Publications des chercheurs de PSE

As from 2009 there are more Chinese women than men enrolled in college. To address this question, we propose a simple model with premarital education investment and endogenous marital matching where spouses split the joint revenue. We show that if women are not empowered enough, then neither men nor women obtain tertiary education. Women's education overtake can only arise if they are powerful enough within their marriage, if educated women's salary is sufficiently high and if there are enough educated men to mate. We calibrate our model using data from the Chinese Census in order to solve the Chinese puzzle, i.e. to understand how Chinese women are better educated without being sufficiently empowered. We find our first that despite the overall increase in education for both men and women, and the raise in women's salaries for all education levels, Chinese women have actually not gained power in the markets since the gender wage gap is widening for all levels of education. Second, that women's education is tightly linked to their power within the household. Indeed, the increase in women's education is not due to an increase in women's power, but on the contrary, a measure to counterbalance a striking decrease.

The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intra-household decision-making process, the strategies put in place by individuals to secure their access to private resources, and the role of the changing economic environment in altering these mechanisms. This paper bridges different strands of the social sciences and exemplifies the complementarities among them. The main features of household organization are described to set the scene for the individual strategies introduced to bypass intra-household negotiations and secure access to private resources. These strategies include efforts to maintain access to income-earning opportunities and secrecy about income and savings. This paper also discusses attempts to maintain or tilt the balance of power within the household through the use of violence, on the one hand, and marital and fertility choices on the other hand. Finally, this paper describes directions for future research aimed at improving the understanding of household behaviour and responses to economic stimuli.

La répartition égalitaire des ressources à l'intérieur du ménage est l'hypothèse la plus communément employée dans l'économie du bien être. A ce jour, très peu de travaux ont tenté de la dépasser. Les résultats sont cependant limités du fait du manque de données appropriées ou du manque de généralité des modèles. Cet article propose un nouveau cadre d'analyse permettant de dériver la règle de partage à partir du pouvoir de négociation. Ce pouvoir est défini pour chaque composant du ménage comme la partie de ressources obtenue par le ménage grâce à sa présence. Les déterminants des différentiels de pouvoir et leurs impacts sur la distribution des revenus sont analysés pour quatre pays européens présentant des différences significatives en termes de systèmes de redistribution : Finlande, Italie, Allemagne et Royaume Uni.

La répartition égalitaire des ressources à l'intérieur du ménage est l'hypothèse la plus communément employée dans l'économie du bien-être. A ce jour, très peu de travaux ont tenté de la dépasser. Les résultats sont cependant limités du fait du manque de données appropriées ou du manque de généralité des modèles. Cet article propose un nouveau cadre d'analyse permettant de dériver le poids stratégique des composants d'un ménage. Cet indice est défini pour chaque composant du ménage comme la partie de ressources obtenue par le ménage grâce à sa présence. Les déterminants des différentiels de pouvoir et leurs impacts sur la distribution des revenus sont analysés pour quatre pays européens présentant des différences significatives en termes de systèmes de redistribution : Finlande, Italie, Allemagne et Royaume-Uni.

This paper considers whether earned wealth affects bidding behavior in an induced-value second-price auction. We find people bid more sincerely in the auction with earned wealth given monetary incentives; earned wealth did not induce sincere bidding in hypothetical auctions.

We use British panel data to determine the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviours (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect of income on health, as the amount won by winners is largely exogenous. Positive income shocks have no significant effect on self-assessed overall health, but a significant positive effect on mental health. This result seems paradoxical on two levels. First, there is a well-known gradient in health status in cross-section data, and, second, general health should partly reflect mental health, so that we may expect both variables to move in the same direction. We propose a solution to the first apparent paradox by underlining the endogeneity of income. For the second, we show that lottery winnings are also associated with more smoking and social drinking. General health will reflect both mental health and the effect of these behaviours, and so may not improve following a positive income shock.

During the crisis, French savers are turning even more towards safe, short-term assets or real estate and away from more risky and long-term financial investments. This state of affairs is a cause of concern to some analysts, who are looking for ways to encourage households to take more risks and put more of their savings into productive investment. Theoretical and statistical analysis show that this reluctance to invest in the stock market comes as much from the supply side – transaction costs in the broad sense, relatively unfavourable taxation that reduces the expected return – as from the demand side – lack of financial education among savers, aversion to risks perceived as being too high, exposure to other risks (income, unemployment, family, health, housing, human capital). In this article, after analyzing financial behaviours in France and Europe, we propose a number of propositions for redirecting savings towards more risky investments.

We analyse the relationship between early maternal employment and child emotional and behavioural outcomes in early childhood and adolescence. Using rich data from a cohort of children born in the UK in the early 1990s, we find little evidence of a strong statistical relationship between early maternal employment and any of the emotional outcomes. However, there is some evidence that children whose mother is in full-time employment at the 18th month have worse behavioural outcomes at ages 4, 7, and 12. We suggest that these largely insignificant results may in part be explained by mothers who return to full-time work earlier being able to compensate their children: we highlight the role of fathers’ time investment and alternative childcare arrangements in this respect.

This paper examines how interventions during early childhood affect disciplining methods in Colombia, where poor households are eligible for a number of social programs targeted to young children, based on a proxy means index. These programs include child care options, nutritional programs and health checks. I analyze whether these programs affect parents' disciplining methods through two different identification strategies. I implement a regression discontinuity design exploiting the discontinuity on the probability of benefiting from these programs, as a function of the proxy means index used for targeting. I also implement a propensity score matching using differences in length of exposure to one of these programs, a subsidized child care program. Results from the first identification strategy show that fathers of children who benefit from these programs to a larger extent, use less physical ways to discipline their children. On the other hand, mothers of children who have been exposed longer to the subsidized child care option, appear to move to more pedagogic ways of discipline. These results hold in particular for households with working or more educated mothers.

Using the first wave of the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), a large micro-level data set on households’ balance sheets in fifteen euro-area countries, this paper explores how households allocate their assets. We derive stylized facts on asset participation as well as the portfolio shares of asset holdings and investigate the systematic relationships between household characteristics and asset holding patterns. Real assets make up the bulk of total assets. Whereas ownership of the main residence varies strongly between countries, the value of the main residence tends to be the major asset for homeowners and represents a signif- icant part of total assets in all countries. While almost all households hold safe financial assets, a low share of households holds risky assets. The ownership rates of all asset categories generally increase with wealth (and income). The significance of inheritances for homeownership and holding of other real estate is remarkable. We tentatively link differences in asset holding patterns across countries to differences in institutions.

This study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti-malaria products in Senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health. Building upon the seminal paper of Dow et al. (1999), we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality risks, in which people allocate expenses to equalize lifetime across all causes of death. We predict that private health investments to fight malaria as well as other diseases should increase in response to anti-malaria public interventions. To test this prediction, we use original panel data from a Senegalese household survey combined with geographical information on malaria prevalence. Our strategy is to compare the evolution of child health expenditures before and after anti-malaria interventions, between malarious and non-malarious regions of Senegal. We find that health expenditures in malarious regions catch up with non-malarious regions, at the extensive and intensive margins, and both in level and in composition. The same result holds for parental health-seeking behavior in case of other diseases like diarrhea. We provide evidence that these patterns cannot be explained by differential trends in total income or access to healthcare or child morbidity between malarious and non-malarious regions. Our results suggest that behavioral responses to anti-malaria campaigns magnify their impact on all-cause mortality for children.

In the classic equivalence scale estimations based on micro-econometric analysis, only the costs of market consumption are taken into account. We define the concept of full cost equivalence scales as integrating both monetary and the time use costs and measure it on matched French family budget and time use surveys. These data allow us to define full prices and to estimate equivalence scales conditional to possible substitution through prices. The results show higher full scales than the monetary for the preferred Independent of a Base specification. Relative to the cost of the second adult, the full child cost is also larger than the monetary for matching estimators and the Prais-Houthakker model. It shows households' capacity to substitute domestic production to market activities. In consequence the measures of income inequality diminish considerably using full income and full equivalence scales.