Publications
We designed an experiment to estimate the socio-economic and behavioral characteristics associated with financial exclusion in a developed economy and the demand for savings products progressively trading-off flexibility for commitment. Our sample includes people in Italy living below the poverty line, stratified by migration status. Despite a large bank branch penetration in the study area, we find a high rate of financial exclusion, with households below the sample median income being unbanked at twice the rate of those above (30% vs. 15%), a difference that is especially significant for migrants. Financial exclusion is associated with poverty and social exclusion, as measured by unemployment, low food consumption, and little help from personal networks. Despite a high-declared willingness to open new accounts and a strong interest in commitment products following a financial education training seminar, actual uptake in the year to follow remains low, suggesting that demand-driven factors besides knowledge hamper access to formal financial services, namely incomes that are perceived too low to make accounts worthwhile. Yet, migrants, especially if non-Muslim, appear more willing to become financially included than non-migrants, suggesting that there are gains to be made by targeting minorities.
The long-term costs of protectionism are difficult to evaluate as very few countries have switched back to this economic policy after a long period of free trade. One country that did make the move was France in 1892, when the Chamber of Deputies, encouraged by the president of the customs commission, Jules Méline, decided to sharply raise cereal import duties. This decision slowed the upwards trend in education levels as it made farming jobs more attractive than manufacturing jobs, thereby reducing the relative return on an education. These findings are consistent with the theory of unified growth which associates demand for education with technological improvement. They also suggest that educational progress is reversible.
La population immigrée (définie comme la population née à l’étranger avec une nationalité étrangère) représentait environ 9 % de la population française totale en 2014, soit près de six millions de personnes. En France, les immigrés se trouvent souvent dans une situation
relativement défavorisée par rapport à la population majoritaire : ils sont plus susceptibles d’être au chômage, de subir des discriminations ou d’être mal logés. Il existe peu de recherches en France sur l’état de santé des nouveau‑nés de parents immigrés. Pourtant, les descendants d’immigrés représentent aujourd’hui près de 11 % de la population française.
Long-term insurance contracts are widespread, particularly in public health and the labor market. Such contracts typically involve monthly or annual premia which are related to the insured's risk profile. A given profile may change, based on observed outcomes which depend on the insured's prevention efforts. The aim of this paper is to analyze the latter relationship. In a two-period optimal insurance contract in which the insured's risk profile is partly governed by her effort on prevention, we find that both the insured's risk aversion and prudence play a crucial role. If absolute prudence is greater than twice absolute risk aversion, moral hazard justifies setting a higher premium in the first period but also greater premium discrimination in the second period. This result provides insights on the trade-offs between long-term insurance and the incentives arising from risk classification, as well as between inter- and intragenerational insurance.
Background:
From November 2014 to November 2015, an experiment in French community pharmacies replaced traditional pre-packed boxes by per-unit dispensing of pills in the exact numbers prescribed, for 14 antibiotics.
Methods:
A cluster randomised control trial was carried out in 100 pharmacies. 75 pharmacies counted out the medication by units (experimental group), the other 25 providing the treatment in the existing pharmaceutical company boxes (control group). Data on patients under the two arms were compared to assess the environmental, economic and health effects of this change in drug dispensing. In particular, adherence was measured indirectly by comparing the number of pills left at the end of the prescribed treatment.
Results:
Out of the 1185 patients included during 3 sessions of 4 consecutive weeks each, 907 patients experimented the personalized delivery and 278 were assigned to the control group, consistent with a 1/3 randomization-rate at the pharmacy level. 80% of eligible patients approved of the per-unit dispensing of their treatment. The initial packaging of the drugs did not match with the prescription in 60% of cases and per-unit dispensing reduced by 10% the number of pills supplied. 13.1% of patients declared that they threw away pills residuals instead of recycling—no differences between groups. Finally, per-unit dispensing appeared to improve adherence to antibiotic treatment (marginal effect 0.21, IC 95, 0.14–0.28).
Conclusions:
Supplying antibiotics per unit is not only beneficial in terms of a reduced number of pills to reimburse or for the environment (less pills wasted and non-recycled), but also has a positive and unexpected impact on adherence to treatment, and thus on both individual and public health.
Training costs may hamper intra-firm human capital accumulation. As a consequence, firms may be tempted to have workers pay for their on-the-job training (OJT). In this paper, we analyse the links of OJT and worker remuneration in the suburb of Tunis, using case study data for eight firms. We find that the duration of former OJT negatively influences starting wages, while there is no anticipated effect of future training on wages at the firm entry. In contrast, current wages are positively affected by former OJT but negatively affected by ongoing OJT. These results provide very rare empirical support in Less Developed Countries (LDCs) for classical human capital theories and cost sharing theories applied to OJT.
FR : Malgré un intérêt croissant pour les déterminants non-monétaires des comportements fiscaux (tax morale), la littérature récente apporte peu d'éléments empiriques sur le lien entre les caractéristiques de personnalité reliées à la moralité et la propension à l'évasion fiscale. Or de telles mesures sont nécessaires pour comprendre les canaux de transmission des dispositifs de lutte contre l'évasion fiscale. Pour pallier cette lacune, le présent article rend compte d'une expérience en laboratoire permettant d'observer à la fois les comportements de déclaration de revenu des participants et des mesures psychologiques issues de la littérature en psychométrie : soumission à la norme, empathie affective et cognitive, et propension à ressentir la honte et la culpabilité. Ces mesures sont combinées à l'aide d'une analyse en composantes principales afin d'en extraire les facteurs indépendants. Nos résultats montrent que la décision de frauder comme son intensité sont fortement liées à l'empathie affective, l'empathie cognitive et la dimension publique de la moralité (mesurée par la soumission à la norme et la propension à la honte). La propension à ressentir la culpabilité, en revanche, est sans effet. Surtout, le pouvoir explicatif global de ces mesures de moralité individuelles est relativement faible. Ce résultat remet en cause l'hypothèse d'une moralité fiscale intrinsèque, et met l'accent sur l'importance du contexte institutionnel pour comprendre les comportements d'évasion.
EN: Despite an increasing interest in the non-monetary determinants of tax behaviors (also known as tax morale), the recent literature offers few empirical elements on the link between moral personality characters and tax evasion propensity. However, such measures are necessary to understand the transmission channels of policies targeted at fighting against tax evasion. To fill this gap, this paper reports a lab experiment allowing to observe participants' behaviors of income declaration and psychological measures from the psychometric literature: norm-submission, affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame. These measures are combined through a Principal Component Analysis to extract independent factors. Results show that the decision to evade as well as its intensity are very highly related to affective empathy, cognitive empathy and public dimension of morality (measured by norm submission and propensity to feel shame). The propensity to feel guiltiness is, however, without significant effects. More importantly, the explanatory power of these individual morality measures is rather weak. This result challenges the assumption of an intrinsical tax morale and highlights the importance of the institutional context to understand evasion behaviors.
In this article, the authors introduce a polluting eco-industry. Depending on the level of damage, there are two optimal equilibria. If the damage is low, one generalizes the usual results of the economic literature to the polluting eco-industry: the dirty firm partially abates their emissions, only efficient eco-industry firms produce and the abatement level increases with the damage. However, very specific results are obtained if the damage is high. In this case, not all efficient eco-industry firms produce. The abatement level and the number of active eco-industry firms both decrease as the damage increases. The authors finally show that a well-designed Pigouvian tax implements these equilibria in a competitive economy.
-
This paper provides empirical evidence that, after protests, citizens substantially revise their views on the current leader, but also their trust in the country's institutions. The empirical strategy exploits variation in the timing of an individual level survey and the proximity to social protests in 13 African countries. First, we find that trust in political leaders strongly and abruptly decreases after protests. Second, trust in the country monitoring institutions plunges as well. Both effects are much stronger when protests are repressed by the government. As no signs of distrust are recorded even a couple of days before the social conflicts, protests can be interpreted as sudden signals sent on a leaders' actions from which citizens extract information on their country fundamentals.
