Sur l'intervention de l'état dans le financement du logement

Magri, S. 1972: Politique du logement et besoins en main d'?uvre. Pinçon, M. 1976: Les HLM. Structure sociale de la population logée, agglomération de Paris. Harvey, D. 1973: Social justice and the city Roberts, J. T. 1976: General improvement areas. Farnborough: National Community Development Project 1975: The poverty of the improvement programme. Lindberg, L. N., Alford, R., Crouch, C. and Offe, C. , editors, 1975: Stress and contradiction in modern capitalism. Perlman, J. E. 1976: The myth of marginality: urban poverty and politics in Rio de Janeiro. Granelle, J-J. 1975: La valeur du sol urbain et la propriété foncière: le marché des terrains à Paris.     

Inferring fundamental value and crash nonlinearity from bubble calibration

Identifying unambiguously the presence of a bubble in an asset price remains an unsolved problem in standard econometric and financial economic approaches. A large part of the problem is that the fundamental value of an asset is, in general, not directly observable and it is poorly constrained to calculate. Further, it is not possible to distinguish between an exponentially growing fundamental price and an exponentially growing bubble price. In this paper, we present a series of new models based on the Johansen–Ledoit–Sornette (JLS) model, which is a flexible tool to detect bubbles and predict changes of regime in financial markets. Our new models identify the fundamental value of an asset price and a crash nonlinearity from a bubble calibration. In addition to forecasting the time of the end of a bubble, the new models can also estimate the fundamental value and the crash nonlinearity, meaning that identifying the presence of a bubble is enabled by these models. In addition, the crash nonlinearity obtained in the new models presents a new approach to possibly identify the dynamics of a crash after a bubble. We test the models using data from three historical bubbles ending in crashes from different markets. They are the Hong Kong Hang Seng index 1997 crash, the S&P 500 index 1987 crash (Black Monday) and the Shanghai Composite index 2009 crash. All results suggest that the new models perform very well in describing bubbles, forecasting their ending times and estimating fundamental value and the crash nonlinearity. The performance of the new models is tested under both the Gaussian residual assumption and non-Gaussian residual assumption. Under the Gaussian residual assumption, nested hypotheses with the Wilks' statistics are used and the p-values suggest that models with more parameters are necessary. Under the non-Gaussian residual assumption, we use a bootstrap method to obtain type I and II errors of the hypotheses. All tests confirm that the generalized JLS models provide useful improvements over the standard JLS model.     

Why do low-educated workers invest less in further training?

Several studies document that low-educated workers participate less often in further training than high-educated workers. This article investigates two possible explanations: low-educated workers invest less in training because of (1) the lower economic returns to these investments or (2) their lower willingness to participate in training. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that the economic returns to training for low-educated workers are positive and not significantly different from those for high-educated workers. However, low-educated workers are significantly less willing to participate in training. We show that this lesser willingness to train is driven by economic preferences, and personality traits.     

Automobile Insurance Contracts and Risk of Accident: An Empirical Test Using French Individual Data

Insurance has for a long time been perceived as a way of transferring responsibility from insured agents to insurers and thus as potentially influencing insured agents' behavior. Two particular opportunistic behaviors have been analyzed. First, the theory of adverse selection predicts that high-risk agents are likely to demand more insurance than are low-risk agents. Second, the theory of moral hazard predicts that the wider the insurance coverage, the less agents will try to prevent accidents. Both theories thus conclude that agents who are totally insured should have a higher probability of accident than those with only partial insurance, ceteris paribus. Nevertheless, one of the aims of insurance rating systems is to control for these opportunistic behaviors. In this article, we use individual data to see if the French automobile insurance rating system has achieved this aim. We do this using a two-step maximum-likelihood method. First, we compute a probit model to estimate the probability of taking out comprehensive versus third-party insurance. We then calculate the generalized residual, which is included as an independent variable in a negative binomial model estimating the probability of having an accident. The coefficient of this variable is argued to represent adverse selection and ex-ante moral-hazard behavior.     

To Acquire,or To Compete? An Entry Dilemma

In this paper we address the following question: is it more profitable, for an entrant in a differentiated market, to acquire an existing firm than to compete? We illustrate the answer by considering competition in the banking sector.     

Food Safety and Adverse Selection in Rural Maize Markets

Without enforced standards or reliable third-party verification, food safety threats such as pesticide residues and aflatoxin contamination are generally unobservable or only partially observable to both buyers and sellers, especially of staple foods in rural maize markets in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, sellers have more information about food quality than do buyers. Such information asymmetries can impede market development and undermine human health. We study farm household behaviour in the context of imperfect food safety information. We pool observations obtained from 707 food storage containers maintained by 309 farm households in Benin, surveyed following the maize harvests of 2011/2012 and 2013/2014. Our results indicate that when a household perceives a food safety risk associated with application of insecticides, on average it is 33 percentage points less likely to apply insecticides to maize it intends to consume than it is to maize it intends to sell. These individuals are also more likely to sell maize than households without food safety concerns. Results highlight the potential value of improved storage technologies and quality control to promote market transactions and reduce hidden health risks.     

How resilient and countercyclical were emerging economies during the global financial crisis?

By studying the cross-country incidence of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, we document a structural break in the way emerging economies responded to the global shock. Contrary to popular perceptions, emerging economies suffered growth collapses (relative to the pre-crisis levels) comparable to those experienced by developed economies, even when they continued growing. Afterwards, most economies returned to their pre-crisis growth rates. Although emerging economies were not able to avoid the collapse originated in the U.S. and then transmitted across countries, they were more resilient during the global crisis than during past crises. Namely, they resumed their higher growth rates earlier and converged more quickly to their pre-crisis growth trend. Moreover, breaking with the past, emerging economies did not fall more than developed economies during the global crisis and were able to conduct countercyclical policies, thus becoming more similar to developed economies.     

Segmental new-product diffusion of residential broadband services

Aggregate models of innovation diffusion do not capitalise on valuable consumer adoption dynamics that may be useful to policy makers and market planners. The non-diffusion choice literature shows quite clearly that these dynamics may indeed be very important factors in the diffusion process. The authors present a segmental broadband diffusion model that is estimated from consumer survey data that measure the effect that household income has on its propensity to adopt this technological product. The results suggest that early broadband adopters are mostly made up from wealthy households and only as time progresses do less well off households adopt. The findings presented in this paper will be important to market planners and policy makers requiring a relatively simple technique that forecasts segmental innovation diffusion.