Publications
Le projet de Philippe Grill est d’enquêter sur les origines et les fondements des doctrines et théories relatives aux libertés et à l’égalité. Son approche est proprement philosophico-économique, au sens où elle s’appuie sur l’une et l’autre discipline. Cette exploration conceptuelle des théories économiques et philosophiques, des hypothèses qui les fondent, des notions qui les irriguent, ou encore des masses de données empiriques aux interprétations multiples, voire contradictoires, se révèle cruciale car c’est à partir de ces doctrines et théories que sont conçues et promues les organisations sociales et les politiques publiques qui déterminent « dans quel monde on vit », en décrétant le possible et l’impossible en ces domaines. L’ouvrage contribue ainsi pleinement aux débats actuels d’éthique sociale en fournissant les moyens de définir ce que pourrait être une organisation sociale « humaniste ».
En effet, si l’on veut changer le monde, il faut le comprendre… Sereinement, pédagogiquement, c’est notamment à cette compréhension maximale que nous invite Philippe Grill. La somme encyclopédique qu’il nous propose déploie le panorama d’une philosophie économique où sont convoqués les savoirs contemporains issus de nombreuses disciplines (outre les sciences économiques bien sûr, les autres sciences sociales, la logique, l’épistémologie, les sciences cognitives, les neurosciences, la biologie de l’évolution, etc., ainsi que les engagements ontologiques des nombreux penseurs que l’ouvrage étudie). Ici, point de simple juxtaposition de disciplines, mais une architecture des connaissances qui veut montrer que les conceptions idoines sont nécessairement connexes si l’on entend démêler l’écheveau d’un homo œconomicus authentique, renversant le modèle factice que rabâchent les propagandistes de vulgates économiques outrancièrement simplistes et irréalistes. Ainsi, ce livre est un puissant levier de ce mouvement salutaire. Moins
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.
Background:
We quantify the mortality burden and economic loss attributable to nonoptimal temperatures for cold and heat in the Central and South American countries in the Multi-City Multi-Country (MCC) Collaborative Research Network.
Methods:
We collected data for 66 locations from 13 countries in Central and South America to estimate location-specific temperature–mortality associations using time-series regression with distributed lag nonlinear models. We calculated the attributable deaths for cold and heat as the 2.5th and 97.5th temperature percentiles, above and below the minimum mortality temperature, and used the value of a life year to estimate the economic loss of delayed deaths.
Results:
The mortality impact of cold varied widely by country, from 9.64% in Uruguay to 0.22% in Costa Rica. The heat-attributable fraction for mortality ranged from 1.41% in Paraguay to 0.01% in Ecuador. Locations in arid and temperate climatic zones showed higher cold-related mortality (5.10% and 5.29%, respectively) than those in tropical climates (1.71%). Arid and temperate climatic zones saw lower heat-attributable fractions (0.69% and 0.58%) than arid climatic zones (0.92%). Exposure to cold led to an annual economic loss of $0.6 million in Costa Rica to $472.2 million in Argentina. In comparison, heat resulted in economic losses of $0.05 million in Ecuador to $90.6 million in Brazil.
Conclusion:
Most of the mortality burden for Central and South American countries is caused by cold compared to heat, generating annual economic losses of $2.1 billion and $290.7 million, respectively. Public health policies and adaptation measures in the region should account for the health effects associated with nonoptimal temperatures.
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.
In this paper, we develop an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and calibrate it to the Swedish historical data in order to estimate the economic cost of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. The model identifies survivors from younger cohorts as main benefactors of the windfall bequests following the influenza mortality shock. We also show that the general equilibrium effects of the pandemic reveal themselves over the wage channel rather than the interest rate, fertility or labor supply channels. Finally, we demonstrate that the influenza mortality shock becomes persistent, driving the aggregate variables to lower steady states which costs the economy 1.819% of the output loss over the next century.
Over the years, oil prices and financial stock markets have always had a complex relationship. This paper analyzes the interactions and co-movements between the oil market (WTI crude oil) and two major stock markets in Europe and the US (the Euro Stoxx 50 and the SP500) for the period from 1990 to 2023. For that, I use both the time-varying and the Markov copula models. The latter one represents an extension of the former one, where the constant term of the dynamic dependence parameter is driven by a hidden two-state first-order Markov chain. It is also called the dynamic regime-switching (RS) copula model. To estimate the model, I use the inference function for margins (IFM) method together with Kim’s filter for the Markov switching process. The marginals of the returns are modeled by the GARCH and GAS models. Empirical results show that the RS copula model seems adequate to measure and evaluate the time-varying and non-linear dependence structure. Two persistent regimes of high and low dependency have been detected. There was a jump in the co-movements of both pairs during high regimes associated with instability and crises. In addition, the extreme dependence between crude oil and US/European stock markets is time-varying but also asymmetric, as indicated by the SJC copula. The correlation in the lower tail is higher than that in the upper. Hence, oil and stock returns are more closely joined and tend to co-move more closely together in bullish periods than in bearish periods. Finally, the dependence between WTI crude oil and the SP500 stock index seems to be more affected by exogenous shocks and instability than the oil and European stock markets.
We study a simple model in which two vertically differentiated firms compete in prices and mass advertising on an initially uninformed market. Consumers differ in their preference for quality. There is an upper bound on prices since consumers cannot spend more on the good than a fixed amount (say, their income). Depending on this income and on the ratio between the advertising cost and quality differential (relative advertising cost), either there is no equilibrium in pure strategies or there exists one of the following three types: (1) an interior equilibrium, where both firms have positive natural markets and charge prices lower than the consumer’s income; (2) a constrained interior equilibrium, where both firms have positive natural markets, and the high-quality firm charges the consumer’s income or (3) a corner equilibrium, where the low-quality firm has no natural market selling only to uninformed customers. We show that no corner equilibrium exists in which the high-quality firm would have a null natural market. At an equilibrium (whenever there exists one), the high-quality firm always advertises more, charges a higher price and makes a higher profit than the low-quality one. As the relative advertising cost goes to infinity, prices become equal and the advertising intensities converge to zero as well as the profits. Finally, the advertising intensities are, at least globally, increasing with the quality differential. Finally, in all cases, as the advertising parameter cost increases unboundedly, both prices converge increasingly towards the consumer’s income.
This paper develops a search and matching framework in which workers are characterized 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.
