A group of agents voluntarily participates in a joint project, in which efforts are not perfectly substitutable. The output is divided according to some given vector of shares. A share vector is unimprovable if no other share vector yields a higher sum of payoffs. When the elasticity of substitution across efforts is two or lower, only the perfectly equal share vector is unimprovable, and all other vectors can be improved via Lorenz domination. For higher elasticities of substitution, perfect equality is no longer unimprovable. Our results throw light on the connections between inequality and collective action.
In the light of first-hand data from a Beninese urban household survey in Cotonou, we investigate several motives aiming to explain participation in Rotating Savings and Credit ASsociations. We provide anecdotal pieces of evidence, descriptive statistics, FIML regressions and matching estimates which tend to indicate that most individuals use their participation in a rosca as a device to commit themselves to save money and to deal with self-control problems.
This paper exploits an original dataset collected in Benin which features data both on income and expenditures at the individual level. We first provide evidence that suggests that husband and wife are not pooling their respective incomes and thus are not making expenditure decisions on the basis of one common budget. As we show, husband and wife are secretive and are individually allocating their personal revenue on private and public goods. We look at a simple model that helps us predict determinants of spouses' pattern of consumptions. Our empirical results indicate that spouse's influence, through his/her income, is always smaller than one self's income impact on both personal private and public goods consumption. Moreover, we find that the spouse's income variable is never significant across all the regressions simultaneously taking into account censoring and endogeneity. We also underline anthropological evidence of gender patterns of public goods expenditures which are corroborated by our results.
In Senegal mutual health organizations (MHOs) have been present in the greater region of Thiès for years. Despite their benefits, in some areas there remain low take-up rates. We offer an insurance literacy module, communicating the benefits from health microinsurance and the functioning of MHOs, to a randomly selected sample of households in the city of Thiès. The effects of this training, and three cross-cutting marketing treatments, are evaluated using a randomized control trial. We find that the insurance literacy module has no impact, but that our marketing treatment has a significant effect on the take up decisions of households.
Civil wars inflict considerable development costs. Understanding the relative fragility of certain segments of the population is a necessary condition to build resilience to ongoing and future violence outbreaks. This paper documents the impact of the violent civil war affecting the Democratic Republic of Congo in the period 1997-2004 on infant mortality. It adopts an instrumental variable approach to correct for the nonrandom timing and location of conflict events using mineral price index variations by district, taking account of the mineral locations and prices, as instrument. Strong and robust evidence, including mother fixed effects regressions comparing siblings, shows that conflict significantly increases girl mortality. The paper also examines the mechanisms explaining this phenomenon, with a focus on disentangling the behavioral from the biological factors. The analysis suggests that gender imbalances in infant mortality are driven by the selection induced by a higher vulnerability of boys in utero rather than by gender discrimination.
We investigate whether entrepreneurs in the network of refugees - from the same country of origin - help refugees enter the labor market by hiring them. We analyze the universe of refugee cases without U.S. ties who were resettled in the United States between 2005 and 2010. We address threats to identification due to refugees sorting into specific labor markets and to strategic placement by resettlement agencies. We find that the probability that refugees are employed 90 days after arrival is positively affected by the number of business owners in their network, but negatively affected by the number of those who are employees. This suggests that network members who are entrepreneurs hire refugees, while network members working as employees compete with them, which is consistent with refugees complementing the former and substituting for the latter.
The Ramanujacharyula method, applied in the field of sports, allows to determine the rank of a team accounting both for the strength of the teams it beats, as well as the strength of the teams that beat it. We analyze the changes in the final rank positions of five soccer championships (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), induced by the use of the Ramanujacharyula scoring method over the 1946-2016 period, and determine its quantitative impact. The Kemeny measure is then applied to establish a real-world ranking method that would best reflect the philosophy promoted by the Ramanujacharyula method. The scoring rule 2 − 1 − 0 (2 points for a win, 1 point for a draw and 0 for a loss) is found to be the best ranking method in this sense.
Working Papers
Refugees, children's health and malaria transmission in Africa, CEPR Discussion Paper, (with Anna Maria Mayda and JF. Maystadt) CEPR - Vox EU Talk Interview of AM Mayda and JF Maystadt
Worms or sugar? An exploration into the long-term impact of mass deworming treatment on diabetes, TREE working paper, (with Isabelle Chort)
Are Referees Neutral? Evidence from the English Football Leagues (with Vincenzo Verardi), April 2019.