Immigration and crime are two first-order issues that are often considered jointly in people's minds. This paper analyzes how media reporting policies on crime impact natives' attitudes towards immigration. We depart from most studies by investigating the content of crime-related articles instead of their coverage. Specifically, we use a radical change in local media reporting on crime in Germany as a naturel experiment. This unique framework allows us to estimate whether systematically disclosing the places of origin of criminals affects natives' attitudes towards immigration. We combine individual survey data collected between January 2014 and December 2018 from the Germain socio-Economic Panel with data from more than 545,000 crime-related articles in German newspapers and data on their diffusion across the country. Our results indicate that systematically mentioning the origins of criminals, especially when offenders are natives, significantly reduces natives' concerns about immigration
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between financial literacy and numeracy. It turns out that numeracy and financial literacy are strongly correlated. In order to clarify this relationship, we review, in a first section, the general definition of numeracy and its most commonly used measures. We then try to enlighten the distinction that can be made between numeracy and financial literacy. In a second section, we focus on the relationship between numeracy and financial literacy using the main empirical studies performed. Since the analyses of their results show that numeracy is a key determinant of financial literacy, we highlight, in a third and final section, the key role that numeracy could have in education programs and consumer protection policies to improve financial decisions.
Exposed to numerical targets, rigid procedures and frequent reorganisation, employees often feel that their loses its meaning. How do they react to these difficulties? Do they seek to leave to find a better job, or do they act collectively to influence management practices? What is the link between changes in the meaningfulness of and the number of days of sick leave? Economists have only recently begum to address the question of meaningful work, and do not have a consensus definition. After reviewing the literature in economics and management, we propose an original definition of meaningful with reference to the critical theory of living work and the psychodynamics of work. The analysis of the 2013-2016 panel of the Working Conditions survey (which includes nearly 17,000 employees), shows that a meaningless in 2013 is clearly associated with a change of job (exit) between 2013 and 2016. When endogeneity issues are taken care of meaningless is also associated with collective (joining a union) over the same period. Changes in the meaning of also have a very significant impact on the variation in the number of days of sickness absence
The inverse dependency of the estimated variances over the sample size throws a fundamental question on the validity of the usual statistical methodology, since any hypothesis on the value of a coefficient can be tested negatively by increasing the size of the data-set. I suppose that large data-sets are characterized by a concentration of information on homogenous sub-populations, a spatial autocorrelation of the error terms and the covariates may bias the estimation of variances. Using the corrections of variances under spatial autocorrelation, we obtain variances comparable to an estimation on sub-samples (named efficient sub-samples) the sizes of which are sufficient to contain the information which gives rise to similar estimates to those obtained on the whole population. Moreover, the estimation on efficient data-sets does not necessitate the specification of the spatial autocorrelations which are supposed to bias the estimated variances.
Finding causal relationships in large dimensional systems is of key importance in a number of fields. Granger non-causality tests have become standard tools, but they only detect the direction of the causality, not its strength. To overcome this point, in the frequency domain, several measures have been introduced such as the Direct Transfer Function (DTF), the Partial Directed Coherence measure (PDC) or the Generalized Partial Directed Coherence measure (GPDC). Since these measures are based on a two-step estimation, consisting in i) estimating a Vector AutoRegressive (VAR) in the time domain and ii) using the VAR coefficients to compute measures in the frequency domain, they may suffer from cascading errors. Indeed, a flawed VAR estimation will translate into large biases in coherence measures. Our goal in this paper is twofold. First, using Monte Carlo simulations, we quantify these biases. We show that the two-step procedure results in highly inaccurate coherence measures, mostly due to the fact that non-significant coefficients are kept, especially in parsimonious systems. Based on this idea, we next propose a new methodology (mBTS-TD) based on VAR reduction procedures, combining the modified-Backward-in-Time selection method (mBTS) and the Top-Down strategy (TD). We show that our mBTS-TD method outperforms the classical two-step procedure. At last, we apply our new approach to recover the topology of a weighted financial network in order to identify through the local directed weighted clustering coefficient the most systemic assets and exclude them from the investment universe before allocating the portfolio to improve the return/risk ratio.
Using a generalization of the Becker's time allocation model to estimate the shadow price of time, the article proposes to evalutate the component of home production which could be substituted by market goods and services. An enlarged households' total expenditure including the production of the informal sector and the value of domestic production and the corresponding enlarged GDP are compared to their monetary counterparts in five developed and under-developed countries. Domestic production substituable to market goods corresponds to 23 to 41% of the GDP in Canada, France, Poland and the US, but much less in Burkina Faso because of much lower opportunity cost of time and elasticity of substitution. Finally, the enlarged GDP including the informal sector is larger by 40% than the official GDP in the three developed countries, 34% in Poland and by 54% in Burkina Faso
The article proposes an explicit modelization of households behavior by describing the possible relationship between the inter-temporal substitution rate and the opportunity cost of time which could afford the missing link between consumers' choices and macro variables in an Austrian trade cycle tradition. The changes of the value of time during expansions and recessions involve direct and indirect changes of households' demand and saving which create shadow prices. The variations of shadow costs are related to the competitivity of markets restoring equilibria by means of associated changes in monetary prices
undraising project unfolds with the sequence of decisions. This paper examines how the different sources of information available to potential donors in such settings influence their decision-making. Contrary to most of the leadership literature, neither leaders nor followers in these settings have certainty about the quality of the fundraising project. We explore whether leaders remain influential, the extent to which they use their influence strategically, and the consequences on followers when leaders are misinformed. We combine an information cascade method with a modified public goods game to create a “Voluntary Contributions in Cascades” paradigm. Participants sequentially receive private signals about the state of the world, which determines the potential returns from the public good, and take two public actions: an incentivized prediction about the state of the world and a contribution to the public good. We find that participants' predictions mostly align with Bayesian predictions, and find no evidence for strategic or misleading predictions. Leaders' contributions are positively correlated with followers', suggesting they remain influential despite their limited informational advantage. This influence takes a tragic turn when leaders happen to be misinformed, as most misinformed leaders end up unintentionally misleading followers. We find that having a misleading leader is associated with a reduction in gains from contributions roughly twice as large as the reduction that stems from dividing the marginal-per-capita-return by two. Our results stress the significance of having well-informed leaders
This paper explores the short-term impact of borrowing via lending-based crowdfunding on performance and health of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in France. We find that firms borrowing from lending-based crowdfunding platforms are more dynamic (higher asset growth and higher profitability) and innovative, but they have lower leverage, less cash, higher funding costs and less tangible assets that could be pledged as a collateral. To account for this selection bias, we construct three control groups by using Propensity Score Matching, Mahalanobis Distance Matching and Coarsened Exact Matching methods and then run difference-in- difference regressions. We find that borrowing via lending-based crowdfunding platforms increases SMEs’ leverage and interest rate burden in the short-term, but these impacts disappear after two years. We observe asset growth during the year of borrowing, but no impact on sales growth, investment, employment or profitability.
It is hard to overstate the importance that the concept of symmetry has had in every field of physics, a fact alluded to by the Nobel Prize winner P.W. Anderson, who once wrote that “physics is the study of symmetry”. Whereas the idea of symmetry is widely used in science in general, very few (if not almost no) applications has found its way into the field of finance. Still, the phenomenon appears relevant in terms of for example the symmetry of strategies that can happen in the decision making to buy or sell financial shares. Game theory is therefore one obvious avenue where to look for symmetry, but as will be shown, also technical analysis and long term economic growth could be phenomena which show the hallmark of a symmetry.
This paper investigates the relations between multiple measures of investor sentiment and the returns, volatility, trading volume, and liquidity. Using both data outside and inside market, we find that the Bullishness from socio-finance model are significant related to future realized volatility and trading volume, similar to Tweet, which is thought to capture information of well-informed investors in Bitcoin market.
In this paper, we combine the Varieties of Capitalism and the global value chain approaches, considering the interaction between lead firms' global strategies and national capitalism, to show how local pharmaceutical employment results from this interaction. Our analysis is grounded in the comparison between France and Quebec. The first part presents the relevant differences in both historical and institutional elements. Second, after highlighting the similarities that can be attributed to global dynamics, we detail the mechanisms by which local institutions shape the global value chain implantation, giving different forms to the employment structure and dynamics. We show that France is clearly oriented towards manufacturing activity because of industrial history and market features, whereas Quebec has a commercial specialty and an outsourced R&D as a result of high prices and the global organization of research.
Abstract We highlight a new paradox for the social evaluation of risk that bears on the evaluation of individual well-being rather than social welfare, but has serious implications for social evaluation. The paradox consists in a tension between rationality, respect for individual preferences, and a principle of informational parsimony that excludes individual risk attitudes from the assessment of riskless situations. No evaluation criterion can satisfy these three principles. This impossibility result has implications for the evaluation of social welfare under risk, especially when the preferences of some individuals are not known. It generalizes existing impossibility results, while relying on very weak principles of social rationality and respect for individual preferences. We explore the possibilities opened by weakening each of our three principles and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of these different routes.
This study investigates the impact of the transmission of gender role attitudes and/or preferences from parents to children on the labor force participation decision of married women in Turkey. Using parents-children data we estimate a reduced-form model in which a married woman's participation in adulthood depends on her mother's and mother-in-law's former labor force participation in her adolescence. Our estimation results show that married women grown up with working mothers are 10.8-17.8 percent more likely to participate in the labor force than married women with nonworking mothers and married women with working mothers-in-law are 9.3-17.3 percent more likely to be in the labor force than married women with nonworking mothers-in-law. In addition, the estimated effects of mother's and the mothers-in-law's former labor force participation in rural sample are larger than those in the urban sample. We also find that as the education level of married women increases, the effect of being raised by a working mother on female labor force participation decreases. Having a husband grown up with a working mother increases the probability that a married woman with less than a high school education participates in the labor force; however, it is not a significant determinant of the labor force participation decision of highly educated women. Our findings reveal that the intergenerational transmission of gender role attitudes and/or preferences influences the labor market behavior of married women in Turkey. More importantly, higher education reduces the effect of intergenerational transmission of gender role attitudes and/or preferences on female labor force participation
Although conflicts in bargaining have attracted a lot of attention in the literature, situations in which bargainers have to share the product of their performance have been rarely investigated theoretically and empirically. Here, by decomposing the well-known overplacement effect, we show that two types of biases can lead to conflict in these situations: players might be overconfident in their own production (overconfidence bias) and / or underestimate the production of others (other-underestimation bias). To quantify these biases, we develop a novel experimental setting using a psychophysically controlled production task within a bargaining game. In comparison to Bayesian agents, participants tend to disagree too often, partly because they exhibit both cognitive biases. We test interventions to mitigate these biases, and are able to increase settlements mainly by reducing the other-underestimation bias. Our approach illustrates how combining psychophysical methods and economic analyses could prove helpful to identify the impact of cognitive biases on individuals' behavior.
The economic environment is market in particular by an increase in relationships between contractors and subcontractors and more flexible management of production or employment. The different forms of labour flexibility imposed on employees have an impact on working conditions, which often prove difficult or deteriorated in subcontracting. A qualitative survey based on interviesw was conducted to identify contrasting cases of career paths marked by subcontracting employment. It sheds light on cases in the business services sector: cleaning or security and guarding professions. The survey also makes it possible to understand which are the main forms of labour flexibility sought by subcontracting firms (external quantitative flexibility, internal quantitative flexibility, employee versatility, wage flexibility). The results show how this flexibility is experienced by subcontracting employees. More generally, these results question the renewal of forms of labour market segmentation
We provide an axiomatic characterization of recursive Maxmin preferences that stem from (possibly) incomplete preferences representing choices that are justified by hard evidence. The decision-maker disposes of objective probabilistic information that may induce dynamically inconsistent behavior. To ensure that her choices be informed by objective information, dynamically consistent, and ambiguity averse, she constructs her subjective set of priors as the rectangular hull of the objective information set. The characterization builds upon two axioms that naturally combine these three requirements in a behavioral way. Moreover, our main result suggests a principled justification for the use of recursive Maxmin preferences in applications to dynamic choice problems.
This paper considers a general yet tractable demand system encompassing directly- and indirectly-separable preferences, with homothetic CES as a commonn ground. An added flexibility of this demand system is that it allows for two alternative curvatures of demand. Beyond the CES, demand may be either sub-convex: less convex than the CES, or super-convex: more convex than the CES. Embedded in a general equilibrium trade model featuring standard assumptions on the supply side, this flexible demand system yields new comparative statics results and a wide range of predictions for the gains from trade, while illustrating existing ones in a simple and compact way. The main finding of this paper is that while demand curvature governs comparative statics results and plays a crucial role in determining the structure and the magnitude of welfare gains from trade, the type of preferences has only a second-order importance from a welfare standpoint
Maximising expected value is the classic doctrine in choice theory under empirical uncertainty, and a prominent proposal in the emerging philosophical literature on normative uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about the standard of evaluation. But how should Expectationalism be stated in general, when we can face both uncertainties simultaneously, as in common in life? Surprisingly, different possibilities arise, ranging from Ex-Ante to Ex-Post Expectationalism, with several hybrid versions. The difference lies in the perspective from which expectations are taken, or equivalently the amount of uncertainty packed into the prospect evaluated. Expectationalism thus faces the classic dilemma between ex-ante and ex-post approaches, familiar elsewhere in ethics and aggregation theory under uncertainty. We analyse the spectrum of expectational theories, showing that they reach diverging evaluations, use different modes of reasoning, take different attitudes to normative risk as well as empirical risk, but converge under an interesting (necessary and sufficient) condition.
The transmission mechanisms of fiscal policy are significantly affected by informality in the labour market. Extending a narrative database of fiscal consolidations in 14 countries from Latin America and the Caribbean between 1989 and 2016 in order to account for heterogeneity in terms of commitment to the reforms, I show that tax-based and spending-based multipliers are both recessionary and do not significantly differ one from another in this region. Furthermore, these multipliers decline in absolute value as the level of labour informality increases in the economy, although evidences are less robust for spending-based consolidations. An analysis of the effects of tax-based consolidations on private demand suggests that labour market informality constitutes a short-term social buffer that attenuates the contractionary effects of this type of policy by increasing investment opportunities through tax evasion and entrepreneurial alternatives to unemployment for dismissed workers
