Lundi 4 juin

Régulation et environnement | 12:00-14:00

Salle R1-13, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

JESSOE Katrina (UC Davis) : Gains from Water Markets : Micro-level Evidence on Agricultural Water Demand

Co-authors : BRUNO Ellen

Résumé

This paper demonstrates that the establishment of well-functioning water markets may substantially mitigate the costs of drought. We develop a framework to model the costs of incomplete water regulation, and simulate the efficiency gains from water trading across the agricultural and urban sectors. Critical to this exercise are credible estimates of the price elasticity of demand for agricultural water. We use monthly panel data on well-level agricultural groundwater extraction in an area that charges volumetric rates for groundwater to estimate the elasticity. Demand is inelastic, with estimates ranging from -0.17 to -0.22. Our simulation suggests that in an agriculturally productive and dense urban area of California, a water market could have reduced the welfare impacts to residential users from the 2015 drought mandate by 60% from $83 million to $33.5 million. Water markets present a promising adaption strategy to climate change.

GSIE | 13:00-14:00

Salle R2-20, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

VOLPE Christian (Inter-American Development Bank) : Information and Exports : Firm-Level Evidence from an Online Platform

Résumé

Lack of information is an important trade barrier. Online platforms connecting firms can reduce this barrier and thereby affect firms’ exports. We examine whether this is the case by focusing on a free online business platform that, by the end of 2016, connected more than 16,000 firms from almost a hundred countries. In particular, we estimate the impact of using the platform on firms’ export outcomes, along both the intensive and extensive margins, exploiting data on firms’ participation in this platform along with customs data from Peru for the period 2010-2016. In so doing, we apply an instrumental variables approach whereby firms’ use of the business platform is instrumented with information on the distribution of emails announcing its launching by Peru’s national trade promotion organization. Consistent with the interpretation of the platform as an information cost-reducing mechanism, our results suggest that its utilization allowed firms to expand their exports by primarily increasing the number of products they sell abroad and enlarging their buyer base.

ROY | 17:00-18:30

Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

WALLACE Chris (U. Manchester) : Information Acquisition and Use by Networked Players

Co-authors : MYATT David P. (LBS)

Résumé

In an asymmetric coordination (or anti-coordination) game, players acquire and use signals about a payoff-relevant fundamental from multiple costly information sources. Some sources have greater clarity than others, and generate signals that are more correlated and so more public. Players wish to take actions close to the fundamental but also close to (or far away from) others’ actions. This paper studies how asymmetries in the game, represented as the weights that link players to neighbours on a network, affect how they use and acquire information. Relatively centrally located players (in the sense of Bonacich, when applied to the dependence of players’ payoffs upon the actions of others) acquire fewer signals from relatively clear information sources ; they acquire less information in total ; and they place more emphasis on relatively public signals.

Mardi 5 juin

Economie appliquée | 12:30-13:30

Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

MUNOZ Mathilde (PSE) : The effect of labour taxation on top earners mobility : Evidence from Europe

Résumé

As a geographic zone with no internal barriers to migration but substantially different levels of taxation, the European Union provides a unique laboratory to examine the effect of taxation on migration. This paper analyses the effects of top earnings tax rates on the mobility of top earners in Europe. Building a detailed micro-level dataset from the largest European labour survey, I investigate how heterogenous levels of taxation affect the migration behaviour of top income migrants and top earners mobile workers. Exploiting country-by-year variation in top marginal tax rates and differential impacts of changes in top tax rates on workers of different earnings level, I estimate macro and micro-level elasticities of migration with respect to taxation.

PSI PSE | 17:00-18:00

Salle R1-13, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

BRIOLE Simon (Paris School of Economics)

Mercredi 6 juin

Histoire économique | 12:30-14:00

Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

HURET Romain (EHESS) : Rethinking the Death Tax’s Origins : States, Federalism and Inheritance Tax in the United States (1826-1929) Economie du développement | 16:30-18:00

Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

SADOULET Elisabeth (UC Berkeley) : Subsidy Policies and Insurance Demand

Co-authors : CAI Jing (University of Maryland, NBER and BREAD) ; JANVRY (de) Alain (University of California at Berkeley)

Résumé

Using data from a two-year randomized pricing experiment in China, we study the impact and design of subsidy policies for weather insurance. Results show that subsidies are effective in boosting demand in the short-run but not in the longer term. Exploring the channels, we show that while subsidies increase the direct and social effects of payout experiences by enlarging coverage, they also dampen these effects by reducing attention to payouts. We estimate a demand model for policy simulations. Results suggest that the optimum subsidy scheme should be continuously adjusted based on the policy objective and on past subsidies and payouts.

Jeudi 7 juin

Comportement | 11:00-12:00

Salle R2-21, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

POLLAK Robert (Olin Business School and Department of Economics, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA) : Fathers’ Multiple-Partner Fertility and Children’s Educational Outcomes

Résumé

We find substantial effects of fathers’ multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children’s long-term educational outcomes. We focus on the children in fathers’ “second families,” emphasizing the case in which the second families are nuclear families – households consisting of a man, a woman, their joint children, and no other children. We analyze outcomes for almost 80,000 children born in Norway in 1986-1988 who, until they were at least age 18, lived with both biological parents. This analysis cannot be done using existing US data sets. Children who spent their entire childhoods in nuclear families but whose fathers had children from another relationship living elsewhere were more likely to drop out of secondary school (24% vs 17%) and less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree (44% vs 51%) than children in nuclear families without MPF. Our probit estimates imply that the marginal effect of fathers’ MPF is 4 percentage points for dropping out of secondary school and 5 percentage points for obtaining a bachelor’s degree. Our analysis suggests that the effects of fathers’ MPF are primarily due to selection.

Travail et économie publique | 12:30-13:45

Salle R1-09, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

TONDINI Alessandro (Paris School of Economics) : Cash Transfers, Unemployment and Informality : Evidence from South Africa’s Child Support Grant

Résumé

This paper explores the role of cash transfers in workers’ allocation across the formal and informal sectors. I study the impact of an unconditional grant in South Africa paid to Black and Coloured mothers, for whom a significant share of employment is informal. I use discontinuous exposure for children of adjacent cohorts to identify the labor market effects on mothers of roughly one year of grant (400 $ 2010). I show that recipients of this grant are more likely to be unemployed when receiving the transfer. Five years after the grant has stopped, the employment probability is the same, but mothers who had received the grant are more likely to work in the formal sector. I present evidence that these are possibly the results of less binding liquidity constraints when unemployed, as the grant allows to spend more on transport when looking for a job.

TOM | 12:30-13:30

Salle R2-20, , Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

COLO Philippe (PSE) : Cheap Talk under Ambiguity : The IPCC in Climate-Change Agreements

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has gained a central position on the report of scientific knowledge on climate change. This paper shows that the IPCC can take advantage of it to mitigate the inefficiency of the level of greenhouse gas emissions in international environmental agreements (IEA). I model an IEA as a game of contribution to a public bad. In making confidence statements over global warming predictions, the IPCC plays a cheap talk game with IEA participants. Under the assumption that players are maxmin expected utility maximisers I show that there is a unique sequential equilibrium in this game. This result backs up the idea that the IPCC could play a regulatory part in the management of climate change. In addition, it sheds new light on the role of strategic communication under ambiguity, supporting the view that it can contribute to restoring economic efficiency.

Vendredi 8 juin

Casual Friday | 12:45-13:45

Salle R2-01, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris

BEKKOUCHE Yasmine (PSE) : Colonial origins and teaching practices : evidence from Cameroon

Co-authors : DUPRAZ Yannick (Warwick University)