Economics serving society

December 2019

This edition offers five synthesis of Paris School of Economics APE and PPD masters students’ dissertations (academic year 2018-2019). The Paris Schoool of Economics thanks the students for their participation and the masters’ directors Bernard Caillaud, Jean-Philippe Tropeano, Marc Gurgand and Akiko Suwa-Eisenmann for their collaboration

When Matching Market Participants Imperfectly Learn, Who Ends Up Matched With Whom?

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Laure Goursat (master APE)

According to Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth, a matching market is “a market in which prices do not do all the work”. Examples of such markets include college admissions, organ donation (matching without transfers - forbidding monetary exchanges), or labor market, even marriage (matching with transfers - allowing monetary exchanges). In particular on such markets, prices do not do the usual simplifying work they usually perform on classical markets, that is they do not aggregate supply and demand parameters...

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How does inequality fundamentally change economic models?

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Morten Nyborg Støstad (master APE)

Most economic models assume that we are unaffected by the inequality around us. Recent research, however, indicates that this is unlikely to be the case. Inequality seems to change at least some factors we individually care about, such as crime, health, political unrest, and so on. It follows, then, that living in a society with high inequality might directly impact our lives – and if economic models consistently assume that it does not, policy suggestions are likely to be biased or incomplete ...

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Are children’s earliest years the most important for their cognitive development?

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Duncan Webb (master PPD)

An expansive body of evidence that spans economics, biology, and neuroscience now backs up the claim that what happens to children in their early childhood can have large effects on their wellbeing and economic productivity in adulthood. Nutrition, exposure to disease, and parental behaviour can all have powerful impacts on children’s cognitive and socioemotional development. These in turn affect individuals’ success in school, the job market, and other areas of life. And such factors may be particularly important in low- and middle-income countries, where children might be more vulnerable to shocks ...

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Can algorithmic predictions and online advice help to reduce unemployment?

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Yagan Hazard (master PPD)

Since the early 2000s, the Internet has created among economists and policy makers some hope for an increase in job search efficiency. Many thought the Internet would enable a much larger number of vacancies and job seekers to “meet” each other, given the low cost of both posting a vacancy on the web and searching for a job on online platforms that would centralize those job offers. Yet the first attempts to evaluate the effect of online job search and online platforms tempered the enthusiasm, as no significant effect were found ...

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Was interwar military conscription in French West Africa an efficient recruitment method?

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Zhexun Fred Mo (master APE)

Sub-Saharan Africa has long been characterized as a region of abundant land and scarce labor during both the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Such labor scarcity had led the European colonizers to resort towards forced-labor regimes, in order to finance either large-scale infrastructure projects or satisfy the needs of military expeditions. Among them all, the French colonial military conscription system (recruits of which now often referred to as “Tirailleurs Sénégalais”) was one of the most drastic and exploitative forced-labor regimes ...