Publications
This paper uses a novel dataset on ethnic warfare to shed light on how conflict affects social identification and cohesion. A large body of anecdotal studies suggests that ethnic identities become more salient at times of conflict. Using data from thirty-six African countries, I provide econometric evidence to this notion. The relationship between ethnic conflict and various measures of social cohesion is also examined, revealing a positive link between the two. The finding is understood as a result of the ethnocentric dynamics generated by conflict: as warfare strengthens ethnic identification, prosocial behaviour increases, albeit primarily towards co-ethnics. This parochial interpretation is strengthened by the use of remote violence and the conditionality of conflict-induced prosocial behaviour on low levels of ethnic fractionalisation.
This paper proposes a new methodological approach using high-frequency data and local projections to assess the impact of weather on agricultural production. Local projections capture both immediate and delayed effects across crop types and growth stages, while providing early warnings for food shortages. Adverse weather shocks, such as excess heat or rain, consistently lead to delayed downturns in production, with heterogeneous effects across time, crops, and seasons. We build a new index of aggregate weather shocks that accounts for the typical delay between event occurrence and economic recognition, finding that these shocks are recessionary at the macroeconomic level, reducing inflation, production, exports and exchange rates.
When can exogenous changes in beliefs generate endogenous fluctuations in rational expectation models? We analyze this question in the canonical one-sector and two-sector models of the business cycle with increasing returns to scale. A key feature of our analysis is that we express the uniqueness/multiplicity condition of equilibirum paths in terms of restrictions on five critical and economically interpretable parameters: the Frisch elasticities of the labor supply curve with respect to the real wage and to the marginal utility of wealth, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption, the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor, and the degree of increasing returns to scale. We obtain two clear-cut conclusions: belief-driven fluctuations cannot exist in the one-sector version of the model for empirically consistent values for these five parameters. By contrast, belief-driven fluctuations are a robust property of the two-sector version of the model—with differentiated consumption and investment goods—, as they now emerge for a wide range of parameter values consistent with available empirical estimates. The key ingredients explaining these different outcomes are factor reallocation between sectors and the implied variations in the relative price of investment, affecting the expected return on capital accumulation.
« Chacun peut être amené au cours de sa vie à s’intéresser à l’histoire pour saisir les enjeux d’un affrontement entre groupes sociaux ou mieux appréhender comment les doctrines...
101 real couples participated in a controlled experimental risk-taking task involving variations in household and individual income risks, while controlling for ex-ante income inequality. Our design disentangles the effects of household risk, intra-household risk inequality, and ex-post payoff inequality. We find that most couples (about 79%) pooled their risk at the household level when risks were borne symmetrically, but a significant proportion of couples (about 36%) failed to do so when individual risks were borne asymmetrically. Additionally, within the scope of the control variables we have utilized, we find that intra-household risk inequality has a larger impact on non-married couples compared to married ones. These results remain robust when the analysis is limited to couples in which both spouses are risk-averse. Lastly, we find that preferences for household efficiency are significantly correlated across both certain and risky situations. However, couples consisting of two income-maximizing spouses do not show greater aversion to risk inequality compared to couples with other compositions.
This paper shows that the negative effect of geographical distance on knowledge flows stems from how firms gain sources of knowledge through their existing network. We start by documenting two stylized facts. First, in aggregate, the distance elasticity of patent citations flows is sizable and has remained constant since the 1980s, despite the rise of the internet. Second, at the micro level, firms’ network of knowledge sources expands through existing knowledge sources. We introduce a framework featuring the latter phenomenon, and generating a negative distance elasticity in aggregate. The model predicts Pareto-distributed innovator sizes, and citation distances increasing with innovator size. These predictions hold well empirically. We investigate changes of the underlying parameters and geographical composition effects over the period. While the distance effect should have decreased with constant country composition, the rise of East Asian economies, associated to large distance elasticities, compensated lower frictions in other countries.
For standard inequality measures, distribution-free inference methods are valid under conventional assumptions that fail to hold in applications. Resulting Bahadur-Savage type failures are documented, and correction methods are provided. Proposed solutions leverage on the positive support prior that can be defended with economic data such as income, in which case directional non-parametric tests can be salvaged. Simulation analysis with generalized entropy measures allowing for heavy tails and contamination reveals that proposed lower confidence bounds provide concrete size and power improvements, particularly through bootstraps. Empirical analysis on within-country wage inequality and on world income inequality illustrates the usefulness of the proposed lower bound, as opposed to the erratic behavior of traditional upper bounds.
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 toward 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.
Lack of high-quality value per statistical life (VSL) studies in low- and middle-income countries have been recognized by scholars and analysts in the benefit-cost analysis field for decades. However, progress has been slow in addressing it. We estimated VSL in China using a stated-preference survey in the context of reducing mortality risks associated with COVID-19. The survey was administered in seven cities across China in 2022 with a purposive sampling approach, and consistency checks at different levels of stringency regarding willingness to pay (WTP) for mortality risk reductions of different magnitudes were used to screen respondents. The estimated VSL ranges from 8.0 million to 10.3 million Chinese Yuan, which is higher than previous estimates. Also previous studies found much higher VSL estimates from a subsample obtained with more stringent consistency check requiring that WTP be approximately proportional to the magnitude of mortality risk reduction, we did not find such a difference with our dataset. In addition, based on our anlaysis, respondents in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have higher VSL than those in second-tier cities such as Changchun, Chengdu, Wuhan and Xi’an; the VSL-age relationship shows a U-shaped pattern; and the collective experience of city lockdown has a negative impact on VSL. Other factors which were found to influence VSL include education, sector of work, health status, risk perception, behaviors (physical exercises, wearing face masks, getting vaccinated), knowledge, political identity, and trust in government.
JEL classification codes
I12, I18
