Publications des chercheurs de PSE

For economists, it is not easy to grapple with a phenomenon as complex as inheritance or wealth transfers, which is inherently multidisciplinary. They are thus puzzled by the specific decline of wealth transfer taxation, which has become highly unpopular today, but also by the current lack of interest in the very issue of inheritance, which was formerly the subject of passionate debate among the most illustrious thinkers and social reformers. These changes appear all the more surprising in the light of the massive and worrying process of property accumulation (patrimonialization) that our societies have been experiencing since 1980, a process that is detrimental not only to economic growth, but also to equality of opportunity and to balanced intergenerational relationships. To explain such a paradox, I have extracted three polar “philosophies of inheritance” from the tangle of the arguments either in favor of or opposed to wealth transfer taxation, showing that only coalitions between holders of these different philosophies had proved historically effective at creating sustainable policies and attitudes towards inheritance and its taxation. The dominant coalition since 1980, between rich neoliberals and “familialists,” explains the current rejection of the inheritance tax. I consider ways and means for wealth transfer tax reforms that would oust this coalition it in favor of a broader, more balanced one that would also simultaneously address the negative effects of the current wealth situation.

Cet article compare le régime légal actuel du cannabis, tel qu’il découle de la mise en œuvre de la loi de prohibition du 31 décembre 1970, avec différents scénarios de légalisation. Pour ce faire, et malgré les difficultés d’observation du marché souterrain, une fonction de bien-être collectif est estimée sous différents scénarios de régime juridique. La dépénalisation de la consommation viendrait augmenter le bien-être collectif. La libéralisation complète du marché du cannabis engendrerait une variation positive de bien-être collectif supérieure tout en réglant la question de la prohibition. Le bénéfice économique de la légalisation complète du cannabis ne tiendrait pas uniquement à la création de recettes fiscales mais aussi à l’économie des ressources publiques présentement allouées à la répression.

Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when U.S. news on the following day are dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel’s strategy aims at minimizing next-day coverage, which is especially charged with negative emotional content. Palestinian attacks do not appear to be timed to U.S. news.

In France, temporary institutionalization solutions for dependent elders have been encouraged since the early 2000s. They are targeting patients who are maintained at home, but may need temporary solutions to adjust the constraints of caregivers, e.g. to facilitate transitions between several informal care providers or to allow informal caregivers to leave for holidays. However, the influence of these solutions on dependent elders and their caregivers has not been explored yet. We use French longitudinal data (REAL.FR, 686 elders and their primary caregivers followed between 2000 and 2006) to explore the impact of institution placement on the wellbeing of both Alzheimer's disease patients and their primary informal caregivers. The data distinguishes permanent placements in institution from temporary stays. Using fixed-effect models, we quantify the change in patients' quality of life and caregivers' burden of care following the placement of patients. We find that permanent and temporary stays are associated with a decrease in informal caregivers' burden. However, only permanent stays lead to an improvement of patients' quality of life. Hence, taken together, the results suggest that while long-run placements may maximize the wellbeing of all the members of a household (patient and caregiver), this is not necessarily the case of short-term placements.

Quantum cognition in decision making is a recent and rapidly growing field. In this paper, we develop an expected utility theory in a context of non-classical (quantum) uncertainty. We replace the classical state space with a Hilbert space which allows introducing the concept of quantum lottery. Within that framework, we formulate axioms on preferences over quantum lotteries to establish a representation theorem. We show that demanding the consistency of choice behavior conditional on new information is equivalent to the von Neumann–Lüders postulate applied to beliefs. A dynamically consistent quantum-like agent may violate dynamic recursive consistency, however. This feature suggests interesting applications in behavioral economics as we illustrate in an example of persuasion.

The prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome (amniocentesis) presents parents with a complex dilemma which requires comparing the risk of giving birth to an affected child and the risk of losing an unaffected child through amniocentesis-related miscarriage. Building on the specific features of the French Health insurance system, this paper shows that variation in the monetary costs of the diagnosis procedure may have a very significant impact on how parents solve this ethical dilemma. The French institutions make it possible to compare otherwise similar women facing very different reimbursement schemes and we find that eligibility to full reimbursement has a largely positive effect on the probability of taking an amniocentesis test. By contrast, the sole fact of being labelled 'high-risk' by the Health system seems to have, as such, only a modest effect on subsequent choices.

This set of three papers is derived from the training session on the commitments organized by Concurrences Review that has held on 10th May 2011 in Paris. Commitments for both mergers and unilateral practices represent what may be considered a bright outcome, from the perspective of undertakings as well as competition authorities. To be implemented, commitments go through procedures and abide by principles, which have been experienced in practice and as a result polished. Many cases are nowadays settled or authorized through commitments, either structural or based on future behavior, which as a matter of fact tend to be combined. The frequent use of commitments makes their array as diverse as sophisticated while the traditional difference between, on the one hand structural remedies tailored for mergers and, on the other hand, behavioral commitments assumed more adapted for unilateral practices, seems to fade away.

The COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on the global economy, and current delays in the negotiation of the post-2020 global biodiversity agenda of the Convention on Biological Diversity heighten the urgency to build back better for biodiversity, sustainability, and well-being. In 2019 the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) concluded that addressing biodiversity loss requires a transformative change of the global economic system. Drawing on the IPBES findings, this policy perspective discusses actions in four priority areas to inform the post-2020 agenda: (1) Increasing funding for conservation; (2) redirecting incentives for sustainability; (3) creating an enabling regulatory environment; and (4) reforming metrics to assess biodiversity impacts and progress toward sustainable and just goals. As the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, and the negotiations for the post-2020 agenda have emphasized, governments are indispensable in guiding economic systems and must take an active role in transformations, along with businesses and civil society. These key actors must work together to implement actions that combine short-term impacts with structural change to shift economic systems away from a fixation with growth toward human and ecological well-being. The four priority areas discussed here provide opportunities for the post-2020 agenda to do so.

The social cost of carbon is a central metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the social cost of carbon, but mostly omits het-erogeneity below the national level. We present an optimal taxation model of the social cost of carbon that accounts for inequality between and within countries. We find that climate and distributional policy can generally not be separated. If only one country does not compen-sate low-income households for disproportionate damages, the social cost of carbon tends to increase globally. Optimal carbon prices remain roughly unchanged if national redistribu-tion leaves inequality between households unaffected by climate change and if the utility of households is approximately logarithmic in consumption.

Utilitarianism plays a central role in economics, but there is a gap between theory, where it is dominant, and applications, where monetary criteria are often used. For applications, a key di culty for utilitarianism remains to de ne how utilities should be measured and compared across individuals. Drawing on Harsanyi’s approach (Harsanyi, 1955) involving choices in risky situations, we introduce a new normalization of utilities that is the only one ensuring that: 1) a transfer from a rich to a poor is welfare enhancing, and 2) populations with more risk averse people have lower welfare. We embed these requirements in a new characterization of utilitarianism and study some implications of this “fair utilitarianism” for risk sharing, collective risk aversion and the design of health policy.

Based on firm-level data in the French manufacturing sector, we find that firms adapt quickly, strongly and through multiple channels to energy shocks, even though electricity and gas bills represent a small share of their total costs. Over the period 1996–2019, faced with an idiosyncratic energy price increase, firms reduce their energy demand, improve their energy efficiency, increase intermediate inputs imports and optimize energy use across plants. Firms are also able to pass-through the cost shock fully into their export prices. Their production, exports and employment fall. A consequence of these multiple adjustment mechanisms is that the fall in profits is either non-significant, small or specific to only the most energy-intensive firms. We also find that the impact of electricity shocks has weakened over time, suggesting that only firms able to adapt their production process to energy cost shocks have survived. Importantly, when faced with large electricity and gas price increases, firms are less able to reduce their consumption. These results shed light on the mechanisms of resilience of the European manufacturing sector in the context of the present energy crisis.