Séminaires de recherche

Mardi | 2013-03-26
B103

Ujjayant CHAKRAVORTY – Beyza Ural MARCHAND – Martino PELLI

This paper studies the effects of increased access to electricity in rural India on household income. We examine the effect of electrification at the intensive margin as well as from connecting to the grid – the extensive margin. The analysis is based on two rounds of a representative panel of more than 10,000 households. We use the district-level variation in land elevation and the district-level density of transmission cables as instruments for the electrification status of the household. The results suggest that the quality of electricity (measured in terms of daily hours of supply) may be as important as connecting to the grid. A grid connection increases average household income by about 8-10 percent, but a high quality connection by about 13-15 percent. Moreover, at the intensive margin, marginal returns from average daily hours of supply are highest at very low and very high levels of supply, not over a wide range in-between.

Mardi | 2013-03-19
B103

Leonardo BECCHETTI – andrew CLARK – Elena GIACHIN RICCA

This paper attempts to establish the value of good relationships between countries by considering their effect on a group of individuals who are arguably intimately affected by them: immigrants. We appeal to an index of conflict/cooperation which is calculated as an annual weighted sum of news items between two countries. This index is matched to a sample of immigrants to Germany in the SOEP data. The index of bilateral relations thus exhibits both time-series and cross-section variation. Good relations are positively and significantly correlated with immigrant life satisfaction, especially when we downplay low-value news events. This significant effect is much stronger for immigrants who have been in Germany longer, and who expect to stay there forever. This is consistent with good relations directly affecting the quality of immigrants’ lives in the host country, but is not consistent with assimilation. There is thus a significant value to diplomacy: good relationships between home and host countries generate significant well-being externalities for those who live abroad.

Mercredi | 2013-03-13
B103

Ismaël ISSIFOU

Mercredi | 2013-03-06
B103

Abdellah BOUCHELLAL

Using a unique data set of credit file retrieved from one of the three major French banks, we investigate whether banking competition affects the loan officer production of particular form of information considering the whole of bank-firm relationship framework. Our data set allows us to introduce direct measure of hard and soft information used by loan officer during the credit underwriting process, as well as the other sources of bank revenues from its relationship with firms such as its prior credit extension, its saving services provided, and the sale of arm’s length services to them. We show that the amount of bank revenues from the saving related activities with firm increases the loan officer’s production of soft information. We follow Hannan (1997) by decomposing the HHI into two terms; we found that both the number of lender relationships and bank financing share affect the information generated by the loan officer by reducing the value of soft information produced by him. Further, the different outcomes of our empirical study provide evidence that competition increases the loan officer reliance to hard information to the detriment of soft information.

Mardi | 2013-03-05
B103

Marc NIKITIN – Dragos ZELINSCHI

Résumé : Nous examinons ici des expériences variées de calcul régulé des coûts, à la lumière du concept de gouvernementalité. Ces expériences sont recensées à différentes époques et dans différents secteurs. Nous constatons que, avant la seconde guerre mondiale, les systèmes régulés étaient principalement destinés à réduire les conséquences négatives d’une concurrence excessive ; au contraire, au cours des trente dernières années, une nouvelle version de calcul réglementé des coûts est mise en place par des États dans certains secteurs tels que la santé, l’armée ou les télécommunications, pour créer ou renforcer la concurrence là où elle fait défaut. Par conséquent, nous considérons que les systèmes régulés de calcul des coûts peuvent être des moyens de réguler la concurrence quand le marché est défaillant. Pour interpréter et comprendre la mise en place de tels systèmes de coûts, nous nous appuyons sur le concept de gouvernementalité développé par Michel Foucault ; les coûts régulés sont alors considérés comme une technique intellectuelle destinée à réguler la vie économique.Abstract : In this paper, we consider various regulated costing experiences, in the light of the concept of governmentality. Those experiences take place in different sectors and at different periods. It is here argued that before World War II, most of the regulated costing systems were dedicated to lower the dramatic consequences of cutthroat competition; on the other hand, in the last three decades, a new form of regulated costing is set up by the State in some sectors like healthcare, army suppliers or telecommunications, in order to create or reinforce competition were the market fails to provide a proper one. As a consequence, we consider that regulated costing systems may be seen as competition regulators when markets fail. In order to understand the setting up of such regulated costing systems, we draw from the concept of governmentality, developed by Michel Foucault; regulated costing is then seen as an intellectual technology designed to govern economic life.

Mercredi | 2013-02-20
B103

Muhammad KHAN – Arslan Tariq RANA

This paper tries to explain inflation-growth non-linearity through factors reallocation using a large panel dataset of 104 countries. Our empirical results, based on instrumental variable 2SLS model, substantiate the view that inflation (weakly) enhances the accumulation of physical capital and reduces the accumulation of human capital. This indicates the presence of „Tobin effect‟ for physical capital accumulation and substitution effect (between work and education) for human capital accumulation. Moreover, this relationship is non-linear since these effects get reverse once inflation crosses certain thresholds. Finally, different macroeconomic conditions i.e financial development, trade openness and democracy can alter the sensitivity of relationship between inflation and (both physical and human) capital accumulation.

Mardi | 2013-02-19
B103

Jacques MELITZ – Farid TOUBAL

We construct new series for common native language and common spoken language for 195 countries, which we use together with series for common official language and linguistic proximity in order to draw inferences about (1) the aggregate impact of all linguistic factors on bilateral trade, (2) whether the linguistic influences come from ethnicity and trust or ease of communication, and (3) in so far they come from ease of communication, to what extent translation and interpreters play a role. The results show that the impact of linguistic factors, all together, is at least twice as great as the usual dummy variable for common language, resting on official language, would say. In addition, ease of communication is far more important than ethnicity and trust. Further, so far as ease of communication is at work, translation and interpreters are extremely important. Finally, ethnicity and trust come into play largely because of immigrants and their influence is otherwise difficult to detect.

Mercredi | 2013-02-13
B103

Armand FOUEJIEU AZANGUE

Mardi | 2013-02-12
B103

Ingrid DALLIMANN – Katrin MILLOCK

We match data from the Indian census of 1991 and 2001 with climate data to test the hypothesis of climate variability as a push factor for internal migration. The main contribution of the analysis is to introduce relevant meteorological indicators of climate variability, based on the standardized precipitation index. Gravity-type estimations based on a utility maximization approach cannot reject the null hypothesis that the frequency of drought acts as a push factor on inter-state migration in India. Drought duration and magnitude as well as flood events are never statistically significant.

Mardi | 2013-02-05
B103

Mauricio APABLAZA – Florent BRESSON – Gaston YALONETZKY

Most welfare studies are based on the assumption that wellbeing is monotonically related to the variables used for the analysis. While this assumption can be regarded as reasonable for many dimensions of wellbeing like income, education, or empowerment, there are some cases where it is definitively not relevant, in particular with respect to health. For instance, health status is often proxied using the Body Mass Index (BMI). Low BMI values can capture undernutrition or the incidence of severe illness, yet a high BMI is neither desirable as it indicates obesity. Illfare estimattions derived from usual poverty measures are then not appropriate. This paper proposes poverty indices that are consistent with some situations of non-monotonic wellbeing relationships and examines the partial orderings of different distributions derived from various classes of poverty indices. An illustration is provided for health-related illfare as proxied by the BMI using DHS data for Bangladesh during the period 1997–2007. It is shown that the gains of the decline of undernutrition are undermined by the rapid increase of obesity.