Sharp Bounds on Heterogeneous Individual Treatment Responses

This paper discusses how to identify individual-specific causal effects of an ordered discrete endogenous variable. The counterfactual heterogeneous causal information is recovered by identifying the partial differences of a structural relation. The proposed refutable nonparametric local restrictions exploit the fact that the pattern of endogeneity may vary across the level of the unobserved variable. The restrictions adopted in this paper impose a sense of order to an unordered binary endogeneous variable. This allows for a uni.ed structural approach to studying various treatment effects when self-selection on unobservables is present. The usefulness of the identi.cation results is illustrated using the data on the Vietnam-era veterans. The empirical findings reveal that when other observable characteristics are identical, military service had positive impacts for individuals with low (unobservable) earnings potential, while it had negative impacts for those with high earnings potential. This heterogeneity would not be detected by average effects which would underestimate the actual effects because different signs would be cancelled out. This partial identification result can be used to test homogeneity in response. When homogeneity is rejected, many parameters based on averages may deliver misleading information.

How private is private information? The ability to spot deception in an economic game

We provide experimental evidence on the ability to detect deceit in a buyer-seller game with asymmetric information. Sellers have private information about the buyer's valuation of a good and sometimes have incentives to mislead buyers. We examine if buyers can spot deception in face-to-face encounters. We vary (1) whether or not the buyer can interrogate the seller, and (2) the contextual richness of the situation. We find that the buyers' prediction accuracy is above chance levels, and that interrogation and contextual richness are important factors determining the accuracy. These results show that there are circumstances in which part of the information asymmetry is eliminated by people's ability to spot deception.

What is the Causal Effect of Information and Learning about a Public Good on Willingness to Pay?

In this study we elicit agents’ prior information set regarding a public good, exogenously give information treatments to survey respondents and subsequently elicit willingness to pay for the good and posterior information sets. The design of this field experiment allows us to perform theoretically motivated hypothesis testing between different updating rules: non-informative updating, Bayesian updating, and incomplete updating. We find causal evidence that agents imperfectly update their information sets. We also field causal evidence that the amount of additional information provided to subjects relative to their pre-existing information levels can affect stated WTP in ways consistent overload from too much learning. This result raises important (though familiar) issues for the use of stated preference methods in policy analysis.

The Impact of Information Provision on Agglomeration Bonus Performance: An Experimental Study on Local Networks

The Agglomeration Bonus (AB) is a mechanism to induce adjacent landowners to spatially coordinate their land use for the delivery of ecosystem services from farmland. This paper uses laboratory experiments to explore the performance of the AB in achieving the socially optimal land management configuration in a local network environment where the information available to subjects varies. The AB poses a coordination problem between two Nash equilibria: a Pareto dominant and a risk dominant equilibrium. The experiments indicate that if subjects are informed about both their direct and indirect neighbors’ actions, they are more likely to coordinate on the Pareto dominant equilibrium relative to the case where subjects have information about their direct neighbors’ action only. However, the extra information can only delay – and not prevent – the transition to the socially inferior risk dominant Nash equilibrium. In the long run, the AB mechanism may only be partially effective in enhancing delivery of ecosystem services on farming landscapes featuring local networks.

Contribution à l'élaboration de mécanismes de détection, de contrôle et de lutte contre le blanchiment d'argent au regard de l'usage des technologies de l'information et de la communication "cas de l'Algérie"

Résumé : Désormais, la lutte contre le blanchiment d'argent constitue une priorité pour les Etats et les gouvernements dans le but, d'une part, de préserver l'économie et l'intégrité des places financières et, d'autre part, de priver les organisations criminelles des ressources financières. Dans ce contexte, la préoccupation majeure des autorités algériennes en charge de la lutte contre ce phénomène est de mettre en place un dispositif capable de détecter les mécanismes de blanchiment, d'en évaluer la menace et sur la base de cette connaissance, de définir et de déployer les moyens de riposte les plus efficaces et efficients. Mais nous constatons que mener des enquêtes de blanchiment en conséquence à un crime sous-jacent a montré ses limites en matière d'établissement de preuves, d'élucidation d'affaires et de recouvrement des avoirs. Par ailleurs, nous pensons qu'il serait plus judicieux de mettre en place en amont un contrôle «systématique» des flux financiers et des opérations inhabituelles et/ou suspectes et de là, identifier d'éventuelles opérations de blanchiment, sans forcément connaître le crime initial, en veillant au maintien de l'équilibre entre le «tout sécuritaire» orienté vers la surveillance accrue des flux et la préservation de la vie privée et des libertés individuelles. Notre thèse apporte un regard critique sur le dispositif actuel de lutte contre le blanchiment existant en Algérie que nous évaluons et sur lequel nous relevons plusieurs lacunes. Pour répondre aux problèmes identifiés nous proposons des solutions stratégiques, organisationnelles, méthodologiques et technologiques intégrées dans un cadre opérationnel cohérent au niveau national et international.

Dynamic Relational Contracts under Complete Information

This paper considers a long-term relationship between two agents who both undertake a costly action or investment that together produces a joint benefit. Agents have an opportunity to expropriate some of the joint benefit for their own use. Two cases are considered: (i) where agents are risk neutral and are subject to limited liability constraints and (ii) where agents are risk averse, have quasi-linear preferences in consumption and actions but where limited liability constraints do not bind. The question asked is how to structure the investments and division of the surplus over time so as to avoid expropriation. In the risk-neutral case, there may be an initial phase in which one agent overinvests and the other underinvests. However, both actions and surplus converge monotonically to a stationary state in which there is no overinvestment and surplus is at its maximum subject to the constraints. In the risk-averse case, there is no overinvestment. For this case, we establish that dynamics may or may not be monotonic depending on whether or not it is possible to sustain a first-best allocation. If the first-best allocation is not sustainable, then there is a trade-off between risk sharing and surplus maximization. In general, surplus will not be at its constrained maximum even in the long run.

Government information transparency

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a benevolent government may ex-post be non-informative, in an attempt to countervail the tax distortion with a "second best" compensating distortion in information. This result provides a rationale for independent national statistical offices, committed to truthful communication. We also find that whether inequality in income distribution favors or harms government transparency depends on labor supply elasticity.

Information Design

There are two ways of creating incentives for interacting agents to behave in a desired way. One is by providing appropriate payoff incentives, which is the subject of mechanism design. The other is by choosing the information that agents observe, which we refer to as information design. We consider a model of symmetric information where a designer chooses and announces the information structure about a payoff relevant state. The interacting agents observe the signal realizations and take actions which affect the welfare of both the designer and the agents. We characterize the general finite approach to deriving the optimal information structure for the designer - the one that maximizes the designer's ex ante expected utility subject to agents playing a Bayes Nash equilibrium. We then apply the general approach to a symmetric two state, two agent, and two actions environment in a parameterized underlying game and fully characterize the optimal information structure: it is never strictly optimal for the designer to use conditionally independent private signals; the optimal information structure may be a public signal or may consist of correlated private signals. Finally, we examine how changes in the underlying game affect the designer's maximum payoff. This exercise provides a joint mechanism/information design perspective.

The Optimal Degree of Monetary-Discretion in a New Keynesian Model with Private Information

This paper considers the optimal degree of discretion in monetary policy when the central bank conducts policy based on its private information about the state of the economy and is unable to commit. Society seeks to maximize social welfare by imposing restrictions on the central bank's actions over time, and the central bank takes these restrictions and the New Keynesian Phillips curve as constraints. By solving a dynamic mechanism design problem we find that it is optimal to grant "constrained discretion" to the central bank by imposing both upper and lower bounds on permissible inflation, and that these bounds must be set in a history-dependent way. The optimal degree of discretion varies over time with the severity of the time-inconsistency problem, and, although no discretion is optimal when the time-inconsistency problem is very severe, our numerical experiment suggests that no-discretion is a transient phenomenon, and that some discretion is granted eventually.

Applications of the MuSIASEM approach to study changes in the metabolic pattern of Catalonia

This document presents an integrated analysis of the performance of Catalonia based on an analysis of how the energy consumption (measured at the societal level for the Catalan Society) is used within both the productive sectors of the economy and the household, to generate added value, jobs, and to guarantee a given level of material standard of living to the population. The trends found in Catalonia are compared to the trends of other European Countries to contextualize the performance of Catalonia with respect to other societies that have followed different paths of economic development. The first part of the document consists of the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach that has been used to provide this integrated analysis of Catalan Society across different scales (starting from an analysis of the specific sectors of the Catalan economy as an Autonomous Community and scaling up to an intra-regional (European Union 14) comparison) and across different dimensions of analyses of energy consumption coupled with added value generation. Within the scope of this study, we observe the various trajectories of changes in the metabolic pattern for Catalonia and the EU14 countries in the Paid Work Sectors composed of namely, the Agricultural Sector, the Productive Sector and the Services and Government Sector also in comparison with the changes in the household sector. The flow intensities of the exosomatic energy and the added value generated for each specific sector are defined per hour of human activity, thus characterized as exosomatic energy (MJ/hour) (or Exosomatic Metabolic Rate) and added value (€/hour) (Economic Labour Productivity) across multiple levels. Within the second part of the document, the possible usage of the MuSIASEM approach to land use analyses (using a multi-level matrix of categories of land use) has been conducted.

Testing low-altitude infrared digital photography from a mini-UAV to retrieve information for biological conservation

Satellite remote sensing imagery is used for forestry, conservation and environmental applications, but insufficient spatial resolution, and, in particular, unavailability of images at the precise timing required for a given application, often prevent achieving a fully operational stage. Airborne remote sensing has the advantage of custom-tuned sensors, resolution and timing, but its price prevents using it as a routine technique for the mentioned fields. Some Unmanned Aerial Vehicles might provide a “third way” solution as low-cost techniques for acquiring remotely sensed information, under close control of the end-user, albeit at the expense of lower quality instrumentation and instability. This report evaluates a light remote sensing system based on a remotely-controlled mini-UAV (ATMOS-3) equipped with a color infra-red camera (VEGCAM-1) designed and operated by CATUAV. We conducted a testing mission over a Mediterranean landscape dominated by an evergreen woodland of Aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) and (Holm) oak (Quercus ilex) in the Montseny National Park (Catalonia, NE Spain). We took advantage of state-of-the-art ortho-rectified digital aerial imagery (acquired by the Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya over the area during the previous year) and used it as quality reference. In particular, we paid attention to: 1) Operationality of flight and image acquisition according to a previously defined plan; 2) Radiometric and geometric quality of the images; and 3) Operational use of the images in the context of applications. We conclude that the system has achieved an operational stage regarding flight activities, although with meteorological limits set by wind speed and turbulence. Appropriate landing areas can be sometimes limiting also, but the system is able to land on small and relatively rough terrains such as patches of grassland or short matorral, and we have operated the UAV as far as 7 km from the control unit. Radiometric quality is sufficient for interactive analysis, but probably insufficient for automated processing. A forthcoming camera is supposed to greatly improve radiometric quality and consistency. Conventional GPS positioning through time synchronization provides coarse orientation of the images, with no roll information.

Quality of web-based information on bipolar disorder

Rapport de synthèse : Introduction : Internet est une source importante d'information sur la santé mentale. Le trouble bipolaire est communément associé à un handicap, des comorbidités, un faible taux d'introspection et une mauvaise compliance au traitement. Le fardeau de la maladie, de par les épisodes dépressifs et maniaques, peut conduire les personnes (dont le diagnostic de trouble bipolaire a été déjà posé ou non), ainsi que leur famille à rechercher des informations sur Internet. De ce fait, il est important que les sites Web traitant du sujet contiennent de l'information de haute qualité, basée sur les évidences scientifiques. Objectif.: évaluer la qualité des informations consultables sur Internat au sujet du trouble bipolaire et identifier des indicateurs de qualité. Méthode: deux mots-clés : « bipolar disorder » et « manic depressive illness » ont été introduits dans les moteurs de recherche les plus souvent utilisés sur Internet. Les sites Internet ont été évalués avec un formulaire standard conçu pour noter les sites sur la base de l'auteur (privé, université, entreprise,...), la présentation, l'interactivité, la lisibilité et la qualité du contenu. Le label de qualité « Health On the Net» (HON), et l'outil DISCERN ont été utilisés pour vérifier leur efficacité comme indicateurs de la qualité. Résultats: sur les 80 sites identifiés, 34 ont été inclus. Sur la base de la mesure des résultats, la qualité du contenu des sites s'est avérée être bonne. La qualité du contenu des sites Web qui traitent du trouble bipolaire est expliquée de manière significative par la lisibilité, la responsabilité et l'interactivité aussi bien que par un score global. Conclusions: dans l'ensemble, la qualité du contenu de l'étude des sites Web traitant du trouble bipolaire est de bonne qualité.

The dynamics of yeast telomeres and silencing proteins through the cell cycle.

Genes integrated near the telomeres of budding yeast have a variegated pattern of gene repression that is mediated by the silent information regulatory proteins Sir2p, Sir3p, and Sir4p. Immunolocalization and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) reveal 6-10 perinuclear foci in which silencing proteins and subtelomeric sequences colocalize, suggesting that these are sites of Sir-mediated repression. Telomeres lacking subtelomeric repeat elements and the silent mating locus, HML, also localize to the periphery of the nucleus. Conditions that disrupt telomere proximal repression disrupt the focal staining pattern of Sir proteins, but not necessarily the localization of telomeric DNA. To monitor the telomere-associated pools of heterochromatin-binding proteins (Sir and Rap1 proteins) during mitotic cell division, we have performed immunofluorescence and telomeric FISH on populations of yeast cells synchronously traversing the cell cycle. We observe a partial release of Rap1p from telomeres in late G2/M, although telomeres appear to stay clustered during G2-phase and throughout mitosis. A partial release of Sir3p and Sir4p during mitosis also occurs. This is not observed upon HU arrest, although other types of DNA damage cause a dramatic relocalization of Sir and Rap1 proteins. The observed cell cycle dynamics were confirmed by direct epifluorescence of a GFP-Rap1p fusion. Using live GFP fluorescence we show that the diffuse mitotic distribution of GFP-Rap1p is restored to the interphase pattern of foci in early G1-phase.