Publications
Decreased transportation costs have led to the transmission of ideas and values across national borders that has helped reduce the barriers to international labor mobility. In this context, high-skilled individuals are more likely to vote with their feet in response to high income taxes. It is thus important to examine the magnitude of tax-driven migration responses in developed countries as well as the possible consequences of income tax competition between nation states. More specifically, how does the potential threat of migration affect a country’s optimal income tax policies?
Owing to recent concerns about the negative externalities of traditional fuel use on the environment and health, the issue of the household fuel transition in developing countries, from dirty fuels towards clean fuels, is receiving growing research attention. This paper provides an up-to-date survey of the economic literature on household fuel use in these countries. We first present the conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Then we discuss the empirical results that show the wide range of factors that drive the household fuel transition and can be understood better by linking them with theory.
Background:
Interest in the Senian capability framework as an alternative approach to wellbeing measurement has increased in recent decades. The aim of this study was to look at the extent to which an individual's capability to achieve wellbeing in one dimension is associated with his or her attempt to achieve wellbeing in another dimension in a fragile setting affected by conflict.
Methods:
Capability is defined as the ability to achieve health, knowledge, and wealth and is measured as latent variables using a structural equation model. Health capability is identified by self-assessed health, mental health, lifestyle, and knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases. Knowledge capability is captured using school attendance, completion of compulsory education, and media access. Wealth capability is identified using indicators on utilities, asset ownership, and housing conditions. Estimation results are used to derive normalised capability scores with values close to 1 indicating high capabilities. A nationally representative sample of 4329 youth aged 15–29 years was drawn from the 2010 Palestinian Family Survey.
Findings:
Interpretations are made in terms of standardised units, which measure the change in the explained variable due to a standard deviation's change in the explanatory variable. Achieving good health is associated with knowledge capability (0·125; p=0·098) and vice versa (0·462; p=0·004). Health capability is positively associated with wealth capability (0·109; p=0·021); however, the reverse is not the case (–0·753; p=0·021). Men are more likely than women to have higher health knowledge and living conditions capabilities but lower knowledge capabilities. Results suggest the importance of some exogenous factors in the conversion of capabilities into achievements (eg, location of residence). With the exception of health, the data show higher capabilities in Areas A and B of the West Bank than in Area C and the Gaza Strip (mean 0·71 and 0·69 vs 0·60 and 0·61 vs 0·57 and 0·68 for wealth and knowledge, respectively).
Interpretation:
Although achieving good health appears to entail knowledge capabilities, the wealth-health association is blurred by the effect of exogenous factors (eg, health-care access). Capability deprivation in the local context seems to derive from geographical barriers, as is captured by the contribution of location of residence. This reflects the effect of geopolitical segregation that restricts the movement of people.
Funding:
Investissements d’Avenir French Government programme, managed by the French National Research Agency (ANR).
Mixed-asset portfolio optimization consists in determining the best allocation among standard financial assets such as money market accounts, bonds, stocks and real estate asset as well. For this latter kind of asset, computing the optimal weight can be challenging. First, there is the need to specify the kind of real estate included in the portfolio (commercial, industrial, residential, direct, REIT shares). Second, the prices used to calibrate real estate values need to be chosen from alternatives like: appraisal values, actual real estate transactions, repeated sales, indices. In this paper we focus on private residential real estate returns, investigating the optimal weight of the real asset with respect to standard financial assets. Using quarterly data on housing indices for four European countries, France, Germany, UK and Spain, we address the question of how investing in housing affects the composition of an investor’s portfolio. We show in particular under which conditions we recover the typical 15%-20% real asset allocation.
What makes people happy? Why should governments care about people’s well-being? How would policy change if well-being was the main objective? The Origins of Happiness seeks to revolutionize how we think about human priorities and to promote public policy changes that are based on what really matters to people. Drawing on a uniquely comprehensive range of evidence from longitudinal data on over one hundred thousand individuals in Britain, the United States, Australia, and Germany, the authors consider the key factors that affect human well-being.The authors explore factors such as income, education, employment, family conflict, health, childcare, and crime—and their findings are not what we might expect. Contrary to received wisdom, income inequality accounts for only two percent or less of the variance in happiness across the population; the critical factors affecting a person’s happiness are their relationships and their mental and physical health. More people are in misery due to mental illness than to poverty, unemployment, or physical illness. Examining how childhood influences happiness in adulthood, the authors show that academic performance is a less important predictor than emotional health and behavior, which is shaped tremendously by schools, individual teachers, and parents. For policymakers, the authors propose new forms of cost-effectiveness analysis that places well-being at center stage.Groundbreaking in its scope and results, The Origins of Happiness offers all of us a new vision for how we might become more healthy, happy, and whole.
This paper studies the constrained multiobjective optimization problem of finding Pareto critical points of vector-valued functions. The proximal point method considered by Bonnel, Iusem, and Svaiter [SIAM J. Optim., 15 (2005), pp. 953--970] is extended to locally Lipschitz functions in the finite dimensional multiobjective setting. To this end, a new (scalarization-free) approach for convergence analysis of the method is proposed where the first-order optimality condition of the scalarized problem is replaced by a necessary condition for weak Pareto points of a multiobjective problem. As a consequence, this has allowed us to consider the method without any assumption of convexity over the constraint sets that determine the vectorial improvement steps. This is very important for applications; for example, to extend to a dynamic setting the famous compromise problem in management sciences and game theory.
Using a pre-order principle in [Qiu JH. A pre-order principle and set-valued Ekeland variational principle. J Math Anal Appl. 2014;419:904–937], we establish a general equilibrium version of set-valued Ekeland variational principle (denoted by EVP), where the objective bimap is defined on the product of left-complete quasi-metric spaces and taking values in a quasi-order linear space, and the perturbation consists of the quasi-metric and a positive vector . Here, the ordering is only to be -closed, which is strictly weaker than to be topologically closed. From the general equilibrium version, we deduce a number of particular equilibrium versions of EVP with set-valued bimaps or with vector-valued bimap. As applications of the equilibrium versions of EVP, we present several interesting results on equilibrium problems, vector optimization and fixed point theory in the setting of quasi-metric spaces. These results extend and improve the related known results. Using the obtained EVPs, we further study the existence and the robustness of traps in Behavioural Sciences.
The twentieth century was a period of exceptional growth, driven mainly by the increase in total factor productivity (TFP). Using a database of 17 OECD countries over the 1890–2013 period, this paper integrates production factor quality into the measure of TFP, namely by factoring the level of education of the working-age population into the measure of labor and the age of equipment in the measure of capital stock. We then estimate how the diffusion of technology impacts the growth of this newly measured TFP through two emblematic general purpose technologies, electricity and information and communication technologies (ICT). Using growth decomposition methodology from instrumental variable estimates, this paper finds that education levels contribute most significantly to growth, while the age of capital makes a limited, although significant, contribution. Quality-adjusted production factors explain less than half of labor productivity growth in the largest countries except for Japan, where capital deepening posted a very large contribution. As a consequence, the “one big wave” of productivity growth (Gordon in Am Econ Rev 89(2):123–128, 1999), as well as the ICT productivity wave for the countries which experienced it, remains only partially explained by quality-adjusted factors, although education and technology diffusion contribute to explain the earlier wave in the USA in the 1930s–1940s. Finally, technology diffusion, as captured through our two general purpose technologies, leaves unexplained between 0.6 and 1 percentage point of yearly growth, as well as a large proportion of the two twentieth-century technology waves. These results both support a significant lag in the diffusion of general purpose technologies and raise further questions on a wider view on growth factors, including changes in the production process, management techniques and financing practices. Measurement problems may also contribute to the unexplained share of growth.
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We evaluate the introduction of various forms of antihypertensive treatments in France with a distribution-sensitive cost-benefit analysis. Compared to traditional cost-benefit analysis, we implement distributional weighting based on equivalent incomes, a new concept of individual well-being that does respect individual preferences but is not subjectively welfarist. Individual preferences are estimated on the basis of a contingent valuation question, introduced into a representative survey of the French population. Compared to traditional cost-effectiveness analysis in health technology assessment, we show that it is feasible to go beyond a narrow evaluation of health outcomes while still fully exploiting the sophistication of medical information. Sensitivity analysis illustrates the relevancy of this richer welfare framework, the importance of the distinction between an ex ante and an ex post approach, and the need to consider distributional effects in a broader institutional setting.
