Publications

Abstract While men and women make joint decisions about fertility, women give birth and are more likely to learn about a significant cost of childbearing-maternal health risk. Within couples in Zambia, men have systematically lower awareness of maternal risk factors and a higher desire for children than their wives. We develop a model in which information asymmetries between partners regarding maternal health risk can persist in equilibrium as the result of strategic incentives and can generate disagreement over fertility that cannot be resolved with transfers. To study the effect of communication barriers on fertility, we design an experiment that varies whether the husband or the wife receives information about maternal health risk. One year after the intervention, directly treated men exhibit significant gains in knowledge, report lower demand for children, and communicate this information to their wives, who also update their beliefs. Pregnancy falls significantly, while transfers remain unchanged relative to the control group. Meanwhile, when women are treated directly, they update their own beliefs, but fail to transmit the information to their husband, who do not change their demand for children. While pregnancy also falls among these couples, the decline is accompanied by a significant reduction in transfers and support from husband to the wife. When childbearing costs, particularly those borne by one party, cannot be easily communicated within the household, targeting information can help overcome asymmetries and improve household decision-making.
Keywords Household decision-making, Fertility, Communication
HAL Google Scholar
Abstract Drift and volatility are two mainsprings of asset price dynamics. While volatilities have been studied extensively in the literature, drifts are commonly believed to be impossible to estimate and largely ignored in the literature. This paper shows how to detect drift using realized autocovariance implemented on high-frequency data. We use a theoretical treatment in which the classical model for the efficient price, an Itō semimartingale possibly contaminated by microstructure noise, is enriched with drift and volatility explosions. Our theory advocates a novel decomposition for realized variance into a drift and a volatility component, which leads to significant improvements in volatility forecasting.
Keywords Volatility Forecasting, Serial Covariance, High-frequency Data, Drift
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Abstract The Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) model is a well-established local technique for analyzing spatial heterogeneity and temporal dependence in georeferenced data. It is recognized for its ability to represent real-world settings. In this study, we expand upon the GTWR model by incorporating spatio-temporal noise that is colored in space and fractional in time. Under this formulation, we derive the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) estimator and formally establish its convergence rate. To evaluate the performance of the WLS estimator, we implemented a simulation study with five defined scenarios. The simulation results indicate that the model residuals exhibit small variations around zero, which suggests the accuracy of the estimator. Finally, we applied the estimator to real data on the incidence of respiratory diseases. Analyzing the residuals in this empirical application allows us to evaluate the ability of the model to capture the spatio-temporal structure of the data.
Keywords Consistency, Fractional Colored Noise, Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression
Publication HAL Google Scholar
Abstract Not all barrels of oil are created equal: their extraction varies in both private cost and carbon intensity. Leveraging a comprehensive micro-dataset on world oil fields, alongside detailed estimates of carbon intensities and private extraction costs, this study quantifies the additional emissions and costs from having extracted the “wrong” deposits. We do so by comparing historical deposit-level supplies to counterfactuals that factor in pollution costs, while keeping annual global consumption unchanged. Between 1992 and 2018, carbon misallocation amounted to at least 11.00 gigatons of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2eq), incurring an environmental cost evaluated at $2.2 trillion (US$ 2018). This translates into a significant supply-side ecological debt for major producers of high-carbon oil. Looking forward, we estimate the gains from making deposit-level extraction socially optimal at about 9.30 GtCO2eq, valued at $1.9 trillion, along a future aggregate demand pathway coherent with the objective of net-zero emissions in 2050, and document unequal reserve stranding across oil nations.
Keywords Misallocation, Stranded assets, Carbon mitigation, Oil
Publication HAL Google Scholar