Alice Fabre

Chercheuse ,  Aix-Marseille Université , Faculté des arts, lettres, langues, sciences humaines (ALLSH)

Développement et économie politique
Fabre
Statut
Maître de conférences
Domaine(s) de recherche
Économie du développement, Macroéconomie
Contact
alice.fabre[at]univ-amu.fr
+33(0)4 13 94 20 12
Adresse

Maison de l'économie et de la gestion d'Aix
424 chemin du viaduc, CS80429
13097 Aix-en-Provence Cedex 2

Résumé Abstract We argue that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe during the Middle Ages, and contributed to bolstering universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scientific Revolutions. We build a unique database of thousands of scholars from university sources covering all of Europe, construct an index of their ability, and map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. We show that scholars tended to concentrate in the best universities (agglomeration), that better scholars were more sensitive to the quality of the university (positive sorting) and migrated over greater distances (positive selection). Agglomeration, selection, and sorting patterns testify to an integrated academic market, made possible by the use of a common language (Latin).
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Résumé Throughout our project on premodern academia, we use a heuristic human capital index to measure each scholar’s quality. This index is built by combining several statistics from individual Wikipedia and Worldcat pages. The question we address here is whether this measure is correlated with the actual wages professors received. This note is a technical appendix to our paper on the academic market (De la Croix et al. 2020) but also has an interest as a stand-alone publication. There is considerable evidence that compensations for academic contractswentwell beyond paid salaries.1 They included payments from students, prebends,2 and many forms of in-kind benefits. Yet, it is interesting to examine the relationship between scholars’ human capital and existing data on monetary remunerations. Such remunerations have been used by Dittmar (2019) to show that professor salaries increased significantly relative to skilled wages after printing spread, with science professors benefiting from the largest salary increases. In the two sections below, we first review the available data on salaries, and argue that such data are imperfect proxies for the overall remuneration for academic services (i.e. a scholar’s market value). Keeping in mind such limitations, we thendocument a positive correlation between monetary income and scholars’ human capital.
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Résumé Que nous dit l’industrie cinématographique américaine sur le rôle économique de Wall Street et la perception de la bourse dans le temps ? À travers un corpus conséquent de films américains du XXe et XXIe siècles, cet article illustre comment, en trois périodes distinctes, Hollywood a pu mettre en scène la finance et contribuer au mythe de Wall Street. Sujet mineur jusque dans les années 1980, ces années ont vu l’apparition de blockbusters financiers avec la montée en puissance de la financiarisation de l’économie. La crise des subprimes renouvelle le genre, questionnant la place de la bourse et l’éthique des traders.
Mots clés Traders, Ethics, Movies, Finance, Wall Street, Wall Street, Cinéma, Ethique, Économie, Traders
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Résumé Une littérature récente en histoire économique4 s’attache à comprendre les avancées et les progrès de la société occidentale sur une longue période en analysant la façon dont la connaissance est créée et diffusée à travers les institutions qui en sont dépositaires. Derrière ces institutions, formelles, telles les universités et les sociétés savantes, ou informelles, telles la République des Lettres5, se trouvent des hommes qui, par leur activité intellectuelle, ont créé, compilé, discuté, transmis les progrès du savoir6. Cette littérature s’appuie sur la notion de capital humain, développée par Gary Becker7, qui comprend l’ensemble des connaissances et compétences détenues par un individu, et étudie son impact et à son évolution dans le temps. La transmission du savoir est au cœur des universités, dont le rôle dans la diffusion du progrès reste sujet à controverse. Alors que les universités médiévales constituent l’une des créations les plus innovantes de la société occidentale, et sont créditées de nombreuses influences positives8, elles sont souvent considérées comme endormies et sclérosées lors de la période moderne9. Leurs difficultés à s’ouvrir aux nouveaux domaines en expansion10, voire leur opposition à la modernité, sont souvent citées comme cause de leur déclin. Nous étudions dans ce travail le corps professoral de l’ancienne université d’Aix, créée en 1409, dans un terreau déjà fertile pour l’enseignement supérieur (école cathédrale, école de grammaire), et abolie en 1793 par la Convention. L’université d’Aix est, typiquement, vue habituellement11 comme une université aux débuts difficiles, avec un développement certain à la fin du XVIe siècle, mais caractérisée par un manque d’éclat général et un faible nombre d’étudiants. Les livres sur l’histoire d’Aix ou de la Provence lui accordent d’ailleurs peu de place12. Cette vision mitigée repose sur la taille de la population étudiante, sur une estimation, subjective, de l’originalité de la production scientifique, ou encore sur le manque de diversité de sa population étudiante13. Construire une base de données sur le corps professoral de l’université d’Aix permet de reconsidérer cette question sous un angle nouveau.
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Mots clés Moral hazard, Heterogeneous agents, Unemployment insurance, Idiosyncratic shocks, Universal basic income
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Résumé In this paper, we provide a dynamic model with heterogeneous agents to study child labor in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Households facing adverse shocks may use child labor as a means to smooth consumption. We show that the introduction of an unemployment insurance program and/or a universal basic income system helps eliminate child labor endogenously in this context. A calibration to South Africa in the 1990s is provided.
Mots clés Economie quantitative
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Résumé This paper uses French data to simultaneously estimate the impact of two types of connections on government subsidies allocated to municipalities. Investigating different types of connection in a same setting helps to distinguish between the different motivations that could drive pork-barreling. We differentiate between municipalities where ministers held office before their appointment to the government and those where they lived as children. Exploiting ministers' entries into and exits from the government, we show that municipalities where a minister was mayor receive 30% more investment subsidies when the politician they are linked to joins the government, and a similar size decrease when the minister departs. In contrast, we do not observe these outcomes for municipalities where ministers lived as children. These findings indicate that altruism towards childhood friends and family does not fuel pork-barreling, and suggest that altruism toward adulthood social relations or career concerns matter. We also present complementary evidence suggesting that observed pork-barreling is the result of soft influence of ministers, rather than of their formal control over the administration they lead.
Mots clés Personal connections, Political connections, Distributive politics, Local favouritism
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Résumé We argue that market forces shaped the geographic distribution of upper-tail human capital across Europe during the Middle Ages, and contributed to bolstering universities at the dawn of the Humanistic and Scienti c Revolutions. We build a unique database of thousands of scholars from university sources covering all of Europe, construct an index of their ability, and map the academic market in the medieval and early modern periods. We show that scholars tended to concentrate in the best universities (agglomeration), that better scholars were more sensitive to the quality of the university (positive sorting) and migrated over greater distances (positive selection). Agglomeration, selection and sorting patterns testify to an integrated academic market, made possible by the use of a common language (Latin).
Mots clés Upper-Tail Human Capital, Universities, Discrete choice model, Scholars, Publications, Agglomeration
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Résumé This paper uses the detailed curricula of French ministers and the detailed accounts of French municipalities to identify governmental investment grants targeted to specific jurisdictions. We distinguish between municipalities in which a politician held office before being appointed as a government’s member and those in which current ministers lived during their childhood. We provide evidence that municipalities in which a minister held office during her career experience a 45% increase in the amount of discretionary investment subsidies they receive during the time the politician they are linked to serves as minister. In contrast, we do not find any evidence that subsidies flow to municipalities from which ministers originate. Additional evidence advocate in favour of a key role of network and knowledge accumulated through connections, illustrated by a persistence of the impact of intergovernmental ties.
Mots clés Pork-barrel economics, Distributive politics, Political connections, Private connections
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Résumé In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should do a better job at protecting the unemployed, it suffers from moral hazard and substantial monitoring costs, which may threaten its usefulness. The universal basic income, which is simpler to manage and immune to moral hazard, may represent an interesting alternative in this context. We work within a dynamic equilibrium model with savings calibrated to the United States for 1990 and 2011, and provide results that show that UI beats UBI for insurance purposes because it is better targeted towards those in need.
Mots clés Idiosyncratic shocks, Universal basic income, Unemployment insurance, Heterogeneous agents, Moral hazard
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Résumé In this paper, we provide a dynamic model with heterogeneous agents to study child labor in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Households facing adverse shocks may use child labor as a buffer to smooth consumption. We show that the introduction of an unemployment insurance program and/or a universal basic income system help eliminate child labor endogenously in this context. A calibration to South Africa in the 1990s is provided.
Mots clés Child labor, Idiosyncratic shocks, Unemployment insurance, Universal basic income, Heterogeneous agents, Child labor ban
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