Economics serving society

February 2020

Why are we sometimes over-confident about our chances of success and sometimes not confident enough?

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Louis Levy-Garboua*, Muniza Askari and Marco Gazel

People often underestimate their chances of succeeding in a difficult task but underestimate them when it is an easy one. Psychologists call this phenomenon the “hard-easy effect”. Is this behaviour due to a “cognitive bias” inherent in a limited rationality? Or does it reveal a temporary learning phase among rational individuals who do not know a priori their real capacities for succeeding at a new task? In this article, Lévy-Garboua, Askari and Gazel answer the question by offering a model of “intuitive rationality” that integrates the two...

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Do drought episodes in Mali cause mass migrations?

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Dimitri Defrance, Esther Delesalle and Flore Gubert*

Recurring warnings from IPCC experts about the magnitude of future climate disruption are often accompanied by very alarming messages about the number of climatic or environmental migrants likely to arrive at Europe’s doorstep. While the influence of the climate on human mobility is undeniable and documented throughout history, the number of people who will leave their region of origin on a permanent basis in the coming years because of the direct or indirect effects of climatic disturbances are difficult to estimate accurately...

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How to forecast economic cycles after the 2008-2009 recession?

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Catherine Doz*, Laurent Ferrara and Pierre-Alain Pionnier

Macroeconomic forecasts are often made by separating two objectives: providing the growth rate of the variable of interest (usually GDP) and providing a more qualitative prediction of turning points in the economic cycle. Yet the 2008-09 Great Recession, and the period of weak growth that followed in most advanced economies, showed that it could be crucial to combine these two approaches. To do that, macroeconomic forecasters need models accounting for...

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Which political and economic factors led to antisemitic pogroms in the Russian Empire?

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Irena Grosfeld*, Seyhun Orcan Sakalli and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya*

What are the economic and political determinants of ethnic violence? Political scientists have extensively studied how factors such as political instability and weakness of the state affect the likelihood of outbreaks of civil conflict. Economists, in turn, have provided robust evidence that economic downturns are an important trigger of civil conflict and that ethnic violence is aggravated by economic competition between ethnic majority and ethnic minority....

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* Paris School of Economics members