Projets ANR

Julieta PEVERI

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CorruptClient aims to understand why individuals in developing countries continue to support corrupt politicians and clientelism, despite their detrimental effects on governance and public goods provision. The project integrates rich datasets and causal inference methods across two main scientific work packages. Work Package 1 studies the determinants and long-term dynamics of clientelism, analyzing how vulnerability and historical state capacity in Argentina shape support for clientelistic politicians, while building new databases on elections and public finance. Work Package 2 examines why voters differ in their tolerance for corruption, using evidence from Brazil’s randomized audit program and the effects of teachers’ strikes on political attitudes. Together, these studies aim to explain the persistence of corruption and to provide insights for policies that can effectively weaken clientelistic and corrupt networks.

Jean-Christophe VERGNAUD 

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The research project focuses on the challenges individuals face when developing effective information search strategies. The project builds upon experimental findings obtained in an experimental paradigm simulating a recruitment situation. Most participants adopt an intuitive but less informative information search strategy. This type of inefficient information search behavior constitutes a cognitive bias that doesn't seem to have been identified previously and could have a broader impact on information search behaviors. The goal is to thoroughly investigate this cognitive bias using theoretical modeling and behavioral experiments and to explore potential remedies. The working hypothesis is that individuals facing a complex information search problem may first generate a prototype of their final decision, which serves as a starting point for information search. In particular, they will specifically seek information that reduces uncertainty about this prototype. Once information collection is complete, they will make their actual selection decision based on the collected information.

Clément BOSQUET

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Nathalie ETCHART-VINCENT 

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AFFINITE aims at analysing and measuring the interactions between individuals, families, stakeholders and the State in the context of environmental and sanitation policies. Environmental objectives are understood in a broad sense: including short term COVID-19 concerns (teleworking, avoiding congestion in public transport), local air pollution (particles, NOx, ozone) as well as greenhouse gas emissions at the level of the household and passenger transport. Environmental policies are also very broadly defined as policies that affect the short run via modal choice (public transport, soft modes or car), impact the type of energy used for cars (Electric versus fossil) and affect the energy use for heating. 
The longer term effects are also taken on board via the relocation of households in relation to workplace, the adaptation of buildings to integrate renewable energy opportunities and the supply of sustainable housing, and the LUTI model.
There is a special emphasis on the urban environment as 80% of French households live in cities. 
What distinguishes this research proposal from other assessments of public policies is the integration of the intra household decision-making process. The intra household decision process involves the study of matching on the marriage as well as the collective bargaining process between spouses, that will determine choice of residence, housing quality, jobs and commuting mode. 
This research set-up has two advantages: first it allows a more refined assessment of public policies, second it allows to unravel the intra- household welfare distribution effects. The latter are important to discuss gender and intergenerational distribution effects. 
The final objective is to construct a tool to assess the impact of various environmental and health policies that want to affect: the reduction in the number of trips, a smart modal choice, use of cleaner vehicles and better location of economic activities and more sustainable housing. We process in three steps. 
First we construct an integrated framework to address consistently individual and household decision trees. This includes job and residential locations as well as the commuting modes. Also the heterogeneity of the local real estate markets is modelled in this first step as the supply of housing is a crucial element of an urban general equilibrium model.
Second we estimate a model using Ile-de-France, partly new, disaggregate / aggregate data for short run and long run choice behaviour within the family as regards the job and residence choice, modal choice as well as the behaviour of the real estate sector with respect to the supply of dwellings.
In the third step, we complement the empirically validated model elements with other literature inputs to allow a comprehensive assessment of the welfare, environmental and energy impacts of urban and transport policies. In this assessment, decisions makers adjust their behavior in the short run (mode choice), medium run (residential and job choices, energy consumption of houses) and long run (real estate investment and automobile ownership). Our comprehensive setting will therefore allow to study not only the aggregated impacts of congestion, pollution, health risks and energy but will also demonstrate the within family impacts of public policies on equity and welfare. 
This ambitious project is proposed by a high potential consortium that has an excellent research record in the field of intra-family decision making, in the empirical analysis of transport and land use decisions as well as in the construction of land use simulation models.

Josselin THUILLIEZ 

Vincent DE GARDELLE 
 

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In the current project, we propose to investigate the nature and conditions of access to stimulus ambiguity. We will examine three main factors: the characteristics of the stimulus; its context; the expertise of observers. We will also collect different measures of access to ambiguity: behavioral performance; explicit judgments of confidence; implicit physiological correlates of confidence such as pupil dilation and reaction times. We will use this general framework to accomplish three main objectives. The first concerns the resolution of ambiguity along “polar” vs. “vague” percepts: polar percepts show little or no access to ambiguity, unlike “vague” percepts, and the relation between the two remains a problem. The second objective concerns the effect of expertise on access to ambiguity, to account for inter-individual variability. Our third objective finally deals with training, to test the effects of learning not only on perception but also on metacognition.

Stéphane ZUBER 

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Climate change impacts and climate mitigation policies have different effects in different locations and for different societal groups. Socio-economically vulnerable groups will likely be hit hardest. Research supporting policy makers in the development of measures that reduce climate change and contribute to greater social justice is therefore of the utmost urgency. CHIPS provides improved conceptual understanding and advanced modeling tools for integrating distributional effects, climate change challenges and related policies. Different integrated scenarios are modelled and analysed. It bridges the scales between large world regions and households as well as local and global impacts of climate change and mitigation policies.

Maria BAS

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This research program proposes several projects to understand the mechanisms at play. Conducting micro econometric analysis theoretically grounded using detailed firm-product data for several countries, this research program explores the heterogeneous effects of international trade on firm performance, quality upgrading and employment demand. The first two projects focus on the role of product quality on final prices and demand, on the one hand, and on the impact of input quality upgrading on product innovation and employment of different skills, on the other hand. The two other projects look at the relationship between firms’ exposure to international markets and different domestic labor market outcomes such as volatility of workers of different skills and gender differences in occupational status. The last project investigates the impact of resource misallocation on external competitiveness and asks whether firms optimizing their use of labor compete more successfully in international markets.

Olena HARVRYLCHYK

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The objective of the project is to understand whether platform-based financial intermediation could lead in the future to a more efficient and stable financial intermediation or whether it would suffer from the same information asymmetries problems as traditional intermediaries. In particular, we address the following issues: 1. Lending-based crowdfunding platforms enter market with large incumbent banks and our aim is to model competition between these two different business models. 2. Lending-based crowdfunding platforms face severe adverse selection problems because they target borrowers and projects that were often rejected by traditional banks. Our aim is to explore the ability of loan-based crowdfunding platforms to overcome these informational asymmetries and to improve firms performance. 3. Since crowdfunding is a new phenomenon, there is a lot of experimentation in what concerns their design. Lending-based crowdfunding platforms experiment with different interest-rate setting mechanisms for listed loans. Equity-based crowdfunding platforms experiment with a wide range of different mechanisms to raise equity (testing-the-waters policy, keep-it-all vs. all-or-nothing, reference values, network effects, secondary markets, investor rights). Our objective is to evaluate the success of these different design mechanism. 4. The ultimate objective of the project is to evaluate the current regulatory stance towards lending-based and equity-based crowdfunding and to provide policy recommendations.

Vincent DE GARDELLE 

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Visual confidence refers to our ability to estimate the correctness of our visual perceptual decisions. As compared to other forms of metacognition, meta-perception has attracted a burst of studies recently, no doubt because perception already benefits from strong theoretical frameworks. We have recently refined these existing frameworks by proposing to clearly distinguish sensory evidence from some “confidence evidence” that drives the confidence decision. The problem now is to characterize the properties and consequences of this confidence evidence, and this is the aim of the present proposal.

As the number of studies grows, it becomes clear that visual confidence is not simply a noisy estimate of the perceptual decision, but instead depends on a large number of factors. We have identified four axes that we believe will contribute to shape confidence evidence: (1) individual variability, (2) task accessibility, (3) global confidence, and (4) perceptual learning. The purpose of the first axis is to understand which cues are used for confidence, and for this purpose, we will study confidence variability across individuals. Some of the idiosyncratic variability in confidence judgment efficiency might come from a variable temptation to exaggerate the impact of stimulus noise on the estimation of one own performance. In the second axis, we will try to understand what in a task determines the accessibility to visual confidence. In particular, we will test the hypothesis that more high-level tasks, such as face identification, lead to better confidence efficiency that low-level tasks, such as detecting whether two line segments are aligned. The aim of the third axis is to understand how individuals construct a sense of confidence for a task as a whole, not for a single isolated judgment. We will start by carefully studying how confidence builds up within a set of stimuli and compare how such a global confidence compares with a single decision confidence. Finally, in the fourth axis, we will study how perceptual learning benefits from visual confidence. In particular, we will test the extent to which confidence evidence can be seen as an internal error signal that can act as a proxy for an external feedback. We believe that a better understanding of these four fundamental aspects of confidence evidence will help us derive an accurate and useful model of visual confidence, and ultimately of metacognition.

Morgane LAOUENAN

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Widening inequality has become a major source of political, social, and scientific concerns during the last decades. Although patterns and trends in inequality have been extensively documented in many countries, research tends to overfocus on individual determinants and to overlook the local contexts underlying mechanisms of inequality. This project aims at contributing to the current prolific inequality literature. First we take a contextual approach focusing on workplaces as the main locus of inequality production. Workplace oriented explanations indeed highlight that the organizational structure of production is shifting toward firm and workplace level polarization of skill and some firms’ ability to capture income from market transactions. These shifts have led to a focus on the contributions of both within and between workplaces dynamics to earnings inequality trajectories. Moreover, workplaces are not only the main sources of inequality because of their productive role; they also act as “social climates” and “relational contexts” of inequality (re)production. Second, we will analyze workplace inequality on different dimensions (gender, citizenship, education, occupation, geographic location, etc.). Studying these dimensions together allows us to assess the relative role of ascription/achievement in the processes of social attainment in France and the degree of congruence between inequality dimensions at the firm level.

Ariell RESHEF

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Advanced economies have experienced rapid structural change over the last few decades, which is manifested in several dimensions. We propose studying the causes of changes in the structure of employment and in the wage distribution in France in 1994-2012, through the lens of the firm. 

Our proposal has two main parts. The first studies broad aspects of structural change and its effect on the distribution of labor income. We start with studying the evolution of the labor share in national income. While the aggregate labor share appears relatively stable in France, changes in the composition of firms which use different labor intensities mechanically affect the distribution of income across workers. We then turn to studying job polarization (the hollowing of the middle class), and how technological change, exporting and offshoring shape it through the firms they affect the most. 

The second part of the proposal studies in more detail the roles of globalization, labor market regulation and labor market dynamics on structural change and income distribution through specific firm level mechanisms. First, we study the role of cross-border mergers and acquisitions on wages in targeted firms in France (a large share of total employment). Then we study the effect of dual labor markets on firm productivity and, therefore, the structure of employment. Finally, we study how changes in labor sorting across firms and rent sharing within firms affect the overall wage distribution.

Our proposal is innovative in several ways, and has three defining features: (1) use of comprehensive administrative data, (2) focus on firm level analysis, and (3) causal inference. We rely on a set of administrative datasets that allow linking workers with technology, exporting, offshoring, cross-border mergers and acquisitions, and labor market regulations – all through the firm at which they work. 

Since most economic activity in advanced economies is organized within and between firms, changes in types of firms, their internal organization and in the distribution of firms over time are important factors that drive structural change and changes in the wage distribution. Therefore, the firm level analysis lends itself to identifying the causal mechanisms of adjustment; overlooking the firm dimension can be misleading. This approach allows distinguishing among competing theories about the determinants of structural change and how it affects the distribution of income. To make causal inferences we employ advanced micro-econometric techniques to firm level analysis and innovative identification strategies of causal effects. While our focus is on demand side mechanisms, we acknowledge the importance of supply shifts and take them into account in the analysis. 

Our project has important policy implications that are highlighted through our firm-level approach. By examining structural shifts through a micro-economic lens, we can better assess which firms are more likely to affect the overall patterns of employment and wages. Inasmuch as there is a concern for, e.g., the hollowing of the middle class and top percentile wage inequality, targeting these firms may be more effective than blanket policies in mitigating the underlying demand-side driving factors, while keeping the costs of labor market regulation low. We will also evaluate in particular how changes in regulation of employment flexibility may affect firm productivity, firm competitiveness, and the distribution of income through these specific channels. All this is enabled by using detailed matched firm-worker datasets over a long period, and careful firm-level micro analysis.

Stéphane ZUBER 

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Recent work on climate change has revived old concerns about a possible conflict between human development and population size. Economic growth accelerates climate change, leading to severe impacts on agriculture (threatening the survival of populations in some developing countries) and, more directly, on mortality through extreme weather events or the increased prevalence of certain diseases.

In this project, we aim to integrate some of the demographic effects of global warming into the assessment of climate policies. Our first objective is to define normative principles that can guide the evaluation of these demographic impacts of climate change by designing new assessment tools known as social choice criteria. We then seek to study the implications of such criteria for climate policy within an integrated economy–climate model, which we will develop from existing models by making population size endogenous.

These new assessment tools should enable comparisons between populations of different sizes and take longevity into account in defining individual well-being.

Vincent DE GARDELLE 

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For individuals navigating in a hazardous environment, for companies competing in complex markets, good decisions are essential to survival. Assessing one’s own decisions, an ability called metacognition, might help improving these decisions. As such, metacognition is becoming an important topic in cognitive sciences and neurosciences of decision-making. Our proposal is aimed at better understanding the influence of this metacognitive ability on our behaviour.

Basic studies in cognitive sciences and neurosciences have aimed at quantifying the ability of agents to make good metacognitive judgments, or at determining the neural mechanisms underlying such judgments. Critically however, in most current approaches, metacognitive judgments seem to be commentaries on behaviour, without real impact. Here, we want to clarify the ways in which metacognition might have a direct impact on the behaviour of an individual, using an experimental and computational approach. 

We will consider several potential links between metacognition and behaviour, and we will conduct series of behavioural experiments to test these links empirically. Our experimental studies are based on visual psychophysics, a discipline which currently serves as a ground to develop neurobiological and computational models of decision-making. We will complement our empirical investigations with eyetracking recordings, focusing on particular on pupil size which has been linked to confidence in recent work. We will adopt in parallel a modelling approach to better motivate and interpret our empirical investigations. 

Our project involves two lines of research. On the one hand, we will investigate the influence of metacognition on the behaviour of an agent performing a task in isolation. For instance, we will test the hypotheses that confidence might act as a value signal during task selection, and as a priority signal during task planning. On the other hand, we will investigate the impact of metacognitive abilities and judgments on the behaviour of an agent who receives information from the environment and from other agents. For instance, we will assess how overconfidence (which is a major issue for instance in behavioural finance) impacts on behavioural adjustment to external information. We will study the influence of metacognition in situations in which agents cooperate or compete with each other.

In sum, the proposed project takes a basic science approach, in the field of behavioural sciences. We wish to study the ability of human observers to assess their own cognitive processes, an ability called metacognition. We will broaden the spectrum of research questions in this domain, in order to provide new insights about metacognition and how it impacts on behaviour. We anticipate that acknowledging the instrumental role of confidence will improve our models of decision-making, and will enrich the emerging dialogue between behavioural psychologists and economists.

Vincent DE GARDELLE 

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MetaStress is a study of the impact of stress on metacognition. Metacognition, or second order cognition, collectively designates the processes through which agents access and control their own cognitive processes. Confidence judgments are typical instances of metacognition. It is now acknowledged that metacognition is critical both for the regulation of cognition by the subject him- or herself, and also that it is critical when agents cooperate in an uncertain environment. Metacognition is now viewed as one of the executive functions, which make what human cognition is: flexible and adaptive. Now, it is nowadays clear that executive functions are fragile and easily disrupted by contextual perturbations. We know that stress provokes a sharp deterioration of executive functions. The stress response re-orient metabolic resources for flight or fight. Attentional resources are re-oriented towards the external world, at the expense of endogenous attention. Thus, it seems reasonable to assume that stress should negatively impact metacognition. However, the impact of stress on metacognition, over and above its impact on cognition has never been systematically studied.

That stress has a detrimental effect on performance is well known, and it has been in particular extensively documented in aeronautics. The intuition behind MetaStress is the following : one of the mechanisms through which stress causes errors, even accidents, is by dampening metacognition. Thus perseverations in erroneous routines, which are often found at the root of human errors could be due to the relative blindness that an agent under stress has with respect to his or her own performance – a typical metacognitive deficit. This relative blindness would preclude the agent from adopting a critical stance on his or her performance, which would precisely be necessary in order to stop the perseverating attitude. 

The goal of MetaStress will be first, to study at a fundamental level the links between stress and metacognition ; Second to evaluate the consequences of stress on metacognition in aeronautics ; And third, to devise cognitive counter-measures. We will use laboratory stressors, so as to determine the modulation of metacognitive access that stress induces. Thanks to cognitive modeling, we shall isolate the influence of stress on first order cognition and on metacognition. Within metacognition, we shall separately assess the potential biasing effects of stress (over- or under-confidence) and the effects on metacognitive sensitivity. By means of a full array of physiological, hormonal, behavioral and psychological measures, we shall unravel the specific mechanisms of stress that have an impact on metacognition. We shall study the impact of stress on metacognitive access and control separately. Furthermore, as metacognition is critical when two or more agents cooperate, since if agents can exchange their confidence levels they can weigh their respective contribution to a common task, we shall study the dysfunctions that stress instills between two cooperating agents. We shall try to identify at which level does stress block the exchange of information on a common task.

MetaStress is a research program in cognitive sciences, with applications to aeronautics. We think that our results should generalize to other domains, such as the piloting of nuclear plants. Our intention is not only to unravel the fine mechanisms of elementary decision and metacognition under stress. We wish to identify cognitive remediation strategies that can counteract the negative impact of stress on metacognition. First, we shall investigate the potential benefits of cognitive training; and second, we shall examine whether some modifications in decisional systems (organizations and Human – Machine interfaces) could foster the retrieval and use of metacognition.

Gregory VERDUGO

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In most European countries, a large majority of recent immigrants have non-European origins. While they are more diverse and visible, they are also more fragile economically. According to the French institute of statistics, the assimilation of many non-European immigrants on the French labor market remain difficult and in 2016, they were three times more likely to be unemployed than natives. Many ethnographic studies also indicate that non-European immigrants are increasingly concentrated in large public housing estates in the suburbs of large metro areas. The combination of a difficult access to the labor market with an increase in spatial segregation might negatively affect the economic assimilation of recent immigrant waves with potentially harmful consequences to second-generation immigrants. The objective of this project is to study how economic and spatial assimilation interact with each other. A better understanding of these interactions is useful to determine how housing and labor market policies could be designed to facilitate economic assimilation. This project exploits original data from the French census of the population that uses Census data back to the 1980s to answer these questions.

Benoît RAPOPORT

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The first generations of baby-boomers reached their sixties on the eve of the 21st century, which means more retirees in the future. The current generations of retirees are quite different from previous generations. Couples are less often married. Retired are more likely to have experienced a marital separation, several marriages or partnerships and formed a stepfamily. Their professional experiences also differ, for women who worked significantly more and men who spend more time unemployed.
Although research on the impact of careers on various dimensions of old age is plentiful, the impact of the changes in marital behavior has been much less studied. Older couples have received some attention in sociology, in particular by Caradec (1994, 1996), and in demography (Murphy et al. 2007, Tomassini et al 2004, Delbès Gaymu 2003, 2004). Yet, they have received relatively little attention in the economic literature. Close to retirement age, the vast majority of people are in couples. Inequalities among partners in terms of income or household tasks, already present during the working life, can be accentuated or dampened at these ages. These elder couples make choices for which the determinants can be different that for younger couples. This project proposes to study couples over 50, soon-to-be or already retired, along several dimensions, but by focusing on economic determinants. Retirement is a key moment in the life cycle and does not necessarily occur simultaneously for both spouses. A first theme describes the evolution in around retirement and at older ages: new types of unions, separations and family decomposition safer age 50. The description of the marital environment is essential for making demographic projections and for estimating the needs for dependence-related policies. Indeed, the presence of a spouse can delay the need for public assistance, as the spouse is often the primary caregiver. Retirement is also a time when traditional roles regarding the allocation of household tasks can be renegotiated, when one spouse retires before the other, or when one becomes dependent. A second theme deals with this time allocation decision for elderly couples. The end of the working life also brings financial consequences in terms of income and wealth, which is the subject of a third theme. Finally, we investigate the economic consequences of marital dissolution in old age resulting from separation or the death of a spouse.

Josselin THUILLIEZ 

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During the last century, WHO have led public health interventions that resulted in spectacular achievements such as the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of malaria from the Western world. However, besides major successes achieved in control of infectious diseases, most elimination/control programs remain frustrating in many tropical countries where specific biological and socio-economical features have prevented implementation of disease control over broad spatial and temporal scales. Emblematic examples include malaria, dengue, yellow fever, measles and HIV. There is consequently an urgent need to develop affordable and sustainable disease control strategies that can target the core of infectious disease transmission in highly endemic areas.

Although on the one hand most pathogens are resistant to elimination, on the other hand, paradoxically, human activities are major drivers of the current high rate of extinction among higher organisms through alteration of their ecology and evolution, i.e., their "niche". During the last decades, the accumulation of ecological and evolutionary studies focused on infectious diseases has shown that the niche of a pathogen holds more dimensions than just the immune system targeted by vaccination and treatment. Indeed, it comprises various intra- and inter- host levels at very different spatial and temporal scales. 

This project aims to shift from disease control to reverse conservation biology of pathogens in order to devise new public health strategies. Our objective is a qualitative understanding of the “niche” of two different pathogens at a fine spatial scale, Plasmodium falciparum in Bobo-Dioulasso (Burkina-Faso) and Dengue virus in Kâmpóng Cham (Cambodia), through a trans-disciplinary approach mixing ecology of infectious diseases, public health and health economics to carefully tailor mathematical models able to demonstrate how public health strategies could be improved for these diseases control in these areas and potentially drive the pathogens to local extinction. Such public health tools could be thus extended to other areas of interest and other diseases.

Francis BLOCH