Publications
As it is documented, households’ investment in their own education (human capital) is negatively related to the number of children individuals will have and requires some loans to be financed. We show that this contributes to explain episodes of bubbles associated to higher growth rates. This conclusion is obtained in an overlapping generations model where agents choose to invest in their own education and decide their number of children. A bubble is a liquid asset that can be used to finance either education or the cost of rearing children. The time cost of rearing children plays a key role in the analysis. If the time cost per child is sufficiently high, households have only a small number of children. Then, the bubble has a crowding-in effect because it is used to provide loans to finance investments in education. On the contrary, if the time cost per child is low enough, households have a large number of children. Then, the bubble is mainly used to finance the total cost of rearing children and has a crowding-out effect on investment. Therefore, the new mechanism we highlight shows that a bubble enhances growth if the economy is characterized by a high rearing time cost per child.
Digital information, particularly for online newsgathering and reporting, is an industry fraught with uncertainty and rapid innovation. Digital Information Ecosystems: Smart Press crosses academic knowledge with research by media groups to understand this evolution and analyze the future of the sector, including the imminent employment of bots and artificial intelligence. The book adopts an original and multidisciplinary approach to this topic: combining the science of media economics with the experience of a practicing journalist of a major daily newspaper. The result is an essential guide to the opportunities of the media to respond to a changing global digital landscape. Independent news reporting is vital in the contemporary democracy; the media must itself become a new smart press.
Objectives:
This study assesses the change in premature mortality and in morbidity under the scenario of meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) global targets for non-communicable disease (NCD) risk factors (RFs) by 2025 in France. It also estimates medical expenditure savings because of the reduction of NCD burden.
Study design:
A microsimulation model is used to predict the future health and economic outcomes in France.
Methods:
A ‘RF targets’ scenario, assuming the achievement of the six targets on RFs by 2025, is compared to a counterfactual scenario with respect to disability-adjusted life years and healthcare costs differences.
Results:
The achievement of the RFs targets by 2025 would save about 25,300 (and 75,500) life years in good health in the population aged 25–64 (respectively 65+) years on average every year and would help to reduce healthcare costs by about €660 million on average per year, which represents 0.35% of the current annual healthcare spending in France. Such a reduction in RFs (net of the natural decreasing trend in mortality) would contribute to achieving about half of the 2030 NCD premature mortality target in France.
Conclusions:
The achievement of the RF targets would lead France to save life years and life years in good health in both working-age and retired people and would modestly reduce healthcare expenditures. To achieve RFs targets and to curb the growing burden of NCDs, France has to strengthen existing and implement new policy interventions.
Background:
GPs are confronted with therapeutic dilemmas in treating patients with multimorbidity and/or polypharmacy when unfavourable medication risk–benefit ratios (RBRs) conflict with patients’ demands.
Aim:
To understand GPs’ attitudes about prescribing and/or deprescribing medicines for patients with multimorbidity and/or polypharmacy, and factors associated with their decisions.
Design and setting:
Cross-sectional survey in 2016 among a national panel of 1266 randomly selected GPs in private practice in France.
Method:
GPs’ opinions and attitudes were explored using a standardised questionnaire including a case vignette about a female treated for multiple somatic diseases, sleeping disorders, and chronic pain. Participants were randomly assigned one of eight versions of this case vignette, varying by patient age, socioprofessional status, and stroke history. Backward selection was used to identify factors associated with GPs’ decisions about drugs they considered inappropriate.
Results:
Nearly all (91.4%) responders felt comfortable or fairly comfortable deprescribing inappropriate medications, but only 34.7% decided to do so often or very often. In the clinical vignette, most GPs chose to discontinue symptomatic medications (for example, benzodiazepine, paracetamol/tramadol) because of unfavourable RBRs. When patients asked for ketoprofen for persistent sciatica, 94.1% considered this prescription risky, but 25.6% would prescribe it. They were less likely to prescribe it to older patients (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 0.48, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.36 to 0.63), or those with a stroke history (AOR 0.55, 95% CI = 0.42 to 0.72).
Conclusion:
In therapeutic dilemmas, some GPs choose to prioritise patients’ requests over iatrogenic risks. GPs need pragmatic implementation tools for handling therapeutic dilemmas, and to improve their skills in medication management and patient engagement in such situations.
Attitude théorique et pratique, la philosophie économique est une démarche intellectuelle qui articule économie et philosophie. Mais comment la définir ? Et d’où vient l’intérêt grandissant que l’on constate depuis vingt ans ? Quelles ressources pluralistes mobilise-t-elle et comment s’est-elle constituée ? Quels rapports entretient-elle avec la théorie économique, l’histoire de la pensée et les philosophies morale et politique ? À ces questions, notamment, et en s’appuyant sur l’ouvrage collectif Philosophie économique. Un état des lieux (Éditions Matériologiques, 2017, 648 pages), cette introduction donne des réponses fondamentales, claires et précises.
Digital information, particularly for online newsgathering and reporting, is an industry fraught with uncertainty and rapid innovation. Digital Information Ecosystems: Smart Press crosses academic knowledge with research by media groups to understand this evolution and analyze the future of the sector, including the imminent employment of bots and artificial intelligence. The book adopts an original and multidisciplinary approach to this topic: combining the science of media economics with the experience of a practicing journalist of a major daily newspaper. The result is an essential guide to the opportunities of the media to respond to a changing global digital landscape. Independent news reporting is vital in the contemporary democracy; the media must itself become a new smart press.
What would be the analogue of the Lorenz quasi-ordering when the variable of interest is continuous and of a purely ordinal nature? We argue that it is possible to derive such a criterion by substituting for the Pigou-Dalton transfer used in the standard inequality literature what we refer to as a Hammond progressive transfer. According to this criterion, one distribution of utilities is considered to be less unequal than another if it is judged better by both the lexicographic extensions of the maximin and the minimax, henceforth referred to as the leximin and the antileximax, respectively. If one imposes in addition that an increase in someone’s utility makes the society better off, then one is left with the leximin, while the requirement that society welfare increases as the result of a decrease of one person’s utility gives the antileximax criterion. Incidentally, the paper provides an alternative and simple characterisation of the leximin principle widely used in the social choice and welfare literature.
A pure Hotelling game is a spatial competition between a finite number of players who simultaneously select a location in order to attract as many consumers as possible. In this paper, we study the case of a general distribution of consumers on a network generated by a metric graph. Because players do not compete on price, the continuum of consumers shop at the closest player’s location. If the number of sellers is large enough, we prove the existence of an approximate equilibrium in pure strategies, and we construct it.
This paper provides direct evidence that learning about demand is an important driver of firms’ dynamics. We present a model of Bayesian learning in which firms are uncertain about idiosyncratic demand in each market and update their beliefs as noisy information arrives. Firms update their beliefs to a given demand shock more, the younger they are. We test and empirically confirm this prediction, using the structure of the model, together with exporter-level data, to identify demand shocks and the firms’ beliefs about future demand. Consistent with theory, we also find the learning process to be weakened in more uncertain environments.
Environmental policies are among the priorities of the UN agenda and figure highly in national and international policy agendas. This brief focuses on environ-mental taxes and green public procurement (GPP). These two environmental po-licy instruments differ in political viability and in the impact they have on consu-mers and producers. The brief provides a comparative analysis of their efficiency in closed and open economy and reveals the opportunities and threats of (un)harmo-nised environmental policy across countries. The results allow to consider particu-lar implications for the collaboration of EU-MENA countries.
