Publications
The public acceptability of a policy is an important issue in democracies, in particular for anti-COVID-19 policies, which require the adherence of the population to be applicable and efficient. Discrete choice experiment (DCE) can help elicit preference ranking among various policies for the whole population and subgroups. Using a representative sample of the French population, we apply DCE methods to assess the acceptability of various anti-COVID-19 measures, separately and as a package. Owing to the methods, we determine the extent to which acceptability depends on personal characteristics: political orientation, health vulnerability, or age. The young population differs in terms of policy preferences and their claim for monetary compensation, suggesting a tailored policy for them. The paper provides key methodological tools based on microeconomic evaluation of individuals’ preferences for improving the design of public health policies.
We analyze the integration of intermittent renewables-based technologies into an electricity mix comprising of conventional energy. Intermittency is modeled by a contingent electricity market and we introduce demand-side flexibility through the retailing structure. Retailers propose diversified electricity contracts at different prices, but in an insufficient number to cover intermittent production. These delivery contracts are modeled similarly to numeraire assets. We study the competitive equilibrium of the state-contingent wholesale electricity markets and the delivery contract markets. We also provide an analysis linking the delivery contracts to social welfare. Finally, we discuss the conditions under which changing the delivery contracts improve penetration of renewables and increases welfare. These provide useful insights for managing intermittency and achieving renewable capacity objectives.
La Revue économique rend hommage à Philippe Mongin, figure marquante de l’économie théorique et de la philosophie des sciences sociales, récipiendaire du Prix de la Revue en 2020 et décédé la même année à l’âge de 70 ans. Dans ce numéro spécial sont rassemblées des contributions qui montrent la diversité et la fécondité de ses travaux dans des domaines aussi variés que l’épistémologie de l’économie, l’application de la théorie des jeux en histoire, l’économie du bien-être ou encore l’agrégation des jugements. /
We build up a general purpose decision model to predict the choice between going to war and staying at peace for a rational decision-maker. This model articulates root causes such as the risk of future war and parameters such as potential gains in case of victory, potential losses in case of defeat, the probability of victory and the war human losses. We apply and calibrate this model to the case of German and French decision-makers at the very end of July 1914, taking into account the decisions already taken by Austria-Hungary and Russia and the uncertainty surrounding the decision of Great Britain. We assume a short war that does not last beyond 1914. Our model predicts the entry into the war of Germany and France, the argument of preventive war (going to war today rather than tomorrow) proving to be decisive for both countries, with the added benefit for France of the potential recovery of Alsace-Moselle in the event of victory. The computation reveals that of the two countries, it was France that seems to have the most interest in the war, making it possible to explain the passive behavior of the French leaders, Raymond Poincare in the first place, who, if they did not provoke the war, did not really try to avoid it either.
We study repeated zero-sum games where one of the players pays a certain cost each time he changes his action. We derive the properties of the value and optimal strategies as a function of the ratio between the switching costs and the stage payoffs. In particular, the strategies exhibit a robustness property and typically do not change with a small perturbation of this ratio. Our analysis extends partially to the case where the players are limited to simpler strategies that are history independent―namely, static strategies. In this case, we also characterize the (minimax) value and the strategies for obtaining it.
The literature is inconclusive on the source of the size effect. Our paper contributes to extant studies by investigating the relationship between the size premium and default risk in Vietnam, an important frontier emerging market. The debt-to-equity ratio and distance-to-default of Merton (1974, The Journal of Finance, 29, 449) are used as distress-risk proxies. Based on more than 300 listed stocks over 2009–2019, we discover that the small portfolio delivers the highest average return. The excess return on the small portfolio is concentrated in firms with high distress risk. Furthermore, neutral size factors are built to dissect returns on the Fama-French size factor from the default-risk premium. Empirical results prove that the explanatory power of the size factor is negatively affected when the default-risk neutrality is applied. Given this backdrop, the size premium in Vietnam is likely to be compensation for distress risk, consistent with a risk-based point of view.
Two main nonpharmaceutical policy strategies have been used in Europe in response to the COVID-19 epidemic: one aimed at natural herd immunity and the other at avoiding saturation of hospital capacity by crushing the curve. The two strategies lead to different results in terms of the number of lives saved on the one hand and production loss on the other hand. Using a susceptible–infected–recovered–dead model, we investigate and compare these two strategies. As the results are sensitive to the initial reproduction number, we estimate the latter for 10 European countries for each wave from January 2020 till March 2021 using a double sigmoid statistical model and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker data set. Our results show that Denmark, which opted for crushing the curve, managed to minimize both economic and human losses. Natural herd immunity, sought by Sweden and the Netherlands does not appear to have been a particularly effective strategy, especially for Sweden, both in economic terms and in terms of lives saved. The results are more mixed for other countries, but with no evident trade-off between deaths and production losses.
In this paper, we study the gains and losses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. We distinguish between the effects of the pandemic and those of the health measures implemented to reduce the death toll, notably “the lockdown.” Our theoretical model is focused on within-sector firm heterogeneity and involves imperfect competition in a partial equilibrium setting. A comparison between the gains and losses triggered by both the pandemic and the lockdown indicates that an excess profits tax imposed on the “winners” could partly compensate the “losers” of the same sector.
Cet article propose une approche intégrant le temps de latence dans le processus d’évaluation de la mortalité de long terme et dans sa valorisation économique, suite à un choc transitoire. Il l’applique aux conséquences des restrictions d’activité en lien avec la Covid‑19 au printemps 2020 sur la pollution de l’air ambiant en France. Ces conséquences sont évaluées en termes d’années de vie gagnées (AVG) ainsi qu’en termes monétaires pour deux indicateurs de pollution de l’air. Cette approche est comparée à une estimation standard par différence. Elle conduit à des résultats inférieurs d’un facteur 3.7 à 5.5 pour les AVG et, du fait de l’influence additionnelle de l’actualisation, à une valorisation économique inférieure d’un facteur 4.7 à 6.9. Ces résultats indiquent qu’une évaluation adaptée des bénéfices sanitaires de long terme, puis leur traduction en termes monétaires, est essentielle pour comparer les conséquences à long terme de politiques ou de chocs exogènes transitoires.
In September 2021, the World Health Organization decided to implement stronger air quality guidelines for protecting health, based on the last decade of research. Ambient air pollution (AAP) was already the first environmental risk to health in terms of number of premature deaths, and this decision suggests that the risk was seriously underestimated. This chapter covers the relationship between AAP and health from an economic perspective. The first part presents the major regulated air pollutants and their related health effects, the way population exposure is measured, and the individual vulnerability and susceptibility to AAP-related effects. Then, the main approaches that estimate the relationships between health effects and air pollutants are covered: pure observational and interventional/quasi-experimental studies. Up-to-date reviews of the most robust relationships, and of the main findings of interventional/causal inference methods, are detailed. Next, impact assessments studies are tackled and some recent global assessments of health impacts due to AAP are presented. Once calculated, the health impacts can be expressed in monetary terms to enter the decision-making process. The relevant approaches for valuing market and nonmarket health impacts – market prices, revealed and stated preferences – are critically outlined, and their adequation with the AAP context examined. Finally, the economic health-related impacts of AAP are presented and discussed, with specific sections devoted to the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach and inequity-related issues at national and international levels. This chapter concludes with a widening of the perspective that tackles interactions between AAP on the one hand and climate change and indoor pollution on the other hand.
We establish general versions of the Ekeland variational principle (EVP), where we include two perturbation bifunctions to discuss and obtain better perturbations for obtaining three improved versions of the principle. Here, unlike the usual studies and applications of the EVP, which aim at exact minimizers via a limiting process, our versions provide good-enough approximate minimizers aiming at applications in particular situations. For the presentation of applications chosen in this paper, the underlying space is a partial quasi-metric one. To prove the aforementioned versions, we need a new proof technique. The novelties of the results are in both theoretical and application aspects. In particular, for applications, using our versions of the EVP together with new concepts of Ekeland points and stop and go dynamics, we study in detail human dynamics in terms of a psychological traveler problem, a typical model in behavioral sciences.
