Publications

Résumé We investigate how the incompleteness of an employment contract—discretionary and noncontractible effort—can affect an employer’s decision about cutting nominal wages. Using matched employer-employee payroll data from Great Britain linked to a survey of managers, we find support for the main predictions of a stylized theoretical framework of wage determination: nominal cuts are at most half as likely when managers believe that their employees have significant discretion over how they do their work, although the involvement of employees, via information sharing, reduces this correlation. We also describe how contract incompleteness and wage cuts vary across different jobs. These findings provide the first observational quantitative evidence that managerial beliefs about contractual incompleteness can account for their hesitancy over nominal wage cuts. This has long been conjectured by economists based on anecdotes, qualitative surveys, and laboratory and field experiments.
Mots clés Wave rigidity, Employment contract, Workplace relations, Employer-employee data, Pay change
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Résumé What patterns of economic relations arise when people are altruistic rather than strategically self-interested? What are the welfare implications of altruistically-motivated choices of business partners? This paper introduces an altruism network into a simple model of choice among partners for economic activity. With concave utility, agents effectively become inequality averse towards their friends and family. Rich agents preferentially choose to work with poor friends despite productivity losses. These preferential contracts can also align with welfare since the poor benefit the most from income gains and these gains can outweigh the loss in output. Hence, network inequality—the divergence in incomes within sets of friends and family—is key to how altruism shapes economic activity, output, and welfare. When skill homophily —the tendency for friends to have the skills needed for high production—is high, preferential contracts and productivity losses disappear since rich agents have poor friends with the requisite qualifications.
Mots clés Networks, Altruism, Income inequality, Connections
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Résumé This paper derives closed‐form solutions for a strategic , simultaneous harvesting in a predator–prey system. Using a parametric constraint, it establishes the existence and uniqueness of a linear feedback‐Nash equilibrium involving two specialized fleets and allows for continuous time results for a class of payoffs that have constant elasticity of the marginal utility. These results contribute to the scarce literature on analytically tractable predator–prey models with endogenous harvesting. A discussion based on industry size effects is provided to highlight the role played by biological versus strategic interactions in the multispecies context. Recommendations for Resource Managers This model presents a thorough examination of the economic inefficiencies inherent in the exploitation dynamics of two interdependent species, elucidating the complex interplay between ecological interactions and economic outcomes. The size of the fishing industries constitutes a significant variable that must be integrated into the formulation of pertinent policy recommendations. This constitutes an advancement towards a more time‐consistent approach to Ecosystem‐Based Fishery Management (EBFM).
Mots clés Common‐pool resource, Dynamic games, Fisheries, Predator–preyrelationship
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Résumé This study examines the acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI)-based diagnostic alternatives compared to traditional biological testing through a randomized scenario experiment in the domain of neurodegenerative diseases (NDs). A total of 3225 pairwise choices of ND risk-prediction tools were offered to participants, with 1482 choices comparing AI with the biological saliva test and 1743 comparing AI+ with the saliva test (with AI+ using digital consumer data, in addition to electronic medical data). Overall, only 36.68% of responses showed preferences for AI/AI+ alternatives. Stratified by AI sensitivity levels, acceptance rates for AI/AI+ were 35.04% at 60% sensitivity and 31.63% at 70% sensitivity, and increased markedly to 48.68% at 95% sensitivity (p
Mots clés Artificial intelligence, AI diagnostics, Neurodegenerative diseases, Machine learning
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Résumé Is elite persistence weaker in Africa than in other parts of the world, given historical barriers to intergenerational inheritance of status, such as limited private property rights and frequent economic and political crises? In the absence of linked intergenerational data, we use name analysis to address this question. Using surnames associated with two Sierra Leonean elites, Krio descendants of settlers and members of chiefly lineages, we measure elite persistence in politics, education and business since 1960. Both groups were highly overrepresented in elite positions at independence, and remain overrepresented today. Benchmarking our results against other countries shows that Sierra Leone's educational elites are as persistent as elsewhere, but elite persistence in the political sphere is lower than in the United Kingdom, our main comparator. We also show marked path dependence: chiefly descendants remain more overrepresented in politics and mining, while the Krio are highly over-represented in education and the professions.
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Résumé We study how altruism networks affect the demand for formal insurance. Agents with CARA utilities are connected through a network of altruistic relationships. Incomes are subject to a common shock and to a large individual shock, generating heterogeneous damages. Agents can buy formal insurance to cover the common shock, up to a coverage cap. We find that ex-post altruistic transfers induce interdependence in ex-ante formal insurance decisions. We characterize the Nash equilibria of the insurance game and show that agents act as if they are trying to maximize the expected utility of a representative agent with average damages. Altruism thus tends to increase demand of low-damage agents and to decrease demand of high-damage agents. Its aggregate impact depends on the interplay between demand homogenization, the zero lower bound and the coverage cap. We find that aggregate demand is higher with altruism than without altruism at low prices and lower at high prices. Nash equilibria are constrained Pareto efficient.
Mots clés Altruism networks, Informal transfers, Formal insurance
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Résumé We study the impact of socioeconomic factors on two key parameters of epidemic dynamics. Specifically, we investigate a parameter capturing the rate of deceleration at the very start of an epidemic, and a parameter that reflects the pre-peak and post-peak dynamics at the turning point of an epidemic like coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We find two important results. The policies to fight COVID-19 (such as social distancing and containment) have been effective in reducing the overall number of new infections, because they influence not only the epidemic peaks, but also the speed of spread of the disease in its early stages. The second important result of our research concerns the role of healthcare infrastructure. They are just as effective as anti-COVID policies, not only in preventing an epidemic from spreading too quickly at the outset, but also in creating the desired dynamic around peaks: slow spreading, then rapid disappearance.
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Résumé A considerable body of work has shown that motherhood is accompanied by a reduction in labor market participation and hours of market work, while more recent findings indicate that women who earn more than their husbands tend to subsequently take actions that reduce their market income. Both patterns of behavior have been interpreted as women trying to conform to child-rearing norms and to the prescription that the husband should be the main breadwinner. In this paper, we use panel data for US couples to re-examine women's behavior when they become mothers and when they are the main breadwinner. We start by asking whether the arrival of a child affects women who are the main breadwinner and those who are not in the same way, and then turn to how mothers and childless women react when they are the main breadwinner. Our results are consistent with the breadwinner norm only affecting mothers, suggesting that the salience of gender norms may depend on the household's context, notably on whether or not children are present. Concerning the arrival of a child, we find that although the labor supply of women who earn more than their husbands initially responds to motherhood less than that of secondary earners, the two groups converge after 10 years. Moreover, women in the former category exhibit a disproportionately large increase in the share of housework they perform after becoming mothers. The latter results suggest that the presence of children pushes women to seek to compensate breaking a norm by adhering to another one.
Mots clés Children, Female labor supply, Gender identity norms, Relativeincome
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