Search

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3202916; We show that banker bonuses cannot be understood exclusively as incentive contracts, but also incorporate a significant risk sharing dimension between bank shareholders and bank employees. This contrasts with the conventional view whereby diversified shareholders fully insure risk averse employees. However, financial frictions imply that shareholder value is concave in a bank's cash reserves---making shareholders effectively risk averse. The optimal contract between shareholders and employees then involves some degree of risk sharing. Using extensive payroll data on 1.26 million bank employee years in the Austrian, German, and Swiss banking sectors, we show that the structure of bonus pay within and across banks is compatible with an economically significant risk sharing motive, but difficult to rationalize based on incentive theories of bonus pay only.

This paper examines a novel negative impact of trade tariffs and the costs they induce by documenting how protectionism reversed the long-term improvements in education and the fertility transition that were well under way in late 19th-century France. The Méline tariff, a tariff on cereals introduced in 1892, was a major protectionist shock that shifted relative prices in favor of agriculture and away from industry. In a context in which the latter was more intensive in skills than agriculture, the tariff reduced the relative return to education, which in turn affected parents' decisions about the quantity and quality of children. We use regional differences in the importance of cereal production in the local economy to estimate the impact of the tariff. Our findings indicate that the tariff reduced enrolment in primary education and increased birth rates and fertility. The magnitude of these effects was substantial, with the tariff offsetting the increasing trend in enrolment rates and the decreasing one in birth rates by a decade.

We study the gains from trade in a new model with oligopolistic competition, firm heterogeneity, and innovation. Lowering trade costs reduces markups on domestic sales but increases markups on export sales, as firms do not pass the entire reduction in trade costs onto foreign consumers. Trade liberalisation can also reduce the number of firms competing in each market, thereby increasing markups on both domestic and export sales. For the majority of exporters, however, the pro- competitive effect prevails and their average markups decline. The incomplete pass-though and the reduction in the number of competitors instead dominate for top-exporters – the top 0.1% of firms – which end up increasing their markup. In a quantitative exercise we find that the aggregate effect of trade-induced markup changes is pro-competitive and accounts for the majority of the welfare gains from trade. Trade-induced changes in competition affect survival on domestic and export markets and firms’ decision to innovate. All exporters, and especially the top exporters, increase their market size after liberalisation which, in turn, encourages them to innovate more. Hence, top exporters contribute negatively to welfare gains by increasing their markups but positively by increasing innovation and productivity. Firms’ innovation response accounts for a small but non-negligible share of the welfare gains while the contribution of selection is U-shaped, being negative for small liberalisations and positive otherwise. A more globalised economy is therefore populated by larger, fewer and more innovative firms, each feature representing an important source of the gains from trade.

La fiscalité des revenus du capital a fait l’objet de nombreuses réformes depuis une dizaine d’années. Ainsi, entre la fin des années 2000 et 2012, les taux du prélèvement forfaitaire libératoire (PFL) et des prélèvements sociaux appliqués aux revenus des capitaux mobiliers ont augmenté. En 2013, le PFL sur les dividendes et sur plusieurs autres revenus du capital est supprimé et ces revenus sont imposés au barème. En particulier, la mise au barème des dividendes a entraîné une augmentation du taux marginal d’imposition des dividendes de 36.5% à 40% pour les contribuables les plus aisés qui utilisaient ce dispositif fiscal avant 2012. Enfin, en 2018, l’imposition forfaitaire des revenus des capitaux mobiliers est rétablie avec la création du Prélèvement Forfaitaire Unique (PFU).L’effet de ces mesures sur les inégalités est dorénavant bien documenté (cf. Ben Jelloul, Bozio, Douenne, Fabre and Leroy (2019), Madec, Mathieu and Raul (2019) ou Paquier and Sicsic (2020)). En revanche, les réactions des acteurs à ces réformes reste beaucoup plus méconnues. Dans ce rapport nous essayons de quantifier les réponses comportementales des revenus du capital, des revenus du travail et du patrimoine aux réformes de la fiscalité des revenus du capital. Nous utilisons pour cela les réformes sur la fiscalité du capital mises en œuvre en France entre 2008 et 2017, et notamment la mise au barème des revenus des capitaux en 2013, qui correspond à une mesure miroir de la mise en place du PFU.

We study the interplay between intragenerational and intergenerational equity in an economy with two countries producing and consuming from national capital stocks.We characterize the sustainable development path that a social planner would implement to achieve intertemporal egalitarianism.If intergenerational equity is defined with respect to the global consumption of each generation, regardless of its distribution between countries, consumption in the poor country should be set as low as possible to maximize investment and hasten convergence, resulting in important intragenerational inequalities.When social welfare accounts for intragenerational equity, the larger the intragenerational inequality aversion (IIA), the smaller the sacrifice asked of the poor country, but the lower the sustained level of generational welfare.Along the intertemporal welfare-egalitarian path with IIA, consumption in the poor country increases, while it decreases in the rich country, resulting in a global degrowth.; L'article étudie les interactions entre équité intragénérationnelle et intergénérationnelle dans une économie à deux pays produisant et consommant à partir d'une richesse nationale. Nous caractérisons le sentier de développement durable qu'un planificateur central implémenterait pour atteindre l'égalitarisme intertemporel. Si l'équité intergénérationnelle est définie par rapport au niveau de consommation global de chaque génération sans prendre en compte la distribution de la consommation entre les deux pays, la consommation dans le pays pauvre doit être réduite le plus possible au profit de l'investissement, afin d'accélérer la convergence des deux économies, ce qui accroît les inégalités intragénérationnelles. Lorsque le bien-être social prend en compte l'équité intragénérationnelle, plus l'aversion aux inégalités intragénérationnelles (IIA) est large, moins le sacrifice demandé au pays pauvre est important, mais plus faible est le niveau de bien-être générationnel soutenu au cours du temps. Le long du sentier de bien-être égalitaire au cours du temps avec IIA, la consommation du pays pauvre croit alors que celle du pays riche décroit, avec une décroissance globale comme résultat.

International audience; Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations grew, while middle wage occupations shrank. At the same time, the share of technology-related occupations (“techies”) grew substantially. Aggregate polarization was driven mostly by changes in the composition of firms within industries. Within-firm adjustments and changes in industry composition were much less important. Polarization occured mostly within urban areas, with roughly equal contributions of men and women. We study the role of technology adoption in shaping firm-level outcomes using a new measure of the propensity of a firm to adopt new technology: its employment share of techies. We find that techies were an important force driving aggregate polarization in France, as firms with more techies grew faster.

This paper describes how plaintiff should compensate lawyers, who choose unobservable effort, when litigation may proceed from the trial to the appeals court. We find that, when it is very likely that the defendant will appeal, transfers made to the lawyer only after an appeals court’s ruling are key instruments in incentivizingbothtrial and appeal court effort. Indeed, the lawyer may not receive any transfer after the trial court’s ruling. In contrast, when reaching the appeals stage is unlikely, a favorable trial court ruling triggers a positive transfer to the lawyer and first-best appeals effort. In our setup, the lawyer may receive a lower transfer after winning in both the trial and the appeals court as compared to the scenario in which the first-instance court ruled against the plaintiff and the appeals court reversed that ruling.

This paper analyzes a litigation contest in which the plaintiff’s lawyer and the defendant choose effort. The plaintiff selects the relative importance of a contract component related to the judgment (similar to contingent fees) and a component related to the lawyer’s efforts (similar to conditional fees) to ensure lawyer participation and guide the lawyer’s decision-making. For our setup, we find that the plaintiff considers the component related to the lawyer’s effort to be the relatively more desirable instrument in the light of its effort-inducing and cost characteristics. However, high levels of the lawyer’s outside utility may limit the role of this component.

International audience; On many two-sided platforms, users on one side not only care about user participation and usage levels on the other side, but they also care about participation and usage of fellow users on the same side. Most prominent is the degree of seller competition on a platform catering to buyers and sellers. In this paper, we address how seller competition affects platform pricing, product variety, and the number of platforms that carry trade.

International audience; We make use of a bootstrap panel analysis of causality between energy use and economic growth for a sample of sixteen African countries over the period 1988-2010. Our results show that growth and energy use are strongly linked in Africa. However, African countries are heterogeneous and there is no "one way" recommendation about energy-growth relationship that may work for all countries in Africa.

Migration contributes to the circulation of goods, knowledge, and ideas. Using community and individual-level data from Moldova, we show that the emigration wave that started in the aftermath of the Russian crisis of 1998 strongly affected electoral outcomes and political preferences in Moldova during the following decade, eventually contributing to the fall of the last Communist government in Europe. Our results are suggestive of information transmission and cultural diffusion channels. Identification relies on the quasi-experimental context and on the differential effects arising from the fact that emigration was directed both to more democratic Western Europe and to less democratic Russia. (JEL D72, D83, F22, P23, P26)

Wage inequality between similar workers has been on the rise in many rich countries. Recent empirical research suggests that heterogeneity in firm characteristics is crucial to understand wage dispersion. Lower trade costs as well as labor and product market reforms are considered critical drivers of inequality dynamics. We ask how these factors affect wage dispersion and how much of their effect on inequality is attributable to changes in wage dispersion between and within firms. To tackle these questions, we incorporate directed job search into a dynamic model of international trade where wage inequality results from the interplay of convex adjustment costs with firms’ different hiring needs along their life cycles. Fitting the model to German linked employer–employee data for the years 1996–2009, we find that firm heterogeneity explains about half of the surge in inequality. The most important mechanism is tougher product market competition driven by domestic product market deregulation and, indirectly, by international trade., Felbermayr thanks the German Science Foundation for support under CRC TRR 190. Prat acknowledges the support of the Investissements d’Avenir grant ( ANR-11-IDEX-0003/Labex Ecodec/ANR-11-LABX0047). Felbermayr is a Research Fellow at CESifo. Impullitti is a Research Affiliate at CESifo.

We explore whether finance influences the impact of labour market institutions on unemployment. Using a data set of 18 OECD countries over 1980-2004, we estimate a panel Vector AutoRegressive model. We check whether causalities from labour market variables (labour market regulation, union density, coordination in wage bargaining) to unemployment are a ffected by the introduction of financial factors (stock market capitalisation, intermediated credit and banking concentration) in the estimation. In Australia, Belgium, Italy, Japan and Spain, accounting for financial indicators mitigates the bene fits of labour market flexibilization or makes it harmful to employment. In Austria, Canada, Finland and Portugal, it reduces its detrimental impact or makes it bene ficial. In Ireland and Netherlands, both e ffects prevail, depending on the labour market indicator used., Nous cherchons à savoir si la finance influence l'impact des institutions du march é du travail sur le chômage. A partir d'un échantillon de 18 pays de l'OCDE entre 1980 et 2004, nous estimons un mod èle VAR en panel. Nous vérifi ons si les causalit és des variables du march é du travail (niveau de r églementation, densit é syndicale, degr é de coordination des n égociations salariales) vers le chômage sont a ffect ées par l'introduction dans l'estimation de variables financi ères (capitalisation du march é des actions, cr édit interm édi é, concentration bancaire). En Australie, en Belgique, en Italie, au Japon et en Espagne, la prise en compte de facteurs financiers diminue le b énéfi ce de la flexibilisation du march é du travail ou la rend n éfaste a l'emploi. En Autriche, au Canada, en Finlande et au Portugal, les variables fi nanci ères diminuent ses e ffects n égatifs ou la rendent b én éfi que pour l'emploi. En Irlande et aux Pays-Bas, les deux e ffets pr évalent, selon l'institution du march é du travail étudi ée.

International audience; Studying the impact of economic growth on the environment in the context of developing countries has become of increasing economic importance in recent years. Alarming international reports show that pollutants emissions are growing at their highest level ever, particularly in the South countries. This paper implements recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between Sulfur dioxide emissions and real GDP for 12 MENA countries over the period 1981–2005. Our investigations lead to the result that no evidence is found for the EKC hypothesis for 10 country of the region. However, the EKC hypothesis is valid for the case of Egypt and Tunisia; the two most industrialised and diversified economies in our sample. At the same time, our findings show that EKC is not valid for the region when considered as a whole.

International audience; This article extends the recent findings of Liu (2005), Ang (2007), Apergis et al. (2009) and Payne (2010) by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions, energy consumption, and real GDP for 12 Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) over the period 1981-2005. Our results show that in the long-run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on CO2 emissions. More interestingly, we show that real GDP exhibits a quadratic relationship with CO2 emissions for the region as a whole. However, although the estimated long-run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the EKC hypothesis in most studied countries, the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases, hence providing poor evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis. CO2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the MENA region, even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981-2005. The econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in CO2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as GDP per capita in the MENA region continues to grow.