French Retirement Reforms and Intragenerational Equity in Retirement Duration

As most developed countries, France has gone over the last 20 years through a process of pension system reforms, mainly aiming at increasing the average retirement age, through increasing the required number of contribution years or through postponing legal (minimal and/or normal) ages. Public debates over which lever should be preferred have been paramount in France, with concerns focusing on redistribution issues between high wage high life-expectancy and low-wage low life-expectancy workers. In this paper, we empirically address this issue by simulating the differentiated impacts of the past French reforms on average retirement ages across wage quartiles. Our simulations show that increasing the required duration criterion—as was done by the 1993 and 2003 reforms–have redistributive impact as regards retirement age, while increasing the normal age—as was done by the 2010 reform—has a counter-distributive impact. The redistributive impact on average of the required duration criterion however only holds thanks to the fact that disabled workers—most of them in the lowest wage quartile—are exempted from it. Last, increasing minimal age has ambiguous impacts according to gender: redistributive among women but counter-distributive among men.     

Erratum to “Walras and dividends equilibrium with possibly satiated consumers”

The main contribution of the paper is to provide a weaker nonsatiation assumption than the one commonly used in the literature to ensure the existence of competitive equilibrium. Our assumption allows for satiation points in the set of individually feasible consumptions, provided that the consumer has satiation points available to him outside this set. As a result, we show the concept of equilibrium with dividends (see Aumann, R.J., Drèze, J.H., 1986. Values of markets with satiation or fixed prices. Econometrica 54, 1271–1318; Mas-Collel, A., 1992. Equilibrium theory with possibly satiated preferences. In: Majumdar, M. (Ed.), Equilibrium and Dynamics: Proceedings of the Essays in Honour of David Gale. MacMillan, London, pp. 201–213) is pertinent only when the set of satiation points is included in the set of individually feasible consumptions. Our economic motivation stems from the fact that in decentralized markets, increasing the incomes of consumers through dividends, if it is possible, is costly since it involves the intervention of a social planner. Then, we show, in particular, how in securities markets our weak nonsatiation assumption is satisfied by Werner’s (1987) assumption.     

Does Real Exchange Rate Depreciation Boost Capital Accumulation? An Intertemporal Analysis

This paper examines the investment‐enhancing effect of real exchange rate (RER) depreciation in a two‐sector small open economy model where a representative firm in the tradable sector maximises its discounted profit over an infinite planning period. In this framework, a one‐time, permanent, unanticipated depreciation in the RER leads to a higher steady‐state level of capital stock and investment. This consequently increases the optimal investment rate associated with an arbitrary level of capital stock as the saddle path shifts upwards. In the benchmark calibration, the investment‐enhancing effect of RER depreciation is sizeable. One per cent depreciation in the RER leads to an increase of 0.4444 per cent in the rate of capital accumulation.     

Strategies for integrating farmers into modern vegetable supply chains in Vietnam: farmer attitudes and willingness to accept

In Vietnam, the development of so‐called ‘modern’ vegetable supply chains is receiving considerable interest amongst researchers and governments. This interest partly stems from the view that enhancements in food safety can be achieved if farmers are willing to adopt supply chains that are often associated with ‘western’ forms of retailing. Our study investigates farmers’ willingness to change to two ‘modern’ alternatives – a supply model based on cooperatives and another based on investors facilitating the change. Using discrete choice data drawn from 412 farmers, mixed logit models in willingness to pay space are developed that reveal the relative importance of different drivers of change. The paper offers insights that can inform governments about the incentives required to bring about change. In addition, the paper illustrates the novel application of a choice experiment to enumerating the perceived costs of changes in vegetable supply chains.     

The sectoral effects of Brexit on the British economy: early evidence from the reaction of the stock market

We investigate the impact of the outcome of the EU referendum (Brexit) on various sectors of the British economy over the period June–July 2016. Using the event study methodology, we assess the effects of Brexit, relative to what had been anticipated, as measured by abnormal returns (ARs). The results show that the banking and travel and leisure sectors were affected negatively, with a cumulative AR of ?15.37% for the banking sector. We observe that Brexit has a mixed effect on ARs with apparent sector-by-sector differences.     

Growth, volatility and stabilisation policy in a DSGE model with nominal rigidities and learning-by-doing

The paper aims to analyse the question of how cyclical fluctuations might affect long run growth. The analysis is based on a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for an imperfectly competitive economy with fully optimising agents. The model is characterized with nominal rigidities, an endogenous technology, and multiple shocks. It predicts either a negative or positive relationship between short run volatility and long run growth depending on the source of shocks and the reaction of the central bank. The model also shows that, even when the negative relationship exits the policy that is designed to stabilise short run volatility may either increase or decrease growth depending on the source of shocks.     

Pesticide use in Vietnamese vegetable production: a 10-year study

Vietnam has had varying success over the past decade with its pesticides policy. Some of the most toxic pesticides have been banned from the market. But while many countries have successfully decreased agricultural pesticide use per hectare, this has not (yet) happened in Vietnam. Due to insufficient pesticide management capacity of the Vietnamese government, pesticide types and quantities registered and distributed on the market have substantially increased in Vietnam over the last 10 years. A 10-year monitoring programme at farm level showed that pesticide use follows the increasing pesticide availability on the market, and many toxic and illegal pesticides are still being used. In an agricultural country dominated by millions of small-scale farmers and with limited state capacity for control at farm level, reduction of the use of the most toxic pesticides can best be achieved by more effective pesticide market control through stricter and more effective state regulations and implementation, aimed at eliminating illegal, low quality and counterfeit pesticides from the market. But even then, better state and private extension services, and greater state capacity for control and enforcement remain essential in enabling farmers to make better decisions about pesticide use.     

The impact of natural disasters on household income,expenditure, poverty and inequality: evidence from Vietnam

Natural disasters are expected exacerbate poverty and inequality, but little evidence exists to support the impact at household level. This article examines the effect of natural disasters on household income, expenditure, poverty and inequality using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey in 2008. The effects of a natural disaster on household income and expenditure, corrected for fixed effects and potential endogeneity bias, are estimated at 6.9% and 7.1% declines in Vietnamese household per capita income and expenditure, respectively. Natural disasters demonstrably worsen expenditure poverty and inequality in Vietnam, and thus should be considered as a factor in designing poverty alleviation policies.     

Mean-variance hedging for continuous processes: New proofs and examples

Let be a special semimartingale of the form and denote by the mean-variance tradeoff process of . Let be the space of predictable processes for which the stochastic integral is a square-integrable semimartingale. For a given constant and a given square-integrable random variable , the mean-variance optimal hedging strategy by definition minimizes the distance in between and the space . In financial terms, provides an approximation of the contingent claim by means of a self-financing trading strategy with minimal global risk. Assuming that is bounded and continuous, we first give a simple new proof of the closedness of in and of the existence of the F?llmer-Schweizer decomposition. If moreover is continuous and satisfies an additional condition, we can describe the mean-variance optimal strategy in feedback form, and we provide several examples where it can be computed explicitly. The additional condition states that the minimal and the variance-optimal martingale measures for should coincide. We provide examples where this assumption is satisfied, but we also show that it will typically fail if is not deterministic and includes exogenous randomness which is not induced by .