Publications
Selon l'auteur, professeur d'économie à l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, le statut des pauvres a évolué. Longtemps oubliés du capitalisme, ils seraient devenus des piliers du profit marchand. De cette relation entre deux entités contradictoires émerge un questionnement sur les fondements et l'avenir du système économique capitaliste.
Constraints that prevent women from working longer hours are argued to be important drivers of the gender wage gap in the United States. We provide evidence that in couples where the wife's working hours exceed the husband's, the wife reports lower life satisfaction. By contrast, there is no effect on the husband's satisfaction. The results still hold when controlling for relative income. We argue that these patterns are best explained by perceived fairness of the division of household labor, which induces an aversion to a situation where the wife works more at home and on the labor market.
Under uncertainty, mean growth of, say, wealth is often defined as the growth rate of average wealth, but it can alternatively be defined as the average growth rate of wealth. We argue that stochastic stability points to the latter notion of mean growth as the theoretically relevant one. Our discussion is cast within the class of continuous-time AK-type models subject to geometric Brownian motions. First, stability concepts related to stochastic linear homogeneous differential equations are introduced and applied to the canonical AK model. It is readily shown that exponential balanced-growth paths are not robust to uncertainty. In a second application, we evaluate the quantitative implications of adopting the stochastic-stability-related concept of mean growth for the comparative statics of global diversification in the seminal model due to Obstfeld (1994).
We investigate the extent to which standard one sector RBC models with positive externalities and variable capacity utilization can account for the large hump-shaped response of output when the model is submitted to a pure sunspot shock. We refine the Benhabib and Wen (2004) model considering a general type of additive separable preferences and a general production function. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis of local stabilities and local bifurcations as a function of various structural parameters. We show that, when labor is infinitely elastic, local indeterminacy occurs through Flip and Hopf bifurcations for a large set of values for the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption, the degree of increasing returns to scale and the elasticity of capital–labor substitution. Finally, we provide a detailed quantitative assessment of the model and conclude with mixed results. We show that although the model is able theoretically to generate a hump-shaped dynamics of output following an i.i.d. sunspot shock under realistic parameter values, the hump is too persistent for the model to be considered fully satisfactory from an empirical point of view.
In 2002, the Israeli government decided to build a wall inside the occupied West Bank. The wall had a marked effect on the access to land and water resources as well as to the Israeli labour market. It is difficult to include the effect of the wall in an econometric model explaining poverty dynamics as the wall was built in the richer region of the West Bank. So a diff-in-diff strategy is needed. Using a Bayesian approach, we treat our two-period repeated cross-section data set as an incomplete data problem, explaining the income-to-needs ratio as a function of time invariant exogenous variables. This allows us to provide inference results on poverty dynamics. We then build a conditional regression model including a wall variable and state dependence to see how the wall modified the initial results on poverty dynamics. We find that the wall has increased the probability of poverty persistence by 58 percentage points and the probability of poverty entry by 18 percentage points.
This paper shows that a large dimensional vector autoregressive model (VAR) of finite order can generate fractional integration in the marginalized univariate series. We derive high-level assumptions under which the final equation representation of a VAR(1) leads to univariate fractional white noises and verify the validity of these assumptions for two specific models.
To expedite payments, firms use convenience pricing strategies. A price is considered convenient if it can be paid with few coins. Convenient prices are well understood in offline retailing, but not online. This article fills the gap, examining an original panel dataset more than 2.5 million observations of book prices from Amazon.com. We provide empirical evidence supporting two claims. First in a static setup, more convenient prices are more likely to be set. Second in a dynamic setup, more convenient prices are more rigid. Emphasizing the role of convenience, this work sheds new light on price setting in online retailing.
In this paper, we study how rents are shared between capital and labour, using industry‐level panel data for 19 OECD countries from 1988 through to 2007. The first step is an explanation of the rent‐creation process. We provide evidence of a significant impact of regulation on value‐added prices at the industry level relative to the value‐added price for the overall economy (rent). In the second step, we dissect the value‐added sharing process. By running ordinary least‐squares and instrumental variables estimations, we obtain results that confirm the Blanchard–Giavazzi prediction: the impact of rents on the capital share depends on workers' bargaining power.
We introduce and examine an inexact multi-objective proximal method with a proximal distance as the perturbation term. Our algorithm utilizes a local search descent process that eventually reaches a weak Pareto optimum of a multi-objective function, whose components are the maxima of continuously differentiable functions. Our algorithm gives a new formulation and resolution of the following important distributive justice problem in the context of group dynamics: In each period, if a group creates a cake, the problem is, for each member, to get a high enough share of this cake; if this is not possible, then it is better to quit, breaking the stability of the group.
The father of the “Austrian” Marginalist revolution and founder of the so-called “Austrian School of economics”, Carl Menger, had a mixed reception during different periods of development of French economics. Somewhat welcomed in the early days, he was rather forgotten later on. Even his major works were not published in translation until recently. What is the reason for such a situation? Criticisms of classical political economy have to be understood in their French context. In comparison to other countries, this paper details the case of France, besides showing how later Austrians, such as Friedrich Hayek, found a limited audience. This comparative study of economic ideas in France must start with the reception of the views of the founder and the role and impact of adopting/adapting or rejecting his views by French scholars. What place did they find in French academia? From Carl Menger to a “Frenchified” Charles Menger, how was Austrian economic thought disseminated in France? This essay starts by recalling the Belle-Époque and an astonishing letter by Charles Rist for the Jubiläum of Menger, in which he deplored the lack of translation of the latter’s works. The Austrian School in France is then discussed as pure economics replaces political economy in the Interwar period, with the 1938 Paris Congress of “liberal thinkers,” as the Vienna Circle became known, also comparing issues in philosophy. The paper considers how Austrian theories of “pure science” were received in Paris from the Vienna of the 1900s, at a time of ”Crossroads,” to the present day, through the Postwar and Cold War, until a revival since the 1990s and a rethinking of economic ideas after 2008.
