Luck egalitarianism--the idea that justice requires correcting disadvantages resulting from brute luck--has gained ground in recent years and is now the main rival to John Rawls's theory of distributive justice. Health, Luck, and Justice is the first attempt to systematically apply luck egalitarianism to the just distribution of health and health care. Challenging Rawlsian approaches to health policy, Shlomi Segall develops an account of just health that is sensitive to considerations of luck and personal responsibility, arguing that people's health and the health care they receive are just only when society works to neutralize the effects of bad luck.
Revealed and stated preference techniques are widely used to assess willingness to pay (WTP) for non-market goods as input to public and private decision-making. However, individuals first have to satisfy subsistence needs through market good consumption, which affects their ability to pay. We provide a methodological framework and derive a simple ex post adjustment factor to account for this effect. We quantify its impacts on the WTP for non-market goods and the ranking of projects theoretically, numerically and empirically. This confirms that non-adjusted WTP tends to be plutocratic: the views of the richest-whatever they are-are more likely to impact decision-making, potentially leading to ranking reversal between projects. We also suggest that the subsistence needs-based adjustment factor we propose has a role to play in value transfer procedures. The overall goal is a better representation of the entire population's preferences with regard to non-market goods.
We analyze a dynamic environmental agreement between two regions. We assume that the agreement is jointly protable, because the eort associated with emission reductions is overcompensated by a cleaner environment in the future The two regions are asymmetric in two respects: their value of a cleaner environment is dierent, and they are responsible for the initial environmental problem in dierent ways. Because the benets of a cleaner environment cannot be transferred, we propose a mechanism on how to share the eorts of lowering current emissions, satisfying two main properties. The rst property is a benets pay principle: the greater one region's relative benet from cooperation, the greater must be its relative contribution. The second property is, a polluter pay principle: a region's relative contribution increases with its responsibility. Moreover, the sharing scheme must be time consistent. At any intermediate time, no country can do better by deviating from cooperation.*
We study competition for the market in a dynamic model with network externalities, focusing on the efficiency of market outcomes. We propose a representation of the strategic advantages of incumbency and embed it in a dynamic framework with heterogeneous consumers. Then, we completely identify the conditions under which inefficient equilibria with several platforms emerge at equilibrium; explore the reasons why these inefficient equilibria arise; and compute the value of incumbency and analyze why static models generally exaggerate it. ; National audience
This paper was written while I was the 2018 Banque de France research fellow at the Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS. I would like to acknowledge the generous support and assistance of the Banque de France and EHESS-FFJ staff during the production of this work. In recent years and particularly since the global financial crisis, zombie firms—unprofitable businesses supported by financial relief—have generated widespread concern due to their purported harm to economic vitality. Economic studies hold that zombie firms impede the normal flow of capital and human resources to healthy businesses, and thereby defy creative destruction and hurt investment and employment growth. But what causes zombie firms to occur? Addressing this question from a political economy perspective, this paper investigates a novel hypothesis about the role of credit guarantees in supporting weak firms. The results of a case study of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in Japan in the 1990s and 2000s suggest that Japan's credit guarantee system may indeed have contributed to numerous zombies among this firm category. However, evidence also suggests that these firms tended to quickly escape from zombie status, calling into question the negative connotation of the zombie firm concept.
Publié dans World Development, Volume 113, January 2019, 204-221 - https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1XkiL,6yxD6jzQ This paper investigates whether, and how, the devolution of revenue raising responsibilities to municipalities enhances access to public services and contributes to reducing poverty in Côte d'Ivoire. The analysis uses a local government' revenue and expenditure dataset from 2001 to 2011 for 115 municipalities in 35 departments. An adjusted multidimensional poverty index and a headcount poverty index are calculated at the local level using the Household Living Standard Survey. The empirical analysis uses a grouped fixed effect approach, combined with a two-stage least squares methodology with panel corrected standard errors clustered by department, to address both time-varying heterogeneity and local revenue endogeneity.The results suggest that increased local revenue positively affects access to public services and reduces poverty. However, there is evidence that fiscal decentralization has a more robust effect on access to public service, than on poverty. This effect seems to work mainly through enhancing access to education more than access to health, water, and sanitation services. Contrary to existing literature, our results indicate that municipalities are more likely to improve access to public services in less ethnically diverse localities and in rural zones. The study provides evidence that the effect of the conflict experienced by the country has been limited statistically.
International audience We show that single and multiple overlapping directorships of large French listed corporations are highly explained by their ownership connections. Both large and small stakes, from 1% to 20% of cash-flow rights or voting rights, have high explanatory power. We provide evidence also of the existence of a positive relationship between the size of a shareholding and the strength of the correlation between ownership ties and overlapping directorates. Finally, we demonstrate that causality goes from ownership to interlocking directorates, for both unilateral stakes and cross-shareholdings. ; Nous montrons que les liens de propriété entre les grandes sociétés françaises expliquent largement la présence d'administrateurs en commun, unique ou multiples, entre elles. Tant les grandes participations que les petites, de 1 % à 20 % du capital ou des droits de vote, ont un fort pouvoir explicatif. Nous montrons également qu'il existe une relation croissante entre la taille de la participation et la force de la corrélation entre les liens de propriété et l'existence d'administrateurs communs entre les sociétés. Finalement, nous montrons que la causalité va des liens de propriété aux réseaux d'administrateurs, tant pour les participations unilatérales que pour les participations croisées.
The literature demonstrates the likely reduction of wholesale electricity prices due to a larger penetration of renewable energy sources (RES). When markets are organized as two or more inter-connected sub-markets within a larger power market the final impact of increasing RES production may be less straightforward given the presence of network constraints. We tests this phenomenon by analyzing the impact of RES production on the probability of congestion and on the size of congestion cost in Italy. Using a database with hourly observations for a five year period we estimate two econometric models on five zonal pairings: a multinomial logit model for the occurrence and direction of congestion and a three stage least square model for the size of congestion costs. The analysis suggests that the effect of a larger local wind and solar supply is to decrease the probability of suffering congestion in entry and to increase the probability of causing a congestion in exit compared to no congestion case. Increasing hydroelectric production has a similar effect. These results hold for both importing and exporting regions, but importing regions are less likely to cause congestion in exit, therefore the installation of new RES capacity in these zones may have a positive effects in terms of flow balance between regions. Concerning the cost level, a larger local RES supply seems to push the congestion cost towards negative values as it decreases the marginal cost for balancing the system. This is true for all zones in the case of explicit congestion cost, but it is only verified in importing regions in the case of implicit congestion cost. This result suggests that the increase of RES production should be promoted in importing zones, but the overall growth should be controlled in order to avoid congestion in the opposite direction.
International audience The present paper discusses the structure of the Church of Almighty God which enables its leader to control the church from a distance and reconsiders the relationship between politics and religion. Although having a Christian identity, the Church of Almighty God adopting a highly hierarchical structure finds its roots in the Maoist political culture and a Chinese messianic tradition as well. The encounter of these traditions and cultures in the context of contemporary China shows us how new religions groups absorb different symbolic resources to nurture their own organisation and to what extent Christianity is sinized. Through this case study, we see how an old tradition can be alive today and how the borrowing of discourse and practice between social-political organisations is common. Not only religious groups inspire government for its politics, but also government measures nurture religious groups' practices.
The outbreak of the Greek crisis has revived the literature on the sovereign debt spreads. Recent evidence has shed new lights on the main determinants of interest rates spreads. The sharp increase of government bond yields cannot be entirely attributed to changes in macroeconomic fundamentals. Contagion effects can occur and self-fulfilling speculation may arise. Yet, this literature has been mainly empirical and needs sound theoretical foundations. The aim of this paper is to fill in this gap. We develop a simple model in the spirit of second generation currency crises models developed by (Obstfled, 1996). The model describes a strategic game between governments and financial markets. Eurozone countries face a trade-off as governments may either commit and implement restrictive fiscal policies or default on debt. The cost of the commitment strategy increases when interest rates increase or when the fiscal multipliers are high. This leaves the opportunity for speculators to drive the economy towards a bad equilibrium, forcing the government to renege its commitment. We introduce a source of uncertainty about the cost of default in the model. By this way, we may introduce the possibility that governments do not default although risk premiums on bond yield is high.
We study fiscal devaluation in a small-open economy with labor market search frictions. Our analysis shows the key role of both dimensions in shaping the optimal tax scheme. By reducing labor market distortions, the tax reform is welfare-improving. Yet, as it makes imports more expensive, fiscal devaluation lowers the agents' purchasing power, which is welfare-reducing. These contrasting effects give rise to an optimal tax scheme. Besides, transition matters. If the economy is better off in the long run, the required transitional saving effort increases the cost of the reform, thereby calling for a moderate magnitude of fiscal devaluation.
International audience The formulation of legal rules is a challenging issue for lawmakers. Trade-offs are inevitable between providing more guidance by specific rules and enlarging the scope by general rules. Using real options theory we show that the degree of precision should be considered as a degree of flexibility which increases the value of the text. Thus, we derive a normative principle for a draftsman to choose between rules versus standards and to decide when the law should be enacted. In highly innovating environments, delaying the enactment allows lawmakers to obtain more information. Therefore, the lower the degree of precision of the law, the shorter the delay. ; La formulation des règles juridiques est un véritable défi pour les producteurs de droit. Des arbitrages sont inévitables entre des règles spécifiques et des règles générales. Les premières apportent de la précision dans les signaux envoyés aux agents, les secondes ont un champ d'action plus large. En utilisant la théorie des options réelles, nous montrons que le degré de précision d'une règle peut être analysé comme un degré de flexibilité qui accroît la valeur de cette règle. Ainsi, nous dérivons un principe normatif pour les producteurs de droit confrontés aux choix entre règles et standards et devant décider de la date d'application de d'une nouvelle règle. Nous montrons en particulier que plus le degré de précision de la règle est faible, plus le délai optimal diminue.
This paper studies the optimal linear tax-transfer policy in an economy where agents differ in productivity and in genetic background, and where longevity depends on health spending and genes. It is shown that, if agents internalize imperfectly the impact of genes and health spending on longevity, the utilitarian social optimum can be decentralized with type-specific redistributive lump sum transfers and Pigouvian taxes correcting for agents' myopia (leading to undersaving and underinvestment in health), and for their incapacity to perceive the effect of health spending on the resource constraint of the economy (causing overinvestment in health). The second-best problem is also examined under linear taxation instruments. Our main result is that it may be optimal to tax health spending, in particular under a complementarity of genes and health spending in the production of longevity. ; Ce papier étudie la politique optimale de taxation linéaire dans une économie où les agents diffèrent selon leur productivité et leur bagage génétique et où la longévité dépend de dépenses privées de santé et des gènes. Il est montré que, si les agents internalisent imparfaitement l'impact des gènes et des dépenses de santé sur la longévité, l'optimum social utilitariste peut être décentralisé avec des transferts forfaitaires redistributifs et des taxes Pigou corrigeant la myopie des agents (menant à une sous-épargne et un sous-investissement dans la santé), et pour leur incapacité à percevoir les effets des dépenses de santé sur la contrainte de ressources de l'économie (causant un sur-investissement en santé). Le problème du second-rang est également examiné sous des instruments de taxation linéaires. Notre résultat principal est qu'il se peut qu'il soit optimal de taxer les dépenses de santé, en particulier sous une complémentarité des gènes et des dépenses de santé dans la production de la longévité.
This paper presents evidence on the equilibrium labor market impacts of a large rural workfare program in India. We use the gradual roll out of the program to estimate changes in districts that received the program earlier relative to those that received it later. Our estimates reveal that following the introduction of the program, public employment increased by .3 days per prime-aged person per month (1.3% of private sector employment) more in early districts than in the rest of India. Casual wages increased by 4.5%, and private sector work for low-skill workers fell by 1.6%. These effects are concentrated in the dry season, during which the majority of public works employment is provided. Our results suggest that public sector hiring crowds out private sector work and increases private sector wages. We use these estimates to compute the implied welfare gains of the program by consumption quintile. Our calculations show that the welfare gains to the poor from the equilibrium increase in private sector wages are large in absolute terms and large relative to the gains received solely by program participants. We conclude that the equilibrium labor market impacts are a first order concern when comparing workfare programs with other anti-poverty programs such as a cash transfer.
