Documents de travail

Résumé This paper advances a theory of unemployment hysteresis—transitory shocks leave permanent effects—based on a model of endogenous path-dependent wage rigidity under incomplete employment contracts. Workers’ relative wage comparisons—incumbents’ aversion to wage cuts and new hires’ concern with pay inequality—imply wage increases are partially irreversible, generating path dependence and asymmetry in wage adjustments. During recessions, hiring wages fail to adjust fully downward, depressing job creation and producing hysteresis effects and large unemployment fluctuations. A quantitative assessment shows that these effects can be significant under plausible calibrations of the cost of wage cuts and the sensitivity of workers to relative wages. A 1% transitory shock can generate a permanent increase in unemployment of about 0.5% to 15%, with benchmark values around 1.5–5.5%. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the theory for the effectiveness of monetary policy and the empirical research on hysteresis effects, suggesting promising directions for future research.
Mots clés Incomplete contracts, Wage rigidity, Irreversibility, Hysteresis, Unemployment
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Résumé Despite growing calls to phase it out, oil exploration persists, often justified by the natural decline of existing fields and potential efficiency gains from discoveries. This paper quantifies the global welfare and environmental impacts of restricting oil exploration. We develop a global dynamic model calibrated to a granular dataset of 14,637 proven oilfields, accounting for heterogeneity in private extraction costs, capacity constraints, life-cycle carbon intensities of oil barrels, along with exploration dynamics and basin-specific estimates of yet-to-find resources. We find that exploration restrictions are an effective second-best climate policy: in the absence of a global carbon tax, a universal ban increases global welfare by$12.5 trillion due to lower social costs of oil production and use (assuming a social cost of carbon of$200/tCO2eq). A partial ban by OECD and BRICS countries alone captures 66% of these gains. Under optimal carbon pricing, however, a global ban yields a modest $0.3 trillion welfare loss, as it precludes access to lower-social-cost deposits and prevents the easing of short-run capacity constraints.
Mots clés Stranded assets, Second-best, Ban, Carbon tax, Climate change, Oil exploration
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Résumé Recessions are often accompanied by heightened uncertainty. We look at the effect of endogenous uncertainty on aggregate demand and its implications for monetary policy. We enrich a non-linear New-Keynesian model with imperfect noisy information, where the precision of signals is pro-cyclical. The endogenous uncertainty channel amplifies aggregate demand effects through precautionary saving. Ultimately, it can even reverse sign of the output-gap response to a supply shock. Monetary policy can eliminate both pricing and information-induced inefficiencies by closing the output gap. Based on U.S. household income forecast errors data, we estimate a sizable and significant degree of pro-cyclicality in the precision of signals.
Mots clés Precautionary saving, Aggregate demand, Imperfect information, Endogenous uncertainty
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Résumé Exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) is a key channel through which external shocks affect domestic inflation in open emerging market economies (EMEs). This paper estimates ERPT for Mexico using local projections with an instrumental-variable strategy to trace the cumulative effects of peso-dollar depreciations on consumer prices. The results indicate a relatively high degree of pass-through–higher than most estimates reported in the existing literature–suggesting that Mexican inflation responds more strongly to exchangerate movements than commonly assumed. Although price subcomponents display the expected heterogeneity (with goods showing the highest sensitivity and services the lowest), the main implication is clear: exchange-rate fluctuations remain a powerful driver of inflation dynamics, underscoring the policy relevance of monitoring currency volatility in open EMEs such as Mexico.
Mots clés Exchange rate Pass-through, ERPT, EMEs, Mexico, Local projections, Inflation
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Résumé Tis paper examines the efectiveness of France’s organized cancer screening programs by leveraging age-based eligibility thresholds to identify causal efects on screening uptake. Using 2019 telephone survey data matched with medico-administrative records from 1,411 women insured by MGEN, we employ a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate Local Average Treatment Efects at program entry and exit ages. Our results reveal dramatic discontinuities in screening behavior: entering mammography screening eligibility at age 50 increases uptake probability by 59 percentage points (pp) (p
Mots clés Cancer screening test uptake, Fuzzy regression discontinuity, Atitude towards risk
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Résumé In order to investigate strategic interactions between a "global north" and a "global south" we introduce a two-country extension of the model in Golosov et al. (2014). We consider different transfers between the two regions, including transfers that can improve the abatement technology. Our model can accommodate several kinds of heterogeneity, including in preferences, time discount rates, and damages resulting from the stock of accumulated GHG. We solve for both planner's solutions and non-cooperative equilibria. We then calibrate our model in order to study quantitative differences between these solutions and to quantitatively explore the role of heterogeneity and Knightian uncertainty. We characterize emissions, damages, consumption, transfers, and welfare by computing the Nash equilibria of the associated dynamic game. We then compare these to efficiency benchmarks. Further, we investigate how (deep) uncertainty affects climate outcomes. We develop a general model for the study of optimal control and differential games that are linear-in-state, which we term the Integral Transformation Method (ITM), which encompasses several existing models as special cases.
Mots clés Integral Transformation Method, Analytical integrated assessment model, Differential game, Climate policy, Robust control
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Résumé The dynamics of capital distribution across space are an important topic in economic geography and, more recently, in growth theory. In particular, the spatial AK model has been intensively studied in the latter stream. It turns out that the positivity of optimal capital stocks over time and space for any initial capital spatial distribution has not been entirely settled even in the simple linear AK case. We use Ekeland’s variational principle together with Pontrya-gin’s maximum principle to solve an optimal spatiotemporal AK model with a state constraint (non-negative capital stock), where the capital law of motion follows a diffusion equation. We derive the necessary optimality conditions to ensure the solution satisfies the state constraints for all times and locations. The maximum principle enables the reduction of the infinite-horizon optimal control problem to a finite-horizon problem, ultimately proving the uniqueness of the optimal solution with positive capital and the non-existence of such a solution when the time discount rate is either too large or too small.
Mots clés Diffusion and growth, Optimal control, State constraint, Ekeland&#039, s variational principle, Convergence
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Résumé We link French households’ tax records to the corporations they control, and build a payout-policy–neutral income measure, with corresponding tax burdens including those of "billionaires": the top 0.0002%. De- fined as such, income is more concentrated than taxable income, it better predicts rich-list membership, and persists more among billionaires. Personal taxes remain progressive until the top 0.1%, but eventually decline to 2% of income. Corporate taxes are an imperfect progressive backstop, as total tax rates fall from 45% at the 0.1% threshold to 25% for billionaires. Among these, the tax burden is global and tax-efficient pyramidal control over businesses ubiquitous.
Mots clés Corporate tax, Business Income, Tax progressivity, Income distribution
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Résumé This paper studies the main determinants of bilateral financial flows in the euro area to achieve sustainable and fair financing opportunities. We revisit the modern theory of the optimal currency area considering the impact of heterogeneity in inequality measures, within and across countries, on crossborder financial flows. To do so, we introduce financial and social fragmentation in gravity models of European capital flows. We use data from 19 Eurozone countries from 2000 to 2021 and show how fragmentation impacts capital flows, namely foreign direct investment, cross-border loans as well as portfolios, equity and bond flows. Since capital is, in principle, free to flow in the Eurozone, our analysis directly identifies the roles of potential sources of fragmentation: social inequalities, lack of market openness, and domestic regulations such as macroprudential controls. Overall, our results show that financial integration in Europe entails more capital flows of any type while social fragmentation across European countries is detrimental to capital flows, no matter which type. This is strong evidence of the importance of financial and social fragmentation in the Eurozone on the distribution of capital.
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Résumé This paper tests experimentally how preferences for redistribution of members of the general public depend on how money is earned. An experiment was designed to form of "microparticipatory-democracy"where redistribution from winners to losers is decided through a sequential strategy-proof majority voting procedure. Based on five distributive justice theories, we elicit people's preferences for redistribution when their earnings come from four factors: effort, social circumstances, brute luck, and option luck. In the aggregate, our results show that a relative majority of people agree with Dworkin's cut, namely, to compensate for social circumstances and brute luck but not effort and option luck. Participants with bad outcomes are more likely to engage in a self-serving vote, but on average, the dominant concern in voting remains people's fairness view. The knowledge of the distribution of earnings and petition for equality of opportunity make participants vote more in favor of redistribution.
Mots clés Social justice, Micro participatory-democracy, Equality of opportunity, Responsibility, Experiment
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Résumé We provide a comprehensive picture of the change in the health status for the self-employed aged 50 and upwards in Europe. We find that self-employed workers are in better physical health than employees at younger ages, due potentially to a selection effect. We also find a negative effect of self-employment status on objective health, leading to worse physical conditions at older ages, despite a catching-up of healthcare consumption after retirement. The examination of the evolution of the self-employed healthcare consumption enables us to distinguish two components: an intense health restoration effect and a regular one, corresponding to two distinct periods in their life. We interpreted the former effect as the increased probability of the self-employed to be hospitalized during their careers, meaning that the self-employed seek care later or for serious reasons only. The latter effect or the regular restoration effect meaning a greater number of medical visits for the self-employed after retirement which is potentially due to a reduction in the opportunity cost of the use of healthcare resources.
Mots clés Self-employment, Health status, Health care consumption, SHARE survey
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Résumé During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Omicron wave was notable for its highly transmissible and contagious variant of concern, coinciding with the availability of a vaccine that has been rolled out well earlier. In this paper, we address two key questions. First, we seek todesign a simple epidemiological model that can best capture the dynamics of Omicron infections. We demonstrate that combining the SIRDand SISD models provides an adequate solution. The second question examines the benefits of vaccination, in terms of both economicactivity and lives saved, once the model is implemented. Our results show that without vaccination, the human cost would have been fivetimes higher, and production losses would have doubled, due to stricter con- finement measures and a higher death toll. We also quantify the cost of vaccine hesitancy at more than 8,000 extra deaths.
Mots clés Compartment models, COVID-19, Omicron wave, Vaccination benefit, Vaccine hesitation
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Résumé Modern society is increasingly polarized, even on purely factual questions, despite greater access to information than ever. In a model of sequential sociallearning, I study the impact ofmotivated reasoningon information aggregation. This is a belief formation process in which agents trade-off accuracy against ideological convenience. I find that even Bayesian agents only learn in very highly connected networks, where agents have arbitrarily large neighborhoods asymptotically. This is driven by the fact that motivated agents sometimes reject information that can be inferred from their neighbors’ actions when it refutes their desired beliefs. Observing any finite neighborhood, there is always some probability that all of an agent’s neighbors will have disregarded information thus. Moreover, I establish thatconsensus, where all agents eventually choose the same action, is only possible with relatively uninformative private signals and low levels of motivated reasoning.
Mots clés Social Learning, Motivated Reasoning, Networks, Polarization
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Résumé Models of social learning conventionally assume that all actions are visible, whereas in reality, we can often choose whether or not to advertise our choices. Inthis paper, I study a model of sequential social learning in which social agents choose whether or not to let successors see their action, only wanting to do so if they are sufficiently confident in their choice (they are timid), and noise agents act randomly. I find that in sparse networks, this produces a form of unravelling to the effect that noise agents are overrepresented. This can damage learning to an arbitrary extent if social agents are sufficiently timid. In dense networks, however, no such unravelling occurs, and the combination of noise and timidity can facilitate complete learning even with bounded beliefs.
Mots clés Sequential Social Learning, Endogenous Social Networks, Network Theory, Information Economics
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Résumé The expansion of intermittent electricity increases supply variability and requires greater flexibility from consumers. This results in welfare losses for these agents, which can nevertheless be mitigated by energy storage. Our model analyzes these welfare consequences in the context of short-term variability in renewable energy given fixed dispatchable and storage capacities. We explore an optimal control problem that determines a welfare-maximizing electricity consumption path by adjusting dispatchable and stored energy throughout the short-term production cycle of renewables. This optimization problem identifies three regimes (no storage and active storage, with or without capacity constraints) and provides the associated consumer welfare over this cycle. Under all three regimes, a certain degree of consumer flexibility is part of the optimal solution and entails welfare losses. Active storage reduces these losses but cannot eliminate them completely due to the energy conversion losses induced by this activity. However, when storage capacity is constrained, a proactive adjustment of this capacity can offset the losses.
Mots clés Optimal control, Welfare analysis, Electricity consumption, Energy storage, Intermittent renewable
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Résumé We propose a new random method to minimize deterministic continuous functions over subsets $\mathcal{S}$ of high-dimensional space $\mathbb{R}^K$ without assuming convexity. Our procedure alternates between a Global Search (GS) regime to identify candidates and a Concentrated Search (CS) regime to improve an eligible candidate in the constraint set $\mathcal{S}$. Beyond the alternation between those completely different regimes, the originality of our approach lies in leveraging high dimensionality. We demonstrate rigorous concentration properties under the $CS$ regime. In parallel, we also show that $GS$ reaches any point in $\mathcal{S}$ in finite time. Finally, we demonstrate the relevance of our new method by giving two concrete applications. The first deals with the reduction of the $\ell_{1}-$norm of a LASSO solution. Secondly, we compress a neural network by pruning weights while maintaining performance; our approach achieves significant weight reduction with minimal performance loss, offering an effective solution for network optimization.
Mots clés High-dimensional optimization, Stochastic search, Lasso, Basis pursuit denoising, Neural network compression
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Résumé The 2014 Automatic Exchange of Information (AEoI) represents the most comprehensive global effort to combat tax evasion by enabling cross-border information exchange on financial assets. We examine how this policy shifted offshore investment behavior. While the AEoI mandates reporting of financial assets, it excludes real estate holdings. Using administrative data on UK real estate purchases by foreign companies, we show that offshore users substituted financial assets for real estate in response to the new transparency regime. Our findings suggest that real estate assets now account for a growing share of offshore portfolios, partly due to their exclusion from the AEoI.
Mots clés Hidden Wealth, Real estate, Tax Enforcement
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Résumé Prior work finds that individuals are often less prosocial when they can exploit uncertainty as an excuse. In contrast to prior work that largely explores the relevance of excuses in the gain domain, this paper investigates the relevance of excuses in both the loss and gain domains. In our laboratory experiment, participants evaluated risky payoffs for themselves and their partners in either the gain or loss domain, with or without interpersonal trade-offs. We found that participants exhibited excuse-driven risk behaviors in both domains. We also documented significant individual heterogeneity in the degree of excuses, influenced by factors such as individuals’ risk preferences, beliefs about others’ risk preferences, and the size of the risk.We present a self-signaling model that incorporates self-image concerns to explain our experimental findings. We show that excuse-driven risk behavior arises because people misattribute their selfish behavior to risk preferences rather than a reduced level of altruism.
Mots clés Risk preferences, Self-image, Misattribution, Experiment, Prosocial behavior
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Résumé In this paper, we examine the determinants of investor money flows in sustainable mutual funds. Owing to differences in preferences, we posit that ESG investors are more sensitive to mutual fund financial attributes than impact investors are. Using a dataset of 840 actively managed European sustainable equity funds for the period 2018–2025, we find that fund flows are significantly more sensitive to past performance for ESG funds than for impact funds. Our empirical results are in line with impact investor specificity among sustainable investors: the first invest for ESG values, whereas the latter invest with ESG values. Our findings are robust to alternative sustainable classifications, geographical investment areas, investor types and time sampling.
Mots clés Impact investing, Mutual funds, Investor behavior, Cash flows
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Résumé Political campaigns influence how voters prioritize issues, which in turn impacts electoral outcomes. In this paper, we study how candidates’ communication shapes which issues prevail during the campaign, through which mechanisms, and to what extent. We develop an electoral competition model with two candidates, each endowed with exogenous platforms and characteristics. Candidates allocate strategically their communication time across two issues to maximize their expected vote shares. We find that when one candidate holds similar comparative advantages on both issues, the disadvantaged candidate communicate on a single issue to saturate the campaign with one topic and then increases the randomness of the election. The advantaged candidate has the opposite incentive and communicate on both issues, creating an asymmetry in the campaign. We show that in some cases, the campaign can become entirely centered on a single issue.
Mots clés Electoral competition, Communication time, Priming
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