Publications

La plupart des informations présentées ci-dessous ont été récupérées via RePEc avec l'aimable autorisation de Christian Zimmermann
The environmental cost of the international job market for economistsJournal articleOlivier Chanel, Alberto Prati et Morgan Raux, Ecological Economics, Volume 201, pp. 107565, 2022

We provide an estimate of the environmental impact of the recruitment system in the economics profession, known as the “international job market for economists”. Each year, most graduating PhDs seeking jobs in academia, government, or companies participate in this job market. The market follows a standardized process, where candidates are pre-screened in a short interview which takes place at an annual meeting in Europe or in the United States. Most interviews are arranged via a non-profit online platform, econjobmarket.org, which kindly agreed to share its anonymized data with us. Using this dataset, we estimate the individual environmental impact of 1057 candidates and one hundred recruitment committees who attended the EEA and AEA meetings in December 2019 and January 2020. We calculate that this pre-screening system generated the equivalent of about 4800 tons of avoidable CO2-eq and a comprehensive economic cost over €4.4 million. We contrast this overall assessment against three counterfactual scenarios: an alternative in-person system, a hybrid system (where videoconference is used for some candidates) and a fully online system (as it happened in 2020–21 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Overall, the study can offer useful information to shape future recruitment standards in a more sustainable way.

What drives the acceptability of restrictive health policies: An experimental assessment of individual preferences for anti-COVID 19 strategiesJournal articleThierry Blayac, Dimitri Dubois, Sebastien Duchêne, Phu Nguyen-Van, Bruno Ventelou et Marc Willinger, Economic Modelling, Volume 116, pp. 106047, 2022

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.

Impact of COVID-19 Activity Restrictions on Air Pollution: Methodological Considerations in the Economic Valuation of the Long-Term Effects on MortalityJournal articleOlivier Chanel, Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, Issue 534-35, pp. 103-118, 2022

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.

The size effect and default risk: Evidence from the Vietnamese stock marketJournal articleLe Quy Duong et Philippe Bertrand, Review of Financial Economics, Volume 40, Issue 4, pp. 377-388, 2022

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.

Air Pollution and Health: Economic ImplicationsBook chapterOlivier Chanel, In: Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, K. F. Zimmermann (Eds.), 2022-10, pp. 1-42, Springer International Publishing, 2022

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.

Environmental costs of the global job market for economistsJournal articleAlberto Prati, Olivier Chanel et Morgan Raux, CentrePiece LSE-UKRI, Volume 27, Issue 3, pp. 9-11, 2022
Quelles leçons de l’histoire ? ou comment faire face aux fortes augmentations de dette publique ?Journal articleVincent Bignon et Pierre Sicsic, Revue d'économie financière, Volume 146, Issue 2, pp. 41-66, 2022

De nouvelles interventions publiques sont en débat pour lutter contre le dérèglement climatique, gérer la crise énergétique et les difficultés sanitaires, entre autres. Ces débats ont lieu dans un environnement singulier pour les finances publiques des pays développés. En effet, le niveau de dettes publiques a augmenté depuis 2017 pour atteindre des niveaux inédits en temps de paix. La gestion de ces dettes publiques conditionne les évolutions budgétaires à venir et le financement des futurs investissements publics, par l’impôt, de nouvelles dettes ou par des baisses d’autres dépenses publiques.Les niveaux actuels des dettes publiques sont parfois jugés inquiétants, sans que la question de leur soutenabilité ou désirabilité soit clairement explicitée. Par ailleurs, les différentes politiques de réduction de dettes publiques à des niveaux souhaitables doivent être comparées quant à leur effet de court terme et long terme. Quel est l’horizon raisonnable de réduction de dettes publiques, 5 ans ou 20 ans ? Quel est ce niveau de dettes publiques à la fois souhaitables et soutenables ? Ces questions difficiles doivent éclairer le débat de politique économique et de manière concrète le cadre européen de coordination budgétaire.Ce numéro aborde ce débat en revenant sur l’histoire des dettes publiques du XVIIIe au XXIe siècle, qui est riche d’enseignements. Il présente le débat économique sur le niveau souhaitable et soutenable des dettes publiques, en discutant à la fois sa dimension économique et politique. Enfin, des propositions de gestion des dettes publiques sont exposées, comme leurs implications pour le débat européen.

E-procurement and firm corruption to secure public contracts: The moderating role of governance institutions and supranational supportJournal articleAlfredo Jiménez, Julien Hanoteau et Ralf Barkemeyer, Journal of Business Research, Volume 149, pp. 640-650, 2022

This paper investigates the effects of e-procurement on firm corruption to secure public contracts, highlighting the moderating roles of the quality of governance institutions and supranational support in that relationship. Taking transaction cost economics as our theoretical lens, and building on a sample of 8,373 firms in 72 countries from 2008 to 2019, we find that the adoption of an e-procurement system in fact reduces firm corruption. However, this effect is only unveiled once one accounts in the analysis for the quality of country-level governance institutions, which also makes the relationship stronger. We also find an e-procurement system only to effectively address firm corruption when it benefits from supranational support. The study contributes to the ongoing academic debate on the impact of digitalization on corruption.

An Economic Perspective on EpidemiologyBook chapterStéphane Luchini, Patrick Pintus et Miriam Teschl, In: Markt, Staat, Gesellschaft: Eine Festschrift für Richard Sturn, R. Dujmovits, E. Fehr, Ch. Gehrke et H. Kurz (Eds.), 2022-10, pp. 241-254, Metropolis Verlag, 2022
General Versions of the Ekeland Variational Principle: Ekeland Points and Stop and Go DynamicsJournal articleLe Phuoc Hai, Phan Quoc Khanh et Antoine Soubeyran, Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Volume 195, Issue 1, pp. 347-373, 2022

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.