Paris West University Nanterre La Défense

About: Paris West University Nanterre La Défense is a education organization based out in Paris, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Finite element method. The organization has 895 authors who have published 1430 publications receiving 21712 citations.

Flight-to-Safety and the Credit Crunch: A New History of the Banking Crisis in France During the Great Depression

Abstract: Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale and consequences of the French banking crises of 1930–1931 were never assessed quantitatively due to lack of data in the absence of banking regulation. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 400 banks, Patrice Baubeau, Eric Monnet, Angelo Riva & Stefano Ungaro show that the crisis was more severe and occurred earlier than previously thought, and it was very asymmetric, without affecting main commercial banks. The primary transmission channel was a flight-to-safety of deposits from banks to savings institutions and the central bank, leading to a major, persistent disruption in business lending. In line with the gold standard mentality, cash deposited with savings institutions and the central bank was used to decrease marketable public debt and increase gold reserves, rather than pursue countercyclical policies. Despite massive capital inflows, France suffered from a severe, persistent credit crunch.

La persistance de l'inflation dans les modèles néo-keynésiens

Abstract: La persistance de l'inflation dans les modeles neo-keynesiens, par Mohamed Safouane Ben Aissa et Olivier Musy Nous derivons les dynamiques de l'inflation issues des differentes hypotheses d'ajustement des prix rencontrees dans la litterature neo-keynesienne. Pour chaque modele nous calculons la reponse de l'inflation et du produit suite a un choc sur le taux de croissance de la masse monetaire. Nous constatons que seules deux modelisations reproduisent correctement certains faits stylises importants concernant l'impact de ce type de choc monetaire : la premiere est la specification avec prix predetermines de Mankiw et Reis (2002) et la seconde celle a prix fixes de Gali et Gertler (1999). Aucune des autres alternatives examinees, y compris le modele a prix fixes de Fuhrer et Moore (1995), ne genere de reponse satisfaisante. Elles sont notamment toutes incapables de reproduire une persistance suffisante de l'inflation. Ceci montre que dans les modeles a prix fixes, la structure de rigidite choisie importe autant pour le degre de persistance de l'inflation que la presence ou non de valeurs retardees de l'inflation dans la dynamique.Numeros de classification du Journal of Economic Literature : E31, E52.

Estimating linear functionals of a sparse family of Poisson means

Abstract: Assume that we observe a sample of size n composed of p-dimensional signals, each signal having independent entries drawn from a scaled Poisson distribution with an unknown intensity. We are interested in estimating the sum of the n unknown intensity vectors, under the assumption that most of them coincide with a given “background” signal. The number s of p-dimensional signals different from the background signal plays the role of sparsity and the goal is to leverage this sparsity assumption in order to improve the quality of estimation as compared to the naive estimator that computes the sum of the observed signals. We first introduce the group hard thresholding estimator and analyze its mean squared error measured by the squared Euclidean norm. We establish a nonasymptotic upper bound showing that the risk is at most of the order of $$\sigma ^2(sp+s^2\sqrt{p}\log ^{3/2}(np))$$ . We then establish lower bounds on the minimax risk over a properly defined class of collections of s-sparse signals. These lower bounds match with the upper bound, up to logarithmic terms, when the dimension p is fixed or of larger order than $$s^2$$ . In the case where the dimension p increases but remains of smaller order than $$s^2$$ , our results show a gap between the lower and the upper bounds, which can be up to order $$\sqrt{p}$$ .

Self-protection, private insurance, and public prevention for non pecuniary risks under ambiguity 1

Abstract: In this paper, we analyze the choice of self-protection and insurance made by individuals whose utility depends simultaneously on their monetary wealth and a non-pecuniary risky status. By considering a two argument utility, we show that in the presence of ambiguity on the effective distribution of the non pecuniary risk, an increase in the agent’s ambiguity aversion increases her self-protection if she is a correlation lover (u12 > 0). Besides, public prevention and private effort may be either substitutes or complements, depending on the population at stake.We also show that full insurance can be optimal even if insurance premia are loaded, in particular when the deterioration of the non pecuniary status presents some irreversibility. These results hold whatever the level of private effort chosen by the agent. Cross prudence and attitude toward correlation between both arguments of the utility as investigated by Eeckhoudt, Rey and Schlesinger (2007) are considered to obtain the results.