Publications
Entrepreneurship, growth and total factor productivity are larger when asset prices are high and decline during financial crises. We explain these facts using a growth model with financial bubbles in which individuals have heterogeneous wages and returns on productive investment. Heterogeneity separates individuals between savers and entrepreneurs. Savers buy financial assets, which are deposits or a financial bubble. Entrepreneurs incur in a start-up cost and borrow to invest in productive capital. The bubble provides liquidities to credit-constrained entrepreneurs. These liquidities increase investment, growth and entrepreneurship. Finally, the bubble may increase productivity when the return of each entrepreneur's investment is positively correlated with her previous income.
IntroductionThere is a lack of quantitative evidence on the role of food innovations-new food ingredients and processing techniques-in the nutrition transition.ObjectiveDocument the distribution of food innovations across 67 high-income (HIC) and middle-income (MIC) countries between 1970 and 2010, and its association with the nutritional composition of food supply.MethodsWe used all available data on food patents, as compiled by the European Patent Office, to measure food innovations. We considered innovations directly received by countries from inventors seeking protection in their territories, and those embedded in processed food imports. Food and Agricultural Organization data were used to estimate the associations between international diffusion of food innovations and trends in total food supply and its macronutrient composition, after adjusting for confounding trends in demand-side factors. We identified the role of trade by simulating the changes in average diet due to innovations embedded in food imports.ResultsTrends in food innovations were positively and significantly associated with changes in daily per capita calorie supply available for human consumption in MIC between 1990 and 2010 (elasticity of 0.027, 95% CI 0.019 to 0.036). Food innovations were positively correlated with the share of animal and free fats in total food supply (elasticities of 0.044, 95% CI 0.030 to 0.058 for MIC between 1970 and 1989 and 0.023, 95% CI 0.003 to 0.043 for HIC between 1990 and 2010). Food innovations were associated with substitutions from complex carbohydrates towards sugars in total food supply for MIC after 1990 (elasticities of -0.037, 95% CI -0.045 to -0.029 for complex carbs, 0.082, 95% CI 0.066 to 0.098 for sugars). For these countries, the trade channel capturing access to innovations through imports of processed food played a key role.ConclusionPolicy-makers should consider the impacts of the international diffusion of food innovations in assessing the costs and benefits of international trade regulations.
This paper develops a search and matching framework in which workers are characterised by asymmetric reference-dependent reciprocity, and firms set wages by considering the effect that these can have on workers’ effort, and therefore on output. The cyclical response of effort to wage changes can considerably amplify shocks, independently of the cyclicality of the hiring wage, which becomes irrelevant for unemployment volatility; and firms’ expectations of downward wage rigidity in existing jobs increases the volatility of job creation. The model is consistent with evidence on hiring and incumbents’ wage cyclicality, and provides novel predictions on the dynamics of effort.
Aims: we propose a sociotechnical taxonomy for the analysis of socio-economic disruptions caused by technological innovations. Methodology: a transdisciplinary principled approach is used to build the taxonomy through categorization and characterization of technologies using concepts and definitions originating from cybernetics, occupational science, and economics. The sociotechnical taxonomy is then used, with the help of logical propositions, to connect the characteristics of different categories of technologies to their socio-economic effects, for example their externalities. Results: we offer concrete illustrations of concepts and uses, and an Industry 5.0 case study as an application of the taxonomy. We suggest that the taxonomy can inform the analysis of opportunities and risks related to technological disruptions, specially of those that result from the rise of cognitive machines.
Salience theory relies on the assumption that not only the marginal distribution of lotteries, but also the correlation of payoffs across states impacts choices. Recent experimental studies on salience theory seem to provide evidence in favor of such correlation effects. However, these studies fail to control for event-splitting effects (ESE). In this paper, we seek to disentangle the role of correlation and event-splitting in two settings: 1) the common consequence Allais paradox as studied by Bordalo et al. (2012), Bruhin et al. (2022), and Frydman and Mormann (2018); 2) choices between Mao pairs as studied by Dertwinkel-Kalt and Köster (2020). In both settings, we find evidence suggesting that recent findings supporting correlation effects are largely driven by ESE. Once controlling for ESE, we find no consistent evidence for correlation effects. Our results thus shed doubt on the validity of salience theory in describing risky behavior.
The paper examines the question of non-anonymous Growth Incidence Curves (na-GIC) from a Bayesian inferential point of view. Building on the notion of conditional quantiles of Barnett (1976. “The Ordering of Multivariate Data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A 139: 318–55), we show that removing the anonymity axiom leads to a complex and shaky curve that has to be smoothed, using a non-parametric approach. We opted for a Bayesian approach using Bernstein polynomials which provides confidence intervals, tests and a simple way to compare two na-GICs. The methodology is applied to examine wage dynamics in a US university with a particular attention devoted to unbundling and anti-discrimination policies. Our findings are the detection of wage scale compression for higher quantiles for all academics and an apparent pro-female wage increase compared to males. But this pro-female policy works only for academics and not for the para-academics categories created by the unbundling policy.
The impact of US allocation of family planning aid on other donors is studied in order to gain new insights into donor interactions. Within this context, the dominant player in the sector is the United States, whose policies on family planning undergo changes influenced by domestic debates surrounding abortion. By utilizing the Mexico City Policy and considering exposure to this particular policy as an instrumental factor, it has been observed that other donors do not immediately react to policy changes made by the United States, either contemporaneously or within one year. However, a noticeable shift occurs after a two-year period, indicating that these donors eventually align their allocation strategies with those of the United States. Further analysis of this phenomenon reveals varying patterns among different types of donors. While smaller donors exhibit a clear intention to compensate for US policy changes, larger donors display a mix of competitive tendencies and herding behavior, thereby reinforcing the impact of the Mexico City Policy after the two-year time frame.
We present an inexact proximal point algorithm using quasi distances to solve a minimization problem in the Euclidean space. This algorithm is motivated by the proximal methods introduced by Attouch et al., section 4, (Math Program Ser A, 137: 91-129, 2013) and Solodov and Svaiter (Set Valued Anal 7:323-345, 1999). In contrast, in this paper we consider quasi distances, arbitrary (non necessary smooth) objective functions, scalar errors in each objective regularized approximation and vectorial errors on the residual of the regularized critical point, that is, we have an error on the optimality condition of the proximal subproblem at the new point. We obtain, under a coercivity assumption of the objective function, that all accumulation points of the sequence generated by the algorithm are critical points (minimizer points in the convex case) of the minimization problem. As an application we consider a human location problem: How to travel around the world and prepare the trip of a lifetime.
In this paper, we provide a better understanding of what drives sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) to improve their governance. Using the most recent SWF governance scoreboard from Maire et al. (2021), we estimate a fractional response model to determine whether SWF governance disclosure norms are driven by the search for internal or external legitimacy. Overall, we find that SWFs have better governance when they originate from democratic countries with high-quality, national governance. Our results also show that SWFs tend to have better governance quality when they need to acquire external legitimacy vis-à-vis the target company and its government. In particular, we find that SWFs have an incentive to improve their governance when they are sufficiently internationalized, when the amount of foreign assets invested abroad is sufficiently large or when the amount of shares acquired in developed countries is significant. These findings demonstrate how SWFs may proactively build legitimacy in host countries when they need to adapt their foreign entry strategies. Our results have important implications for understanding the determinants of SWF governance in general.
We study whether fiscal policies, especially public debt, can help to curb the macroeconomic and health consequences of epidemics. Our approach is based on three main features: we introduce the dynamics of epidemics in an overlapping generations model to take into account that old people are more vulnerable; people are more easily infected when pollution is high; public spending in health care and public debt can be used to tackle the effects of epidemics. We show that fiscal policies can promote convergence to a stable disease-free steady state. When public policies are not able to permanently eradicate the epidemic, public debt, and income transfers could reduce the number of infected people and increase capital and GDP per capita. As a prerequisite, pollution intensity should not be too high. Finally, we define a household subsidy policy that eliminates income and welfare inequalities between healthy and infected individuals.
