TRANNOY Alain

Land is back. The increase in wealth in the second half of 20th century arose from housing and land. It should be taxed. We introduce land and housing structures in Judd’s standard setup: first best optimal taxation is achieved with a property tax on land and requires no tax on capital. With positive taxes on housing rents, a first best is still possible but with subsidies to rental housing investments, and either with differential land tax rates or with a tax on imputed rents. It can be taxed. Even absent land taxes, one can tax it indirectly and reach a Ramsey-second best still with no tax on capital and positive housing rent taxes in the steady-state. This result extends to the dynamics under restrictions on parameters.

The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils’ effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31% and 40% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school.

In this paper, I study access to housing and its financing in France. In the first chapter, I study how often the children of homeowners are themselves homeowners, and how this intergenerational relationship has changed between 1970 and 2015. I find that the intergenerational linkage of housing status has increased significantly, particularly since 1990. This is particularly important among those aged 20-39, at the top of the wealth distribution, and in areas with high urban concentrations. In my second chapter, I study the disparities in real estate interest rates across geographic areas, and how monetary policy is transmitted to household credit conditions. I find that banks set significantly higher interest rates in areas with less market competition. Moreover, in times of advantageous monetary policy, banks reduce interest rates less in less competitive areas. In my final chapter, I assess the impact of monetary policy changes on housing loan defaults over the 2004-2015 period. I find that a one percentage point increase in interest rates increases the probability of household default by 45 percent. In addition, stable employment appears to be a major insurance against rising policy rates.

Objective: We assess the existence of unfair inequalities in health and death using the normative framework of inequality of opportunities, from birth to middle age in Great Britain. Methods: We use data from the 1958 National Child Development Study, which provides a unique opportunity to observe individual health from birth to the age of 54, including the occurrence of mortality. We measure health status combining self-assessed health and mortality. We compare and statistically test the differences between the cumulative distribution functions of health status at each age according to one childhood circumstance beyond people's control: the father's occupation. Results: At all ages, individuals born to a 'professional', 'senior manager or technician' father report a better health status and have a lower mortality rate than individuals born to 'skilled', 'partly skilled' or 'unskilled' manual workers and individuals without a father at birth. The gap in the probability to report good health between individuals born into high social backgrounds compared with low, increases from 12 percentage points at age 23 to 26 at age 54. Health gaps are even more marked in health states at the bottom of the health distribution when mortality is combined with self-assessed health. Conclusions: There is increasing inequality of opportunities in health over the lifespan in Great Britain. The tag of social background intensifies as individuals get older. Finally, there is added analytical value to combining mortality with self-assessed health when measuring health inequalities.

Two traditional theorems of welfare economics posit a trade-off between a government redistribution targets and efficiency. We propose a third ‘claim’ of welfare economics, stating that in closed economies the actual efficiency costs associated with redistribution are small. We then examine the claim in the current phase of ‘hyper-globalization’. On the one hand, a race-to-the-bottom in taxation restricts the capacity to tax high-earners and the associated brain drain may affect a country’s long-run growth. On the other hand, demand for social insurance should be particularly high in an open economy, especially with advancing digitalization. Xenophobic sentiments may, however, offset this demand. We also discuss the impact of globalization on wage equalization and productive efficiency. We conclude against the idea that the welfare state is intrinsically unable to carry out its redistributive function in an era of globalization. However, its strategies and tools of intervention must be rethought.

Chapter 1 estimates the impact of the 2014 real estate transfer tax (RTD) reform on the housing market. We show that buyers and sellers moved up sale dates to before the tax increase. In the medium term, we estimate a negative effect on transaction volume. With respect to sales prices, we find only a short-run effect close to zero. Chapter 2 is an example of the indirect consequences of urban-rural inequality. It estimates the effect of containment in France due to the Covid-19 epidemic, and more specifically of the urban exodus that preceded it: prior to containment, hundreds of thousands of city dwellers moved to their second homes. Using data from cell phone geolocation, we estimate that the urban exodus led to a significant increase in hospitalizations, and that the local determinants of Covid-19 spread are population density and the share of public housing. We also find evidence that containment measures were effective in reducing the spread of the epidemic. Chapter 3 analyzes the effects of housing policies on poverty and inequality at the European level. The main results show that housing allowances are generally more effective than social housing, but also more effective in reducing poverty than inequality. The results also suggest that some countries achieve greater reductions in poverty and inequality while spending half as much on housing policies.

We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity-inequality curve for a population that gives how the between-type inequality varies with the number of types. A population A is said to have less inequality of opportunity than population B if its curve is statistically below that of population B. This version of the latent class approach allows for a robust ranking of 31 European countries regarding inequality of opportunity in health.

In this paper, the authors present a general procedure for decomposing inequality measures by income sources. The proposed methods are based on the Shapley value of cooperative games with transferable utility and on extensions of this value. The authors show, in particular, that Owen's value can be applied in this context, but also that the characterization by Hart and Mas-Collel's potential remains valid in the domain of inequality indices. Then, they propose a study of the properties of these decomposition rules and compare them with those of the decomposition rule proposed by Shorrocks.

We adopt a philosophical perspective of equality of opportunity and address the issue of whether outcome inequalities are legitimate when they come from differences in talent. We propose a cumulative definition of talent. In a dynamic setting, talent is a by-product of past-effort, current effort and innate talent, which becomes a residual as time goes by. It implies that talent can change from the status of a circumstance when people are young to an almost responsibility variable when people are getting older. We plug this definition of talent into the Mirrlees model of optimal non-linear income tax and we show that the conflict between the principle of compensation and the principle of natural reward boils down to the optimal income tax with Rawlsian weights in the second-best setting.

We study the incentive properties of physician contracts in different contexts and using different methods. In Chapter 1, we propose a "principal-agent" model in which there is adverse selection on the altruism of agents, limited liability and a technology provided by the regulator that can improve the quality of physicians' effort. In such a context (characterizing the health sector with access to personalized medicine for instance), we show that optimal contracts imply higher wages for altruistic agents and better quality effort-enhancing technology for selfish agents. In Chapter 2, we propose an experiment in which physicians can access personalized medicine techniques for free or at a given cost. We evaluate for different payment systems, the likelihood that physicians will make the decision to pay for access to personalized medicine, and we also focus on how they use these technologies, depending on whether they are free or costly to access. We find that physicians tend to make better use of personalized medicine techniques when they acquired it at a cost. In Chapter 3, we investigate the incentive properties of pay-for-performance systems. Using the same experiment from Chapter 2, we find that pay-for-performance systems enhance physicians' focus on what is relevant to the patient, but are associated with an erosion of their intrinsic motivation.

This thesis includes a series of theoretical essays on the macroeconomic study of health, and also offers a reflection on the recent history of economic thought. Its main contribution is to show that health does not necessarily follow from economic development. The first chapter is an investigation of contemporary differences in mortality between the United States and Europe. He proposes an explanation of the American Puzzle, the fact that life expectancy is lower in the United States despite a higher share of GDP devoted to health expenditures. Considering the deleterious effect of long working hours on health, differences in working hours may explain Americans' poor health and excessive spending, emphasizing a trade-off between consumption and health. The second chapter takes a more historical perspective and theorizes the decline in the average skill level of the population during the Industrial Revolution in England, looking at the political motivations of the capitalist class to invest in public health measures that would increase the longevity of workers and their incentives to educate themselves. The nature of technical progress in the nineteenth century, biased towards low-skilled work, may explain why the life expectancy of the working classes did not take off sooner. The third chapter is a reflection on the history of modern macroeconomics. It documents more than thirty years of controversy about the value of the elasticity of labor supply and questions the aggregation of individual behavior and the hypothesis of a representative agent.

This thesis consists of three chapters that concern household taxation. The first chapter studies the impact of the frequency of taxation and more specifically the welfare gains associated with the shift from an annual to a monthly taxation system. The second chapter studies the tax optimization behaviors of cohabiting couples via the optimal allocation of children on tax forms. The third chapter aims at assessing the impact on the taxable base of the double lowering of the ceiling of the family allowance that took place in 2012 and 2013.

This thesis is composed of three chapters, each of which evaluates the effects of a spatialized housing policy in France. The first two chapters apply a quasi-experimental methodology to evaluate, for the first of them, the effects of Article 55 of the 2000 "Solidarités et Renouvellement Urbain" law, which aims at stimulating the construction of social housing in medium and large municipalities, and for the second the Scellier tax credit, which applies from 2008 to 2012 to rental investment targeted at low-income tenants. The evaluation focuses on several variables of interest: housing construction, but also real estate prices and the spatial segregation of income. The third chapter applies microsimulation methods to estimate the profile of the share of income devoted by households to paying the housing tax. It also proposes a simulation of this profile under the hypothesis of a revision of rental values, which constitute the tax base of this local tax and which, in the absence of any revision since they were introduced, reflect the market values of housing in the 1970s. The three chapters are based on the exploitation of databases produced by the tax administration or French notaries, which are exhaustive and very rich and which have been little used until now. The first two chapters show that the financial or fiscal incentives put in place make it possible to stimulate the local supply of social housing or private rental housing targeted at low-income households. Chapter 1 shows that this increase in social construction has led to a decrease in property prices and spatial segregation of incomes in the municipalities concerned. Chapter 2 shows that housing built under the Scellier scheme is more often vacant and that the measure has led to an increase in property prices in the areas treated, as a result of increased tension in the local housing markets, which is capitalized on in land prices. Finally, Chapter 3 shows that aligning the rental values that serve as a basis for the housing tax with the relative prices of housing observed in today's real estate markets leads to a radical change in the profile of the weight of this levy in household income as a function of that income: whereas this has the shape of a bell curve with a maximum tax effort for households around the median income for the tax in its current form, the revision studied leads to a more progressive profile for most French households.

France is characterized by a high number and level of taxes on production. These can be particularly harmful because of the distortions they create throughout the production chain: they directly affect firms' decisions in terms of choice of production methods and prices and can therefore penalize their productivity and competitiveness. In addition, they increase the break-even point of firms and may explain, along with other factors, the relative atrophy of the French productive sector. In this new CAE Note, Philippe Martin and Alain Trannoy examine three of the most important taxes on production and recommend, based on empirical work, that priority be given to eliminating the C3S, whose harmfulness is unparalleled in our tax system, and then to attacking the CVAE. This strategy of reforming and simplifying corporate taxation could be accompanied, if the financial margins are not sufficient, by measures aimed at obtaining less harmful substitute public revenues.

We examine the feasibility of a single property tax on the property and real estate holdings of households that would replace all the existing taxes on this type of wealth, in particular, the property tax, the IFI tax, the DMTO tax, the tax on real estate capital gains and the tax on rental income received by landlords. Net property worth, after deducting real estate debt and 50,000 euros for the value of the principal residence, would be taxed at a rate of 1% up to the threshold of the IFI (1.

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This study assesses the impact of a tax incentive scheme to boost private rental investment in force in France from 2009 to 2012, called the “Scellier scheme” (after the name of the minister who promoted it), on changes in the price of building land. A difference in differences estimation is implemented, drawing on data from the BNDP database covering the period 2004 2010. The definition of the control and treatment groups is based on the boundary between municipalities which are eligible for the Scellier scheme and municipalities which are not. The estimation results suggest that the scheme had an inflationary effect and point to land price capitalisation, with an increase in the price per square metre of around 7 euros in the first year and of 8 to 9 euros over 2009 and 2010, without a significant rise of the phenome¬non in the second year, i.e. an increase of 8% in the first year and of 9 to 10% after two years. The regions where the market was the tightest saw the most rapid price increase, particularly the Mediterranean region.

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This paper estimates the effects of an increase in the share of the real estate transfer taxes (RETT) rates going to the French départements from 3.80% to 4.50%. Not all the départe-ments voted the RETT increase on the same date, which is the starting point of a natural experiment. Using a difference-indifferences design, we estimate two main effects. (1) An anticipation effect, one month before the implementation of the reform, in order to avoid the RETT increase. (2) A retention effect in the post-reform period. In the end, the net effect (retention minus anticipation) corresponds to an average drop in transactions of around 6% over the first three months after the reform, that is, approximately 15,000 transactions lost at national level. If we find a short term effect of the reform, we do not find evidence of a medium-or long-term effect. JEL Classification: H71, R21, R31, R51.

[Eng] Housing is a crucial good for households, both as a consumer good via the flow of services it fosters, and as an essential component of a homeowner’s wealth. It is also crucial because it accounts for more than a quarter of household’s expenses, and an increase in rent or property prices instantly has a major impact on their living standards, choice of location, mobility, and savings options. Finally, housing is also crucial because it is unique as an element of space‑time, space and time that cannot be separated in this instance. These themes are examined in this special issue, with a variety of approaches and different perspectives, providing valuable information on a number of outstanding issues.

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The proportion of people aged 65 to 74 who are employed has increased sharply over the past 10 years, although it still represents only 5% of this age group. Compared to inactive people of the same age, employed people between 65 and 74 are more often men, in good health, more educated and living in the Paris area. Managers, but also the self-employed and farmers are over-represented in this group. Compared to employed 60-64 year olds, employed 65-74 year olds are more often self-employed and more frequently work part-time when they are employed. whether they are employed or self-employed, their activity income is lower on average. Among the employed 65-74 year olds, 70% also receive a retirement pension. those who do not receive a pension are more often immigrants, female, in good health and residing in the Paris metropolitan area. The employment of these non-recipients is mainly characterized by a longer working time: 78% are working full time (compared to 32% for those receiving a pension). Four typical profiles of people in employment after the age of 65 emerge: part-time employees with few diplomas, highly qualified urban workers, shopkeepers and finally elderly farmers. Finally, among the non-financial determinants associated with the decision to remain in employment beyond the age of 65 for those who were still employed at that age, non-salaried employment, the absence of limitations in the usual activities, the continuation of the spouse's activity or the small age difference with the spouse stand out as the most significant explanatory factors.

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[The IFRS accounting standards have integrated into the balance sheet of banks most of the derivative financial instruments that we consider here under the term "off-balance sheet", at the price of a certain invisibility of their "leverage effect". We describe the activity of corporate and investment banks and show that these derivative instruments correspond to an intermediation function of risk in the economy where banks do not "carry" this risk on the balance sheet, contrary to the traditional banking business of "transformation". We describe the bank as a source of "increasing the possibilities of market size" that we define beforehand in a general way. Such a source, like any innovation, is synonymous with risk. In this framework, the bank's "off-balance sheet" appears as a leverage effect without natural limits. We then study what could be the taxation systems adapted to three different objectives: correcting and capturing rents, limiting systemic risk, and controlling the "growth of possibilities". A tax base that considers a measure of the absolute value of liabilities associated with derivative positions on banks' balance sheets seems relevant to limit the growth of possibilities and, hence, of risk.

This paper estimates the effects of an increase in the real estate transfer taxes (RETT) rate from 3.80% to 4.50%, following an optional reform implemented in March 2014 by French départements. Not all the départements implemented the RETT increase, which is the starting point for a natural experiment: using a difference-in-differences design, we estimate two main effects. (1) An anticipation effect a month before the implementation of the reform in order to avoid the RETT increase (timing response). The total tax base increased by 28% just the month before. (2) The classic depressing effect of a tax on the equilibrium quantity (extensive margin response) is estimated to be 7% on average from March 2014 to October 2015. All in all, the average net effect corresponds to a drop of the transactions of 4.6% over a period of ten months following the implementation date. Furthermore, we estimate that the elasticity of the tax revenue to the tax increase is about 0.65, meaning that départements’ tax revenues are still on the increasing side of the Laffer curve.

This paper proposes a method to quantify the contribution of inequalities of opportunities and inequalities due to differences in effort to be in good health to overall health inequality. It examines three alternative specifications of legitimate and illegitimate inequalities drawing on Roemer, Barry and Swift‟s considerations of circumstances and effort. The issue at stake is how to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort. Using a representative French health survey undertaken in 2006 and partly designed for this purpose, and the natural decomposition of the variance, the contribution of circumstances to inequalities in self-assessed health only differs of a few percentage points according to the approach. The same applies for the contribution of effort which represents at most 8%, while circumstances can account for up to 46%. The remaining part is due to the impact of age and sex.

This paper aims to quantify and compare inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries considering two alternative normative ways of treating the correlation between effort, as measured by lifestyles, and circumstances, as measured by parental and childhood characteristics, championed by Brian Barry and John Roemer. This study relies on regression analysis and proposed several measures of inequality of opportunities. Data from the Retrospective Survey of SHARELIFE, which focuses on life histories of European people aged 50 and over, are used. In Europe at the whole, inequalities in opportunities stand for almost 50% of the health inequality due to circumstances and efforts in Barry scenario and 57.5% in Roemer scenario. The comparison of the magnitude of inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries shows considerable inequalities in Austria, France, Spain, Germany, whereas Sweden, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland present the lowest inequalities of opportunities. The normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort makes little difference in Spain, Austria, Greece, France, Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland whereas it would matter the most in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark. In most countries, inequalities of opportunity in health are mainly driven by social background affecting adult health directly, and so would require policies compensating for poorer initial conditions. On the other hand, our results suggest a strong social and family determinism of lifestyles in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark, which emphasises the importance of inequalities of opportunities in health within those countries and calls for targeted prevention policies.

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The approach of equality of opportunity is becoming ubiquitous in the social justice literature. Marc Fleurbaey [1994], [2008] and John Roemer [1993], [1998] have played a major role in transmitting ideas put forth by philosophers and in transforming these ideas in models of social justice that can be absorbed by economists. The ideas of compensation and responsibility are defined in a different way by these two authors and we show that hybrid concepts are meaningful. More specifically, we propose a new principle of natural reward, ?reward on average,? which is compatible with the principle of compensation ex post in a quite general setting. Furthermore, we show how to introduce the idea of a social determinism in private choices in Fleurbaey?s approach.

In addition to the cyclical difficulties linked to the low price of nickel, the New Caledonian economy suffers from low productivity gains, insufficient competitiveness and high income inequalities. The authors of the note, Catherine Ris, Alain Trannoy and Étienne Wasmer, show how to tackle these three handicaps and define a long-term growth strategy. The gradual transformation of natural resources into sustainable assets through a sovereign wealth fund, measures to promote competition and international openness, substantial investment in training and a more redistributive tax policy are the main avenues proposed.

This chapter reviews the literature about inequality and welfare with a particular focus on whether Europe has a special sensitivity to these matters or specific outcomes. It is argued that both statements are likely to be true, which raises the possibility of a causal link. Europe has relatively good results in terms of inequality and welfare in comparison with other continents and more specifically America, because these issues matter for European people. Still, research needs to be fostered in at least 5 areas that are detailed at the end of this review. Specific attention is devoted to the contribution of other social sciences and natural sciences (cognitive science) to the development of our knowledge for the field of inequality and welfare.

Equality of opportunity is usually defined as a situation where the effect of circumstances on outcome is nullified (compensation principle) and effort is rewarded (reward principle). We propose a new version of the reward principle based on the idea that effort deserves reward for it is costly. We show that luck can be introduced in two ways in the definition of these principles, depending on whether the correlation between luck and circumstances should be nullified and whether the correlation between luck and effort should be rewarded. In this regard, the timing of luck with respect to effort decisions is crucial, as is exemplified by moral hazard where effort choice influences the lottery of future uncertain events.

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The paper investigates the link between the over-exposure of African immigrants to unemployment in France and their under-representation in jobs in contact with customers. We build a two-sector matching model with ethnic sectorspecifc preferences, economy-wide employer discrimination, and customer discrimination in jobs in contact with customers. The outcomes of the model allow us to build a test of ethnic discrimination in general and customer discrimination in particular. We run the test on French individual data in a cross-section of local labor markets (Employment Areas). Our results show that there is both ethnic and customer discrimination in the French labor market.

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This article describes two reforms, the modulation of family allowances according to income and the further lowering of the ceiling on the family quotient. These reforms announce the end of the principle of equal sacrifice, which underlay the family quotient mechanism, and its quasi-replacement by a flat rate principle. We are studying the financial impact on the households concerned and suggest that the choices made should be implemented by simplifying the current complex system with a flat-rate tax credit.

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Since the international real estate crisis erupted in 2008, the markets in different countries have experienced very different outcomes. What lessons can be drawn from this in terms of policymaking?

The modern formulation of equality of opportunity emerges from discussions in political philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century beginning with Rawls (1971) and and . Equality of opportunity exists when policies compensate individuals with disadvantageous circumstances so that outcomes experienced by a population depend only on factors for which persons can be considered to be responsible. Importantly, inequality of opportunity for income exists when individuals’ incomes are in some important part determined by the educational achievement and income of the families that raised them. We review the philosophical debates referred to, commenting upon them from an economist's viewpoint. We propose several ways of modeling equality (or inequality) of opportunity, pointing out that an equal-opportunity ethic implies a non-welfarist way of ranking social outcomes. We propose that economic development should be conceived of as the equalization of opportunities for income in a country. We consider equalization of opportunity from a dynamic viewpoint, and we review popular attitudes with regard to distributive justice, showing that there is substantial popular support for an equal-opportunity ethic. We discuss the empirical issues that emerge in measuring inequality of opportunity and provide a review of the empirical literature that measures degrees of inequality of opportunity for the achievement of various objectives, in various countries.

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Universities present some similarities with professional partnerships in law and accounting. Universities are close to being partnerships in a non-profit environment. In particular, the practice of co-option for the appointment of new teachers is similar to partnership rules according to which a new partner cannot be appointed without the consent of all the other partners. We compare co-option with other recruitment procedures such as delegation of recruitment to headhunters or the sale of academic positions at auction. Asymmetries of information, reputation, joint production of teaching and research and externalities in academic production, explain that co-option is the commonly adopted way of hiring new faculty. Still, the incentives to recruit the best candidate are weakened by free-riding, moral hazard, and the fact that academics do not invest their own wealth in the university. We explore some ways of realigning incentives to recruit good candidates in the framework of a collective co-option procedure in French universities. We end up by concluding that the key factor to improve the situation lies in the institution of the university president, who should be chosen to be more independent from the academic senate. Classification JEL : I23, J54, D82, M51.

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The objective of this thesis is to study the interdependence of school resources and individual resources in the production of human capital. Through three case studies on French data, different methods are proposed to analyze the effect of educational policies while taking into account the behavior of individuals. The first chapter shows that priority education policies are likely to lead families, especially the most socially advantaged, to bypass the schools treated. These avoidance strategies are likely to counterbalance the effects of the additional resources on student results. The second chapter seeks to determine whether students' choices of direction are constrained by the local school offer. We show that the opening of a new lycée increases the proportion of students who continue their studies in the second cycle, particularly in the vocational stream. Finally, the third chapter shows that students take into account the contemporary information they have about their grades when evaluating the pedagogical qualities of their teachers.

With aging populations, European countries face difficult challenges. In 2002, France implemented a public allowance program (APA) offering financial support to the disabled elderly for their long-term care (LTC) needs. Although currently granted to 1.2 million people, it is suspected that some of those eligible do not claim it—presenting a non-take-up behavior. The granting of APA is a decentralized process, with 94 County Councils (CC) managing it, with wide room for local interpretation. This spatial heterogeneity in the implementation of the program creates the conditions for a “quasi-natural experiment”, and provides the opportunity to study the demand for APA in relation to variations in CCs’ “generosity” in terms of both eligibility and subsidy rate for LTC. We use a national health survey and administrative data in a multilevel model controlling for geographical, cultural and political differences between counties. The results show that claiming for APA is associated with the “generosity” of CCs: the population tends to apply less for the allowance if the subsidy rate is in average lower. This pecuniary trade-off, revealed by our study, can have strong implications for the well-being of the elderly and their relatives.

We thank Kathryn Spier, three anonymous referees of the RAND Journal of Economics, Christian Gollier, and Pierre-André Chiappori for very useful remarks and comments. This manuscript is the revised version of a Working Paper by the same authors, circulated in May 2012 and titled, “Equal Treatment as a Second Best: Student Loans under Asymmetric Information.” This research has been supported by a research grant of the ANR “programme blanc.” Gary-Bobo's research is also supported by Investissements d'Avenir (no. ANR-11-IDEX-0003), Labex Ecodec (no. ANR-11-LABX-0047).

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We investigate how potential tax-driven migrations modify the Mirrlees income tax schedule when two countries play Nash. The social objective is the maximin and preferences are quasi-linear in consumption. Individuals differ both in skills and migration costs, which are continuously distributed. We derive the optimal marginal income tax rates at the equilibrium, extending the Diamond-Saez formula. We show that the level and the slope of the semi-elasticity of migration (on which we lack empirical evidence) are crucial to derive the shape of optimal marginal income tax. JEL Codes: D82, H21, H87, F22.

Conference volume of the Congres of AFSE in Aix-en-Provence.

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We derive testable conditions ensuring that the income tax is optimal when agents are ex-ante identical but face idiosyncratic income risk. The optimal tax depends positively on both absolute risk aversion and risk variance and negatively on labor supply elasticity and absolute prudence. The comparison with the formula of the optimal non-linear income tax provides the restrictions on both the preferences and the income distribution conditional on effort ensuring that the optimal tax is indeed linear. In general it requires that the ratio of absolute prudence to absolute risk aversion be no less than two. if the income density has a linear likelihood ratio, it requires a (generalized) logarithmic consumption utility. Under HARA utility and linear or logarithmic likelihood ratios, explicit solutions for the optimal non-linear income tax are derived.

We characterize the set of second-best optimal "menus" of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines student loans with an elementary optimal income-tax problem. The second-best optima provide incomplete insurance because of moral hazard. they typically involve cross-subsidies between students. Generically, optimal loan repayments cannot be decomposed as the sum of an income tax, depending only on earnings, and a loan repayment, depending only on education. Therefore, optimal loan repayments must be income-contingent, or the income tax must comprise a graduate tax. The interaction of adverse selection and moral-hazard, i.e., self-selection constraints and effort incentives, determines an equal treatment property. the expected utilities of different types of students are equalized at the interim stage, conditional on the event of academic success (i.e.

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We investigate the problem of how to perform comparisons of income distributions across families of different sizes. We argue that social welfare ought to be computed as the average individual utility instead of the average household utility as in most known criteria. We provide dominance criteria which allow for some indeterminacy about the average optimal family size, by resorting to the bounded approach to dominance analysis proposed by Fleurbaey et al. (2003). Indeed, when differences in needs come from family size, a specific population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are introduced in order to make explicit the choice of an optimal family size. An application to French data shows that shifting from the household to the individualistic point of view can substantially alter the outlook of dominance results.

Property prices rose sharply in France between 1998 and 2007, and again between 2009 and 2012. The first phase of increase is partly linked to factors common to the euro zone (easing of financing conditions), partly also to specifically French factors (policies to support demand, shortages of land supply, rising construction costs). The second phase is more directly linked to the financial crisis, which has encouraged investors to withdraw from assets considered safe, including real estate, whose attractiveness has been further enhanced by policies to support demand. In France, housing is the largest household expenditure item, far ahead of food. Access to decent housing, or even just housing, has become a major problem, especially in tense areas such as the Paris region. There are many arguments in favor of a public policy aimed at moderating the rise, or even reversing the curve of real estate prices, especially if part of the rise in prices is due to ill-adapted public policies: rising prices accentuate inequalities (to the notable detriment of younger generations from modest backgrounds) and lead to economic inefficiencies, such as the distance between home and work, investment (in the event of a bubble) in overvalued property, or the loss of competitiveness of the French economy when the cost of housing is passed on to salaries or in corporate real estate We believe that the risks associated with a downturn in the real estate market are less significant in France than in other countries. In this context, we propose a combination of measures to stimulate supply, correct distortions on the demand side and make the market more fluid. To stimulate supply, we propose to improve land management by systematically transferring responsibility for it to the level of inter-municipalities and to encourage productivity gains and competition in the construction sector. To make the market more fluid and property taxation more equitable, we suggest abolishing transfer duties in stages and reforming the property tax on built-up areas. The latter would henceforth be based on the net market value of the property (market value minus outstanding loans). This reform would be neutral for the budget and would be completed by a tax on latent capital gains on unbuilt land, encouraging the sale of land when it becomes buildable. These reforms presuppose the rapid implementation of the obligation for notaries to inform the notarial databases. At the same time, it seems desirable to us to progressively eliminate all of the subsidies for housing, which are costly measures (more than 4 billion euros in 2012) that tend to support prices for a limited gain in terms of home ownership. Housing policies and, in particular, home ownership policies, have the potential to improve efficiency, equity and budgetary savings. This note was submitted to the Prime Minister on February 13, 2013.

The way to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort is a central, yet largely neglected issue in the applied literature on inequality of opportunity. This paper adopts three alternative normative ways of treating this correlation championed by Roemer, Barry and Swift and assesses their empirical relevance using survey data. We combine regression analysis with the natural decomposition of the variance to compare the relative contributions of circumstances and efforts to overall health inequality according to the different normative principles. Our results suggest that, in practice, the normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort makes little difference on the relative contributions of circumstances and efforts to explained health inequality.

Two methods are generally considered for the evaluation of health policies. The cost-benefit approach is based on the sum of individual willingness to pay: it respects individual preferences but gives priority to the preferences of the richest people because their willingness to pay is generally higher. The cost-effectiveness approach selects policies that provide the highest overall health gain for a given total cost. It does not benefit high-income individuals, but it may have other undesirable effects, such as favoring treatment of a minor condition that will benefit the most people over a major condition that affects few. A variant of cost-benefit analysis avoids these pitfalls. It consists of weighting the willingness to pay by coefficients that vary in the opposite direction to an indicator of individual well-being combining income and health status. The indicator chosen is health equivalent income: this is the individual's actual income minus the amount he or she would be willing to forego in order to be in perfect health. For a given income, it therefore decreases when health deteriorates. Unlike subjective utility indices, it has the advantage of being based solely on the ordinal preferences of individuals. This approach is implemented through a survey conducted on a representative sample of the French population. Given their financial constraints, low-income individuals attach less relative importance to their health status. However, the coefficients obtained nevertheless allow us to overweight the least privileged individuals who have a combination of low income, poor health and a strong preference for improving their health. These coefficients can then be used to evaluate any policy for which individual willingness to pay is known.

The way to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort is a central, yet largely neglected issue in the applied literature on inequality of opportunity. This paper adopts three alternative normative ways of treating this correlation championed by Roemer, Barry and Swift and assesses their empirical relevance using survey data. We combine regression analysis with the natural decomposition of the variance to compare the relative contributions of circumstances and efforts to overall health inequality according to the different normative principles. Our results suggest that, in practice, the normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and effort makes little difference on the relative contributions of circumstances and efforts to explained health inequality.

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We investigate how potential tax-driven migrations modify the Mirrlees income tax schedule when two countries play Nash. The social objective is the maximin and preferences are quasilinear in income. Individuals differ both in skills and migration costs, which are continuously distributed. We derive the optimal marginal income tax rates at the equilibrium, extending the Diamond-Saez formula. The theory and numerical simulations on the US case show that the level and the slope of the semi-elasticity of migration on which we lack empirical evidence are crucial to derive the shape of optimal marginal income tax. Our simulations show that potential migrations result in a welfare drop between 0.4% and 5.3% for the worst-off and an average gain between 18.9% and 29.3% for the top 1%.

This chapter aims to quantify and compare inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries considering two alternative normative ways of treating the correlation between effort, as measured by lifestyles, and circumstances, as measured by parental and childhood characteristics, championed by Brian Barry and John Roemer. This study relies on regression analysis and proposes several measures of inequality of opportunity. Data from the Retrospective Survey of SHARELIFE, which focuses on life histories of European people aged 50 and over, are used. In Europe at the whole, inequalities of opportunity stand for almost 50% of the health inequality due to circumstances and efforts in Barry scenario and 57.5% in Roemer scenario. The comparison of the magnitude of inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries shows considerable inequalities in Austria, France, Spain and Germany, whereas Sweden, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland present the lowest inequalities of opportunity. The normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and efforts makes little difference in Spain, Austria, Greece, France, Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland, whereas it would matter the most in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark. In most countries, inequalities of opportunity in health are mainly driven by social background affecting adult health directly, and so would require policies compensating for poorer initial conditions. On the other hand, our results suggest a strong social and family determinism of lifestyles in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark, which emphasises the importance of inequalities of opportunity in health within those countries and calls for targeted prevention policies.

The purpose of this note is to analyze properties of the risk lovers? utility function beyond the positive sign of its second order derivative. We show that??contrarily to a priori beliefs??risk lovers are prudent and are willing to accumulate precautionary savings.

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This paper presents a general procedure for decomposing income inequality measures by income sources. The methods of decomposition proposed are based on the Shapley value and extensions of the Shapley value of transferable utility cooperative games. In particular, we find that Owen's value can find an interesting application in this context.We show that the axiomatization by the potential of Hart and Mas-Colell remains valid in the presence of the domain restriction of inequality indices. We also examine the properties of these decomposition rules and perform a comparison with Shorrocks' decomposition rule properties.

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We survey the burgeoning literature on inequality of opportunity in health. We focus on ways to tackle health inequalities. We are of the opinion that the main contribution so far of this literature is in inviting us to choose a new indicator of the relative success of the public policy, which aims at reducing health inequalities. This indicator is the part of explained health inequalities due to lifestyles. We can defend the use of this indicator on the basis of a value judgment but we will restrain us to do so here. Our argument is mainly positive. It resorts on the fact that, so far, we do not know how to tackle health inequalities coming from differences in lifestyles. These inequalities seem more irreducible than inherited health inequalities, as the Great Britain example shows us. When these inequalities are quite high in proportion of total explained inequalities, it means that we are not so far from a public health policy, which is going to reach his main objective in reducing health inequalities.

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The central objective of this thesis is to study the tax evasion behavior of taxpayers when they report only a portion of their income. The first chapter complements the existing literature by studying the level of income reporting and the effects of changes in tax rates, penalty rates, and control probabilities, by considering nonlinear tax and penalty functions, within the framework of utility expectation theory.The framework provided by cumulative prospect theory is then used in the second chapter. The framework provided by cumulative prospect theory is then used in the second chapter. The focus is on the dependence of the taxpayer's decisions on the benchmark income introduced by this theory. The third chapter characterizes the optimal income tax schedule and the control and penalty strategy to be implemented by the state when the taxpayers' evasion behavior verifies the properties of the prospect theory.

This doctoral thesis aims to contribute to the debate on the origin of ethnic discrimination, by focusing on the population of African immigrants in France and on that of African-Americans in the United States. Specifically, by analyzing French and American microeconomic data, it identifies the existence of discrimination based on the principle of employer and consumer preferences and their effect on the weakening of the economic situation of these two minority groups. It establishes the importance of indirect discrimination on the part of consumers, and suggests that it is essential to know the origins of ethnic discrimination in order to establish public policies capable of effectively combating this phenomenon. The first chapter offers a descriptive analysis of the access of working people according to their geographical origins to customer-facing jobs in France. It shows that immigrants in France, and African immigrants in particular, have less access to jobs in contact with the public. In order to analyze whether consumers play a role in this underrepresentation, the second chapter formulates a test strategy to distinguish between consumer and employer discrimination. The existence of these two sources of discrimination against African immigrants is then proven through the use of the French population census. Using the previous test strategy, the third chapter reveals the presence of this source of discrimination against African-Americans in the United States.

This thesis is an applied study of optimal taxation and income risk in Latin America, with a focus on Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Faced with high levels of income inequality, income taxes are an essential redistributive tool for Latin America that, until now, has not been fully exploited. One of the objectives of this thesis is to see how far these countries are at their optimal level of taxation in order to explore the capacity for improvement that this type of burden may have in each of the countries in the study. Income risk is another important characteristic of developing economies such as those found in Latin America. Given their vulnerability to external macroeconomic shocks, these economies tend to be particularly volatile. Under these conditions, individuals in Latin America are subject to higher income risks than individuals in developed countries. The presence of risk has an effect on how agents respond to various changes in the economy. Therefore, the study of risk levels and in particular how riskier incomes affect optimal taxation is one of the pillars of this thesis. Income risk can be decomposed into two elements, permanent and transitory. The last part of this thesis is devoted to assessing to what extent the income risk in each country is caused by a permanent or a transitory component.

Does income inequality affect the provision of public goods? Warr established a neutrality theorem in 1983: under certain conditions, a marginal redistribution of income between agents does not affect the quantity of public goods provided by their voluntary contributions. The generalizations of this result by Bergstrom et al (1986) have made it possible to better understand this phenomenon: neutral redistributions are of "small" magnitude, so that agents whose income has been cut always have the possibility of maintaining their expenditure on private goods, and adjustments to individual contributions leave the aggregate contribution to the public good unchanged. Itaya et al (1997) have investigated the welfare consequences of non-neutral redistribution. In the first two chapters of this thesis we test these predictions in the laboratory with a public good game with quadratic utilities. The first chapter considers a "small" redistribution that should not lead to a change in the quantity of the public good. In contrast, in chapter 2, the redistribution is of such magnitude that it affects the quantity of public good supplied and the welfare of society. Although we find some theoretical predictions in the laboratory, notably concerning the modification or not of the quantity of public good produced and of well-being, the predictions concerning individual behaviour and gains are rarely verified. In particular, we observe that, following the modification of their income, some players reduce or increase their contribution less than the theory predicts and that poor agents over-contribute. Finally, it seems that the emergence of inequalities does not affect behavior in the same way as when these inequalities are pre-existing, and thus that the direction of redistribution, depending on whether it creates or reduces inequalities, matters. In Chapter 3, we look specifically at an inequality-creating redistribution in a linear public good game and examine whether men and women respond to this change in the same way and what consequences this has for the quantity of public good provided. We show that when women benefit from the redistribution, the quantity of public good produced decreases. It also appears that behavior is modified when subjects know the gender of those who have become richer.

The central theme of this thesis is the study of two problems raised in modern fisheries, habitat degradation and lack of information, which are among the most important causes of overexploitation of fishery resources. The first two chapters are devoted to the examination of the problem of marine habitat degradation linked in particular to destructive fishing activities. The Gordon-Schaefer model is extended to take into account the negative impact of fishing on habitats. The consequences for management are analyzed and the importance of taking habitats into account in the development of fisheries management programs is highlighted. The model developed is then used to evaluate the economic benefits of artificial reefs, a management tool that is increasingly used by artisanal fisheries managers to respond to habitat degradation. Finally, in the third chapter, the role of information for sustainable fishing is examined when the resource is open access. While in the first two chapters it is assumed that complete information is available for the development of management recommendations, in the last study the decision on the exploitation of fishery resources is made in a context where no information on the resource is available. This decision is made individually by each fisherman operating in the fishery. By developing a multi-agent model, we show the impact of fishermen's learning on the overall dynamics of the fishery system.

The term "transfer pricing" refers to the price of transactions concluded between subsidiaries of the same multinational enterprise. The thesis deals, from an essentially normative point of view, with the problem of regulating these prices, i.e. determining the optimal way to share the profit of a group between its subsidiaries. The thesis first shows the effect of transfer pricing regulation on firms' production and investment decisions, and then on global welfare. On the basis of the results obtained, the objectives that a benevolent international dictator should assign to this type of regulation are then established. This double work allows us to draw the outline of an optimal regulation project, based on the concept of inter-nation equity, and whose application would lead to assigning to each subsidiary its Shapley value in a previously defined game. The thesis also sheds light on the contemporary debate by proposing a protocol for comparing the arm's length principle with the lump sum allocation method.

Although the importance of housing in the well-being of individuals is well known, this field is largely under-investigated by French economists. There is a real lack of quantitative studies that show a causal link between public policies and their impact on housing. This thesis aims to fill this gap by producing empirical results with French data, but also to develop innovative methodologies for the implementation of econometric evaluation techniques of public policies. The thesis is divided into two main parts and includes three original contributions. In the first part, we place ourselves in the framework of hedonic prices. We evaluate, for the city of Marseille, the price that households attribute to living in one neighborhood rather than another. The second part focuses on the evaluation of public policies concerning housing. We evaluate two French legislative schemes. The first one is the so-called Scellier scheme, which allows to benefit from tax advantages when buying real estate for rent. We use the fact that the scheme applies only in certain areas to assess the impact of the scheme on property prices. The second evaluation concerns Article 55 of the SRU law, which requires certain municipalities to have more than 20 percent social housing, subject to financial penalties. As part of this evaluation, we are developing an innovative methodology to measure the incentive nature of the law on the effective production of social housing.

This thesis focuses on the measurement of dissimilarities in the distribution of economic attributes, and the implications for inequality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity has gained popularity for defining the goal of distributing a wide range of economic outcomes across social groups. This thesis is motivated by the fact that public policy evaluation based on equal opportunity always relies on comparisons of dissimilarity between conditional distributions, and we propose empirical criteria for testing these comparisons. In the first chapter, we axiomatically characterize the pre-order of dissimilarity for classifying distributions conditional on the original group, which are defined over discrete outcome classes. When the classes are permutable, we show that the dissimilarity is rationalized by a matrix majorization order and implemented by checking the inclusion of zonotopes. When the classes are ordered we base the dissimilarity judgment on a finite number of comparisons within the Lorenz majorization between the proportions of the groups, verified at different stages of aggregation of the aggregate population. In the second chapter, we examine the relevance of the dissimilarity pre-order to study segregation at the individual level. A complete characterization of a well-defined family of segregation indicators is obtained and we study one of them, the Gini exposure index, using Italian data. The last chapter presents a criterion of equalization of opportunity. Equalization of opportunity is achieved when there is no consensus, according to a given preference class, on the identity of the disadvantaged group. We use changes in (lack of) consensus about the existence and extent of disadvantage to characterize the equalization of opportunity criterion. The necessary restrictions, as well as possible aggregation procedures, are also discussed. We show that this criterion is identified according to the class of preferences represented by the rank-dependent utility functions and we obtain innovative inference results on the inverse stochastic dominance that allow us to test this criterion. Two applications on French data illustrate the impact in terms of equalization of opportunities of educational policies that take place early in the life of students.

Can humans, alone or in groups, understand the influence they have within a decision-making committee? Is he able to treat all actors fairly in the process of designing a parliamentary assembly, or will he give life to bizarre creatures with purely political motivations? Are the current voting rules designed to avoid paradoxical election outcomes? This thesis answers these questions using tools from cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, using both computational and experimental approaches. The first part of this work analyzes two-tier federal voting systems and election laws. The second part focuses on the learning of individuals in games in which actors must identify and choose the situation that gives them the greatest influence.

A large literature explores the many mechanisms through which competition in goods markets influences factor productivity. In particular, the lack of competition can alter the incentives to innovate and to adopt the most efficient technologies. The purpose of this thesis is to bring new elements to the analysis of this mechanism. Most analyses of the relationship between competition and factor productivity focus only on the effect of competition in a sector on the productivity of that sector. However, the lack of competition in sectors producing intermediate goods may affect incentives in sectors using these goods. Chapter I formalizes this relationship through two mechanisms: difficulties of access to intermediate goods and rent-sharing between the producer and user sectors of these goods. The empirical analysis in chapter II seems to confirm this link, with anti-competitive regulations on the intermediate goods producing sectors reducing the productivity of the user sectors. Chapters III and IV propose an empirical analysis of the role of investment in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the influence of anti-competitive regulations in goods markets on Total Factor Productivity (TFP), using panels of aggregate data from OECD countries. The estimation results show that anti-competitive regulations reduce the demand for ICT and that such a reduction leads to a decline in TFP.

This thesis is a compilation of essays that apply experimental and survey methods to two topics dealing with group decision making. Group decision-making is a type of participatory process in which several individuals act collectively, analyze problems or situations, examine and evaluate alternative courses of action, and choose from the various alternatives one or more solutions (Van den Ven & Delbeq, 1974). One of the most important characteristics of group decision making is that individuals have individual responsibility (Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). Therefore, this dissertation is concerned with both actual group-level decisions, but also with individual opinions.The first topic is in the area of welfare and social choice and focuses on equal opportunity (referred to as EOP thereafter). We first test the intuitive foundations of EOP by means of a survey, during which individuals are "unbiased spectators" without any personal gain. This survey allows us to illustrate the notion of impartial justice in the absence of interest. We then test the foundations in a non-cooperative experiment, where decisions made have consequences for individuals' gains. The experiment used in this topic focuses on the revealed justice preferences of decision makers. The second topic focuses on weighted majority voting systems (referred to as WMV hereafter). We first conduct a survey of different groups of students to find that individuals ignore the nonmonotonic relationship between the number of votes and the associated voting power. We then conduct several laboratory experiments to test whether this nonmonotonic relationship can be learned in a repeated game. Thus, the first part of this thesis includes two chapters about EOP, while the second includes two chapters about WMV. Chapter 1 is a general introduction, Chapter 6 presents the conclusions.Chapter 2 presents the EOP survey, which is a preference survey using multiple visuals to present hypothetical scenarios. This allows us to reveal individuals' preferences on the principles of EOP. To the best of our knowledge, our survey is the first attempt to fully explore the concept of EOP from the perspective of an "unbiased viewer." We systematically analyzed five factors that fall under the umbrella of EOP in two vignettes and several scenarios. Between the two vignettes: sales and alcohol, we found a high level of agreement on the circumstances. Not all individuals should suffer circumstance-related consequences in all situations for at least two reasons: first, this would clearly be morally arbitrary and second, because the resulting equalization must be adjusted. The thin consensus on effort and raw luck is also presented in our results. Since raw chance is defined in terms of the risk decay associated with the chance of non-option, it may lead to undesirable outcomes with respect to the EOP. Conversely, effort is defined as a reflection of the behavior of individuals. They control this effort, which influences their status. Thus, the effects of different levels of effort may not be neutralized.

This thesis is in the field of measuring and explaining health in the context of analyzing health inequalities. A first chapter considers the health indicators commonly used in empirical work and returns to the debate on the use of self-assessed health. It highlights the relevance of methodological refinements in health measurement proposed in the international literature that have not yet been applied to France. A second chapter proposes an original methodology for measuring health. The construction is based on an individual health status data considered less subjective, namely the number of diseases and their degree of severity, and considers variables classically collected in health surveys. A third chapter describes the tools of stochastic dominance and the indices commonly used in the analysis of inequalities in a health framework. The fourth chapter analyses social inequalities in health in France in 2004, then over the period 1998-2004. It highlights social inequalities in health in favour of the highest social groups. However, these inequalities decreased between 1998 and 2004, due to a lower elasticity of health with income and a decrease in the unequal distribution of income within social groups. Moreover, the analysis conducted on different measures of health reveals an inffluence on the magnitude of inequalities of the number of categories of the discrete health variable and of the health distribution chosen to cardinalize it. The fifth chapter focuses on the influence of the social background of origin and the relative longevity of the parents with respect to their birth cohort on the health status in adulthood, using three approaches. The first approach highlights the fact that the distributions of health status of persons born to a father or mother belonging to the upper social categories significantly dominate those of persons with parents from lower social categories. The parametric approach confirms an effect of the occupation of each parent on health status in adulthood. It also shows that health status depends significantly on the longevity of each parent. Finally, the concentration index approach highlights an inequality of health opportunities in favour of individuals whose parents have experienced a high longevity and then an inequality of health in favour of individuals from more privileged backgrounds. The chapter concludes that there are inequalities of opportunity in health in France.

The general theme explored in this doctoral research is "Tax Competition and Convergence". Examining the concepts of tax competition and convergence in an integrated manner is an important objective in itself. It allows, to a certain extent, to bring an innovative vision to the problem studied. A second objective of the work is to confront theory with empirical reality. Chapter 2 defines the tax on which we wish to work and presents the literature on effective tax rates with some extensions. Having defined the capital tax as the instrument on which we focus our attention, chapter 3 develops a model of tax competition. Chapter 4 looks at tax competition between countries and relates it to the convergence measures presented in the next chapter. In a similar way, chapter 5 attempts to observe tax convergence between countries in an empirical way.

This thesis is based on the theory of optimal income taxation developed by Mirrlees. It seeks to better understand the consequences of incentive constraints in a closed economy and the nature of the interactions between incentive and participation conditions in an open economy. Chapter 1 develops the comparative statics of the optimal income tax problem with a discrete population and quasi-linear preferences in consumption. Chapter 2 studies the proposed tax schedule developed by Kolm (2004) in the light of optimal taxation theory. Chapter 3 presents the main models of optimal income taxation that allow us to identify the impact of tax mobility for the most competent agents. Chapters 4 and 5 introduce type-dependent participation constraints in linear and then non-linear optimal taxation problems to assess the effects of individual mobility.

Consumer theory provides a framework from which to offer an empirical representation of consumer behavior. The study of these behaviors is interesting in itself. It also offers a set of tools to understand the effects of public policies. This thesis aims to contribute to the study of consumption behaviors, and to propose some applications. The first chapter deals with the problem of measuring price effects when the quantities consumed are not recorded in surveys. The second chapter studies indirect taxation in a behavioral framework using a new microsimulation model. Finally, the third chapter of this thesis is devoted to the contribution of the panel structure for consumption surveys, where we identify consumption laws on a very fine nomenclature by building a pseudo-panel from time-less data.

This thesis measures inequality of opportunity in income and education in France and the United States. According to post-welfarist economic theories of justice, the measurement of inequality must distinguish between inequalities that result from factors exogenous to individual responsibility and those that result from choices for which individuals can be held responsible. Chapter I uses stochastic dominance tools to measure the evolution of inequality of income opportunities in France from 1980 to 2000. Chapter II presents an index of inequality of opportunity and makes an international comparison between nine developed countries during the 1990s. Chapter III presents a micro-simulation approach to income distributions in the United States between 1985 and 2000 to measure the share of inequality of opportunity in total inequality. Finally, Chapter IV focuses on the causal nature of inequality of opportunity and measures the impact of parental income on children's schooling using US data.

Over the past twenty years, growing unemployment and stagnating poverty have prompted public authorities to implement policies to promote employment. At the same time, the Minimum Integration Income was created for the most disadvantaged. Numerous studies have examined the problems of poverty and the return to work of recipients of minimum social benefits, but the field of study has been restricted to metropolitan France. This thesis is an empirical contribution to the evaluation of poverty and the integration of recipients of social minima in the context of an overseas department with both the highest unemployment rate and the highest rate of people covered by the RMI in France. We assess poverty in the DOM and metropolitan France using the 2001 Family Budget Survey. The integration of recipients of minimum social benefits is evaluated using a database provided by the CAF of Reunion Island, in the context of two public policies: the reform of the incentive system included in the Aubry law against exclusion of 1998 and the alignment of minimum social benefits with the amounts in metropolitan France included in the orientation law of 2000.

Our contemporary societies are more and more marked by a search for productivity and rationalization. This requires the possession and proper use of information (whether economic, scientific, technological, social or political). Thus, the activities of expertise and communication are growing. The producers and transmitters of information (experts) can, by strategically manipulating the information transmitted, influence decision making. This thesis studies from a theoretical, normative and positive point of view, the impact of the possibilities of information certification on those of decision manipulation. In a first part, we deal with a consultative decision making (experts are consulted by decision makers). In the second part, we deal with deliberative decision making (the decision making is directly entrusted to the experts who have to give their opinion after deliberation).

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This thesis analyzes the impact of inequality within the family on inequality judgments about household income. It is assumed that homogeneous individuals are treated unequally within the family. The aim is to describe the sharing rules that preserve dominance in the Lorenz sense (relative, generalized, absolute) at the individual level. For the welfare analysis, the central condition (extended to the case of heterogeneous families) is the concavity of the sharing function. The inequality analysis highlights the role of other classes of partition functions consistent with the intuition that the richest households are also the most unequal. A microeconomic model derives the sharing rule in terms of the risk attitudes of the couple members. The relationship between the household poverty line and the individual poverty line is discussed before concluding with an axiomatic approach to poverty in the space of "capabilities" at Sen.

During the depressive phase experienced by the European economies of the continent in the first half of the 1990s, the emphasis on social minima as a safety net was the subject of a broad social consensus. Today, analysts are concerned about whether these same social minima are not a major obstacle to a return to employment for this segment of the population. In this thesis, we propose to evaluate, with the help of original instruments, the impact, both incentive and redistributive, that a reform of this type could have. Income compensation allowance. On French households. To do this, we develop a microsimulation model whose originality lies in taking into account the temporal specificity of the fiscal-social system. In order to evaluate the redistributive effects, we construct a modified version of the sequential dominance criteria. This new criterion makes it possible to conclude that the reform is normative, whereas the usual criteria lead to a much more vague diagnosis. With respect to the incentive aspect, we study the consequences that the reform could have on the labor supply of individuals, using a model combining econometrics and microsimulation. The results show that financial incentives do play a significant role in the return to work. However, even in the case of scenarios with particularly advantageous formulas, the fraction of individuals who would be. Back to work. Remains modest. Moreover, the reform would induce a non-negligible share of individuals working before the reform to reduce their labor supply.

In this paper, we study three specific problems in normative public economics or positive political economy related to the lack of information (or the impossibility of obtaining information) about the state of the economy. First, in the classical optimal income taxation model of Mirrlees, we abandon the assumption that the state knows perfectly the distribution of talents in the economy. In a dynamic model with Bayesian learning, we show that this initial uncertainty leads to a systematic bias towards a higher inactivity rate (chapter 2). Second, we continue to explore the consequences of imperfect information about talent allocation by considering the case where the decision is not taken by a central planner but by democratically elected representatives based on their fiscal policy proposals. We show that when two political parties compete on the basis of proposals for a linear income tax, the lack of certainty about the distribution of talent leads to higher inactivity and tax rates than when this distribution is known with certainty at the outset (chapter 3). In a final chapter, we address the problem of the informational efficiency of indirect democracy: in a framework close to that of the Condorcet jury, we show that even if voters are rather poorly informed about the economic situation, the competition for power encourages relatively better informed political parties to propose the policy they consider best for the electorate (chapter 4).

This thesis has a double objective: to inventory the concepts and results discovered by economists to analyze income distributions and direct taxation and to apply them to the study of the French fiscal and social system. In the first part, the measures of inequality are described and the use of the Lorenz criterion is justified with the work done since Atkinson. The relationship between progressivity and the equalizing power of tax scales is examined using Jakobson's approach, when incomes are exogenous. In France, incomes are successively subject to different levies, social contributions and income tax. Breton, Moyes and Trannoy studied the equalization properties of compound scales and established the necessary and sufficient conditions for inequality to be reduced when the degree of progressivity of an element of the compound scale is increased. The results are established independently of the distribution of primary incomes and focus on the function linking disposable income to primary income. In the second part, we present the theory of optimal taxation which asks how best to construct a tax system with redistributive objectives, defined by an exogenous social welfare function, when labor income is endogenous I. E. . Result from individual labor supply behavior. Incentive constraints limit government action: too much progressivity may undermine its objectives. In the third part, we describe the social and fiscal legislation and analyze the equalizing power of the French compound tax system from 1959 to 1996. We investigate whether it has reduced income inequality and study the evolution of the equalizing power of the compound tax scale, reasoning independently of the income distribution. This study also highlights the negative effects of certain mechanisms on equalization and efficiency.

The main objective of the thesis is to provide instruments, criteria for comparing uncertain income flows over time. For example, investment projects, consumption plans, and salary careers generate incomes that are considered random over several periods. The author therefore first reviews stochastic dominance criteria, which allow us to compare uncertain income distributions over a period, by comparing the distributions or their inverses. The analogy with tools for comparing the inequality of income distributions between companies is highlighted. Then, original criteria of temporal dominance, allowing the comparison of certain incomes over several periods, are provided. The thesis then gives the criteria allowing the comparison of either the utility expectation of present values or the present value of utility expectations, the stochastic and temporal dominance criteria. The thesis concludes with a comparison of the indexed careers of some teachers in the French National Education system, followed by a comparison of two samples of university professors' salary careers.