Publications
Economic growth in advanced countries has slowed in successive stages since the 1970s and, since the crisis, has fallen to a historical low compared with the 20th century. This slowdown is mainly attributable to weaker growth in total factor productivity. In emerging countries, the situation varies: in some countries, such as South Korea and Chile, GDP per capita have been converging for several decades; in others, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, relative GDP per capita has stagnated or even declined. While weak long-term growth in these latter countries can be attributed to a lack of appropriate institutions, the widespread slowdown observed in advanced countries is more difficult to interpret. One possible explanation that we explore is the decline in real interest rates since the 1990s. A circular relationship appears to exist between interest rates and productivity: productivity determines long-term returns on capital and thereby interest rates; interest rates in turn determine the minimum productivity expected from investment projects. The decline in real interest rates, which is in part attributable to demographic factors, may have led to a slowdown in productivity by making an increasing number of unproductive companies and projects profitable. We illustrate this circular relationship using a cross-country panel regression. One way of breaking out of the circular relationship would be via a new technological revolution linked to the digital economy, or, in countries where there is still room for convergence, via structural reforms to improve the diffusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).
C’est un fait remarquable que, ces derniers temps, on aborde de nouveau le capitalisme à travers la question de savoir comment il prendra fin et ce qui viendra après lui. Non seulement les spéculations des médias de masse sur le « post-capitalisme » à l’ère du numérique rencontrent un grand intérêt auprès du public, mais des spécialistes de sciences sociales tout à fait établis se préoccupent, eux aussi, des symptômes de crise au sein du capitalisme, sous l’angle de sa fin possible. Au vu de ...
I. Les économistes comme les spécialistes de sciences sociales semblent largement s’accorder sur le fait que le capitalisme industriel est entré à un moment donné dans une phase avancée de son développement, tout particulièrement dans ses variantes que l’on observe en Europe de l’Ouest, en Amérique du Nord et au Japon. Que le capitalisme se situe encore à cette étape, ou qu’il l’ait entre-temps déjà dépassée et laissée à nouveau derrière lui, il se différencie à tout le moins de la phase ant...
Our new approach to mobility measurement involves separating out the valuation of positions in terms of individual status (using income, social rank, or other criteria) from the issue of movement between positions. The quantification of movement is addressed using a general concept of distance between positions and a parsimonious set of axioms that characterize the distance concept and yield a class of aggregative indices. This class of indices induces a superclass of mobility measures over the different status concepts consistent with the same underlying data. We investigate the statistical inference of mobility indices using two well‐known status concepts, related to income mobility and rank mobility. We also show how our superclass provides a more consistent and intuitive approach to mobility, in contrast to other measures in the literature, and illustrate its performance using recent data from China.
This study investigates the empirical association of oil prices with economic activity in developed open economy namely: The United States by using the wavelet transform framework. This methodology enables the decomposition of time-series at different time-frequencies. In this study, we have used maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform, wavelet covariance, wavelet correlation, continuous wavelet power spectrum, wavelet coherence spectrum and wavelet based Granger causality approaches to analyze the relationship between oil prices and economic activity. The present study uses month frequency data for the period of 1979M1-2013M7. The results indicate that oil prices have positive impact on economic activity and the feedback effect exists between oil prices and economic activity.
This paper investigates the predictive power of several risk attitude measures on a series of medical practices. We elicit risk preferences on a sample of 1500 French general practitioners (GPs) using two different classes of tools: scales, which measure GPs’ own perception of their willingness to take risks between 0 and 10; and lotteries, which require GPs to choose between a safe and a risky option in a series of hypothetical situations. In addition to a daily life risk scale that measures a general risk attitude, risk taking is measured in different domains for each tool: financial matters, GPs’ own health, and patients’ health. We take advantage of the rare opportunity to combine these multiple risk attitude measures with a series of self-reported or administratively recorded medical practices. We successively test the predictive power of our seven risk attitude measures on eleven medical practices affecting the GPs’ own health or their patients’ health. We find that domain-specific measures are far better predictors than the general risk attitude measure. Neither of the two classes of tools (scales or lotteries) seems to perform indisputably better than the other, except when we concentrate on the only non-declarative practice (prescription of biological tests), for which the classic money-lottery test works well. From a public health perspective, appropriate measures of willingness to take risks may be used to make a quick, but efficient, profiling of GPs and target them with personalized communications, or interventions, aimed at improving practices.
Les analyses coûts-bénéfices constituent un moyen pour le décideur public comme privé de rationaliser ses choix. Le processus semble transparent et le traitement des préférences égalitaire, puisque les préférences de chaque individu sont prises en compte de façon similaire lors de l’agrégation. Toutefois, en présence de composantes non marchandes évaluées sur la base des préférences de la population, les individus sont limités dans l’expression de leurs préférences, à la fois par leur revenu et par leur besoin de subsistance. Nous étudions les conséquences de ces contraintes sur la révélation des préférences et sur l’évaluation monétaire des biens non marchands. Nous trouvons qu’elles amènent à favoriser implicitement les préférences des individus à revenu élevé. Se pose alors la question de la correction des évaluations monétaires lors du traitement des préférences individuelles.
Developments in macro-econometrics have been evolving since the aftermath of the Second World War.[...]
No abstract is available for this item.
We document strong and robust negative correlations between the length of the title of an economics article and different measures of scientific quality. Analyzing all articles published between 1970 and 2011 and referenced in EconLit, we find that articles with shorter titles tend to be published in better journals, to be more cited and to be more innovative. These correlations hold controlling for unobserved time-invariant and observed time-varying characteristics of teams of authors.
