Publications

Résumé In the follow-up to the 1926 political and monetary crisis in France, a new government led by Raymond Poincaré attempted to restore monetary stability by restructuring public debt. A sinking fund was missioned to withdraw short-term public bills from money markets. This policy disorganized the largest Parisian banks of the time, as they relied on these bills to manage their liquidity. Without developed domestic money markets, no other asset could absorb the excess liquidity freed by the withdrawal of these bills, and these leading banks faced a low-rate environment. In search of yield, they expanded their activities abroad a few months before the 1929 crash. These findings renew our understanding of the expansion of France's banking sector in the 1920s. In addition, they shed new light on the role of public debt in financial stability in an open economy.
Mots clés Interwar, International finance, Liquidity, Public debt
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Résumé We provide a unified framework with demand for housing over the life cycle and financial frictions to analyze the existence and macroeconomic effects of rational housing bubbles. We distinguish a housing price bubble, defined as the difference between the housing market price and its fundamental value, from a housing demand bubble, which corresponds to a situation where a pure speculative housing demand exists. In an overlapping generation exchange economy, we show that no housing price bubble occurs. However, a housing demand bubble may occur, generating a boom in housing prices and a drop in the interest rate, when households face a binding borrowing constraint. The multiplicity of steady states and endogenous fluctuations can occur when credit market imperfections are moderate. These fluctuations involve transitions between equilibria with and without a housing demand bubble that generate large fluctuations in housing prices consistent with observed patterns. We finally extend the basic framework to a production economy and we show that a housing demand bubble increases housing prices, which can still be characterized by large fluctuations.
Mots clés Bubble, Housing, Self-fulfilling fluctuations
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Résumé This paper combines a database on non-tari measures (NTMs) with Morocco's rm-level census to explore the eect of regulatory harmonization with the E.U. on rms' outcomes. Exploiting cross-sectoral variation in the timing and extent of regulatory harmonization, we nd that harmonization waves correlate with rises in productivity, with higher markups and with greater numbers of export- ing rms. These eects were reinforced by an induced market-structure change: harmonization temporarily protected the Moroccan market from competition from low-end producers in other developing countries, who took time to adapt. We identify these eects through changes in both trade patterns and rm-level outcomes.
Mots clés Trade, Non-Tariff Measures, Firms, Harmonizations, Morocco, Markup, Productivity
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Résumé This paper exploits daily infrared images taken from satellites to track economic activity in advanced and emerging countries. We first develop a framework to read, clean, and exploit satellite images. Our algorithm uses the laws of physics (Planck's law) and machine learning to detect the heat produced by cement plants in activity. This allows us to monitor in real-time whether a cement plant is working. Using this on around 1,000 plants, we construct a satellitebased index. We show that using this satellite index outperforms benchmark models and alternative indicators for nowcasting the production of the cement industry as well as the activity in the construction sector. Comparing across methods, neural networks appear to yield more accurate predictions as they allow to exploit the granularity of our dataset. Overall, combining satellite images and machine learning can help policymakers to take informed and swift economic policy decisions by nowcasting accurately and in real-time economic activity.
Mots clés High-frequency Data, Construction, Machine learning, Data science, Big data
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Résumé Earnings inequality in Germany has increased dramatically. Measuring inequality locally at the level of cities annually since 1985, we find that behind this development is the rapidly worsening inequality in the largest cities, driven by increasing earnings polarisation. In the cross-section, local earnings inequality rises substantially in city size, and this city-size inequality penalty has increased steadily since 1985, reaching an elasticity of .2 in 2010. Inequality decompositions reveal that overall earnings inequality is almost fully explained by the within-locations component, which in turn is driven by the largest cities. The worsening inequality in the largest cities is amplified by their greater population weight. Examining the local earnings distributions directly reveals that this is due to increasing earnings polarisation that is strongest in the largest places. Both upper and lower distributional tails become heavier over time, and are the heaviest in the largest cities. We establish these results using a large and spatially representative administrative data set, and address the top-coding problem in these data using a parametric distribution approach that outperforms standard imputations.
Mots clés Earnings inequality, Spatial inequality, Local earnings polarisation, Earnings inequality spatial inequality inequality decomposition local earnings polarisation, Local earningspolarisation, Inequality decomposition, Spatial inequality, Earnings inequality
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Résumé This article synthesizes the insights gained through presentations and discussions at the 2023 IEEE Workshop on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century (21CW2023), which focused on “The Future of Work in the Age of Automation.” Hosted at Purdue University, this interdisciplinary convening of technologists, social scientists, and humanists explored the impacts of automation on labor, drawing on Wiener’s legacy of insights as a backdrop to examine the technologically mediated future we face in coming decades. The workshop presented a rare opportunity to reflect critically on these issues at a pivotal moment in human and technological history, and to elicit underappreciated dimensions. Areas of focus include: the qualitative and quantitative losses associated with automation and AI, the impacts automation has for questions about the meaningfulness of work, the challenges we face related to uncertainty and lack of predictability in technological advancement, and the opportunities that exist for centering human values and agency in these conversations. While acknowledging many items for concern in the context of automation in the future of work, such as the domination of economic narratives, a potential loss of qualitative texture, and the neglect of certain issues key to human identity, the authors conclude by offering optimistic visions—or calls—for redefining value and labor, preserving human agency, and embracing creative problem-solving.
Mots clés Meaning of work, Ethical innovation, Artificial intelligence, Technology ethics, Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, Automation, Future of work, Heating systems, IEEE Societies, Oral communication, SOCIAL SCIENCES, Technological innovation, Industries, Cybernetics, Ethics, Automation, Conferences, Limits of predictability
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Résumé This paper provides a macroeconomic explanation for the United States suffering from a health disadvantage relative to other rich European countries despite spending much more on health care. We introduce health capital à la Grossman in the neoclassical growth model and assume that its rate of depreciation increases with labor supply. The steady-state share of GDP devoted to health expenditure increases with labor supply, but the relationship between the health capital stock and the number of hours worked is hump-shaped, meaning that there is a country-specific health-maximizing level. We calibrate the model to the United States and assess how much of this “American Health Puzzle” can be explained by the greater number of hours Americans work. Higher labor supply in the US accounts for 2 to 3 percentage points in extra health expenditure as a share of GDP and between 10% and one-third of the American health disadvantage.
Mots clés Working Time, Health Capital, Health Expenditure, Health-Maximizing Level of Labor Supply, American Health Puzzle
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Résumé Wine experts’ ratings provide quality information and reduce the information asymmetry for the consumer. We hypothesize that consumers’ ratings will come to dominate expert ratings in the wine expertise market. We employ a hedonic regression framework on the attributes of 36,970 French red wines to determine the relative impacts of expert and Vivino community ratings on wine prices. Average consumer ratings are found to have a larger effect on price than expert scores. These results are found to be robust to outliers and the general conclusion that peers matter more than experts holds when we exclude the top-end wines.
Mots clés Hedonic analysis, Wine experts, Peer rating, Wine prices, Quality evaluation
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Résumé This paper describes an empiric study of aggregation and deliberation—used during citizens’ workshops—for the elicitation of collective preferences over 20 different ecosystem services (ESs) delivered by the Palavas coastal lagoons located on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea close to Montpellier (S. France). The impact of deliberation is apprehended by comparing the collectives preferences constructed with and without deliberation. The same aggregation rules were used before and after deliberation. We compared two different aggregation methods, i.e. Rapid Ecosystem Services Participatory Appraisal (RESPA) and Majority Judgement (MJ). RESPA had been specifically tested for ESs, while MJ evaluates the merit of each item, an ES in our case, in a predefined ordinal scale of judgment. The impact of deliberation was strongest for the RESPA method. This new information acquired from application of social choice theory is particularly useful for ecological economics studying ES, and more practically for the development of deliberative approaches for public policies..
Mots clés Ecosystem services, Preference elicitation, Non-monetary methods, Deliberation, Social choice theory, Coastal lagoons
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