Gravel
Nicolas Gravel
Publications
This paper examines the validity of the “folk” intuition that endogenous formation of jurisdictions is likely to create stratification of households according to their wealth. More specifically, we examine a simple model of jurisdiction formation, close in spirit to that of Whestoff ([27]), in which a continuum of unequally wealthy households endowed with the same preferences for one public good and one private good make a location decision in a finite set. Households who choose the same location form a jurisdiction. Within each jurisdiction, the public good is financed by a proportional wealth tax whose rate is decided by a social choice mechanism. The only assumption imposed on the mechanism is to select the most preferred tax rate of one member of the jurisdiction. We define a jurisdiction structure to be stable if it gives to no household any incentive to move away from its jurisdiction. We raise the question of whether stable jurisdiction structures will be stratified in the precise sense that if two households belong to one jurisdiction, then so do all households with intermediate wealth. We provide a necessary and, if households preferences satisfy an additional regularity property, sufficient condition on the households preferences that guarantees that any stable jurisdictions structure involves stratification in this sense. The condition is that the household’s most preferred tax rate must be a strictly monotonic function of its wealth.
La troisième conférence en l'honneur du fondateur de l'Institut d'Économie Publique (IDEP), Louis-André Gérard-Varet (LAGV) s'est tenue à Marseille en Juin 2004. Cette conférence annuelle vise à encourager la production et la diffusion de la recherche en économie publique, en mettant essentiellement l'accent sur les résultats qui contribuent significativement à améliorer la décision publique. La troisième édition de cette conférence, organisée sur le thème «Santé. Assurance et Équité », a rassemblé 60 contributions qui ont porté sur différentes questions relative à l'économie et à la gestion des systèmes de santé, définis au sens large. Cette conférence à été retenue comme Conférence ADRES 2004 et elle a été soutenue financièrement par l'ADRES, le Conseil Régional Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, le Département des Bouches-du-Rhône, le Mairie de Marseille et le ministère français des Affaires étrangères.
A non-linear hedonic model is used to estimate the implicit marginal prices of 17 local public goods in a Paris suburban area on an original data set of some 8200 housing units. The results reveal a robust effect of local public school quality (measured both by the fraction of junior high school students that are at least two years behind grade level and the student/teacher ratio) on house prices. It is observed that housing owners' marginal willingness to pay for reducing commuting time is roughly similar for public transportation than for car transportation. Another noticeable result is the complete capitalization of local taxes at a discount rate of 3.5%. An illustration of the potential usefulness of the results for Cost-Benefit analysis is also provided.
We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist constitution maker would always choose to set up a progressive equalization payment scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payment scheme is defined as a list of per capita net (possibly negative) subsidies – one such net subsidy for every jurisdiction - that are decreasing with respect to jurisdictions per capita wealth. We examine the question in a setting in which the case for progressivity is a priori the strongest, namely, all citizens have the same utility function for the private good and the public good, inhabitants of a given jurisdiction are all identicals and are not able to move accross jurisdictions. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition that the objective function of the constitution maker must satisfy to favour a progressive equalization payment scheme for all distributions of wealth and all population sizes is to be additively separable between each jurisdiction’s per capita wealth and number of inhabitants. When interpreted for a mean of order social welfare function, this condition is shown to be equivalent to additive separability of the individual’s indirect utility function with respect to wealth and the price of the public good. Some implications of this restriction to the case where the citizen direct utility function is additively separable are also derived.
Cet article étudie les conséquences qu’aurait eues une réforme du régime des minima sociaux sur l’offre de travail des célibataires. La réforme étudiée est une variante de l’Allocation Compensatrice de Revenu. L’analyse s’appuie sur une estimation du comportement d’offre de travail d’un échantillon représentatif d’individus (avec ou sans enfants) dont la contrainte budgétaire est micro-simulée. La micro-simulation est effectuée en tenant compte du décalage temporel qu’introduit la législation entre la perception des revenus d’activité et celle des transferts nets auxquels ces revenus donnent lieu. Les comportements individuels d’offre de travail sont estimés en tenant compte de la possibilité de non-emploi involontaire, de l’endogéneité du salaire net induit par le système fiscal et des biais de sélection endogène de l’échantillon. Les estimations des paramètres décrivant les comportements individuels d’emploi et d’offre de travail sont utilisées pour simuler des réactions individuelles à la modification de la contrainte budgétaire induite par la réforme. Les résultats suggèrent que la réforme aurait « remis au travail » 6 % des individus inemployés et réduit le nombre d’heures que désirent travailler quelque 12 % des individus employés. Au total, la réforme aurait entraîné une réduction du nombre total d’heures travaillées.
This paper examines some consequences of the assumption that individuals constrain morally their behaviour in games in general and in games of voluntary provision of public good in particular. Moral behaviour is defined in terms of a maxim which assigns one moral action to every player. Maxims themselves are defined with respect to a system of moral equivalence between individual actions referred to as a system of moral universalization.
No abstract is available for this item.
[fre] Dans cet article, on étudie l'impact que pourrait avoir la mise en œuvre de réformes de type "allocation compensatrice de revenu" (ACR) sur le retour à l'emploi des RMistes et autres titulaires de minima sociaux. Nous faisons état de prévisions des comportements d'offre de travail des individus qui pourraient résulter de la mise en œuvre d'une série de variantes d'ACR. Ces prévisions sont effectuées à partir d'une modélisation structurelle et d'une estimation économétrique préalable des comportements des ménages effectuée et présentée en détail dans Gravel- Hagneré-Picard [2000] . La fraction des individus (ménages monoparentaux) qui retrouveraient un travail à temps partiel par suite de ces réformes ne dépasse jamais 15 % du total de la population cible. Par contre des individus qui, entre autres, travaillaient à plein temps opteraient pour le temps partiel. Le bilan agrégé en termes d'heures de travail serait négatif. L'effet redistributif de ce type de réforme est cependant indéniable. Parmi toutes les réformes envisagées, celle qui consiste à laisser à l'individu 60 centimes sur chaque franc gagné semble préférable, lorsqu'on combine des critères d'efficacité et d'équité.
[eng] This paper examines the impact that reforms of the French welfare system could have on the employment and labour force participation of welfare recipients. More specifically we present predictions of the individuals'labour supply behaviour that could result from the introduction of a few reform scenarios based on a reduction of the marginal implicit income tax rate faced by welfare recipients under the current system. These predictions are derived from a structural modelization and an econometric estimation of the labour supply of single-head households discussed in detail in Gravel-Hagneré-Picard (2000). The fraction of actually unemployed single head households who would become employed after the reforms never exceed 15 % of the total target population. Moreover, some households head who were working under the current system would choose to reduce their hours worked. The aggregate effect of all the reforms on the labour supply turns out to be negative. On the other hand, this kind of reform appears to have an undeniable redis- tributive effect. Among the reforms considered, it is the one associated with a 40 percent implicit marginal tax rate on the labour income which seems to represent the best compromise between equity and efficiency considerations.
This paper examines two problems associated with the use of potential Pareto criteria in welfare economics. The first problem is the well-known intransitivity of the compensation criteria Á la Kaldor-Hicks-Scitovsky. The second problem is the possible incompatibility between the Chipman-Moore-Samuelson criterion and the Pareto principle. The main result of this paper is that, in order to avoid either of these problems, it is necessary and sufficient that the domain to which these criteria are used is such that the Chipman-Moore-Samuelson criterion encompasses completely the Pareto criterion. When interpreted in a standard economic environment, this result is shown to be equivalent to Gorman's requirement of non-crossing between utility possibility frontiers.
