THE JOINT DESIGN OF UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE AND EMPLOYMENT PROTECTION: A FIRST PASS

Unemployment insurance and employment protection are typically discussed and studied in isolation. In this paper, we argue that they are tightly linked, and we focus on their joint optimal design in a simple model, with risk‐averse workers, risk‐neutral firms, and random shocks to productivity. We show that, in the “first best,”unemployment insurance comes with employment protection—in the form of layoff taxes; indeed, optimality requires that layoff taxes be equal to unemployment benefits. We then explore the implications of four broad categories of deviations from first best: limits on insurance, limits on layoff taxes, ex post wage bargaining, and ex ante heterogeneity of firms or workers. We show how the design must be modified in each case. Finally, we draw out the implications of our analysis for current policy debates and reform proposals, from the financing of unemployment insurance, to the respective roles of severance payments and unemployment benefits.     

Perception of Multisensory Gender Coherence in 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants

One of the most salient social categories conveyed by human faces and voices is gender. We investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Infants viewed two side‐by‐side video clips of a man and a woman singing a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female sound track. Results showed that 6‐month‐old infants did not match the audible and visible attributes of gender, and 9‐month‐old infants matched only female faces and voices. These findings indicate that the ability to perceive the multisensory coherence of gender emerges relatively late in infancy and that it reflects the greater experience that most infants have with female faces and voices.     

TAX POLICY AND INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, 1979–2007

This paper assesses the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality over around three decades, from 1979 to 2007. It applies a new method for decomposing changes in government redistribution into (1) a direct policy effect resulting from policy changes and (2) the effects of changing market incomes. Over the period as a whole, the tax policy changes increased income inequality by pushing up the income share of high‐income earners (the top 20%). (JEL H23, H31, H53, P16)     

Economic Modeling Triggers More Efficient Planning: An Experimental Justification

Consider a firm as an organization that needs to efficiently coordinate several specialized departments in an uncertain environment. Decision making involves collective planning sessions and decentralized operational processes. In this setting this paper explores the role of economic modeling through an experimental game. Results support the idea that economic modeling favors higher performance. Economic modeling facilitates the emergence of common knowledge and the decomposition of a group decision problem into individual decision problems that are meaningfully interrelated. This paper was presented at the Porquerolles Summer School on Cognitive Sciences, September 2001.     

Celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory

This article proposes to redefine celebrity as a kind of capital, thereby extending Bourdieu’s field theory. This redefinition is necessary, it is argued, because one of the main limitations shared by current definitions of celebrity is their lack of explanatory power of the convertibility of celebrity into other resources, such as economic or political capital. Celebrity capital, or broadly recognizability, is conceptualized as accumulated media visibility that results from recurrent media representations. In that sense, it is a substantial kind of capital and not a subset or special category of social or symbolic capital, the latter being defined as legitimate recognition by other agents in a social field. Rather than adding another definition of celebrity next to many others, the notion of celebrity capital proposed here should be seen as an attempt to integrate the existing approaches of celebrity into a single comprehensive conceptualization that can enable us to grasp this societal and cultural phenomenon better.     

Regression modelling of interval censored data based on the adaptive ridge procedure

A new method for the analysis of time to ankylosis complication on a dataset of replanted teeth is proposed. In this context of left-censored, interval-censored and right-censored data, a Cox model with piecewise constant baseline hazard is introduced. Estimation is carried out with the expectation maximisation (EM) algorithm by treating the true event times as unobserved variables. This estimation procedure is shown to produce a block diagonal Hessian matrix of the baseline parameters. Taking advantage of this interesting feature in the EM algorithm, a L0 penalised likelihood method is implemented in order to automatically determine the number and locations of the cuts of the baseline hazard. This procedure allows to detect specific areas of time where patients are at greater risks for ankylosis. The method can be directly extended to the inclusion of exact observations and to a cure fraction. Theoretical results are obtained which allow to derive statistical inference of the model parameters from asymptotic likelihood theory. Through simulation studies, the penalisation technique is shown to provide a good fit of the baseline hazard and precise estimations of the resulting regression parameters.     

Le télétravail des cadres : entre suractivité et apprentissage de nouvelles temporalités

Telework is often considered to be a means for making life at work and at home more compatible. Why do some wage-earners, in particular white-collar employees, choose it? Do they actually make a choice or simply adopt a solution “for want of anything better” in an organizational context with its limitations? In this case, what factors do they weigh against each other? Once they have opted for telework, how do these white collars manage to adjust their occupational and family lives? Is their aspiration to improve the balance between the two satisfied? Or do they run up against unexpected difficulties? Answers to these questions come out of two studies conducted among white-collar employees in different sorts of telework. Given the absence of institutional regulations governing the relation between life at home and at work, telework, far from leading to a more balanced life, jeopardizes the organization’s collective efficiency.