Publications by PSE researchers

We emphasize an important point in the transformation of sources into data that affects economists and historians alike in every era: the theoretical framework they share. On a broad scale, three major moments can be distinguished during the twentieth century in terms of the general conceptual framework for economic data, which we shall call the price era, the quantity era and the individual era. In the first, economic activity is observed primarily through prices, which is justified by the preponderance of price theory. In the second, the organized measurement of quantities is produced by national accounting systems within the framework of Keynesian macroeconomic theory, and then of growth theory. Criticism of these earlier frameworks is now leading to experimentation with a very large number of measures, characterized by the sheer volume of information analyzed, greater vagueness between sources and data, and a multiplicity of conceptual frameworks. While each of these three stages represents a break with the previous ones, they nonetheless retain much of what has already been achieved.

The reforms of the Paris Stock Exchange between 1893 and 1898 gave rise to manifestations of antisemitism that were very much of their time. Supporters of the stockbrokers’ monopoly branded their opponents who participated in the free market (known as coulissiers ) as Jews. Beyond the conservative defense of a privileged guild and its liberal contestation, this episode illuminates two conceptions of the financial market that are still current today. The coulissiers favored liquidity and speed of execution, professional financiers, and international exchanges, potentially at the cost of trading security and equality, and to the detriment of small traders and market stability. The official brokers ( agents de change ) had opposite priorities. The debate was complexified by the emergence of a third, socialist position that rejected both liberal and conservative visions, proposing a public-service stock exchange that would favor transparency and security without benefiting a privileged group. Although this position did not win out, it nevertheless heralded new conceptions of the market economy.

We study two regulatory changes that affected competition between the transparent Parquet and the OTC-like Coulisse markets in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century. The two reforms determined three regimes of competition—illegal competition, free competition, and enforced monopoly. After documenting institutional changes and their political economy, we show that the Paris market touch (i.e., the average spread of securities traded in the two markets) widened under the free competition regime but narrowed under the enforced monopoly regime to a size much smaller than during the first. These results accord with recent literature that questions the effects of competition between transparent and opaque markets; a transparent monopoly might be more effective than competition if the latter involves opaque markets.

Grâce à une démonstration implacable, Thomas Philippon jette une lumière crue sur l’accroissement du pouvoir des monopoles aux États-Unis et ses conséquences néfastes sur les prix et l’investissement. L’analyse pourrait être prolongée en recourant à d’autres disciplines que l’économie.

The last paper of the session was aimed at offering some insights from a later perspective. The researcher analysed and compared two market systems which coexisted in the 19th-century Paris Stock Exchange, the Coulisse (unregulated market) and the Parquet (strictly regulated), arguing for a complementarity of the two rather than a competition between them

This text presents the hypothesis at the origin of this book, namely the crucial character of the Great War in the economic and social history of Europe in the 20th century, in comparison, in particular, with the Great Depression or the Second World War. It discusses the reasons for asking this question, both in terms of the evolution of the historiography of the Great War, and the place of this unprecedented conflict in the "spontaneous" representations of the 20th century (and thus among possible points of comparison for contemporary crises), particularly in the economic world, with the consequences this may have for economic policy choices made on a national or international scale. It presents the shocks resulting from the Great War: demographic and health shocks, rural and urban destruction, environmental damage, population movements, monetary and financial crises, instability of public finances, reduced trade, new fragilities of peace, the Bolshevik revolution. On the other hand, he considers several major areas in which the Great War was part of a longer movement, such as the rise of technosciences and social protection, transformations in business and work, the expanding role of States, and changes in international relations with the rise of national liberation movements in colonial empires and the establishment of international organizations. All in all, it suggests that the Great War may have been a unique turning point, from which the various local, national and international players drew the final lessons after 1945 and up to 1973, contributing to a new phase of globalization and proposing new answers to the nagging question of inequality.

Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face.Les lauréats du Prix du meilleur jeune économiste livrent dans cet ouvrage leur perception, leur compréhension, leurs analyses et leurs propositions de ce que pourrait ou devrait être l’avenir du monde. Ils répondent aux questions fondamentales que se posent aujourd’hui les économistes et les principaux dirigeants. Les inégalités qui se creusent depuis la fin du siècle dernier sont-elles encore tolérables ? L’État social a-t-il encore un avenir ? La mondialisation est-elle vraiment la cause de tous les maux ? L’Europe reste-t-elle un espace économique pertinent ? La science économique s’ouvre-t-elle enfin aux autres disciplines ? Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face. Créé en 2000 par le Cercle des économistes et le journal Le Monde, le Prix du meilleur jeune économiste est décerné chaque année à un économiste de moins de 40 ans, sélectionné en raison de la reconnaissance de son expertise et de sa participation active au débat public et économique.

The recessions during the periods in the 1930s and starting in 2008 are compared on two points : a) public authorities’ reactions at the peak of these two banking and financial crises (which differed significantly thanks to what both the United States and Europe had learned during the Great Depression) ; and b) the financial regulations adopted in reaction to the 2008 meltdown. In the main, the regulations adopted during the Great Depression were gradually lifted between the 1950s and 1990s, thus doing away with many inconsistences and sources of inefficiency but also recreating considerable fragility – as became apparent in 2008. Owing to the political and scientific context, the long stagnation after 2008 has not (yet) set off a regulatory trend on as large a scale as during the Great Depression.

This paper aims at explaining the changes in the number of bankruptcies during the second part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We firstly study these changes in the perspective of the evolution of the French insolvency law; we then introduce a geographic dimension that we show to be very relevant. We indeed observe that the court of the Paris district is more tolerant than the others; however, this kind of use of the law will spread in the other courts until the reform in 1889 that creates the judicial liquidation. The spatial analysis permits us to show that the changes in the law do not explain the total variations of the total amount of bankruptcies. The local practices, the way judicial agents act and the changes in the firms’ strategies are also essential in the explanation.

La création des banques qui sont devenues les banques centrales modernes s’étend du xvii e siècle (la Banque d’Amsterdam, la Banque de Suède et la Banque d’Angleterre) au xx e siècle (le Federal Reserve System des États-Unis et bien d’autres). Fondées dans des contextes très différents, ces banques ont, à l’origine, peu en commun.

When faced with a run on a "systemically important" but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate was formed penalizing those who had participated in the copper speculation that had caused the crisis bringing the bank down. Creation of the syndicate and other actions were consistent with mitigating the moral hazard from such an intervention. This episode contrasts the advice given by Bagehot to the Bank of England to counter a panic by lending freely at a high rate on good collateral, allowing insolvent institutions to fail.