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Exists also as CEPR Discussion Paper n°17310; We study the characteristics and behavior of small campaign donors and compare them to large donors by building a dataset including all the 340 million individual contributions reported to the U.S. Federal Election Commission between 2005 and 2020. Thanks to the reporting requirements of online fundraising platforms first used by Democrats (ActBlue) and now Republicans (WinRed), we observe contribution-level information on the vast majority of small donations. We first show that the number of small donors (donors who do not give more than $200 to any committee during a two-year electoral cycle) and their total contributions have been growing rapidly. Second, small donors include more women and more ethnic minorities than large donors, but their geographical distribution does not differ much. Third, using a saturated fixed effects model, we find that race closeness, candidate ideological extremeness, whether candidates and donors live in the same district or state, and whether they have the same ethnicity increase contributions, with lower effects for small donors. Finally, we show that campaign TV ads affect the number and size of contributions to congressional candidates, particularly for small donors, indicating that pull factors are relevant to explain their behavior.

This article assesses the impact of a two-year long project-based learning program conducted by the National Opera of Paris in a large number of junior high-schools located in underprivileged areas, aiming at preventing school dropout and tackling educational inequalities by providing disadvantaged students with the opportunity to discover the world of opera. Taking a counterfactual approach (propensity score matching), we measure the impact of participation in the program on final exam and continuous assessment grades. The analysis displays mixed results: a significant and positive impact for the students who participate in the program for its whole duration (two years), at least for continuousassessment scores, but a negative impact for those who leave the program after only one year. The contrast between the effects of full and partial participation in the program suggests that these may be primarily due to a selection effect in favor of the most culturally and socially compliant students, in line with Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s reproduction theory (1997 [1970]) rather than a mobility effect (DiMaggio, 1982) resulting from the transfer of cultural capital to disadvantaged students.

International audience; Paediatric sarcoidosis is an extremely rare disease characterized by a granulomatous inflammation. The estimated incidence is 0.6–1.02/100,000 children, but in the absence of international registers, the disease is probably under-reported. Its pathophysiologic basis is not clearly understood but the current hypothesis is a combination of a genetic predisposition and an environmental exposure that could be either organic or mineral. Contrary to adult forms of the disease, general symptoms are often at the forefront at diagnosis. In its most frequent form, paediatric sarcoidosis is a multi-organ disorder affecting preferentially the lungs, the lymphatic system and the liver, but all organs can be affected. This review aims to provide an overview of current knowledge on sarcoidosis in children, providing a summary of the data available from cohort studies on the presentation, the management and the evolution of the disease in this specific population.

International audience; We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the take-off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We study how this indicator relates to prices and quantities in the corporate real estate market. We find that for offices in counties more exposed, the Covid-19 crisis has led to (1) higher vacancy rates, (2) less construction, (3) lower prices. Our findings reveal that teleworking has already an impact on the office market. Furthermore, forward-looking indicators suggest that market participants are anticipating the shift to teleworking to be durable.

This study presents the results of a randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of a shared-book reading (SBR) intervention that targeted children aged 4 living in socially mixed neighborhoods of the city of Paris. We selected a large, random sample of families and provided parents with free books, information on the benefits of SBR and tips for effective reading practices. We measured SBR frequency and children's vocabulary before and after this intervention, among treated and control children. The intervention had a large effect on SBR frequency. At the pre-test, SBR on a daily basis involved 41.2% of the families, and the treatment fostered this practice by 8 percentage points. SBR on a weekly basis was fostered by 14 percentage points. The intervention fostered SBR frequency only in low-educated households. This equalizing impact is an important finding against the background of previous research reporting that disadvantaged families tend to benefit less from SBR programs. The intervention also significantly enhanced children's language skills measured with standardized tests of receptive vocabulary. The effect size for the main treatment effect ranges from 0.12 at the post-test to 0.16 at the follow-up. Treatment effects are persistent six months after the end of the intervention. Children from low-educated and immigrant families improved their vocabulary as much as those from high-educated, native families. Moreover, the persisting positive impacts on vocabulary growth detected at the follow-up also involve children from disadvantaged families. Furthermore, these children more often attend schools with lower educational resources. It is therefore encouraging that the intervention has strong impacts in schools with initially low involvement in reading-related activities and with low educational resources.

International audience; Future-oriented individuals tend to display more pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, compared to those who are present-oriented. Investigating the determinants of time preferences could therefore shed light on factors that also influence environmentalism. A key factor that impacts time preferences is socioeconomic status (SES). Importantly, SES is also positively correlated with willingness to act for the environment. In this paper, we test whether time preferences partially mediate the relationship between SES and pro-environmentalism in three studies. In the first study, we tested the assumption that pro-environmental attitudes are positively correlated with SES on a large cross-sectional French sample (N = 15,924). We found expected results both with an objective and a subjective measure of SES. Then, we conducted an online study including a temporal discounting task, which allowed us to fully test the mediation hypothesis on British participants (N = 650). Our results suggest that the positive association between SES and pro-environmental attitudes is partially mediated by temporal discounting, but no significant mediated relationship was found for pro-environmental behaviour. Finally, we conducted a third study with an experimental setting, for which we recruited British participants who underestimated their position in the income distribution (N = 855). In the treatment group, participants received a correction of their misperception, in order to increase their perceived relative income. Although the expected shift towards increased preferences for the future was not observed, we found a moderated effect of the treatment on pro-environmentalism.

International audience; As a long tradition in urban studies made clear, the production of urban space is twofold: users continuously reshape what a contentious political process produces at first. The struggle around conflictual memories invests cities increasingly by marking spots or reshaping places to reconstruct or re-signify past events.The politics of memory deploy a combination of argumentative, emotional and ordinary arguments. The intent is neither preserving nor deleting but re-writing memories. However, places interfere with the political and argumentative strategies making room for ordinary uses that question the stability of meanings, although not providing political answers to the issues of power and domination.The paper introduces sense-making to suggest that places reinforce the social processes that build collective memories. The relationship between memory and place is not unidirectional. Briefly, a social process infuses place and this latter ‘hits back’. This statement leads to the apparent odd conclusion that, in the long term, place-making is as essential as the reframing of memory.A few initiatives involving institutions, human rights movements and bottom-up initiatives in Buenos Aires are investigated: a clandestine detention centre, a memorial garden, an ordinary urban square, aiming at developing an analytical framework that highlights the details of the sense-making mechanism linking memories and places.

We present a general equilibrium model of the world economy where sovereigns face idiosyncratic risks and can default on their debt. In this model, the world interest rate is determined through the global financial market equilibrium, the amount of safe asset is endogenous and determines international risk sharing. Non-trivial multiple equilibria naturally arise, due to the endogeneity of the interest rate. These equilibria can be ranked according to their aggregate welfare, such that equilibria with a higher quantity of safe assets correspond to higher welfare. Due to a shortage in the safe asset supply, even the equilibrium with the highest welfare is not constrained-efficient. Finally, we prove that a world fund issuing a safe asset can reach the constrained-efficient aggregate welfare. With a standard calibration, the size of the fund is found to be around 4.1% of the world GDP. Its relationship with the Special Drawing Rights of the IMF is discussed.

The substantial turmoil created by both 2000 dot-com crash and 2008 subprime crisis has fueled the belief that the two classical paradigms of economics, which are the invisible hand and the rational agent, are not appropriate to describe market dynamics and should be abandoned at the benefit of alternative new theoretical concepts. At odd with such a view, using a simple model of choice dynamics from sociophysics, the invisible hand and the rational agent paradigms are given a new legitimacy. Indeed, it is sufficient to introduce the holding of a few intermediate mini market aggregations by agents sharing their own private information, to recenter the invisible hand and the rational agent at the heart of market self regulation including the making of bubbles and their subsequent crashes. In so doing, an elasticity is discovered in the market efficiency mechanism due to the existence of agents anticipation. This elasticity is found to create spontaneous bubbles, which are rationally founded, and at the same time, it provokes crashes when the limit of elasticity is reached. Although the findings disclose a path to put an end to the bubble-crash phenomena, it is argued to be rationality not feasible., 20 pages, 7 figures

International audience; Uncertainty in inherent to every aspects of medical practice. As the concept of uncertainty in healthcare is still to explore, deciphering the determinants and the roots of this uncertainty would benefit from the insights of various disciplines, such as epistemology, sociology, mathematics, or philosophy. The urgent need to improve physician's ability to cope with uncertainty, has been recently highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, the concept of uncertainty tolerance has been proposed, and could serve as a relevant basis for approaching uncertainty, in medical education. Thus, we propose at first to discuss the uncertainty tolerance framework from Hillen et al. Then, from an educational perspective, we outline some avenues regarding how uncertainty tolerance could be thought, in a competence-based approach, and discuss several educational activities, which have proven efficient in promoting uncertainty tolerance among medical practitioners abroad.

We study the impact of alternative innovation policies on the short- and long-run performance of the economy, as well as on public finances, extending the Schumpeter meeting Keynes agent-based model (Dosi et al., 2010). In particular, we consider market-based innovation policies such as R&D subsidies to firms, tax discount on investment, and direct policies akin to the “Entrepreneurial State” (Mazzucato, 2013), involving the creation of public research oriented firms diffusing technologies along specific trajectories, and funding a Public Research Lab conducting basic research to achieve radical innovations that enlarge the technological opportunities of the economy. Simu- lation results show that all policies improve productivity and GDP growth, but the best outcomes are achieved by active discretionary State policies, which are also able to crowd-in private investment and have positive hysteresis effects on growth dynamics. For the same size of public resources allocated to market-based interventions, “Mission” innovation policies deliver significantly better aggregate performance if the government is patient enough and willing to bear the intrinsic risks related to innovative activities.

[For it to be legitimate, this study must be carefully circumscribed. The problem it purports to address is not that of the legitimacy of the structures or organs of the European Union but that of the integration of EU law into the legal systems of its Member States[1]. By what title can EU law impose its norms on national legal systems, and so much so that the conditions in which rule-making is organized within those orders are affected to the point of turmoil? On what conditions can EU law be integrated? What consequences does such normative integration hold for the way in which relations among legal systems are described? Our discussion addresses not so much the actual dynamics of legal integration but rather the discourses of justification it produces and on which it rests.]

International audience We use the analogy-based expectation equilibrium (Jehiel, 2005) to study cheap talk from a sender who does not perfectly understand all the messages available to him. The sender is endowed with a privately known language competence corresponding to the set of messages that he understands. For the messages that he does not understand, the sender has correct but only coarse expectations about the equilibrium response of the receiver. An analogy-based expectation equilibrium is always a Bayesian solution but usually differs from a standard communication equilibrium and from an equilibrium with language barriers (Blume and Board, 2013). We characterize conditions under which an outcome remains an equilibrium outcome when the sender's competence decreases. Partial language competence rationalizes information transmission and lies in pure persuasion problems, and can facilitate information transmission from a moderately biased sender.

Science and knowledge are called to participate in the institutional, political and behavioral changes that are necessary to address biodiversity loss. Knowledge however does not possess direct performative powers, and the relationships between knowledge production and use are complex, as has been documented for multiple issues and by different fields of research. This paper proposes to unpack three dimensions of “decision-making”. By taking the field of ecosystem service assessment and valuation as its main example, the paper discusses and illustrates how this unpacking can help researchers situate themselves in the diversity of decision-making contexts that can exist, and how this can influence the contributions they can make to try and solve biodiversity issues they are involved in. After describing some key characteristics of the “rationalist” vision of decision, it suggests that looking at the temporal continuity of decision-making processes (e.g., a one-time moment versus a continuous and diffuse process), the degree of conflict in a process, and the range of actors involved and their modes of interaction, widely expands the variety of ways that ecosystem service assessment and valuation can be involved in decision-making. The paper uses three case studies to illustrate this variety, and discusses some implications for researchers, both in terms of acknowledging their situatedness and of future research prospects.

International audience; Covid-19 has shocked governance systems worldwide. Legislatures, in particular, have been shut down or limited due to the pandemic, yet with divergence from one country to another. In this article, we report results from a cross-sectional quantitative analysis of legislative activity during the initial reaction to this shock and identify the factors accounting for such variation. Exploring legislatures across 159 countries, we find no relation between the severity of Covid-19 and limitations on legislatures' operation, thus suggesting that legislatures are at risk of being shut down or limited due to policy "overreaction" and that a health risk may serve as an excuse for silencing them. However, we find that legislatures in democratic countries are relatively immune to this risk, while those in frail democracies are more exposed. In partially free countries, the use of technology can mitigate this risk. We also find that the coalitional features of the government may lead to legislatures' closing.

The present study adds to the literature on routinization and employment by capturing within-occupation task changes over the period 1980-2010. The main contributions are the measurement of such changes and the combination of two data sources on occupational task content for the United States: the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). We show that within-occupation reorientation away from routine tasks: i) accounts for 1/3 of the decline in routine-task use; ii) accelerated in the 1990s, decelerated in the 2000s but with significant convergence across occupations; and iii) allowed workers to escape the employment and wage decline, conditional on the initial level of routine-task intensity. The latter finding suggests that task reorientation is a key channel through which labour markets adapt to various forms of labour-saving technological change.

Mobilising the literature on global governance, governmentality and accounting regulation, we trace the historical deployment of transparency and the associated assemblages of actors and technologies in transnational economic and market governance. Starting with the first uses of the term “transparency” in the European Common Market (ECM) after World War II, we show how transparency came to inform and frame the imagined rational individual as the central economic (customer, central to price discovery) and later political (citizen, central to the market's public accountability) participant. We then show how in the 1990s, with the rise of the New Financial Architecture (NFA), the role of transparency in economic/market governance was fundamentally transformed. Beginning with their good governance programs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank gradually adopted “standardised transparency” (in the form of financial accounting, as well as standardised statistics, state budgets, corporate governance, etc.) to govern market participants through financial market discipline. This disciplining program worked in concert with a program of moral persuasion enacted through an intensifying performance measurement apparatus. We elaborate on the implications of this transformation for the political economy of accounting, by reflecting on how the reliance on standardised transparency in neoliberal governmentality has been about: a reconfiguration of the sites of problems (focused on the national level) and solutions (focalised at the global), a liquidation of transnational market governance (that is increased reach, flexiblisation and self-organisation of both the disciplining and moralising/subjectivising governance processes), and a reconfiguration of the topology of actorhood (away from states and individuals both as enablers and beneficiaries, and towards financial investors and private standard bodies).

National audience; While food waste amounts to about 20 Kg per person per year in France, more and more individuals adopt “zero waste” practices. In 2016, the French Agency for the Environment (Ademe) led a study entitled “Living well with zero waste”, aimed at demonstrating that consuming without waste is compatible with a high level of self-reported well-being and happiness. Through observations and interviews carried out with a selection of households for this study, we show how food and packaging waste reduction practices — ranging from buying in bulk to making one's own yogurts — fit into a project of eating well and living well. Whether the households embark on this path to save money or to protect their health or the environment, they often find a source of satisfaction in the food itself and in the activity of cooking by themselves or with their family. More than that, they encounter meaning in their engagement as a form of voluntary simplicity. These results question the role of public policies in promoting simplicity (sobriété) in food.; Alors que le gaspillage alimentaire est estimé à plus de 20 Kg par habitant et par an en France, de plus en plus d’individus adoptent des pratiques « zéro gaspillage » ou « zéro déchet ». En 2016, l’Agence de l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie a mené l’enquête « Bien vivre en zéro déchet » pour montrer qu’une consommation sans gaspillage est compatible avec un haut niveau de bien-être et de bonheur exprimés. À partir des observations et des entretiens menés auprès d’une sélection de foyers pour cette enquête, nous faisons apparaître comment les pratiques de réduction des déchets alimentaires et d’emballages — des achats en vrac à la fabrication de ses propres yaourts — s’inscrivent dans une recherche de bien-manger et de bien-vivre. Que les foyers entrent dans la démarche pour faire des économies, protéger leur santé ou l’environnement, ils y rencontrent souvent de la satisfaction liée à la nature des produits ou au fait de cuisiner soi-même ou en famille. Surtout, ils trouvent du sens dans leur engagement qu’ils associent à une forme de simplicité volontaire. Ces résultats interrogent le rôle de l’action publique dans la promotion de la sobriété dans l’alimentation.

Do workers gain from lower business taxes, and why? We estimate how a large French corporate income tax credit is passed on to wages and explore the firm- and employee-level underlying mechanisms. The amount of tax credit firms get depends on their payroll share of workers paid less than a wage threshold. Exposure to the policy thus varies both across workers depending on their wage and across firms depending on their wage structure. Using exhaustive employer-employee data, we find that half of the surplus generated by the reform falls onto workers. Wage gains load on incumbents in high-skill occupations. The wage earnings of low-skill workers -- nearly all individually eligible -- do not change. This heterogeneous wage incidence is unlikely to be driven by scale effects or skill complementarities. We find that the groups of workers benefiting from wage gains are also more likely to continue working for the same firm. Further, we show that firms do not change their wage-setting behavior in response to the individual eligibility status of workers as there is no bunching in the distribution of entrants' wages. Overall, our results suggest that the wage incidence of firm taxation operates collectively through rent-sharing and benefits workers most costly to replace.

This paper aims to investigate the economic and institutional determinants of Foreign Direct Investment in the world post-2000. To this end, I analyze the inwards stocks of FDIs using unilateral and bilateral data. Based on the UNCTAD database, I also study the impact of Bilateral Investment Treaties on the inflow of FDIs. Main results provide evidence supporting the idea that treaties increase the inflows of FDIs in the years following their signature. However, regulations aimed at increasing the protection of property rights have a larger effect on the attractiveness for investors. This paper does not find robust evidence demonstrating that political stability and corruption level have significant effects. More, I demonstrate that an increase of tariffs in the host country results in an increase of FDIs, supposedly due to relocation processes.

We build a simple dynamic model to study the effects of technological learning, market selection and international competition in the determination of export flows and market shares. The model features two countries populated by firms with heterogeneous productivity levels and sales. Market selection in each country is driven by a finite pairwise Pólya urn process. We show that market selection leads either to a national or to an international monopoly in presence of a static distribution of firm productivity levels. We then incorporate firm learning and entry-exit in the model and we show that the market structure does not converge to a monopoly. In addition, we show that the extended model is able to jointly reproduce a wide ensemble of stylized facts concerning intra-industry trade, industry and firm dynamics.

This essay argues that the common competition framework is not to be applied to the financial sector. If traditionally competition brings efficiency and diversity in a market, financial regulators must also ensure the stability of the financial market. Henceforth, some limits and entry barriers have to exist. This is particularly true for FinTech companies. If the potential of those new actors is not to be contested, the risk they can bring is also quite obvious. If regulators want the market to be disrupted and to see consumers benefiting from the power of innovation of technology-based companies, they need to adapt their regulatory framework. Only under this condition will the benefits outweigh the potential risks.

This essay investigates the relationship between corruption and development. By a study of the determinants of the phenomenon as well as its implications on growth, this paper address the corruption challenge faced by governments and policymakers. Based on the theoretical framework of the political economy of development, I argue that even though the causality is not entirely clear, it is however without debate to say that development is necessarily linked with anti-corruption initiatives. If some counterexamples still exist, it is remarkable to see that the vast majority of developed countries did fight corruption at some point. Still, the path to fight corruption is blurry. It is unlikely for a developing country to get rid of the phenomenon on its own, without external help. Finally, according to the classical studies on the quality of institutions, this paper concludes that a strong rule of law and government effectiveness are among the key factors able to fight a corrupt system.

We empirically investigate the relationship between corruption and growth using a firm-level data set that is unique in scale, covering almost 88,000 firms across 141 economies in 2006-2020, with wide-ranging corruption experiences. The scale and detail of our data allow us to explore the corruption-growth relationship at a very local level, within industries in a relatively narrow geography. We report three empirical regularities. First, firms that make zero informal payments tend to grow slower than bribers. Second, this result is driven by non-bribers in high-corruption countries. Third, among bribers growth is decreasing in the amount of informal payments in both high- and low-corruption countries. We suggest that this set of results may be reconciled with a simple model in which endogenously determined higher bribe rates lead to lower growth, while non-bribers are often excluded entirely from growth opportunities in high-corruption settings.

Cahier Scientifique CIRANO 2020s-27; The policy initiatives announced on both sides of the Atlantic to complement competition rules focus on two key dimensions: the contestability of markets on the one hand and fairness in their functioning on the other. The underlying idea is that the market positions of Big Tech would be inexpugnable - insofar as high barriers to entry protect them from self-regulating competition and insofar as they would have regulatory power over their respective ecosystems. Competition for the market would no longer be free, and competition in the market would be distorted. Our purpose in this working paper is to discuss these two dimensions. Are digital markets still contestable, and is the competition in them still competition on the merits? Finally, we discuss the remedies proposed to address these two alleged phenomena.

International audience; For long, state building has been addressed as the expression of an exclusive power over a portion of space and population. In recent years, the scholarship moved away from such a conception by regarding state building as an assemblage of multi-scalar public and private actors, beneath and beyond its territorial borders. This paper adds to this conversation by focusing on the way states transform as they engage with migration-induced transnational flows. This paper defines the transnational migration state as the set of policies, concepts and institutions designed to make the most of “profitable” migration-related flows (of people, money, ideas, etc.) while filtering out unwanted ones. Next to the national-level administrations in charge of the management of human, financial and immaterial flows, states seek to extend their reach by rescaling their engagement and relying on a range of private and civil society actors, including local authorities. This paper is a theoretical contribution to the debate on state reconfiguration in a world of globalised migration. It distinguishes and conceptualises two types of migration-related transnational migration states: emigration and immigration states tackling incoming and outgoing flows respectively.

International audience; Exporting firms face foreign exchange risk when the export contract is invoiced in a foreign currency. For instance, for firms located outside of the United States, the US dollar is often used as a vehicle currency. The cost of hedging against this risk represents an additional trade cost for exporters, which is specific to the targeted destination. In this paper, we exploit an episode of heightened tensions in the USD/EUR foreign exchange market in July 2011, which increased the cost of hedging against US dollar fluctuations for French exporters. Using disaggregated information on bank balance sheets, bank-firm relationships and individual export flows for France, we show that exporters with a higher propensity to use hedging instruments reduced more their exports to "US dollar destinations" after this shock. For the average "treated" individual export flow in our sample, the increased hedging cost is equivalent to a counterfactual rise in trade costs by about 3 percentage points.

Evidence suggests that firms in poor countries stagnate because they cannot access growth-conducive markets. We hypothesize that overlooked heterogeneity in marketing ability distorts market access. To investigate, we gave a random subset of Liberian firms vouchers for a week-long program that teaches how to sell to corporations, governments, and other large buyers. Firms that participate win about three times as many contracts, but only firms with access to the Internet benefit. We use a simple model and variation in online and offline demand to show evidence that this is because ICT dampens traditional information frictions, but not marketing barriers.

Public schooling systems are an essential feature of modern states. These systems often developed at the expense of religious schools, which undertook the bulk of education historically and still cater to large student populations worldwide. This paper examines how Indonesia’s longstanding Islamic school system responded to the construction of 61,000 public elementary schools in the mid-1970s. The policy was designed in part to foster nation building and to curb religious influence in society. We are the first to study the market response to these ideological objectives. Using novel data on Islamic school construction and curriculum, we identify both short-run effects on exposed cohorts as well as dynamic, long-run effects on education markets. While primary enrollment shifted towards state schools, religious education increased on net as Islamic secondary schools absorbed the increased demand for continued education. The Islamic sector not only entered new markets to compete with the state but also increased religious curriculum at newly created schools. Our results suggest that the Islamic sector response increased religiosity at the expense of a secular national identity. Overall, this ideological competition in education undermined the nation-building impacts of mass schooling.

This working-paper describes the main impact evaluation methods, both experimental and quasi-experimental, and the statistical model underlying them. Some of the most important methodological advances to have recently been put forward in this field of research are presented. We focus not only on the need to pay particular attention to the accuracy of the estimated effects, but also on the requirement to replicate assessments, carried out by experimentation or quasi-experimentation, in order to distinguish false positives from proven effects

We study a class of sender–receiver disclosure games in the lab. Our experiment relies on a graphical representation of sender's incentives in these games, and permits partial disclosure. We use local and global properties of the incentive graph to explain behavior and performance of players across different games. Sender types whose interests are aligned with those of the receiver fully disclose, while other types use vague messages. Receivers take the evidence disclosed by senders into account, and perform better in games with an acyclic graph. Senders perform better in games with a cyclic graph. The data is largely consistent with a non-equilibrium model of strategic thinking based on the iterated elimination of obviously dominated strategies.

Results from a randomized experiment conducted with teenage schoolgirls in Cameroon suggest that HIV prevention interventions can be effective at reducing the incidence of teen pregnancy in the following 9-12 months by over 25 percent. We find little difference in effectiveness between one-time, one-hour sessions delivered directly to students by specialized consultants and sessions delivered through regularschool staff trained over two days by specialized consultants. We also find little difference between the standard “Abstain, Be Faithful, Use Condoms” curriculum and an enriched curriculum that includes informationon the heightened risk of cross-generational sex. Lastly, a one-time, one-hour self-administered questionnaire on HIV and sexual behavior has an equally large impact on teen pregnancy. These results suggest that rural teenage schoolgirls’ sexual behavior is highly responsive to even small interventions that make the risks of HIV and pregnancy salient. We find no effects among urban schoolgirls, who are more exposed to information and experience much lower rates of teenage pregnancy under the statusquo.

We develop an agent-based model in which heterogeneous firms and households interact in labor and good markets according to centralized or decentralized search and matching protocols. As the model has a deterministic backbone and a full-employment equilibrium, it can be directly compared to Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. We study the effects of negative productivity shocks by way of impulse-response functions (IRF). Simulation results show that when search and matching are centralized, the economy is always able to return to the full-employment equilibrium and IRFs are similar to those generated by DSGE models. However, when search and matching are local, coordination failures emerge and the economy persistently deviates from full-employment. Moreover, agents display persistent heterogeneity. Our results suggest that macroeconomic models should explicitly account for agents' heterogeneity and direct interactions. Moreover, our results point to the role of quantity adjustments in determining the ability of the economy to return or not to full-employment.

Jacks et al. (2011) offer an alternative to price gaps to quantify trade costs. Implementing a method which consists in deducing international trade costs from trade flows, they argue that the reduction in trade costs was the main driving force of trade growth during the first globalization (1870-1913), whereas economic expansion was the main driving force during the second globalization (1950-2000). We argue that this important result is driven by the use of an ad hoc aggregation method. What Jacks et al. (2011) capture is the difference in the relative starting trade of dyads experiencing faster trade growth in the first and second globalization. More generally, we cast doubts on the possibility to reach conclusions of such nature with a method that infers trade costs from trade flows, and then uses these costs to explain trade flows. We argue that it can only rephrase the information already contained in openness ratios.

International audience; The reopening of the Mediterranean routes in the tenth century sparked, in some regions of Europe, a long period of economic boom. It also triggered a social change whereby some members of the nobility, despite their social status, turned to commerce. I explain these events through the lens a Kiyotaki and Wright (1989) model, extended to a two-country world. The response of the elite to a communication shock causes the economy to transit from a low-to a high-production equilibrium, if pre-existing class di¤erences are not too large. Quantitative experiments illustrate the view of economic historians that medieval expansion ensued in regions where the elite enjoyed relatively modest privileges and was slow in places, most notably France, where the elite's preoccupation for preserving the social-status was strong.

The impact of chemotherapy on fertility appears to be of essential importance for the youngest cancer survivors. The aim of this study was to assess plasma anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH) evolution, using an automated sensitive AMH immunoassay in women younger than 35 years old before and after treatment with adjuvant chemotherapy for early breast cancer. We selected 54 women aged less than 35 years old, at the time of breast cancer diagnosis, who received chemotherapy between 2008 and 2014, and with plasma samples collected from the diagnosis, to 1 year, 3 years and 5 years post-diagnosis. The median AMH decreased markedly in the year after the diagnosis compared with the pretreatment values (P < 0.0001), and slightly increased 2 years later (P = 0.007, comparing 1-year and 3-years post-diagnosis concentrations), without any additional AMH recovery 5 years after diagnosis. This recovery did not reach age-dependent AMH expected values (P < 0.0001, comparing AMH measured values to AMH expected values). Addition of taxanes to an anthracyclines + alkylating-based regimen was associated with a worse AMH decrease (P = 0.007). Ovarian tissue cryopreservation before treatment did not influence the AMH recovery. These results highlight the necessity of fertility counselling before treatment, especially in women wanting children.

We study spatial variation in criminal sentencing. We show the existence of local sentencing practices varying widely even across geographically proximate areas. Using compulsory rotation of judges in North Carolina, we find that judges arriving in a new court gradually converge toward local sentencing practices. We provide evidence that convergence in sentencing corresponds to a process of learning about local practices, which is accelerated by the presence of senior judges in the district, and that these sentencing practices are correlated with local norms of behavior. Finally, we discuss the theoretical implications of these results for the optimal design of judicial systems.

This paper investigates how the transmission of monetary policy to the real economy depends on the distribution of household debt. Using an original loan-level dataset covering the universe of UK mortgages, we assess the effect of monetary shocks on aggregate consumption by exploiting time variation in a measure of the proportion of households close to their borrowing constraint. We find that monetary policy is most potent when there is a large share of constrained households. In contrast, we find no evidence that the average level of borrowing relative-to-income of the household sector affects the transmission of monetary policy.

International audience; People eat on a regular schedule, at times that are shared within a society, and with others. While this phenomenon is theoretically formulated in sociological literature, few empirical studies have tested it, and the available evidence is incomplete. Against this backdrop, this article analyzes the association between meal synchronization and commensality using representative survey data in Santiago and Paris. We hypothesize that commensality influences having meals on a regular schedule because sharing a meal with others needs synchronization. Nevertheless, the strength of this association might be different across the two metropolises given the singular social value of gastronomy in French culture. Using logistic and multinomial regression models, we find that in both metropolises, sharing meals with others more frequently is positively associated with having meals in synchronized timeslots. Next, we find differences between Santiago and Paris. In Paris, commensality is associated with synchronization in all three shared timeslots, and in Santiago, in the midday and the evening slots. Besides, in Paris, sociodemographic characteristics have a stronger effect on synchronization than in Santiago. We interpret those differences as explained by variations in the social norms around food practices. Ultimately, our findings contribute to challenging the thesis of food modernity from an empirical and global perspective.

We derive bias-corrected least-squares estimators of panel vector autoregressions with fixed effects. The correction is straightforward to implement and yields an estimator that is asymptotically unbiased under asymptotics where the number of time series observations grows at the same rate as the number of cross-sectional observations. This makes the estimator well suited for most macroeconomic data sets. Simulation results show that the estimator yields substantial improvements over within-group least-squares estimation. We illustrate the bias correction in a study of the relation between the unemployment rate and the economic growth rate at the U.S. state level.

This paper shows that real effective exchange rate (REER) regressions, the standard approach for estimating the response of aggregate exports to exchange rate changes, imply biased estimates of the underlying elasticities. We provide a new aggregate regression specification that is consistent with bilateral trade flows micro-founded by the gravity equation. This theory-consistent aggregation leads to unbiased estimates when prices are set in an international currency as postulated by the dominant currency paradigm. We use Monte-Carlo simulations to compare elasticity estimates based on this new “ideal-REER” regression against typical regression specifications found in the REER literature. The results show that the biases are small (around 1 percent) for the exchange rate and large (around 10 percent) for the demand elasticity. We find empirical support for this prediction from annual trade flow data. The difference between elasticities estimated on the bilateral and aggregate levels reduces significantly when applying an ideal-REER regression rather than a standard REER approach.

We develop a macroeconomic agent-based model to study how financial instability can emerge from the co-evolution of interbank and credit markets and the policy responses to mitigate its impact on the real economy. The model is populated by heterogenous firms, consumers, and banks that locally interact in different markets. In particular, banks provide credit to firms according to a Basel II or III macro-prudential frameworks and manage their liquidity in the interbank market. The Central Bank performs monetary policy according to different types of Taylor rules. We find that the model endogenously generates market freezes in the interbank market, which interact with the financial accelerator, possibly leading to firm bankruptcies, banking crises and the emergence of deep downturns. This requires the timely intervention of the Central Bank as a liquidity lender of last resort. Moreover, we find that the joint adoption of a three mandate Taylor rule tackling credit growth and the Basel III macro-prudential framework is the best policy mix to stabilize financial and real economic dynamics. However, as the Liquidity Coverage Ratio spurs financial instability by increasing the pro-cyclicality of banks’ liquid reserves, a new counter-cyclical liquidity buffer should be added to Basel III to improve its performance further. Finally, we find that the Central Bank can also dampen financial instability by employing a new unconventional monetary-policy tool involving active management of the interest-rate corridor in the interbank market.

As the actions of individuals contribute substantially to climate change, identifying factors that underpin environmentally-relevant behaviors represents an important step towards modifying behavior and mitigating climate change impacts. This paper introduces a sequential model in which antecedent psychological and socio-demographic variables predict climate change risk perceptions, which lead to enhanced levels of response efficacy and psychological adaptation in relation to climate change, and ultimately to environmentally-relevant behaviors. The model is tested and refined using data from large national surveys of Australian and French residents. As hypothesized, in both samples, risk perception (indirectly), response efficacy (both indirectly and directly), and psychological adaptation (directly) predicted behavior. However, these effects were stronger in the Australian than in the French sample, and other unexpectedly strong direct effects were also observed. In particular, subscribing to a “green” self-identity directly predicted all endogenous variables, especially in the French sample. The study provides valuable insights into the processes underlying environmentally-relevant behaviors, while serving as a reminder that effects on behavior may be nation-specific. Strategies are recommended for promoting pro-environmental behavior through the enhancement of a green identity, response efficacy, and psychological adaptation.

This paper shows that the reforms which expanded short-time work in France after the great 2008-2009 recession were largely to the benefit of large firms which are recurrent short-time work users. We argue that this expansion of short-time work is an inefficient way to provide insurance to workers, as it entails cross-subsidies which reduce aggregate production. An efficient policy should provide unemployment insurance benefits funded by experience rated employers’ contributions instead of short-time work benefits. We find that short-time work entails significant production losses compared to an unemployment insurance scheme with experience rating.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a simple theoretical framework of firms’ investment with credit rationing and real estate collateral. We show that real estate prices affect firms’ borrowing capacities through two channels. An increase in real estate prices raises the value of the firms’ pledgeable assets and mitigates the agency problem characterizing the creditor-entrepreneur relationship. It simultaneously cuts the expected profit due to the increase in the cost of inputs. While the literature only focuses on the first channel, the identification of the second channel allows for heterogeneous effects of real estate prices on investment across firms. We test our theoretical predictions using a large French database. We do find heterogeneous effects of real estate prices on productive investment depending on the position of the firms in the sectoral distributions of real estate holdings. Our preferred estimates indicate that a 10% increase in real estate prices causes a 1% decrease in the investment rate of firms in the first decile of the distribution but a 6% increase in the investment rate of firms belonging to the last decile.

L’essor des postes de coordonnateurs offre aux infirmiers de nouvelles opportunités de carrière et de formation. Il pourrait aussi favoriser une montée en qualification de la profession et contribuer à transformer les relations entre les acteurs du soin.

This paper explores the nature and the key empirical regularities of green employment in US local labor markets between 2006 and 2014. We construct a new measure of green employment based on the task content of occupations. Descriptive analysis reveals the following: 1. the share of green employment oscillates between 2 and 3 percent, and its trend is strongly pro-cyclical; 2. green jobs yield a 4 percent wage premium; 3. despite moderate catching-up across areas, green jobs remain more geographically concentrated than similar non-green jobs; and 4. the top green areas are mostly high-tech. As regards the drivers, changes in environmental regulation are a secondary force compared to the local endowment of green knowledge and resilience in the face of the great recession. To assess the impact of moving to greener activities, we estimate that one additional green job is associated with 4.2 (2.4 in the crisis period) new jobs in non-tradable activities in the local economies.

International audience; Combining large (up to 25%) extracts of five French censuses and data from Labor Force Surveys for 1968-1999, we use Borjas (2003)'s factor proportions methodology for France and find that a 10 p.p. increase in the immigrant share raises natives' wages by 3.3%, which is in stark contrast with the results in Borjas (2003) for the U.S. The positive impact of immigration on natives' wages and employment is shown to hold also at the regional level. We find evidence that this positive correlation partly comes from the imperfect substitutability of natives and immigrants within education/experience cells. Specifically, (i) the occupational distribution of natives and immigrants within these cells is more dissimilar when there are more immigrants in the cell; (ii) natives tend to perform more abstract tasks when there are more immigrants in the cell; and (iii) an important part of the positive relation between immigration and wages comes from a reallocation of natives to better-paid occupations within the cells. However, we argue that this positive correlation is also likely to be related to the inability of the Borjas (2003) model to perfectly account for the important changes in the wage distribution and the educational level characterizing the French economy in this period.

This paper provides new evidence on international productivity gaps; this evidence is obtained from large-scale firm-level data from the French and Japanese manufacturing industries using non-parametric methodologies designed to overcome confidentiality restrictions. Our primary finding is that international productivity gaps are sensitive to the export status of firms. We also show that productivity differences between French and Japanese exporters vary across export destinations. We propose a simple analytical framework to relate those basic findings to the new models of international trade with heterogeneous firms. Under this framework, international firm-level productivity comparisons provide new insights into the importance of trade-related institutional and policy differences across countries.