Publications des chercheurs de PSE

L’enquête «  Voices of Ukraine  » (VOU), initiée sur les réseaux sociaux en 2022 par une équipe de chercheuses et de chercheurs et un organisme de sondage, donne la parole aux exilé⋅e⋅s ukrainien⋅ne⋅s dispersé⋅e⋅s en Europe. Depuis l’Allemagne, la Pologne ou la France, principalement, les Ukrainien⋅ne⋅s déplacés par la guerre entre leur pays et la Russie reviennent sur leurs expériences du passage des frontières, leur installation dans les pays d’accueil, les obstacles rencontrés pour leur intégration, et leurs craintes et leurs espoirs concernant la guerre en Ukraine.

We propose a two-stage experiment in which people receive feedback about their relative intelligence. This feedback is a noisy message reminded at every stage, so that subjects cannot forget this ego-relevant information. Instead, we exogenously vary whether the informativeness of the message is reminded in the second stage. We investigate how this treatment variation affects the informativeness reported by subjects, and their posterior beliefs about their intelligence. We show that subjects report informativeness in a self-serving way: subjects with negative messages report that these messages are significantly less informative in the absence of reminder than with it. We also show that the lack of reminder about message informativeness allows subjects to keep a better image of themselves. These results are confirmed by complementary treatments in which we decrease messages informativeness: subjects tend to inflate the informativeness of positive messages that should now be interpreted as bad news.

We examine the political costs of taxation in early modern France. We focus on efforts to enforce the salt tax, the rate of which varied across regions. Using a spatial difference-in-discontinuities design, we compare municipalities just inside the high-tax region with those just outside, before and after a reform aimed at curbing illicit salt smuggling. We find that tax enforcement led to a twenty-fold increase in conflicts between taxpayers and the state in municipalities in the high-tax region. This effect persists until the French Revolution, supporting the view that enforcing the salt tax incurred significant political costs. Finally, we document that the likelihood of conflict increases with tax differences between neighboring regions, which we use to derive an upper bound on the political costs of increased tax enforcement in this historical period

Dix-huit Conférences citoyennes régionales (CCR) (13 dans les régions métropolitaines et cinq dans les départements et régions d’outre-mer) et une Conférence citoyenne nationale dédiée à la jeunesse se sont tenues dans la deuxième phase du Grand débat national (GDN) (soit les vendredi et samedi 15-16 mars 2019, soit les vendredi et samedi 22-23 mars 2019). 1 404 personnes y ont participé (1 216 dans les 13 CCR hexagonales, 68 dans la Conférence nationale sur la jeunesse, à partir d’un tirage au sort national dans la base des numéros de téléphones, et 120 dans les cinq CCR des départements et régions d’outre-mer, à partir d’un recrutement spécifique à chacun de ces territoires). Pour la France métropolitaine, il s’agit du plus vaste tirage au sort réalisé pour constituer un mini-public. Ce rapport décrit en premier lieu précisément le processus de recrutement, globalement désigné par les termes de tirage au sort, pour discuter la représentativité des CCR. Puis il décrit le protocole d’observation de leur déroulement, mis en place par l’Observatoire des débats (https://observdebats.hypotheses.org/), ainsi que le processus de passation des questionnaires lors des CCR, d’une part (en entrée et en sortie) par la mission organisatrice, d’autre part (en sortie) par les chercheurs rassemblés par l'Observatoire des débats. Le rapport compare ensuite les caractéristiques socio-démographiques des participants aux CCR avec celles de la population française générale, ce qui nous permet de montrer que les CCR ne sont pas représentatives de la population générale. Finalement, le rapport resitue les réponses données aux questionnaires et les statistiques descriptives associées (c’est-à-dire le nombre de répondants à chaque question et la distribution, la moyenne et l'écart-type des réponses).

The views expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the EU Tax Observatory. EU Tax Observatory working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been subject to peer-review or to the internal review process that accompanies ofBicial EU Tax Observatory publications.

This paper documents the rise of corporate tax-base narrowing measures in the EU using a novel dataset covering both tax rate and tax base reforms implemented between 2014 and 2022. Our findings indicate a shift away from the 'cut rate -broaden base' approach, as governments increasingly align corporate taxation with industrial policy objectives. We show that EU tax competition exerts downward pressure on high-tax countries, while the likelihood of tax cuts also varies with the political orientation of governments. Using financial accounts from more than 40,000 affiliates, we find that the average effective tax rate of multinational enterprises in the EU has declined more rapidly than the statutory rate and estimate that tax base reforms account for 24% of this decline. The estimated revenue cost of all reforms combined amounts to 3.5% of total corporate tax revenue collected from the sample firms. These revenue losses should be carefully weighed against the anticipated benefits of tax reforms.

This paper studies the impact of beneficial ownership transparency in the British real estate market. In an effort to reduce illicit investment following the invasion of Ukraine, the UK government announced a new law in 2022 requiring offshore companies that owned domestic real estate to identify their ultimate owners in a public register. Using a difference-in-difference framework, we find that new property purchases by companies registered in tax havens fell relative to those made via non-havens, a result consistent with transparency raising the costs of illicit investment. These declines persist even after dropping tax havens favored by Russians, suggesting that the reform drove the decline, rather than sanctions. We do not find strong evidence of price effects nor substitution into ownership through suspicious domestic companies. While the policy does appear to have been effective at deterring some anonymous investment into the British property market, incomplete implementation led some clients to still successfully shield their ownership information, implying scope for better design and enforcement in the future.

We propose and construct novel measures of the effectiveness and potential of trade blocs, combining estimation with granular data and simulation with a New Quantitative Trade Model. We deploy our methods and new indexes to quantify the potential benefits from (i) further integration within the largest and most successful trade liberalization effort in the world -the Single European Market -and (ii) a possible enlargement. Three main results and implications stand out from our analysis. First, European integration has been very effective in promoting trade among its members, with heterogeneous effects across industries and member states. Second, and most novel and important, our estimates reveal that only half of the potential benefits from EU membership have been realized to date. Third, EU accession will generate very large gains from trade for the new joiners and moderate gains for existing members, with larger benefits for some small and peripheral EU members. Importantly, our methods enable us to construct confidence bounds for the effects of EU enlargement.

How can social prospects be evaluated and compared when there may be a risk on i) the actual allocations that people will receive, ii) the existence of these future people, and iii) their preferences? This paper investigates this question, which can arise when considering policies, such as climate policy, that affect people who do not yet exist. We start from the observation that there is no social ordering that meets minimal requirements of fairness, social rationality, and respect for people's ex ante preferences. We explore three ways around this impossibility. First, if we drop the ex ante Pareto requirement, we can obtain fair ex post criteria that take an (arbitrary) expected utility of an equally-distributed equivalent level of well-being. Second, if the social ordering is not an expected utility, we can obtain fair ex ante criteria that evaluate uncertain individual prospects with a certaintyequivalent measure of well-being. Third, if we accept that interpersonal comparisons rely on VNM utility functions even in absence of risk, we can construct expected utility social orderings that satisfy of a version of Pareto ex ante.

Equivalence scales (ES) are widely used to compare income levels across different households. Yet the commonly used OECD and square-root scales rely on assumptions about household economies of scale that lack robust empirical support. Using responses to the Minimum Income Question (MIQ) from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey, we construct subjective ES based on panel data, rather than relying on pooled OLS as in most previous studies, allowing us to track how income needs evolve within households over time instead of comparing different households. The economies of scale in this subjective scale are notably different from those in traditional ES, and these differences have a substantial effect on the levels and distribution of equivalised income. Based on our empirical findings, we propose a simple alternative to conventional ES and illustrate its implications for poverty and inequality, both within and across countries. Our results show that the choice of equivalence scale significantly influences not only the estimated levels of these variables but also country rankings in comparative analyses.

We here use European Social Survey data to disentangle the 'inherited' and 'contextual' components of resilience, following the approaches taken in Alesina and Giuliano (2010) and Luttmer and Singhal (2011). We suggest that the inherited part of resilience reflects culture in the country of birth, while the contextual part captures both institutions and culture in the country where the individual currently resides. We separately identify these two components via a sample of immigrants, for whom the birth and residence countries differ. We find that resilience is both inherited and contextual, with the latter component being the most important. The 'inherited' component of resilience is larger for men and those who do not have citizenship in their residence country. We last present some evidence from second-generation immigrants of the intergenerational transmission of inherited cultural resilience.

We here use UK data and exploit the State Pension eligibility age to establish the causal effect of parental retirement on adult children's well-being in a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design analysis. Maternal retirement increases adult children's life and income satisfaction by 0.20 standard deviations in the short run. These impacts are stronger for adult children with lower incomes, with young children of their own, and who live close to their retired parents. We emphasise the critical role of intergenerational time transfers from retired mothers in enhancing their adult children's well-being.