Public Outreach

For the most impoverished, the various obstacles and pitfalls along the path to school do not always make it a walk in the park. To fight against poverty, many microcredit programs have been set up. One of these, the “Self Help Group” in the state of Jharkhand, India, has been studied by economists Jean-Marie Baland, Timothée Demont, and Rohini Somanathan. After six years of operation, the program has increased school enrollment by 40%. However, it remains ineffective in reducing child labor. These results can further help us understand how microcredit works.

Qualifications are not everything in the job market. Knowing how to be patient, work in a team, and manage your emotions are all highly valued skills. These so-called non-cognitive or social-emotional skills are developed during a key period in our life: childhood. Economists Simon Briole, Hélène Le Forner, and Anthony Lepinteur reveal in a recent study how sibling size influences the development of social-emotional skills and has the dependent variable of gender.

When you step into a voting booth, you are faced with a choice: who do you vote for? What happens to people who share the ideas of several parties at once? How can these people influence elections? These are the questions that Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde and João V. Ferreira answer in an article that examines how individuals divided between several ideologies can impact elections.

Should we wish for the best or focus on damage control? From deciding who will sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, to choosing a cake for guests, or distributing a budget, the question is always there. Anna Bogomolnaia, Ron Holzman, and Hervé Moulin look at the mechanisms of decision-making and come up with ways to increase the guarantee that the worst will not happen.

Bruno Ventelou (AMSE/CNRS), a health economist, talks about his research.

Fuel prices are almost constantly changing, whilst prices paid for electrical appliances may remain stable for several months. For most products, prices tend to remain the same over weeks or even months. There is a simple explanation for this: it would be too expensive for companies to perpetually analyse market price changes. This is the conclusion reached by economists Mark N. Harris, Hervé Le Bihan and Patrick Sevestre after analysing the evolution of prices of several hundred industrial product pricess.

In 2019, public health expenditure in the European Union amounted to 983 billion euros - 7% of GDP on average. According to a study conducted by researchers Yevgeniy Goryakin, Sophie Thiébaut, Sébastien Cortaredona, Aliénor Lerouge, Michele Cecchini, Andrea Feigl, and Bruno Ventelou, health spending will continue to increase steadily, reaching an estimated figure of between 1223 and 1278 billion euros by 2050.

Dialogues économiques is taking its summer break and looks forward to seeing you on September 1st ! To keep you waiting until then, the online magazine offers you a selection of articles to (re)read...

In May 2021, a French youtuber revealed on social networks that he had been approached by a communication agency to discredit the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Following his statement, other European influencers report receiving an identical proposal. The deal was that they would put forward a pre-written false argument in exchange for a fee. The aim? Likely to promote another vaccine over the German one. This attempt to cast doubt is reminiscent of how industrialists attempt to manipulate public opinion. Economists Yann Bramoullé and Caroline Orset modelled the cost of firms’ manipulation of scientific facts.

What is talent? According to the economist Alain Trannoy, it is the sum of an initial skill and the efforts made to maintain it. This definition is part of a larger philosophical sphere focused on equal opportunity, which applies to a redistributive tax model that aims to reduce income inequality.