(May 2020) 5 papers...in 5 minutes!
How can information exchanges among competitors facilitate collusion?
David Spector*
The combination of increasingly punitive sanctions and leniency measures introduced by competition authorities has reduced the prevalence of traditional forms of “hard” collusion among large firms. Accordingly, competition authorities now are turning their attention to more subtle practices, which are more difficult to detect and classify in legal terms and, where appropriate, to apply sanctions. First and foremost, among them are information exchanges among competitors, which have been at the heart of several recent cases. One needs a better theoretical understanding of these information exchanges because their effects are ambiguous: they can improve efficiency in some circumstances, but they can also encourage ...
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Is there a link between marital payments and women’s well-being in Senegal?
Rozenn Hotte and Sylvie Lambert*
In many countries, marriages involve monetary transactions between the wedding couple’s families. In Senegal, a bride price paid by the groom (and his family) to the parents of his future wife is a widespread practice. According to the “Poverty and Family Structure” survey (Pauvreté et Structure Familiale, PSF) conducted in Senegal in 2006, a bride price was given in 85% of marriages occurring within the 10 years before the survey. This practice, highly codified, seals the alliance between two families, and the bride-to-be plays no part in the negotiations. In contrast to what happens in other African countries, the bride price ...
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Does immigration make Europeans less supportive of redistribution?
Alberto Alesina, Elie Murard, Hillel Rapoport*
Will immigration make Europeans less supportive of redistribution policies and, eventually, threaten the future of the Welfare State in Europe? To answer this question, Alberto Alesina, Elie Murard and Hillel Rapoport collected data on immigration stocks and on attitudes to redistribution in 140 regions of 16 Western European countries (in the years 2000 and 2010). Holding the analysis at the regional level allows them to introduce country-year fixed effects in their pooled cross-sectional regressions, thereby controlling for welfare and redistribution policies set at the national level that can potentially create “welfare-magnet effects”. The authors demonstrate that there are lower levels of …
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How do we measure skills and personality in developing countries?
Rachid Laajaj, Karen Macours*
Increasing human capital is often seen as key for reducing poverty. Large investments are made in training programmes aimed at improving skills ($1 billion a year by the World Bank alone). Skills are among the main drivers of productivity differences between sectors in the economy and cognitive and non-cognitive skills can be linked to individuals’ success in life. Development economists and policymakers therefore are increasingly interested in measuring skills and personality, and in using those measures for policy design and evaluations. Skills and personality are, however, complex and multidimensional, and therefore hard to measure. Typically, economic studies rely on …
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Industry policy: watch out for the backlash!
Catherine Bobtcheff*, Claude Crampes and Yassine Lefouili
The French law on the energy transition for green growth (La loi relative à la transition énergétique pour la croissance verte) sets the goal of raising the share of renewable energy to 32 % of gross final energy consumption by 2030. To achieve this goal and to stimulate demand for solar panels and windmill turbines, “every kilowatt hour put into the public grid will be bought by a buyer obliged to pay a feed-in tariff, fixed in advance”. The rationale behind this policy has been to take advantage of learning effects that is, the accumulation of experience over time, to reduce the costs …
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* PSE members