy relevance in many countries, and it became very concrete recently as President Barrack Obama announced the goal of extending the school week and year as a central objective in his proposed education reform for the US. In this paper, I estimate the effects of instructional time on students‘ academic achievement in math, science and reading. I estimate non-linear instructional time effects controlling for unobserved heterogeneity of both pupils and schools. The evidence from a sample of 15 year olds from over fifty countries that participated in PISA 2006 consistently shows that instructional time has a positive and significant effect on test scores. The effect is large relative to the standard deviation of the within pupil test score distribution. I obtain similar evidence from a sample of 10 and 13 year olds in Israel. The OLS results are highly biased upward but the within student estimates are very similar across groups of developed and middle-income countries and age groups. Evidence from primary and middle schools in Israel is similar to the evidence from OECD countries. However, the estimated effect of instructional time in the sample of developing countries is much lower than the effect size in the developed countries. I also show that the productivity of instructional time is higher in countries that implemented school accountability measures, and in countries that give schools autonomy in hiring and firing teachers.

  1 document to download

  • Papier (PDF, 641.6 kb)

• Monday 3 May 2010 16:30-18:00

  Robert Breunig (Australian National University - Research School of Social Sciences)
  Chid Care in Australia
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  (papers available in working paper series)
  Paper 1: we examine whether responses to survey questions about child care availability, quality, and cost, aggregated at the local geographical level, have any explanatory power in models of maternal labour supply. We find that married women who live in areas with more reports of lack of availability, low quality, or costly child care work less than women in areas with fewer reported difficulties with child care. We find this effect on both the hours of labour supplied and on the part-time/full-time choice. We find few effects for lone parents.
  Paper 2: The question of the responsiveness of Australian women’s labour supply to child care costs has been a matter of some debate. Running counter to anecdotal evidence and being arguably counter-intuitive, there is, though, a widespread view that the level of responsiveness is very low or negligible for all women with young children. In this paper we review the Australian and international literature on labour supply and child care, and provide improved estimates of labour supply and child care demand elasticities with respect to child care prices for Australia. We find that the limited literature in Australia suffer from measurement error problems due to limitations in the modelling and insufficiency of information on child care price and child care usage. We address this problem by extending the standard labour supply and child care model to allow for separate effects of different child care prices for children of different age ranges and by using the median child care price at the local Labour Force Survey Region level constructed from child-specific prices for the analysis. The salient finding is that child care prices have significant effects both on mothers’ labour supply and child care demand. Based upon the latest three waves of HILDA data (2005-2007), the point estimate for the elasticity of mothers’ labour force participation with respect to the average child care price is -0.29, which is significantly larger in magnitude than that found in previous studies for Australia, but which is well in accordance with international findings. The robustness of this finding is supported by repeating the analysis for the earlier three waves (2002-2004).

• Monday 12 April 2010 16:30-18:00

  Brigitte Dormont, Université Paris Dauphine
  Ownership and hospital productivity: assessing the impact of inefficiency and the roles of patient and production characteristics
  avec Carine Milcent (PSE)
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  There is ongoing debate about the effect of ownership on hospital performance as regards efficiency and care quality. This paper proposes an analysis of the differences in productivity and efficiency between French public and private hospitals. In France, public and private hospitals do not only differ in their objectives. They are also subject to different rules as regards investments and human resources management. In addition, they were financed according to different payment schemes until 2004: a global budget system was used for public hospitals, while private hospitals were paid on a fee-for-service basis.
  Since 2004, a prospective payment system (PPS) with fixed payment per stay in a given DRG is gradually introduced for both private and public hospitals. Payments generally differ for the same DRG, depending on whether the stay occurred in a private or public hospital. By 2018, a convergence of payments between the private and public sector should be achieved. Pursuing such a convergence comes down to suppose that there are differences in efficiency between private and public hospitals, which would be reduced by the introduction of competition between these two sectors.
  The purpose of this paper is to compare the productivity of public and private hospitals in France. We try to assess the respective impacts, on productivity differences, of differences in efficiency, patient characteristics and production composition. The literature devoted to hospital performances generally considers cost functions, which have the great advantage to makes it possible to deal with the multiproduct activity of hospitals. Our data does not provide reliable information at hospital level about costs per stay in private hospitals. Moreover, we have no information about factor prices. Therefore, we have chosen to estimate a production function. For that purpose, we have defined a variable measuring the volume of care services provided by each hospital, synthetizing the hospital multiproduct activity into one homogenous output.
  Our data comes from two administrative sources which record exhaustive information about French hospitals. Matching these two database provides us an original source of information, at the hospital-year level, about both the production composition (number of stays in each DRG), and production factors (number of beds, facilities, number of doctors, nurses, of administrative and support staff, etc.). We observe 1,604 hospitals over the period 1998-2003, of which 642 hospitals are public, 126 are private not-for-profit and 836 are private-for-profit. This database is relative to acute care and covers more than 95 % French hospitals.
  We use a stochastic production frontier approach combined with hospitals fixed effects. We find that the lower productivity of public hospitals is not explained by inefficiency (distance to the frontier), but oversized establishments, patient characteristics and production characteristics (small proportion of surgical stays). Once patient and production characteristics are taken into account, large and medium sized public hospitals appear to be more efficient than private hospitals. As a result, payment convergence would provide incentives for public hospitals to change the composition of their supply for care.

• Monday 22 March 2010 16:30-18:00

  Pas de séminaire (Recrutements)

• Monday 8 March 2010 16:30-18:00

  Alfred Galichon, Ecole Polytechnique
  Set Identification in Models with Multiple Equilibria
  Speaker’s homepage
  Papier

  Abstract

  We propose a computationally feasible way of deriving the identified features of models with multiple equilibria in pure or mixed strategies. It is shown that in the case of Shapley regular normal form games, the identified set is characterized by the inclusion of the true data distribution within the core of a Choquet capacity, which is interpreted as the generalized likelihood of the model. In turn, this inclusion is characterized by a finite set of inequalities and efficient and easily implementable combinatorial methods are described to check them. In all normal form games, the identified set is characterized in terms of the value of a submodular or convex optimization program. Efficient algorithms are then given and compared to check inclusion of a parameter in this identified set. The latter are illustrated with family bargaining games and oligopoly entry games.

• Monday 22 February 2010 16:30-18:00

  Pas de séminaire (Recrutements)

• Monday 8 February 2010 16:30-18:00

  Pas de séminaire (Recrutements)

• Monday 25 January 2010 16:30-18:00

  MSE

  Nicholas Feltovich, University of Aberdeen
  Experimental evidence of a sunk-cost paradox: a study of pricing behavior in Bertrand-Edgeworth duopoly
  Speaker’s homepage
  Paper

  Abstract

  We experimentally test the effect of sunk costs on decision making. In the experiment, subjects play the role of price-setting duopolists. Both firms have identical costs, including an exogenous sunk cost that varies across sessions over six different values. We observe that the sunk cost has a U-shaped effect: from low to medium levels, average prices decrease, but from medium to high levels, average prices increase. This effect, which is consistent with loss avoidance, develops quickly and persists throughout the game. A follow-up experiment confirms the main results of the original experiment.

• Monday 11 January 2010 16:30-18:00

  MSE

  Yann Algan, SciencesPo. Paris
  Family Values and the Regulation of Labor
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  Flexible labor markets requires geographically mobile workers to be efficient. Otherwise, firms can take advantage of the immobility of workers and extract monopsony rents. In cultures with strong family ties, moving away from home is costly. Thus, individuals with strong family ties rationally choose regulated labor markets to avoid moving and limiting the monopsony power of firms, even though regulation generates lower employment and income. Empirically, we do find that individuals who inherit stronger family ties are less mobile, have lower wages, are less often employed and support more stringent labor market regulations. There are also positive cross-country correlations between the strength of family ties and labor market rigidities. Finally, we find positive correlations between labor market rigidities at the beginning of the twenty first century and family values prevail- ing before World War II, which suggests that labor market regulations have deep cultural roots.

  1 document to download

  • Paper (PDF, 392.2 kb)

• Monday 14 December 2009 16:30-18:00

  MSE

  Kathryn Shaw, Stanford Graduate School of Business
  Insider Econometrics: A Roadmap for Estimating Empirical Models of Organizational Design and Performance
  Page web de l’intervenant

  Abstract

  (with Casey Ichniowski)

• Monday 23 November 2009 16:30-18:00

  MSE

  Etienne Wasmer, SciencesPo. Paris
  A model of a non-walrasian economy with three imperfect markets: some economics of “multi-frictional economies”
  First part of the seminar: The cyclical volatility of labor markets under frictional financial markets
  Speaker’s homepage

  Abstract

  The Keynesian and neo-Keynesian agendas were originally to iden- tify general equilibrium interactions between markets and in particular the regimes in which unemployment depends on disequilibrium in other markets than the labor markets (money or good). We adress these old questions by introducing search frictions on several markets: adapting the model of credit and labor market imperfections as in Wasmer and Weil (2004), we introduce search in the good market. We therefore attempt to uncover the properties of a simple, three-dimensional non-walrasian economy. We …nd that the model can easily be solved by blocks: on two of the three markets, the relevant “market tightness” is a constant of parame- ters. Good market tightness is equal to a constant of parameters in the benchmark regime, and even to 1 under simplifying assumptions (stochas- tic Say’s law) The equilibrium in the labor market is a¤ected by other markets with strong complementarities. This leads to several accelerators amplifying productivity shocks, by a factor 2.4 according to our calibration compared to an economy with only frictions in labor markets. Some features of the “regimes” analysis of the neo-Keynesian litera- ture can be recovered under alternative timing assumptions. When good market tightness is high relative to labor market tightness, …rms have an incentive to …nd …rst consumers and then produce. In this case "re- pressed inflation regime", contracts between matched parties di¤er from the benchmark and tightness of the good market is no longer equal to 1, and is negatively a¤ected by labor market tightness. Credit market tightness remains a constant of parameters.

  2 documents to download

  • Part II (PDF, 602.4 kb)

  • Part I (PDF, 221.4 kb)

• Friday 6 November 2009 16:30-18:00

  NOTE: MSE — 114

  Michael Rosholm, Aarhus School of Business
  Experimental evidence on the effectiveness of intensive labour market policies
  Speaker’s homepage
  (Please note:Room and day change)

  Abstract

  This paper presents experimental evidence on the causes of the apparent success of the Danish labour market model during recent decades, where structural unemployment has been lowered from 9 to around 3.5%. The culprit is perceived to be the Flexicurity concept, relying heavily on active labour market policies for several purposes. There are a number of social labour market policy experiments involving further tightening of labour market policies that can shed light on this explanatiion. We study short run effects of intensive ALMPs, long run effects, and substitution effects in the experimental settings, and find robust positive effects of more intensive ALMP regimes.

• Monday 12 October 2009 16:30-18:00

  MSE

  Govert Bijwaard, Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)
  Labour Market Status and Migration Dynamics
  Page web de l’intervenant

  Abstract

  In this empirical paper we assess how labour market transitions and out- and repeat migration of immigrants are interrelated. We estimate a multi-state multiple spell competing risks model with four states: employed, unemployed receiving benefits, out-of-the-labour market (no benefits) and abroad. We discuss one-step ahead transitions from all four states and the transition probability, including all intermediate transitions, from employment.
  Based on the estimated parameters we simulate the labour-migration dynamics for a synthetic cohort to derive relevant economic indicators, e.g. the probability of experiencing an unemployment spell.
  For the analysis we use data on recent labour immigrants to The
  Netherlands, which implies that all migrants are (self)-employed at the
  time of arrival. We find that many migrants leave the country after a
  period of no-income. Employment characteristics and the country of origin
  play an important role in explaining the dynamics. The microsimulations of
  synthetic cohorts reveal that many migrants experience unemployment spells, but ten years after arrival only a few are unemployed. They also indicate that the Credit Crunch will not only increase the unemployment among migrants but also departure from the country. An increase in the number of migrants from the EU accession countries will lead to more dynamics. We do not expect that the recent simplification of the entry of high income migrants will have a lasting effect, as many of those migrants leave fast.

  1 document to download

  • Papier (PDF, 607.8 kb)

• Monday 29 June 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Joel HOROWITZ, Northwestern University
  Specification testing in nonparametric instrumental variables estimation

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 200.7 kb)

• Monday 22 June 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Emmanuel DUGUET, Université d’Evry
  Are young French jobseekers of ethnic immigrant origin discriminated against? A controlled experiment in the Paris Area

• Monday 15 June 2009 16:30-18:00

  salle 6ème

  Marc FERRACCI, Université de Marne-la-vallée
  Analyzing the anticipation of treatments using data on notification dates

• Monday 25 May 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  ROOM CHANGE Salle 114

  Susanne SCHENNACH, University of Chicago
  Entropic Latent Variable Integration via Simulation

• Monday 18 May 2009 16:30-18:00

  salle 6e

  Bo HONORE, Princeton University
  Estimation of a Transformation Model with Truncation, Interval Observation and Time-Varying Covariates

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 304.9 kb)

• Monday 4 May 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  salle 6ème

  Catherine DOZ
  A two-step estimator for large approximate dynamic factor models based on Kalman ¯ltering

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 312 kb)

• Monday 27 April 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Fatih GUVENEN, University of Minnesota
  Taxation of Human Capital and Cross-country Trends in Wage Inequality

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 686.5 kb)

• Monday 20 April 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  No seminar

• Monday 13 April 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  No seminar

• Monday 6 April 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Bruce Shearer, Université Laval
  TBA

• Monday 6 April 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Bruce SHEARER, Université Laval
  On the Relevance and Composition of Gifts within the Firm: Evidence from Field Experiments

  1 document to download

  • info document (PDF, 261.7 kb)

• Monday 30 March 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Andrew CHESHER, University College London
  Single equation endogenous binary response models

  2 documents to download

  • info document (PDF, 551 kb)

  • Schedule (PDF, 11 kb)

• Monday 23 March 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Charles MANSKI, Northwestern University
  Diversified Treatment under Ambiguity

  2 documents to download

  • info document (PDF, 278.3 kb)

  • Schedule for Charles MANSKI (PDF, 11.1 kb)

• Monday 9 March 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Robert PORTER, Northwestern University

  1 document to download

  • The Effects of Technological Improvements on Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration and Development (PDF, 258.4 kb)

• Monday 2 March 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Olivier DONNI, Université de Cergy-Pontoise
  Labor Supply in the Extended Family: Theory and Evidence from South Africa

• Monday 23 February 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  No seminar

• Monday 16 February 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  No seminar

• Monday 9 February 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Steffen Huck, University College of London

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Huck1-2.pdf" title='PDF - 453.7 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 453.7 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>comparing charitable fundraising schemes

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Huck2-2.pdf" title='PDF - 489.5 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 489.5 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Testing consumer theory in the field: Private consumption versus charitable goods

• Monday 2 February 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Shelly LUNDBERG, University of Washington

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Lundberg.pdf" title='PDF - 192.2 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 192.2 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Decision-making by Children

• Monday 26 January 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Cristian BARTOLUCCI, CEMFI

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Bartolucci-2.pdf" title='PDF - 341 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 341 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Gender Wage Gaps Reconsidered: A Structural Approach Using Matched Employer-Employee Data

• Monday 19 January 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Bernard FORTIN, Université Laval

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Fortin.pdf" title='PDF - 277.9 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 277.9 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Are Children Decision-Makers Within the Household?

• Monday 12 January 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Jérôme ADDA, Univerisyt College London

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Adda.pdf" title='PDF - 360 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 360 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Labour Market Programmes and Labour Market Outcomes: A study of the Swedish Active Labour Market Interventions

• Monday 5 January 2009 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  No seminar

• Monday 22 December 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  No seminar

• Monday 15 December 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Andrea ICHINO, University of Bologna

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Ichino.pdf" title='PDF - 430.7 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 430.7 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>The Political Economy of Intergenerational Income Mobility

• Monday 8 December 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Pierre GRANIER, GREQAM

  1 document to download

  • Le service militaire et l'insertion professionnelle des jeunes suivant leur niveau d'études : les leçons de la suspension de la conscription (PDF, 1.2 Mb)

• Monday 1 December 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Bruce FALLICK, Federal Reserve Board

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Fallick.pdf" title='PDF - 144.2 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 144.2 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Employment and Wage Consequences of Job Separation in the United States

• Saturday 29 November 2008 12:30-14:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Date and time change Salle 6e

  Hermann VAN DIJK, Erasmus University Rotterdam

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Van_Dijk.pdf" title='PDF - 2 Mb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 2 Mb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Bayesian Forecasting of Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall using Adaptive Importance Sampling

• Monday 17 November 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  ANNULE

  Cancelled

• Wednesday 12 November 2008 12:30-14:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Date and time change Salle 6e

  Janet CURRIE, Columbia University

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Currie.pdf" title='PDF - 274.3 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 274.3 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Child Health and Young Adult Outcomes

• Monday 3 November 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  No seminar

• Monday 27 October 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  No Seminar

• Monday 20 October 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Guido SCHWERDT, IFO

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Schwerdt.pdf" title='PDF - 385.8 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 385.8 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Labor Turnover Before Plant Closure: ’Leaving the Sinking Ship’ vs. ’Captain Throwing Ballast Overboard’

• Monday 13 October 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Thierry MAGNAC, Université de Toulouse
  Set Identified Linear Models

• Monday 6 October 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Christophe MULLER, Université de Cergy-Pontoise

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Muller.pdf" title='PDF - 301 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 301 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Focused Transfer Targeting against Poverty

• Monday 29 September 2008 16:30-18:00

  Maison des Sciences Economiques, 106-112, boulevard de L’Hôpital, Paris 13°

  Salle 6e

  Audra BOWLUS, University of Western Ontario

  Abstract

  <a href="IMG/pdf/Muller.pdf" title='PDF - 301 kb' type="application/pdf"><img src='plugins-dist/medias/prive/vignettes/pdf.png' width='52' height='52' alt='PDF - 301 kb' />

  
  <dt
  class='spip_doc_titre' style='width:120px;'>Focused Transfer Targeting against Poverty

  1 document to download

  • Human Capital Prices, Productivity and Growth (PDF, 1.1 Mb)