Publications

Abstract This article identifies the effect of trade policy on market power through new data and a new identification strategy. We identify market power by observing how exporting firms price discriminate across markets following variations in bilateral exchange rates. Pricing-to-market is prevalent in all countries in our sample, even among small firms, although it is increasing in firm size. More importantly, we find that the effect of nontariff measures (NTMs) is not isomorphic to that of tariffs. Whereas tariffs reduce the market power of foreign firms through rent-shifting effects, NTMs reinforce the market power of nonexiting firms, domestic and foreign alike.
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Abstract This paper aims at quantifying the effect of healthcare programs on economic outcomes in the context of developing countries experiencing epidemiological transitions. It is widely accepted in the literature that treatment programs result in production gains among ill-health workers. However, these programs have the additional effect of modifying both the size and the composition of the working population by increasing the proportion of chronically-ill individuals. First, we define the theoretical conditions under which this macro-epidemiological phenomenon outweighs the positive effect of an increase in production. Second, we decompose the economic consequences of access to antiretroviral treatments against HIV in three sub-Saharan African countries. Forecasts of an individual’s health status, depending on whether he or she has access to medication, are generated using a microsimulation model. We use the model to generate a counterfactual (as if the adverse epidemiological effect did not exist), which allows decomposing the total impact of the HIV-medicines program into two different effects: positive and negative. We find that the positive effect of treatment procurement outweighs the negative epidemiological effect. Of course, this approach is only an indicator of economic performance and should in no way constitute a decision-making criterion about the ethical necessity of access to health care.
Keywords Microsimulation, Demographic changes, Treatment programs, Macroeconomic indicators, HIV/AIDS, VIH-SIDA, Changements démographiques, Programmes de traitement, Indicateurs macroéconomiques, Microsimulation
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Abstract Over the period 1994–2012, immigrants’ wage growth in France outperformed that of natives. We investigate to what extent changes in task-specific returns to skills contributed to this wage dynamics differential through two channels: changes in the valuation of skills (price effect) and occupational sorting (quantity effect). We find that the wage growth premium of immigrants is mainly explained by the progressive reallocation of immigrants toward tasks whose returns increase over time. Immigrants seem to have taken advantage of labor demand restructuring driven by globalization and technological changes.
Keywords Skills, Immigrants, Tasks, Wage dynamics
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Abstract This paper is about a little known part of Allais’ oeuvre, namely his restatement of the quantity theory of money. It shows that this restatement contains an original refinement of the notion of stability of the relative demand for money. To explain this refinement, this essay investigates Allais’ concept of psychological time – a concept strongly emphasised but not duly examined by most of his commentators. It shows how Allais’ restatement of the quantity theory amounts – in the final analysis – to a theory of time. It explores an analogy, Allais mentioned, between his quantity theory and the theory of relativity in physics, revealing thereby the ontological nature of this restatement.
Keywords Ontology, Relativity, Psychological time, The quantity theory of money, Maurice Allais
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Abstract This analysis proposes new measures of rent creation and rent sharing and assesses their impact on productivity on cross-country-industry panel data. We find first that: (1) anticompetitive product market regulations positively affect rent creation and (2) employment protection legislation boosts hourly wages, particularly for low-skill workers. However, we find no significant impact of this employment legislation on rent sharing, as the hourly wage increases are offset by a negative impact on hours worked. Second, using regulation indicators as instruments, we find that rent creation and rent sharing both have a substantial negative impact on total factor productivity. (JEL E22, E24, O30, L50, O43, O47, C23)
Keywords TFP, Rent-sharing, Mark-up, Labor market regulations, Product market regulations
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Abstract In this paper, we are interested in the interplay between real estate bubble, aggregate capital accumulation and taxation in an overlapping generations economy with altruistic households. We consider a three-period overlapping generations model with three key elements: altruism, portfolio choice, and financial market imperfections. Households realise different investment decisions in terms of asset at different periods of life, face a binding borrowing constraint and leave bequests to their children. We show that altruism plays a key role on the existence of a productive real estate bubble, i.e. a bubble in real estate raising physical capital stock and aggregate output. The key mechanism relies on the fact that a real estate bubble raises income of retired households. Because of higher bequests, there children are able to invest more in productive capital. Introducing fiscal policy, we show that raising real estate taxation dampens capital accumulation.
Keywords Real estate, Overlapping generations, Credit, Bubble, Altruism
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Abstract We study the existence of endogenous competitive equilibrium cycles under small discounting in a two-sector discrete-time optimal growth model. We provide precise concavity conditions on the indirect utility function leading to the existence of period-two cycles with a critical value for the discount factor that can be arbitrarily close to one. Contrary to the continuous-time case where the existence of periodic-cycles is obtained if the degree of concavity is close to zero, we show that in a discrete-time setting the driving condition does not require a close to zero degree of concavity but a symmetry of the indirect utility function’s concavity properties with respect to its two arguments.
Keywords Two-sector optimal growth model, Strong and weak concavity, Small discounting, Period-two cycles
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Abstract We examine the problem of providing a non-rival and excludable public good to individuals with the same preferences and differing contributing capacities. Exclusion from the public good is costly in the sense that if two different quantities of the public good are consumed in the community, then the sum of the costs of providing the two quantities must be borne. By contrast, costless exclusion only requires the cost of the largest quantity consumed of the public good to be financed. We show that despite its important cost, providing public goods in different quantities is often part of any optimal provision of public good when the public authority is imperfectly informed about the agents' contributive capacities. In the specific situation where individuals have an additively separable logarithmic utility function, we provide a complete characterization of the optimal exclusion structure in the two-type case. We also show that the preference for such a costly exclusion is more likely when the heterogeneity in the population or income is large, and when the aversion to utility inequality is important.
Keywords Costly exclusion, Public goods, Asymmetric information, Mechanism design
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Abstract In this paper, we investigate the effect of real estate prices on productive investment. We build a 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. 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.
Keywords R30, O52, G30, Financial constraints JEL classification D22, Collateral channel, Real estate prices, Firms&#039, investment, Financial constraints
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