Publications

Résumé The citizen candidate models of democracy assume that politicians have their own preferences that are not fully revealed at the time of elections. We study the optimal delegation problem which arises between the median voter (the writer of the constitution) and the (future) incumbent politician under the assumption that not only the state of the world but also the politician's type (preferred policy) are the policy-maker's private information. We show that it is optimal to tie the hands of the politician by imposing both a policy floor and a policy cap and delegating him/her the policy choice only in between the cap and the floor. The delegation interval is shown to be the smaller the greater is the uncertainty about the politician's type. These results are also applicable to settings outside the specific problem that our model addresses.
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Résumé Basic sanitation facilities are still lacking in large parts of the developing world, engendering serious environmental health risks. Interventions commonly deliver in-kind or cash subsidies to promote private toilet ownership. In this paper, we assess an intervention that provides information and behavioral incentives to encourage villagers in rural Mali to build and use basic latrines. Using an experimental research design and carefully measured indicators of use, we find a sizeable impact from this intervention: latrine ownership and use almost doubled in intervention villages, and open defecation (OD) was reduced by half. Our results partially attribute these effects to increased knowledge about cheap and locally available sanitation solutions. They are also associated with shifts in social norms governing sanitation. Taken together, our findings, unlike previous evidence from other contexts, suggest that a progressive approach that starts with ending OD and targets whole communities at a time can help meet the United Nations’ 2015 Sustainable Development Goal of ending OD.
Mots clés Social norm, Community-based intervention, Behavioral change, Sanitation
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Résumé We consider the constrained multi-objective optimization problem of finding Pareto critical points of difference of convex functions. The new approach proposed by Bento et al. (SIAM J Optim 28:1104–1120, 2018) to study the convergence of the proximal point method is applied. Our method minimizes at each iteration a convex approximation instead of the (non-convex) objective function constrained to a possibly non-convex set which assures the vector improving process. The motivation comes from the famous Group Dynamic problem in Behavioral Sciences where, at each step, a group of (possible badly informed) agents tries to increase his joint payoff, in order to be able to increase the payoff of each of them. In this way, at each step, this ascent process guarantees the stability of the group. Some encouraging preliminary numerical results are reported.
Mots clés Behavioral sciences, Variational rationality, DC function, Proximal point method, Multi-objective programming
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Résumé We show that sleep deprivation exerts strong negative effects on mothers’ labour market performance. To isolate variations in maternal sleep, we exploit unique variations in child sleep disruption using a UK panel dataset that follows mother-child pairs through time. We find that sleeping one hour less per night on average significantly decreases maternal labour force participation, the number of hours worked and household income. We identify one mechanism driving the effects, namely the influence of maternal sleep on selection into full-time versus part-time work. Increased schedule flexibility for mothers with sufficient tenure mitigates the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Mots clés Child sleep, Sleep, Maternal employment, Working hours, Workplace flexibility, ALSPAC
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Résumé Many regulations with first-order economic and environmental consequences have to be adopted under significant scientific uncertainty. Examples include tobacco regulations in the second half of the 20th century, climate change regulations and current regulations on pesticides and neonicotinoid insecticides. Firms and industries have proved adept at exploiting such scientific uncertainty to shape and delay regulation. The main strategies documented include: hiring and funding dissenting scientists, producing and publicizing favorable scientific findings, ghostwriting, funding diversion research, conducting large-scale science-denying communication campaigns, and placing experts on advisory and regulatory panels while generally concealing involvement. In many cases, special interests have thus deliberately manufactured doubt and these dishonest tactics have had large welfare consequences. Largely and unduly neglected by economists, these doubt-manufacturing strategies should now be addressed by the field. Here, we first present a simple theoretical framework providing a useful starting point for considering these issues. The government is benevolent but populist and maximizes social welfare as perceived by citizens. The industry can produce costly reports showing that its activity is not harmful, and citizens are unaware of the industry’s miscommunication. This framework raises important new questions, such as how industry miscommunication and citizens’ beliefs are related to scientific uncertainty. It also sheds new light on old questions, such as the choice of policy instrument to regulate pollution. We subsequently outline a tentative roadmap for future research, highlighting critical issues in need of more investigation.
Mots clés Lobbying, Scientific Uncertainty, Biased Research, Populist Policies, Incertitude scientifique, Lobbying, Politique populiste, Recherche biaisée
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Résumé This chapter presents an intuitive overview of the methods that researchers can use to estimate the monetary value of changes in health outcomes. These methods are separated into two categories: stated preference methods and revealed preference methods. Stated preference methods ask people how much they are willing to pay for health improvements directly using surveys of the relevant population. Revealed preference methods infer the trade-offs that people make between health and money indirectly by observing everyday behavior, such as when people accept a riskier job in return for higher wages; or when they buy products to protect their health from hazards. The chapter discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of each method.
Mots clés Choice experiments, Contingent valuation, Stated preference methods, Hedonic regression, Value of a statistical life
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Résumé As Ricoeur acknowledges, the publication of Rawls' book, A Theory of Justice (TJ), in 1971 was a major event in the area of contemporary political philosophy. Ricoeur offers important comments on Rawls' approach to justice. These commentaries are mainly based on a close reading of this book. This article focuses on such commentaries. They are at the same time glowing and critical. Ricoeur expresses his support to Rawls for his illuminating study of justice, seen as a virtue of institutions. Indeed, in TJ, Rawls focuses on the two following questions. First, how can we identify the most basic universal standards and requirements concerning justice? Second, what formal expression can we find for such requirements? The fundamental issue at stake is the identification of the principles of just institutions: such principles are at the basis of the rule of law. 1 Ricoeur agrees with Rawls that addressing such issues demand reference to both the deontological perspective on morals and the political tradition of the social contract. At the same time, Ricoeur is uncomfortable with the pure and procedural approach of justice that Rawls supports. According to this approach, the characterisation of the just is meant to be independent from the definition of the good. Ricoeur disagrees with this claim. He insists on the fact that justice does not refer primarily to the virtue of the institutions; rather, it refers first to an ethical desire. As Ricoeur notes, this desire, which is commonly called "a sense of justice", expresses itself mostly negatively by means of a cry of indignation: "it's unfair!" 1 The first question leads Rawls to his theory of fairness. The second one leads him to the characterisation of the two Rawlsian principles of justice.
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Résumé From July 25 to 31, 1796, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then working as a private tutor for the aristocracy in Bern, took a mountain hike in the neighbouring Alps. Hegel travelled from Thoune to Altdorg via the Jungfrau and the Uri, a land of glaciers. As Hegel began studying economics for good, the query would reappear: in his reading of Sir James Steuart’s Inquiry into the Principles of Political economy, Hegel would make his first step into economic theorizing. In Frankfurt, Hegel was not yet a tenured Gymnasium professor. He was again a private tutor, experiencing hardships of a salaried life – though in wealthy families. Paul Chamley selected excerpts of interest based on his first assessment of the thesis that there surely exists a solid ‘system of political economy’ by Hegel. He assumed it rather than he found it as a result of his comparative study.
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