Macro oriented work

This paper studies the role of information on the evolution of beliefs and smoking in the United States in the 20th and early 21st centuries. We develop a dynamic and dynastic model of smoking, mortality and beliefs. The information about the harmfulness of smoking comes from three different sources: (i) medical information or public health messages, including obfuscation from the tobacco industry, (ii) learning from individual health shocks,  and (iii) social learning, understood as the diffusion of information and beliefs within and across social groups over time. We estimate the model using data on smoking behavior, health information and data on beliefs on the effect of smoking on health that cover several decades and different social groups. The estimated model shows that each of these mechanisms played an important role in the formation of beliefs about the harmfulness of smoking and that social learning was particularly important for low-educated individuals.

Viruses are a major threat to human health, and—given that they spread through social interactions—represent a costly externality. This article addresses three main questions: (i) what are the unintended consequences of economic activity on the spread of infections; (ii) how efficient are measures that limit interpersonal contacts; (iii) how do we allocate our scarce resources to limit the spread of infections? To answer these questions, we use novel high frequency data from France on the incidence of a number of viral diseases across space, for different age groups, over a quarter of a century. We use quasi-experimental variation to evaluate the importance of policies reducing interpersonal contacts such as school closures or the closure of public transpor- tation networks. While these policies significantly reduce disease prevalence, we find that they are not cost-effective. We find that expansions of transporta- tion networks have significant health costs in increasing the spread of viruses, and that propagation rates are pro-cyclically sensitive to economic conditions and increase with inter-regional trade. 

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We study the effect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime-aged population. Using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a 25-year period in three different cross-sectional surveys we aggregate data by date-of-birth cohort to construct a “synthetic cohort” data set with details of income, expenditure, socio-demographic factors, health outcomes, and selected risk factors. We then exploit structural and arguably exogenous changes in cohort incomes over the 1980s and 1990s to uncover causal effects of permanent income shocks on health. We find that such income innovations have little effect on a wide range of health measures, but do lead to increases in mortality and risky health behaviour.

This paper studies under which conditions a cross-sectional regression yields unbiased estimates of the parameters of an individual dynamic model with fixed effects and individual-specific responses to macro shocks. We show that the OLS estimation of a relationship involving non stationary variables on a cross-section yields estimates which converge to the true value when calendar time tends to infinity. We then consider the particular case of an AI demand model, and we show, using French quarterly aggregate time-series, that budget shares, relative prices and the log of real total expenditure are I (1) and form a cointegrated system. We compare these macro estimates to estimates obtained from three Family Expenditure Surveys and find large differences.

This paper studies the effects of subsidies on durable goods markets. In particular, we focus on a recent policy in France in which the governments of Balladur and Juppé subsidized the replacement of old cars with new ones. To study this policy, we construct a dynamic stochastic discrete choice model of car ownership at the household level. The resulting decision rules and equilibrium conditions are used to estimate the underlying parameters of the model using aggregate data. These policy functions are used to evaluate the short‐ and long‐run effects of the French policies. We find that these policies do stimulate the automobile sector in the short run but, through the induced changes in the cross‐sectional distribution of car ages, create the basis for subsequent low activity. Further, while these policies increase government revenues in the short run, revenues in the long run are lower relative to a baseline without intervention.

This paper studies the joint dynamics of aggregate car sales, prices and income. We analyze theses series using a dynamic discrete choice model which is consistent with microeconomic evidence on the infrequency of durable purchases. We estimate the parameters of this choice problem at the household level. Through aggregation we show that the model can reproduce the dynamics of demand captured by an ARMA model, as in Mankiw (1982), and the joint dynamics summarized through a VAR representation of car sales, income and prices. We find that most of the variation in car sales is due to shocks which influence the replacement probability rather than the cross sectional distribution of car vintages.

We develop a framework for estimating the optimal expenditure of agents subject to unobserved liquidity constraints. Our framework allows us to estimate credit ceilings as well as preference parameters. We apply the framework to data on net resource transfers from private lenders to twenty-nine sovereign debtors during 1973-1993. We obtain reasonable estimates of the discount factor, elasticity of marginal utility of expenditure, and the credit ceiling for most countries. Our estimated credit ceilings rise quite regularly with income across the countries of our sample, and are positively associated with a country's trade, in line with several theoretical arguments. Our estimates imply that slilghtly less than half the countries in our sample were liquidity constrained during the 1970s. The fraction rose to around 80 per cent in the mid 1980s, and subsequently declined.