Avner Seror

Chercheur ,  CNRS , Faculté d'économie et de gestion (FEG)

Développement et économie politique
Statut
Chargé de recherche
Domaine(s) de recherche
Économie du développement
Thèse
2018, Paris School of Economics - Paris 1
Contact
avner.seror[at]univ-amu.fr
Adresse

AMU - AMSE
5-9 Boulevard Maurice Bourdet, CS 50498
​13205 Marseille Cedex 1

Site
https://sites.google.com/site/avnerseror
Résumé During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.
Mots clés Legitimacy, Political economy, Religion, Institutions, Cultural transmission, Long divergence
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Résumé Using data on roughly half a million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India, Mehmood et al. estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions. They find that fasting increases judicial leniency and reduces reversals of decisions in higher courts. We estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions in Pakistan and India from half a century of daily data. We use random case assignment and exogenous variation in fasting intensity during Ramadan due to the rotating Islamic calendar and the geographical latitude of the district courts to document the large effects of Ramadan fasting on decision-making. Our sample comprises roughly a half million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India. Ritual intensity increases Muslim judges' acquittal rates, lowers their appeal and reversal rates, and does not come at the cost of increased recidivism or heightened outgroup bias. Overall, our results indicate that the Ramadan fasting ritual followed by a billion Muslims worldwide induces more lenient decisions.
Mots clés Religious rituals, Ramadan, Decision-making, Religious rituals Ramadan decision-making, Religious rituals
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Résumé In this paper, we provide systematic evidence of how historical religious institutions affect the rule of law. In a difference-in-differences framework, we show that districts in Pakistan where the historical presence of religious institutions is higher, rule of law is worse. This deterioration is economically significant, persistent, and likely explained by religious leaders gaining political office. We explain these findings with a model where religious leaders leverage their high legitimacy to run for office and subvert the Courts. We test for and find no evidence supporting several competing explanations: the rise of secular wealthy landowners, dynastic political leaders and changes in voter attitudes are unable to account for the patterns in the data. Our estimates indicate that religious leaders expropriate rents through the legal system amounting to about 0.06 percent of GDP every year.
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Résumé I present a model of child development that highlights the effect of parent-child interactions on the formation of skills. Through the parent’s affection, the child learns and builds mental representations of the self as loved and competent. These mental representations shape the child’s noncognitive skills and foster learning. I show that this model provides a unifying explanation for well-established evidence on child development. The model also sheds light on how early exposure to media devices can negatively impact skill acquisition. I discuss implications for the design of policies to reduce inequalities in child development.
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Résumé Why do some societies have political institutions that support productively inefficient outcomes? And why does the political power of elites vested in these outcomes often grow over time, even when they are unable to block more efficient modes of production? We propose an explanation centered on the interplay between political and cultural change. We build a model in which cultural values are transmitted inter-generationally. The cultural composition of society, in turn, determines public-goods provision as well as the future political power of elites from different cultural groups. We characterize the equilibrium of the model and provide sufficient conditions for the emergence of cultural revivals. These are characterized as movements in which both the cultural composition of society as well as the political power of elites who are vested in productively inefficient outcomes grow over time. We reveal the usefulness of our framework by applying it to two case studies: the Jim Crow South and Turkey’s Gülen Movement.
Mots clés Institutional change, Cultural transmission, Cultural beliefs, Institutions
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Résumé As large language models (LLMs) become integrated to decision-making across various sectors, a key question arises: do they exhibit an emergent "moral mind" -a consistent set of moral principles guiding their ethical judgments -and is this reasoning uniform or diverse across models? To investigate this, we presented about forty different models from the main providers with a large array of structured ethical scenarios, creating one of the largest datasets of its kind. Our rationality tests revealed that at least one model from each provider demonstrated behavior consistent with stable moral principles, effectively acting as approximately optimizing a utility function encoding ethical reasoning. We identified these utility functions and observed a notable clustering of models around neutral ethical stances. To investigate variability, we introduced a novel non-parametric permutation approach, revealing that the most rational models shared 59% to 76% of their ethical reasoning patterns. Despite this shared foundation, differences emerged: roughly half displayed greater moral adaptability, bridging diverse perspectives, while the remainder adhered to more rigid ethical structures.
Mots clés PSM, LLM, Artificial intelligence, Rationality, Revealed Preference, Decision Theory
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Résumé This paper studies dynamic contracts in illegal addictive markets where individuals' tastes for addictive goods develop through prolonged consumption and contract enforcement is limited. Our theoretical analysis uncovers the optimality of a 'freefirst-dose' strategy where sellers intensify buyers' addiction by offering consumption credit to newcomers. We show that buyers default a certain portion of the debts for early period consumption but are never imposed any penalty on the equilibrium path. This implies that illegal markets might favor non-violent interactions over violent ones, defying the stereotypical association of illegality with violence. Meanwhile, in illegal gambling markets, a distinct equilibrium phenomenon known as the long-shot bias emerges due to the influence of addiction, illustrating another complex dynamic within these markets. We discuss the implications of the model in the context of illegal sports wagering, narcotics, and religious sects.
Mots clés Addiction, Dynamic Contracts, Illegal Markets
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Résumé This paper shows how to recover behavioral biases from revealed preference ranking implied by choices. The approach formalizes and unifies known behavioral models, including salience thinking, inattention, and logarithmic perception, thereby accounting for many well-documented choice puzzles. I show that this approach provides a way to filter out choice data from behavioral biases explaining rationality breaches before fitting parametric utility models. The approach is applied to workhorse data sets of the literature on choice under risk and scanner consumer choices.
Mots clés Decision Theory, Revealed Preference, Behavioral economics
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Résumé In this paper, I introduce a novel methodology to conduct surveys. The priced survey methodology (PSM). Like standard surveys, priced surveys are easy to implement, and measure social preferences on numerical scales. The PSM's design draws inspiration from consumption choice experiments, as respondents fill out the same survey several times under different choice sets. I extend Afriat's theorem and show that the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preferences is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a concave, continuous, and single-peaked utility function rationalizing answers to the PSM. I apply the PSM to a sample of online participants and show that most respondents are rational when answering the PSM. I estimate respondents' single-peaked utility functions and draw several implications on their social preferences.
Mots clés Survey, Behavioral economics, Social preferences, Revealed Preference, Decision Theory
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Résumé In this paper, I introduce a novel methodology to conduct surveys. The priced survey methodology. Like standard surveys, priced surveys are easy to implement, and measure invisible assets such as feelings, happiness, knowledge, views, and attitudes on numerical scales. Unlike standard surveys, priced surveys allow to leverage decades of research on revealed preference and consumer demand in the analysis of invisible assets.
Mots clés Revealed Preference, Invisible Assets, Survey, Priced Survey
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Résumé In this paper, I introduce a workable dynamic utility model on the interplay between economic actions and social roles. I model both how economic actions are embedded in social roles, and how social roles reciprocally feed back into preferences and affect economic outcomes. I also consider a set of policy interventions aimed at breaking social roles when they deteriorate economic outcomes.
Mots clés Discrimination, Gender, Endogenous preferences, Identity, Social roles
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Résumé We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests' vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differencesin-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to be driving our results, since we find no effect on enrollment in deacon or lay ministry studies that do not require celibacy. We also find that coming out decisions, as inferred through enrollment in priestly studies, are primarily affected by the presence of gay communities and by prevailing social attitudes toward gays. We explain our findings with a stylized model of lifestyle choice.
Mots clés Homosexuality, Religion, Identity
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Résumé Most enlightenment philosophers argued that the separation between Church and State would prevent capture of resources by one state religion. We formalize and test a theory that addresses a different danger. We demonstrate that a reduction in the separation between Church and State can be corrosive to political institutions, especially the Judiciary. We show that religious leaders use their high legitimacy to gain political office, and become particularly abusive politicians, misusing their political authority to undermine the independence of the Judiciary. We provide a theoretical framework and estimate the structural equations of our theory using data from Pakistan. Our empirical strategy exploits the plausibly exogenous timing of a military coup to provide causal evidence for the key predictions of our theory.
Mots clés Religion, Judicial independence, Elections, Economic development
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Résumé This paper presents a general theory of child development that incorporates interactive learning and identity formation in social interactions with caregivers. The model sheds light on many puzzling aspects of child development. Child learning responds nonmonotonically to caregivers' attention and approval in social interactions. I highlight key parental characteristics associated with child learning, and identity formation. The theory also explains why media devices widen human inequality. Lessons are finally drawn for the design of policies that alleviate human inequality.
Mots clés Identity, Parenting, Learning, Intergenerational transmission, Media, Social interactions, Human inequality, Human development
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