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International audience; The Gold Pool was probably the most ambitious case of central bank cooperation in history. Major central banks pooled interventions to stabilize the dollar price of gold. Why did it collapse? From at least 1964, the fate of the Pool was, in fact, tied to sterling, the first line of defense for the dollar. Sterling’s devaluation in November 1967 eventually spurred speculation and unbearable losses for the Pool. Inflationary U.S. policies were weakening confidence in the dollar. The demise of the Pool provides a striking example of contagion between reserve currencies and the limits of central bank cooperation.

Ce Working Paper fait l'objet d'une publication in Games and Economic Behavior (2017), 106: 239-259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2017.10.009. ; In a polarized committee, majority voting disenfranchises the minority. By allowing voters to spend freely a fixed budget of votes over multiple issues, Storable Votes restores some minority power. We study a model of Storable Votes that highlights the hide-and-seek nature of the strategic game. With communication, the game replicates a classic Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric forces. We call the game without communication a decentralized Blotto game. We characterize theoretical results for this case and test both versions of the game in the laboratory. We find that, despite subjects deviating from equilibrium strategies, the minority wins as frequently as theory predicts. Because subjects understand the logic of the game – minority voters must concentrate votes unpredictably – the exact choices are of secondary importance. The result is an endorsement of the robustness of the voting rule.

In this paper we analyze the relationship between turnover-driven growth and subjective well-being. Our model of innovation-led growth and unemployment predicts that: (i) the effect of creative destruction on expected individual welfare should be unambiguously positive if we control for unemployment, less so if we do not; (ii) job creation has a positive and job destruction has a negative impact on well-being; (iii) job destruction has a less negative impact in areas with more generous unemployment insurance policies; and (iv) job creation has a more positive effect on individuals that are more forward-looking. The empirical analysis using cross-sectional MSA (metropolitan statistical area) -level and individual-level data provide empirical support to these predictions.

International audience; During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.

Updated version of NBER WP No. 27075 and CEPR DP No. 14719.; We show a causal impact of immigration on innovation and growth in US counties. To identify the causal impact of immigration, we use 130 years of detailed data on migrations from foreign countries to US counties to isolate quasi-random variation in the ancestry composition of US counties; interacting this plausibly exogenous variation in ancestry composition with the recent inflows of migrants from different origins, we predict the total number of migrants flowing into each US county in recent decades. We show immigration has a positive causal impact on innovation, measured as patenting of local firms, and on economic growth, measured as real income growth for native workers. We interpret those results through the lens of a quantitative model of endogenous growth and migrations. A structural estimation of this model targeting the well identified causal impact of migration on innovation suggests the large inflow of foreign migrants into the US since 1965 may have contributed to an additional 8% growth in innovation and 5% growth in wages.

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal spending shocks in a dynamic, multi-country model with international production networks. We first derive a decomposition of the effects of a fiscal spending shock on the GDP of any country. This decomposition defines the response as the sum of a Direct, Income, and Price effect. The Direct Effect depends only on structural parameters and is independent of assumptions about monetary policy, wage setting, or capital mobility, while the Price Effect is zero in the aggregate across countries. We apply this decomposition to an analysis of fiscal spillovers in the Eurozone, using the production network structure from the World Input Output Database (WIOD). We find that fiscal spillovers from Germany and some other large Eurozone countries may be large, and within the range of empirical estimates. Without international production network linkages, spillovers would be only a third as large as predicted by the baseline model. Finally, we explore the diffusion of identified government spending shocks at the sectoral level, both within and across countries, using an empirical measure of the response, based on the theoretical decomposition. The empirical estimates are strongly consistent with the theoretical model.

Revised. First version of NBER WP n°28448 edited in February 2021.; We study how decades-long exposure to individuals of a given foreign descent shapes natives' attitudes and behavior toward that group. Using individualized donations data from large charitable organizations, we show that long-term exposure to a given foreign ancestry leads to more generous behavior specifically toward that group's ancestral country. To shed light on mechanisms, we focus on attitudes and behavior toward Arab Muslims, combining several existing large-scale surveys, cross-county data on implicit prejudice, and a newly-collected national survey. We show that greater long-term exposure: (i) decreases both explicit and implicit prejudice against Arab-Muslims, (ii) reduces support for policies and political candidates hostile toward Arab-Muslims, (iii) leads to more personal contact with Arab-Muslim individuals, and (iv) increases knowledge of Arab-Muslims and Islam in general.

This paper studies the informational e¢ ciency of voting mechanisms in shareholder meetings. When the management cannot a¤ect the proposal being voted on, we show that voting mechanisms are more e¢ cient when their ballot space is richer. Moreover, e¢ ciency requires full divisibility of the votes. When the management has agenda power, we uncover a novel trade-o¤: more e¢ cient mechanisms provide worse incentives to select good proposals. This negative e¤ect can be large enough to wash out the higher voting e¢ ciency of even the most e¢ cient mechanisms.

International audience; Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations grew, while middle wage occupations shrank. At the same time, the share of technology-related occupations (“techies”) grew substantially. Aggregate polarization was driven mostly by changes in the composition of firms within industries. Within-firm adjustments and changes in industry composition were much less important. Polarization occured mostly within urban areas, with roughly equal contributions of men and women. We study the role of technology adoption in shaping firm-level outcomes using a new measure of the propensity of a firm to adopt new technology: its employment share of techies. We find that techies were an important force driving aggregate polarization in France, as firms with more techies grew faster.

International audience; This paper briefly presents the methodology of Distributional National Accounts (DINA), which distributes total national income and total wealth among all individual residents. With DINA, we can estimate inequality statistics and growth by income and wealth groups that are consistent with aggregate growth from National Accounts. This methodology has been recently applied to a number of countries, and the data produced are available from WID.world. The paper summarizes the initial empirical findings. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades, but the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific institutions and policies matter. We combine countries’ statistics to estimate global inequality since 1980. Global inequality has increased since 1980 in spite of the catching up of large emerging countries like China and India. This has been driven by the income growth of top world earners.; Cet article présente brièvement la méthodologie des comptes nationaux distributifs, qui ventile le revenu national total et le patrimoine total entre résidents. Ces comptes permettent d’estimer des statistiques d’inégalité et de croissance par catégorie de revenu et niveau de patrimoine cohérentes avec la croissance agrégée des comptes nationaux. Cette méthodologie a récemment été appliquée à plusieurs pays et les données produites sont disponibles dans WID.world, base de données sur les inégalités mondiales. L’article résume les premières conclusions empiriques. Au cours des dernières décennies, nous observons dans la quasi-­totalité des pays une hausse de la part du revenu et du patrimoine détenue par les plus riches, mais l’ampleur de cette hausse varie fortement, ce qui suggère que les institutions et politiques des différentspays jouent un rôle. Nous combinons les statistiques nationales pour estimer les inégalités mondiales depuis 1980. Malgré le rattrapage de grands pays émergents comme la Chine et l’Inde, les inégalités mondiales ont augmenté depuis 1980. Cette évolution s’explique par la croissance desrevenus des personnes les mieux payées au niveau mondial.

By exploiting new macroeconomic data known as foreign affiliates statistics, we show that affiliates of foreign multinational firms are an order of magnitude more profitable than local firms in a number of low-tax countries. Leveraging this differential profitability, we estimate that 36$\%$ of multinational profits are shifted to tax havens globally. US multinationals shift twice as much profit as other multinationals relative to the size of their foreign earnings. We analyse how the location of corporate profits would change if shifted profits were reallocated to their source countries. Domestic profits would increase by about 20$\%$ in high-tax European Union countries, 10$\%$ in the US, and 5$\%$ in developing countries, while they would fall by 55$\%$ in tax havens. We provide a new international database of GDP, trade balances, and factor shares corrected for profit shifting. In contrast to the picture painted by official statistics, our results suggest that the corporate capital share has increased not only in North America but also in high-tax European countries. Capital is making a comeback globally, but its rise is obscured by the tax avoidance strategies of multinational companies.

International audience; The common finding of a zero or negative correlation between the presence of children and parental well-being continues to generate research interest. We consider international data, including well over one million observations on Europeans from 11 years of Eurobarometer surveys. We first replicate this negative finding, both in the overall data and then for most different marital statuses. Children are expensive: controlling for financial difficulties turns our estimated child coefficients positive. We argue that difficulties paying the bills explain the pattern of existing results by parental education and income and by country income and social support. Last, we underline that not all children are the same, with stepchildren commonly having a more negative correlation with well-being than children from the current relationship.

This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal spending shocks in a multi-country model with international production networks. In contrast to standard results suggesting that production network linkages are unimportant for the aggregate response to macro shocks in a closed economy, we show that network structures may place a central role in the international propagation of fiscal shocks, particularly when wages are slow to adjust. The paper first develops a simple general equilibrium multi-country model and derives some analytical results on the response to fiscal spending shocks. We then apply the model to an analysis of fiscal spillovers in the Eurozone, using the calibrated sectoral network structure from the World Input Output Database (WIOD). In a version of the model with sticky wages, we find that fiscal spillovers from Germany and some other large Eurozone countries may be large, and within the range of empirical estimates. More importantly, we find that the Eurozone production network is very important for the international spillovers. In the absence of international production network linkages, spillovers would be only a third as large as predicted by the baseline model. Finally, we explore the diffusion of identified German government spending at the sectoral level, both within and across countries. We find that government expenditures have both significant upstream and downstream effects when these links are measured by the direction of sectoral production linkages.

International audience; We develop a model of cross-border acquisitions in which the foreign acquirer's ownership choice reflects a trade-off between easing the target's credit constraints and the costs of operating in an environment with weak institutions. Data on domestic and foreign acquisitions in emerging markets over the period 1990–2007 support the model predictions. The share of full foreign acquisitions is higher in sectors more reliant on external finance, in countries with lower financial development, and in countries with higher institutional quality. Sectoral external finance dependence accentuates the effect of country-level financial development and institutional quality. By contrast, the level of foreign ownership in partial acquisitions is insensitive to institutional factors and depends weakly on financial factors.

International audience; This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find that official survey-based measures vastly under-estimate the rise of inequality since 1990. According to our benchmark estimates, top income shares are now similar to (or higher than) the levels observed in the United States. We also find that inequality has increased substantially more in Russia than in China and other ex-communist countries in Eastern Europe. We relate this finding to the specific transition strategy followed in Russia. According to our benchmark estimates, the wealth held offshore by rich Russians is about three times larger than official net foreign reserves, and is comparable in magnitude to total household financial assets held in Russia.

NBER Working Paper No. 24623; We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States, inequality in mortality increased for older groups (especially women) while it decreased for children and young adults. These patterns highlight the fact that despite the strong cross-sectional relationship between income and health, there is no necessary connection between changes in income inequality and changes in health inequality.

NBER Working Paper No. 24623; We develop a method for comparing levels and trends in inequality in mortality in the United States and France between 1990 and 2010 in a similar framework. The comparison shows that while income inequality has increased in both the United States and France, inequality in mortality in France remained remarkably low and stable. In the United States, inequality in mortality increased for older groups (especially women) while it decreased for children and young adults. These patterns highlight the fact that despite the strong cross-sectional relationship between income and health, there is no necessary connection between changes in income inequality and changes in health inequality.

International audience; This paper investigates the role of individual firms in international business-cycle comovement using data covering the universe of French firm-level value added and international linkages over the period 1993-2007. At the micro level, trade and multinational linkages with a particular foreign country are associated with a significantly higher correlation between a firm and that foreign country. The impact of direct linkages on comovement at the micro level has significant macro implications. Without those linkages the correlation between France and foreign countries would fall by about 0.098, or one-third of the observed average correlation of 0.291 in our sample of partner countries. (JEL F14, F23, F44, F62, L14) Countries that exhibit greater bilateral trade and multinational production linkages have more correlated business cycles (Frankel and Rose 1998; Kleinert, Martin, and Toubal 2015). While the empirical literature has repeatedly confirmed the trade-comovement relationship in the data, its meaning is not well understood, either empirically or quantitatively. Taken at face value, the positive association between bilateral trade and multinational linkages and comovement is often interpreted as evidence of transmission of shocks across countries through those linkages. The empirical literature has faced two related challenges. The first is the critique by Imbs (2004) that countries that trade more with each other are similar in other ways, and thus subject to common shocks. Under an extreme version of this view, the trade linkage variable in the Frankel-Rose specification does not reflect the

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high - income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China over the 1978 2015 period. We find that the aggregate national wealth - income ratio has increased from 350% in 1978 to 700% in 2015. This can be accounted for by a combination of high saving and investment rates and a gradual rise in relative asset prices, reflecting changes in the legal system of property. The share of public property in national wealth has declined from about 70% in 1978 to 30% in 2015, which is still a lot higher than in rich countries (close to 0% or negative). Next, we provide sharp upward revision of official inequality estimates. The top 10% income share rose from 27% to 41% of national income between 1978 and 2015, while the bottom 50% shar e dropped from 27% to 15%. China’s inequality levels used to be close to Nordic countries and are now approaching U.S. levels.

International audience; We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil and minerals) and other commodities. Moreover, African Big Hits exhibit similar patterns as Big Hits in non-African countries. We also discuss some concerns about data quality. These stylized facts are inconsistent with the traditional view that sees African exports as a passive commodity endowment, where changes are driven mostly by global commodity prices. In order to better understand the determinants of export success in Africa we interviewed several exporting entrepreneurs, government officials and NGOs. Some of the determinants that we document are conventional: moving up the quality ladder, utilizing strong comparative advantage, trade liberalization, investment in technological upgrades, foreign ownership, ethnic networks, and personal foreign experience of the entrepreneur. Other successes are triggered by idiosyncratic factors like entrepreneurial persistence, luck, and cost shocks, and some of the successes occur in areas that usually fail.

International audience; We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand facing highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz (2003). In addition to differing in their productivity, firms differ in their skill intensity. We model skill-biased technology as a correlation between skill intensity and technological acumen, and we estimate this correlation to be large using firm-level data from Chile in 1995. A fall in trade costs leads to both greater trade volumes and an increase in the relative demand for skill, as the lowest-cost/most-skilled firms expand to serve the export market while less skill-intensive non-exporters retrench in the face of increased import competition. This mechanism works regardless of factor endowment differences, so we provide an explanation for why globalization and wage inequality move together in both skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. In our model countries are net exporters of the services of their abundant factor, but there are no Stolper-Samuelson effects because import competition affects all domestic firms equally.

When faced with a run on a “systemically important” but insolvent bank in 1889, the Banque de France pre-emptively organized a lifeboat to ensure that depositors were protected and an orderly liquidation could proceed. To protect the Banque from losses on its lifeboat loan, a guarantee syndicate was formed, penalizing those who had participated in the copper speculation that had caused the crisis bringing the bank down. Creation of the syndicate and other actions were consistent with mitigating the moral hazard from such an intervention. This episode contrasts the advice given by Bagehot to the Bank of England to counter a panic by lending freely at a high rate on good collateral, allowing insolvent institutions to fail.

There is considerable interest among policy-makers in documenting short-term effects of science funding. A multiyear scientific journey that leads to long-term fruits of research, such as a moon landing, is more tangible if there is visible nearer-term activity, such as the presence of astronauts. Yet systematic data on such activities have not heretofore existed. The only source of information for describing the production of most science is surveys that have been called “a rough estimate, frequently based on unexamined assumptions that originated years earlier” ( 1 ).

International audience; Using a unique matched employer-employee dataset on Taiwanese manufacturing, we examine the impact of foreign direct investment in China on domestic employment adjustments controlling for firm and worker heterogeneity as well as for potential endogeneity of firms' expansion in China. Our findings suggest that workers employed at firms with higher levels of investment in China are more likely to leave the firm, compared with workers at firms with zero or lower levels of investment in China. We provide evidence that foreign expansion in China decreases worker employment security at parent companies, particularly for low-skilled workers. Employment adjustments through employer-to-employer transitions are found to be highly associated with wage losses, with the strongest wage effects for low-skilled workers who shift employment between industries. Moreover, we find no evidence that FDI in China contributes to skill upgrading at parent companies. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Mimeo, 2010; We study the reaction of financial markets to aggregate liquidity shocks when traders face cognition limits. While each financial institution recovers from the shock at a random time, the trader representing the institution observes this recovery with a delay, reecting the time it takes to collect and process information about positions, counterparties and risk exposure. Cognition limits lengthen the recovery process. They also imply that traders who find their institution has not yet recovered from the shock place market sell orders, and then progressively buy back at relatively low prices, while simultaneously placing limit orders to sell later when the price will have recovered. This generates round trip trades, which raise trading volume. We compare the case where algorithms enable traders to implement this strategy to that where traders can only place orders when they have completed their information processing task.

We study the allocation and compensation of human capital in the U.S. finance industry over the past century. Across time, space, and subsectors, we find that financial deregulation is associated with skill intensity, job complexity, and high wages for finance employees. All three measures are high before 1940 and after 1985, but not in the interim period. Workers in finance earn the same education-adjusted wages as other workers until 1990, but by 2006 the premium is 50% on average. Top executive compensation in finance follows the same pattern and timing, where the premium reaches 250%. Similar results hold for other top earners in finance. Changes in earnings risk can explain about one half of the increase in the average premium; changes in the size distribution of firms can explain about one fifth of the premium for executives.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 12030/2006; This paper investigates the efficiency of household investment decisions in a unique dataset containing the disaggregated wealth and income of the entire population of Sweden. The analysis focuses on two main sources of inefficiency in the financial portfolio: underdiversification of risky assets ("down") and nonparticipation in risky asset markets ("out"). We find that while a few households are very poorly diversified, the cost of diversification mistakes is quite modest for most of the population. For instance, a majority of participating Swedish households are sufficiently diversified internationally to outperform the Sharpe ratio of their domestic stock market. We document that households with greater financial sophistication tend to invest more efficiently but also more aggressively, so the welfare cost of portfolio inefficiency tends to be greater for these households. The welfare cost of nonparticipation is smaller by almost one half when we take account of the fact that nonparticipants would be unlikely to invest efficiently if they participated in risky asset markets.

International audience; We study the relation between the ownership structure of financial assets and non-fundamental risk. We define an asset to be fragile if it is susceptible to non-fundamental shifts in demand. An asset can be fragile because of concentrated ownership, or because its owners face correlated or volatile liquidity shocks, i.e., they must buy or sell at the same time. We formalize this idea and apply it to mutual fund ownership of US stocks. Consistent with our predictions, fragility strongly predicts price volatility. We then extend the logic of fragility to investigate two natural extensions: (1) the forecast of stock return comovement and (2) the potentially destabilizing impact of arbitrageurs on stock prices.

This paper examines the relationship between cross-country differences in drug price regulation and the location of biopharmaceutical Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Europe. Simple theory predicts that price regulation in one country might affect total investment, but not the location of that investment, if sales are global. Nevertheless, some manufacturers threaten that the introduction of price regulation in a country will motivate them to move their investments to other countries. Are such threats cheap talk, or is there evidence that firms avoid price-controlling countries when making FDI location choices? We use data on 527 investments initiated in 27 European countries between 2002 and 2009 and find that investors are less likely to choose countries with price controls, after controlling for other determinants of investment. We also observe a relative decline in investment in countries that increased the stringency of regulatory regimes during our sample period. The effect is restricted to non-manufacturing investments and is most robust for those related to administrative functions.

Existing estimates of power laws in firm size typically ignore the impact of international trade. Using a simple theoretical framework, we show that international trade systematically affects the distribution of firm size: the power law exponent among exporting firms should be strictly lower in absolute value than the power law exponent among non-exporting firms. We use a dataset of French firms to demonstrate that this prediction is strongly supported by the data, both for the economy as a whole and at the industry level. Furthermore, the differences between power law coefficients for exporters and non-exporters are larger in sectors that are more open to trade. While estimates of power law exponents have been used to pin down parameters in theoretical and quantitative models, our analysis implies that the existing estimates are systematically lower than the true values. We propose two simple ways of estimating power law parameters that take explicit account of exporting behavior.

We present a model of the optimal level of international reserves for a small open economy seeking insurance against sudden stops in capital flows. We derive a formula for the optimal level of reserves and show that plausible calibrations can explain reserves of the order of magnitude observed in many emerging market countries. The buildup of reserves in emerging market Asia can be explained only if one assumes a large anticipated output cost of sudden stops and a high level of risk aversion.

NBER Working Paper Series - National Bureau of Economic Research, n° 11441/2004; Recent research documents that aggregate stock prices are driven by shocks with persistence levels ranging from daily intervals to several decades. Building on these insights, we introduce a parsimonious equilibrium model in which regime-shifts of heterogeneous durations affect the volatility of dividend news. We estimate tightly parameterized specifications with up to 256 discrete states on daily U.S. equity returns. The multifrequency equilibrium has significantly higher likelihood than the classic Campbell and Hentschel (1992) specification, while generating volatility feedback effects 6 to 12 times larger. We show in an extension that Bayesian learning about stochastic volatility is faster for bad states than good states, providing a novel source of endogenous skewness that complements the "uncertainty" channel considered in previous literature (e.g., Veronesi, 1999). Furthermore, signal precision induces a tradeoff between skewness and kurtosis, and economies with intermediate investor information best match the data.

International audience; A substantial part of international differences in prices of individual products, both goods and services, can be explained by differences in per capita income, wage compression, or low wage dispersion among low-wage workers, and exchange rate fluctuations. Higher per capita income is associated with higher prices and higher wage dispersion with lower prices. The effects of higher income and wage dispersion are moderated for the more tradable products. The effects of wage dispersion, on the other hand, are magnified for the more labor-intensive products, particularly low-skill services. The differences in prices across countries are reflected in differences in the composition of consumption. Countries in which prices of labor-intensive services are very high, such as the Nordic countries, consume much less of them. For some services, the shares of GDP consumed in high-price countries are less than 20% of the shares in low-price countries. Since these are services of very low tradability, the low consumption levels of these services imply low employment in them.

Countries that have experienced occasional financial crises have, on average, grown faster than countries with stable financial conditions. Because financial crises are realizations of downside risk, we measure their incidence by the skewness of credit growth. Unlike variance, negative skewness isolates the impact of the large, infrequent, and abrupt credit busts associated with crises. We find a robust negative link between skewness and GDP growth in a large sample of countries over 1960-2000. This suggests a positive effect of systemic risk on growth. To explain this finding, we present a model in which contract enforceability problems generate borrowing constraints and impede growth. In financially liberalized economies with moderate contract enforceability, systemic risk taking is encouraged and increases investment. This leads to higher mean growth but also to greater incidence of crises. In the data, the link between skewness and growth is indeed strongest in such economies.

We show that the size of the public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible for France to stabilize its price level and return to the pre-war parity immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would not have had any negative effects on real income. The reason for the immediate postwar inflation then was not mismanaged policy but a wise choice in the French context. Nevertheless, a stabilization at a devalued franc which would have been substantially higher than the rate achieved by Poincar‚‚ in 1926 was historically possible in early 1924, and it would likely have benefited not only France but the entire international monetary system.

We present a new empirical decomposition of the effects of financial liberalization on economic growth and on the incidence of crises. Our empirical estimates show that the direct effect of financial liberalization on growth by far outweighs the indirect effect via a higher propensity to crisis. We also discuss several models of financial liberalization and growth whose predictions are consistent with our empirical findings.

Diffusion du document : INRA Unité d'Economie et Sociologie rurales 4 Allée Adolphe Bobierre CS 61103 35011 Rennes cedex (FRA); Le partage optimal de pertes liées à la survenance d'un événement catastrophique est analysé au sein d'un pool de marché créé par des assureurs. L'auteur examine en particulier la situation extrême dans laquelle la capacité financière du pool est insuffisante pour indemniser l'ensemble des pertes assurées ; le pool se trouve alors en état d'insolvabilité. Il exclut le recours à l’État en tant que réassureur en dernier ressort. Les deux principes fondamentaux de partage des risques (i.e., le principe de mutualité et le partage des risques non diversifiables) sont reconsidérés en présence de cette menace d'insolvabilité. Il montre que ces résultats restent valides pour un sous-ensemble d'assureurs acceptant de rester dans le pool après la survenance d'une catastrophe. Dans le contexte du marché de l'assurance, cette situation d'insolvabilité peut résulter d'un refus des assurés de payer une surprime excédant leur indemnité initiale suite à la survenance d'une catastrophe. Ce risque de défaut de paiement ne permet pas un partage optimal des risques du premier rang qui procurerait une couverture complète avec une prime d'assurance variable dépendant des pertes agrégées. L'optimum du second rang est alors caractérisé. Il consiste en une couverture complète au-delà d'une franchise variable ; cette dernière est déterminée de façon à égaliser la somme des indemnités versées et la capacité financière du pool. Ce schéma d'assurance contraste avec celui prévu dans les pools de marché existants où, en cas d'insolvabilité, les indemnités sont calculées au pro-rata des capitaux disponibles. L'auteur montre que ce schéma d'assurance novateur, incluant une franchise variable, permet de proposer de nouvelles formes de partage de risques afin de repousser les limites de l'assurabilité des risques lorsque toutes les solutions alternatives de financement proposées par les marchés financiers ont été épuisées.