Trannoy
Alain Trannoy
Publications
Cet article décrit deux réformes, la modulation des allocations familiales en fonction du revenu et le nouvel abaissement du plafonnement du quotient familial. Ces réformes annoncent la fin du principe d’égal sacrifice, qui sous-tendait le mécanisme de quotient familial, et son quasi-remplacement par un principe forfaitaire. Nous étudions l’impact financier sur les ménages concernés et suggérons d’assumer les choix faits en simplifiant le système actuel, complexe, par une aide forfaitaire de type crédit d’impôt.
[eng] This article describes two recent reforms, the means-testing, of family benefits and further reduction of the ceiling of the “quotient familial”. These reforms announce the end of the principle of equal sacrifice, which underpinned the “quotient familial” mechanism in French taxation, and its quasi-replacement by a lump-sum principle. We evaluate the financial impact of the reforms on affected households and suggest to consistently assume the choices made by simplifying the current system, too complex, by a simple universal transfer, such as a tax credit.
The paper investigates the link between the over-exposure of African immigrants to unemployment in France and their under-representation in jobs in contact with customers. We build a two-sector matching model with ethnic sectorspecifc preferences, economy-wide employer discrimination, and customer discrimination in jobs in contact with customers. The outcomes of the model allow us to build a test of ethnic discrimination in general and customer discrimination in particular. We run the test on French individual data in a cross-section of local labor markets (Employment Areas). Our results show that there is both ethnic and customer discrimination in the French labor market.
With aging populations, European countries face difficult challenges. In 2002, France implemented a public allowance program (APA) offering financial support to the disabled elderly for their long-term care (LTC) needs. Although currently granted to 1.2 million people, it is suspected that some of those eligible do not claim it—presenting a non-take-up behavior. The granting of APA is a decentralized process, with 94 County Councils (CC) managing it, with wide room for local interpretation. This spatial heterogeneity in the implementation of the program creates the conditions for a “quasi-natural experiment”, and provides the opportunity to study the demand for APA in relation to variations in CCs’ “generosity” in terms of both eligibility and subsidy rate for LTC. We use a national health survey and administrative data in a multilevel model controlling for geographical, cultural and political differences between counties. The results show that claiming for APA is associated with the “generosity” of CCs: the population tends to apply less for the allowance if the subsidy rate is in average lower. This pecuniary trade-off, revealed by our study, can have strong implications for the well-being of the elderly and their relatives.
Depuis l’éclatement en 2008 de la crise immobilière internationale, les marchés des différents pays ont connu des parcours fort dissemblables. Quels enseignements faut-il en tirer dans la définition des politiques ?
We thank Kathryn Spier, three anonymous referees of the RAND Journal of Economics, Christian Gollier, and Pierre-André Chiappori for very useful remarks and comments. This manuscript is the revised version of a Working Paper by the same authors, circulated in May 2012 and titled, “Equal Treatment as a Second Best: Student Loans under Asymmetric Information.” This research has been supported by a research grant of the ANR “programme blanc.” Gary-Bobo's research is also supported by Investissements d'Avenir (no. ANR-11-IDEX-0003), Labex Ecodec (no. ANR-11-LABX-0047).
Universities present some similarities with professional partnerships in law and accounting. Universities are close to being partnerships in a non-profit environment. In particular, the practice of co-option for the appointment of new teachers is similar to partnership rules according to which a new partner cannot be appointed without the consent of all the other partners. We compare co-option with other recruitment procedures such as delegation of recruitment to headhunters or the sale of academic positions at auction. Asymmetries of information, reputation, joint production of teaching and research and externalities in academic production, explain that co-option is the commonly adopted way of hiring new faculty. Still, the incentives to recruit the best candidate are weakened by free-riding, moral hazard, and the fact that academics do not invest their own wealth in the university. We explore some ways of realigning incentives to recruit good candidates in the framework of a collective co-option procedure in French universities. We end up by concluding that the key factor to improve the situation lies in the institution of the university president, who should be chosen to be more independent from the academic senate. Classification JEL : I23, J54, D82, M51
The modern formulation of equality of opportunity emerges from discussions in political philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century beginning with Rawls (1971) and and . Equality of opportunity exists when policies compensate individuals with disadvantageous circumstances so that outcomes experienced by a population depend only on factors for which persons can be considered to be responsible. Importantly, inequality of opportunity for income exists when individuals’ incomes are in some important part determined by the educational achievement and income of the families that raised them. We review the philosophical debates referred to, commenting upon them from an economist's viewpoint. We propose several ways of modeling equality (or inequality) of opportunity, pointing out that an equal-opportunity ethic implies a non-welfarist way of ranking social outcomes. We propose that economic development should be conceived of as the equalization of opportunities for income in a country. We consider equalization of opportunity from a dynamic viewpoint, and we review popular attitudes with regard to distributive justice, showing that there is substantial popular support for an equal-opportunity ethic. We discuss the empirical issues that emerge in measuring inequality of opportunity and provide a review of the empirical literature that measures degrees of inequality of opportunity for the achievement of various objectives, in various countries.
