Publications by PSE researchers

In this paper, I study the impact of the Freycinet plan (1879-1914) on the French population and economy,in the short run.The Freycinet plan was one of the major public works programmes launched by the young Third Republic in 1878-1879, which aimed to massively develop rail way connections across the French territory. I first show that, in accordance with there public an ideology at the time, the plan targeted less served and under privileged areas, there fore contributing to the unification of the French territory. Then, I use a difference-in-differences methodology to assess the impact of the plan on the French population. Since rail road construction is endogenous, I resort to an instrumental variable strategy focusing on the shortest route between the predefined end points of each train line. I find that gaining access to the rail way thanks to the Freycinet plan is associated with are lative increase in the population of connected municipalities by around 30% after the plan was implemented (in the early Interwar period),a result that with stands a series of robustness checks and is mainly explained by population displacement, from unconnected to connected municipalities. Eventually, I find evidence that additional connected municipalities thanks to the Freycinet plan did increase the GDP of French départements, in a non-linear way, but had no effect on farming profits.

A large literature now points towards the importance of early life circumstance in determining long-run human capital and wellbeing outcomes. This literature often justifies a focus on the very early years by citing the first 1000 days of life as a ‘critical period’ for child development, but this notion has rarely been directly tested, and it is still unclear whether it applies to socioemotional as well as cognitive development. Using an empirical setting in which children are potentially subject to shocks in every year of their childhood, I estimate the impact of early life weather shocks on adult cognitive and socioemotional outcomes for individuals born in rural Indonesia between 1988 and 2000. I show evidence suggesting there is a strong critical period for these shocks at age 2 for cognitive development, but no similar critical period for socioemotional development. I further demonstrate that the impacts of the shocks are likely to be taking place through household agricultural income and nutrition channels, and may be mitigated by compensatory parental investments.

Does inequality shape society? This thesis proposes to consider inequality as an economic externality by inserting an inequality measure into the individual utility function. The externality is largely distinct from other conventional inequality consid- erations, and directly captures both (i) societal e_ects of inequality and (ii) individual distributional preferences. It has large theoretical implications: the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem no longer holds, as goods consumed by low- and high-income agents are op- timally subsidized and taxed, respectively. The First Welfare theorem falls away, and the Mirrlees (1971) optimal income taxation model changes drastically. An appropri- ate externality can bene_t public policy by reconciling di_erences between economic theory and current tax systems. To motivate the discussion, the existing empirical evidence for an inequality externality is critically examined.

I study the effect of an online job search assistance program taking advantage of a previousexperiment made by the French public employment services, which provides some exogenousvariation in the use of this platform. I focus on the heterogeneity analysis of this treatment,using two main different approaches.The first one is theory-driven, and focus on the analysis of the heterogeneity of thetreatment with respect to various different labour market tightness indicators. Two mainassessments can be made based on this analysis. (i) Tightness indicators are (surprisingly)decorrelated, making it difficult to corroborate the rare significant results obtained. (ii) Theset of significant results obtained suggest that the treatment effect isincreasingin labourmarket tightness. I suggest competing ways of modelling the treatment consistent withthose results. I also document some evidence of a larger treatment effect for individuals withweaker employment prospects. This is in line with other empirical evidence in the literatureevaluating job search assistance programs.The second approach is more data-driven, and resorts to the new machine learning (ML)techniques developed for heterogeneity analysis. I focus on tree-based techniques and forests,which have been central in the development of these techniques. The results of this analysisshed light on the limits of ML in the exploration of treatment effect heterogeneity, especiallyas the main ML-specific test for treatment effect heterogeneity developed by Chernozhukovet al. (2018a) concludes that ML is unable to detect any heterogeneity — yet this mightbe not that surprising after all given the lack of statistical power (low take-up) and theprobably low order of magnitude of the treatment effect studied. Still, I provide applicationsof a large part of the existing ML techniques for treatment effect heterogeneity, trying totake advantage of each of them to document which are the dimensions that are likely to beimportant to study treatment effect heterogeneity in my setting.

This dissertation introduces bounded rationality on matching markets,by way of imperfect cognition in social learning. On a two-sided agent-agent one-to-one matching market with Beckerian match utilities though forbidding transfers, a Live-Polarised-Unidimensional-Valuation (LPUV) rational agent m observes the surplus that a potential partner f is currently generating with her own match and uses it as an estimate of the surplus they (m and f) would jointly generate. The agent plugs this incorrect estimate of the surplus into the correct splitting rule, hence a coarse belief on match utilities. I compare the implicitly defined LPUV-stability to the usual(Gale-Shapley) stability concept, under odd or specific splitting rules, exogenous or endogenous surpluses. Quite remarkably, there exist splitting systems for which LPUV-stability is robust to the specification of surpluses. In addition, LPUV-stable matchings are disproportionately assortative with respects to GS-stable ones.

Among a set of extractive institutions particularly set up by colonial powers themselves, military conscription has been understudied to this day. In this paper, I attempt to delve deeper into this important historical institution in French West Africa (FWA) during the interwar era (1920-1939). First of all, I find that when the conscription target stipulated by higher colonial officials increased, strikingly the lower district-level authorities were not complying with this figure faithfully, even when they complied, the target increase was only met by a dubious increase in “deemed fit” soldiers in regions where labor constraints were already running high. Such findings point to a more complex French colonial rule in West Africa where authorities were “fighting over” the scarce resource of labor. Secondly, I find that in times of negative income shocks, potential flooding events in tropical regions of FWA made individuals more likely to volunteering into the army and correspondingly, an increase in drought risk in arid Sahel regions of FWA also made the indigenous more likely to present themselves to the military. Both effects point to the fact that the conscription system was being exploited as an informal insurance device by the locals at a time when insurance institutions were lacking and weather-induced negative agricultural income shocks were frequent.

I investigate the impact of the higher education quota that the Malawi an government instituted in 1987. The quota allocated a number of university seats to each district which was proportional to the district’s population size. I find that the quota did not have statistically significant impacts on secondary school completion or university entry, but that it did have large and negative impacts on the relative university completion rates of historically over-represented districts and districts in the Northern region. I also find evidence to suggest that the quota may have negatively impacted the long-run decisions of northern individuals to migrate to other regions. The direction and magnitude of these effects contradicts the existing literature on affirmative action in education, and may evidence the claim that the quota was intended to harm the north in favor of the south and center. I argue that affirmative action may have unexpected consequences, and that existing educational policy and limited enforcement capacity due to information constraints have serious implications on the effectiveness of affirmative action in improving societal welfare.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how subjective perceptions of climate change of farmers in Bangladesh affect the implementation of on-farm adaptation strategies to climate change. I present a model of subjective perceptions and adaptation in response to a change in climatic conditions. The empirical analysis is based on a unique national-representative panel dataset of rural households in Bangladesh and adopts a two-step approach disentangling the role of subjective perceptions on on-farm adaptation. I assess the accuracy of beliefs by comparing subjective probabilities to historical meteorological data and find considerable heterogeneity in beliefs and accuracy, depending on weather events and seasonal patterns. Moreover, I test whether farmers are subject to confirmation bias, finding that they tend to recall information and overweight evidence in a way that it confirms their own beliefs. The accuracy of farmers’ beliefs explains differences in the adaptation decision-making process. A detailed comprehension of farmers’ perceptions of climate change and adaptation strategies can significantly contribute to the design of adequate policies for agricultural security.

I combine measures of neighbourhood characteristics with high-resolution remote-sensing data to provide the first national-scale study of cross-sectional and longitudinal inequality in exposure to fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) in France. Descriptive evidence indicates that, at the national level, there is a U-shaped relationship between income and PM 2.5 exposure, which is not reflected within urban areas. Fixed-effect models confirm that on average, higher neighbourhood income is associated with lower exposure. Longitudinal inequality measures suggest that recent air quality improvements accrued predominantly to areas that had a lower initial exposure, and intermediate income. I then exploit a change in air quality schemes at the level of urban areas in an event-study framework, so as to shed light on potentially unequal benefits from the induced reduction in exposure. I find that initially lower-income areas received smaller benefits from the policy change, and quantile regression estimates suggest that exposure decreased more in less polluted areas. As some results are sensitive to formally accounting for spatial autocorrelation, this study also underlines the need to pay specific attention to this issue when measuring environmental inequality.

Public consultations, especially online, are more and more commonplace in contemporary democracies. This work aims to study how interpersonal trust determines participation in public consultations, and the forms there of. I use the Grand Débat National, that occurred in France in 2019, as a natural experiment to study the geographic cross sectional relation ship between a novel synthetic measure of local interpersonal trust and various aspects of participation in this public consultation. Then I study evidence from a small-scale experiment on interpersonal trust and participation in an online public consultation. I conclude that high-trust individuals participate more to public consultations compared to low-trust individuals, both at the extensive and intensive margins, and that there exists a discrepancy in their forms of participation, in terms of content, but also when it comes to textual or lexical aspects of participation. This result calls for questioning the common presumption that public consultations will give a better representation to and help design be.er policies for everyone, particularly low-trust individuals. In fact, it appears that public consultations can be instead captured by the demands of high-trust individuals.

What have been the effects of quantitative easing in Europe since 2008, and would helicopter money have been a better way to allocate the new money created? Since only a fraction of households holds assets, and since their marginal propensity to consume is quite low, the assets purchase program by the European Central Bank may be less efficient than a direct transfer of money to all households, i.e. helicopter money. Using a Two-Agent New-Keynesian (TANK) model, we simulate the QE program in Europe between 2009 and 2019, and find that this policy had sizable effects on inflation, consumption and output, but that helicopter money would have been more efficient, while reducing inequalities during this period.

La politique énergétique est au carrefour de trois discours : le discours scientifique lié à la faisabilité technique d’un projet, le discours économique guidé par une analyse coûts-bénéfices dans son acception néoclassique, et le discours politique dépendant de préférences d’un groupe ou d’une société.