PSE Chaired professor and Opening Economics Chair holder
PSE Internal Seminar
Internal monthly meeting allowing PSE searchers and PhD students to present their on-going work.
This seminar is co-funded by a French government subsidy managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the framework of the Investissements d’avenir programme reference ANR-17-EURE-0001.
Organizers
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PSE Chaired Professor
Administrative correspondent
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Administration Assistant
Multiple event dates
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Neighbor Effects and Early Track Choices, with Manon Garrouste (University Paris Saclay)
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What are the limits to private certification? Evidence from an attempt to protect Intact Forests
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Place-Based Policies: Opportunity for Deprived Schools or Zone-and-Shame Effect with Manon Garrouste (Université Paris-Saclay)
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Even though place-based policies involve large public transfers toward low-income neighborhoods, they may backfire by stigmatizing the targeted areas. This paper appeals to the quasi-experimental discontinuity in a French reform that redrew the zoning map of subsidized neighborhoods based on a sharp poverty cut-off to assess place-based policies’ “net” effect on school enrollment. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence of stigma from policy designation, as public middle schools located in neighborhoods below the poverty cut-off saw a significant decrease in their post-reform pupil enrollment, compared to their counterfactual analogs in unlabeled areas lying just above the threshold. This “zone-and-shame” effect is immediate; it persists up to five years after the reform, and it is triggered by the reactions of parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who started avoiding public schools in labeled areas and shifted to those in unlabeled areas or only for wealthy parents, to private schools. On the contrary, we uncover only weak evidence of stigma reversion after an area loses its designation, suggesting hysteresis in bad reputations conveyed by policy labeling. -
True colors: identity and authenticity in social interaction with Rachel Kranton
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We study a model of social interactions where agents choose a behavior which may be in conflict with their identity. We consider two possible identities which give rise to a majority and a minority group. We study the impact of commitment on the behavior and welfare of the agents in the majority and minority groups. We also analyze how competition among agents affects the incentives to commit
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Floods and residential mobility in France, with : Christine Le Thi (OECD) and Julie Sixou (INSEE)
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In this article, we analyse residential mobility following floods using comprehensive French data. Our identification strategy consists in comparing individuals living in zones exposed to flood risk which were actually subject to a flood, with individuals also residing in flood risk zones but which were not subject to flood. Our results suggest that residential mobility increases by 1 percentage point in the two years following a flood. The effects are larger for private renters than for home-owners. Mobility rates following flood are also lower for the bottom and top quintiles of equivalised disposable income than for the middle quintiles. When analysing aggregate flows at the municipality level, we find no effect of flooding on residential mobility on average, confirming the importance of using granular individual data. However, there are changes in the composition of population outflows and inflows. We find a decrease in the share of people with an equivalised disposable income below the national median in the population outflows from municipalities with flooding. The share of homeowners is also lower in the post-flood population outflows. -
Urbanisation and urban divergence: France 1760 – 2020 – with Pierre-Philippe Combes, Gilles Duranton, Clément Gorin and Frédéric Robert-Nicoud
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We use a combination of image processing and machine learning tools to extract data from historical maps of France. Granular information about the distribution of population allows us to delineate cities consistently (and relatively) over 260 years. Against a backdrop of rising population, the rate of urbanization increased, but the number of cities declined, and the size distribution of cities also became increasingly skewed. Within cities, population density rose, and its gradient flattened. To bring these facts together, we propose a model of urban divergence for which we verify further empirical predictions
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Quantifying Climate Damages When Regions Trade: A Structural Gravity Approach, with Jeanne Astier, Geoffrey Barrows, Raphael Calel
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This paper presents a method for estimating treatment effects of local cost shocks when regions trade with each other. Because of spillovers induced by trade flows, comparing the evolution of outcomes between pre-shock and post-shock periods in regions exposed versus unexposed to local shocks leads to a biased estimate of treatment effect. We model these across-region dependencies using standard assumptions from international trade theory. We use our model-consistent estimation strategy to revisit the literature on the evaluation of impacts from climate change onto country-level gross output using year-to-year variation in temperature and precipitation. -
The Distributional Effects of Oil Shocks with Actual and Counterfactual Monetary Policy With Mitman, Kramer with Mitman, Kramer
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We study the effects of oil supply shocks across the income distribution using 45 years of high-frequency German administrative data. At the bottom of the distribution, earnings growth two years after an exogenous 10-percent rise in oil prices falls by 0.75 percentage points; the top of the distribution is affected little. Similarly, the separation probability rises significantly at the low end of the distribution while the top is unaffected. We investigate how the systematic response of monetary policy to oil shocks affects these findings. Monetary tightening to counteract oil-shock-induced inflation generates significant output and employment costs. Across the income distribution, we find that the tightening of the nominal rate in response to oil shocks hurts the bottom of the income distribution disproportionately more than the top.
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We examine the impact of the recommender algorithm of Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) on political attitudes. In a field experiment conducted in 2023, we randomly assigned active U.S.-based users to either an algorithmic feed or a chronological feed for seven weeks, measuring their political attitudes and online behavior. Several key findings emerged: Switching from the chronological to the algorithmic feed increases user engagement and shifts political opinions toward more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump, and views on the war in Ukraine. Using NLP methods to analyze the content of users’ feeds, we confirm that the algorithm promotes more conservative content. In contrast, we do not find symmetrical effects among users randomized to switch from the algorithmic feed to the chronological feed, suggesting that exposure to recommender algorithms persistently affects political attitudes. We provide evidence for the mechanism behind this effect: exposure to algorithmically curated content induces users to follow new accounts, which they continue to follow even after the algorithmic feed is switched off
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How do homophily and talent shape the dynamics of collegial organizations? This paper shows that to avoid depriving itself of its talent pool, an organization’s majority may leverage the minority’s own homophily by voluntarily engaging in affirmative action. This occurs when the organization, while currently unattractive to the minority, still retains enough quality and diversity to allow a turnaround. A small decrease in the initial quality or diversity of the organization may induce a vicious path instead of a virtuous one. We consider both quality-based and diversity-based interventions and characterize when they improve or reduce welfare
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The Effect of Public Transport Pricing Policy: Experimental Evidence , joint with Philippe Gagnepain (PSE, Paris 1) , Sébastien Massoni (Université de Lorraine, Beta) et Alexandre Mayol (Université de Lorraine, Beta)
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We investigate the impact of different public transport pricing schemes on daily com- muting habits. We build a controlled experiment, where participants make transport mode decisions and are assumed to be affected by psychological inertia and car sticki- ness. Our findings indicate that players are rational as they reach the Nash predictions of our model, but cognitive biases inherent to commuters are also present. Peak/off- peak and two-part tariffs prove to be more successful in encouraging public transport mode use than transit passes, possibly due to a preference for flexibility and the abil- ity to take past experiences into account (congestion and incident) in future travel choices. Thus, this paper suggests that well-designed pricing strategies are useful tools to promote public transport use and reduce road congestion. -
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