Research
Reseach topics: public economics, political economy, applied microeconomics, experimental economics
My amazing coauthors: Antoinette Baujard, Sylvain Bouveret, Théo Delemazure, João V. Ferreira, Carl Gaigné, Federico Gonzalez, Gianluca Grimalda, Jérôme Lang, Isabelle Lebon, Maria Marino, Simone Marsilio, Pauline Mille, Fabien Moizeau, Johanna Mollerstrom, Sonia Paty, Matthieu Pourieux, Benoit Tarroux
You can find all my published work and working papers here: Google Scholar, ORCID
Publications
2. Baujard, A., Brunetti, R., Lebon, I., & Marsilio, S. (2025). How people understand voting rules. Public Choice [Link to paper]
If individuals are to be empowered in their selection or use of a voting rule, it is necessary that they understand it. This paper analyzes people’s understanding of two voting rules: evaluative voting and majority judgment. We first distinguish three components of understanding in this context: how to fill in the ballot; how votes are aggregated; and how to vote strategically. To measure each component, we draw on results from a lab experiment on incentivized voting where participants are exogenously assigned single-peaked preferences and answer comprehension questions on the rules employed. We find that most participants understand how to fill in the ballot and how votes are aggregated; however, participants’ understanding of vote aggregation under majority judgment is lower and more heterogeneous. While some participants correctly understand its aggregation property, a sizable group fails to grasp it. We also observe no difference in voting behavior between evaluative voting and majority judgment: the data confirm the theoretical prediction that under evaluative voting there will be a greater incidence of strategic voting through the use of extreme grades, but contradict the prediction that under majority judgment voters will vote more sincerely. Finally, we find that with majority judgment, the better voters understand how votes are aggregated, the more they make use of extreme grades.
Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of the credit market on urban land rents and the implications for tax policy. We introduce two credit market imperfections in the canonical urban land use model: a borrowing cost and a down-payment requirement. We first show that both imperfections lower equilibrium land prices in the most attractive locations within a city. This downward effect is more likely to occur when land is scarce as well as when cities are large and endowed with inefficient transport infrastructures. However, only the down-payment requirement generates utility differentials among homogeneous households (symmetry-breaking). We further show that the Henry George Theorem, which posits that a confiscatory tax on land rents is sufficient to finance public goods, needs to be amended in the presence of credit market imperfections as aggregate land rents are lower than public expenditures. Depending on the nature of mortgage market imperfections, we derive optimal tax schedules.
Working papers
We examine the role of land in wealth dynamics and taxation policy by focusing on the interplay among agents’ bidding for location, mortgage market imperfections, and inheritance. We develop a model in which altruistic agents leave to their heir a financial bequest and their housing wealth. The borrowing constraint generates a housing return premium and spatial wealth sorting, which translate into persistent inequality. We derive an optimal tax schedule that combines a tax on the land share in the value of inherited housing assets and on lifetime wealth, allowing a more efficient allocation of resources and lower inequality.
Representative Policy-Makers? A Behavioral Experiment with French Politicians (with Matthieu Pourieux) [Working paper] Revise & Resubmit - Economica
This study leverages an online behavioral experiment to analyze political representation—whether politicians’ decisions align with citizens’ preferences over the same issue—and behavioral representation—whether politicians’ decisions align with citizens’ decisions within the same decision environment. We recruited 760 local politicians and 655 non-politicians in France to participate as policy-makers in a taxation-redistribution game. In the game, two policy-makers compete to choose a flat tax rate for a group of citizens, who are selected from the French general population and state their preferred tax rate. We exogenously manipulate (i) the information provided to policy-makers about citizens’ preferred tax rates and (ii) the degree of competition between policy-makers. Finally, we measure policy-makers’ beliefs regarding both citizens’ preferences and their competitor’s choice. We observe that policy-makers positively react to the information, but they often deviate from it, which can be mostly explained by their beliefs about both citizens’ preferences and their competitor’s choices. Varying the degree of political competition has no impact on these results. Finally, we find that politicians believe citizens want lower tax rates and are more confident in their beliefs than non-politicians. Once beliefs are accounted for, we observe little differences between the two groups within the game. Our findings suggest that policy-makers act as pro-social agents who implement citizens’ preferences based on their beliefs when they lack information about these preferences.
Whether in education, performance reviews, or elections, grades serve as a tool for assessment, yet the universality of their meanings remains an open question. When voting under majority judgment, voters assign verbal grades such as “excellent, very good, good, fairly good, acceptable, insufficient, to reject” to each candidate. The meaning of these grades should be clear and consistent to every voter. Balinski and Laraki (2011) call it “universal language” and claim that the grade labels convey absolute meaning. This paper explores the concept of “absolute meaning”. We conducted an online experiment (N=1955) where participants voted for French presidential candidates under majority judgment with different grade scales. We find that the grade distributions obtained by candidates are strongly impacted by the grade scales used by voters. Therefore, the data rejects the assertion that grades convey absolute meaning.
Trickle-Down Economics, Merit, and Redistribution: An Experiment with the Poorest and Richest US Americans (with Gianluca Grimalda & Maria Marino) [Working paper]
Despite growing inequality, demand for redistribution has remained stagnant, which is particularly puzzling for the poor. We investigate whether attitudes toward "trickle-down" economics and preferences for fairness affect demand for redistribution. We involve US residents in the bottom (N=1,200) and top (N=1,146) 20% of the income distribution in experimental redistributive decisions from high-income real-life entrepreneurs to low-income recipients. We find that entrepreneurs' activities with potential for trickle-down, such as high employment or innovation rates, are largely irrelevant to redistribution. Philanthropic donations, however, reduce redistribution demand among the poor. The most important factor for redistribution is the desire to sanction the "undeserving poor" and, to a lesser extent, to reward the "deserving rich", measured by daily working hours and the founding of the firm. Decisions by high-income and low-income participants generally follow the same patterns, are quantitatively similar, and are mediated by economic and political identity.
Selected work in progress
Municipalities' Voting Power and Housing Supply: Evidence From French Intermunipal Cooperation [WP coming out soon]
Mediation, Fairness, and Efficiency in Bargaining (with João V. Ferreira and Benoit Tarroux) [Analyzing the data]
The Determinants of Municipalities' Mergers (with Pauline Mille and Sonia Paty)
Climate change and redistributive preferences (with Federico Gonzalez, Maria Marino, and Johanna Mollerstrom)
An Experiment on the Impact of the Number of Candidates in Approval Voting (with Antoinette Baujard, Jérôme Lang, and Théo Delemazure)
Miscellaneous
Replicating Schwardmann, Tripodi and van der Weele: Self-persuasion: Evidence from field experiments at international debating competitions (with Alistair Cameron, Yao Kpegli, Jona Krutaj, and Sudipta Sarangi) [Discussion paper]