http://dspace.essec.fr/handle/essec/1 2026-04-17T12:03:32Z 2026-04-17T12:03:32Z Berrou, Maxime http://dspace.essec.fr/handle/essec/8203 2026-02-05T04:03:20Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Essays on globalization, domestic distortions, and development Berrou, Maxime This thesis is organized in three chapters. The first chapter is titled “The Effects of Tariff Liberalization on Informality" and is co-written with Pamela Bombarda and Maria Bas. This chapter illustrates how trade modifies the magnitude of the main consequence of size-dependent distortions in the economy: the informal sector. Specifically,we study howthe substantial trade reforms implemented in the 1990s and the 2000s impacted the allocation of economic activity between formality and informality. We adopt a differences-in-differences framework based on the comparison of industry states for which tariffs were more liberalized, relative to other less liberalized industries. We find evidence of two competing effects: while greater output competition leads to a greater reduction in formality shares, access to foreign intermediates increases it relatively more. Those results are validated using worker-level data, and are not driven by a change in the structure of industries but by within-industry reallocations. The input-trade liberalization effect dominates overall. A quantification exercise based on a development accounting framework estimates a large labor productivity gap between sectors, large trade-induced reallocations of workers and susbtantial productivity gains due to the reallocations induced by the trade reforms. In the second chapter, “Tax Reform, Access to Intermediates, and Production Decisions", I focus on large manufacturing plants and investigate how a reduction in input taxation impacted their access to intermediates as well as their productivity. Because it lacked a nationwide input tax credit system, India used to tax out-of-state intermediates without giving plants the possibility to claim those input taxes afterwards. In 2017, a reform led to the implementation of a nationwide system which removed this excessive tax burden. To analyze the effects of this reform on plant-level outcomes, I implement a differences-in-differences strategy. I define a control group of plants outside the scope of the reform due to their pre-reform production of exempted goods. Relative to control plants, I find that treated plants benefited from lower taxes per sales, and were able to source more inputs on the intensive margin as well as on the extensive margin. I also show that those effects are driven by large plants, and plants located in landlocked states, which were particularly hurt by interstate barriers to trade prior to the reform. Lastly, I show that the productivity of treated plants and the number of products they make increased relatively more for treated plants following the reform. Lastly, the third chapter, “Local Labor Market Institutions, Trade and Employment" is also a joint work with Pamela Bombarda and Maria Bas. It extends the first chapter by considering the rôle of local labor market institutions. Specifically, we assess whether hiring and firing costs magnify or reduce the effects of trade on formal employment, and notice that the results depend on the decade under consideration. We make the hypothesis that this difference over time is due to the rise in the use of contract labor in the 2000s, permitting formal firms to legally circumvent some regulations. Then, relying on plant-level and worker microdata, we investigate how specific labor market institutions, such as enforcement, union strength and employment protection legislation, mediate the effect of trade on plants’ decisions to hire workers.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z de Villeneuve Bargemon, Mahaut http://dspace.essec.fr/handle/essec/8202 2026-02-05T04:03:15Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Three essays in environmental microeconomics de Villeneuve Bargemon, Mahaut This thesis explores how incomplete information shapes both environmental policies and market outcomes. Across three chapters, it investigates different situations of informational asymmetries – between regulators, consumers, and firms – in contexts involving pollution, the provision of green products, and climate-related risks. The first chapter, titled “Tax the Emissions You Can’t See : Designing CBAMs under Incomplete Information” examines the design of a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism when a regulator cannot verify the emissions embedded in imported goods. The chapter builds a Principal-Agent model in which a regulator aims to regulate firms with different emission levels. It shows that when emissions cannot be verified, the optimal CBAM must distort the tax structure relative to the optimal solution : clean firms may face quantity restrictions while polluting firms are rewarded through lower taxes to induce truthful reporting of their emissions. The analysis also considers the role of exogenous constraints such as WTO rules, and the firms’ endogenous choice of technology. The second chapter, “Green, Greener or Neutral ? Signaling Environmental Quality When Consumers Can’t Tell”, explores how a firm can credibly convey information about the environmental quality of its product when consumers value this attribute but cannot directly observe it, reflecting the credence nature of green products. I develop a signaling model in which a monopoly firm can be either green or neutral, and consumers derive both private and public-good benefits from purchasing the environmentally superior product. The firm chooses observable instruments (price and costly effort) to provide information about its environmental performance. Effort has asymmetric effects : it yields further environmental gains for a green firm but is purely wasteful for a neutral one. I show that a separating equilibrium can arise where the green firm distinguishes itself by exerting positive effort and charging higher price. As a consequence, incomplete information can partially offset the under-provision of environmental quality by inducing green effort for signaling purposes, which indirectly contributes to the public good. The chapter also analyzes how subsidies for green effort may both restore optimal levels of environmental quality while ensuring proper separation between green and neutral firms. The third chapter, titled “The Insurer-Investor Dilemma : When Insurers Fuel the Risks They Cover” investigates the interaction between insurers’ financial decisions and the design of insurance policies, when the nature of investments influence climate-related risks. The model considers two insurers that operate in two indirectly linked activities. On the one hand, they compete to offer insurance policies to agents with heterogeneous probabilities of loss ; on the other, they invest on financial markets, choosing between a risky and a safe strategy. Risky investments (e.g. in carbon-intensive assets) yield higher returns but simultaneously increase the likelihood of loss for agents exposed to climate-related hazards. When insurers can perfectly identify agents’ risk types, risky investments are always preferred, as they justify higher premiums and increase expected returns. However, when insurers cannot perfectly observe agents’ risk types, the coverage distortions necessary to separate low and high-risk agents worsen with risky investments, reducing their attractiveness relative to safe strategies. In this setting, asymmetric information can therefore discipline excessive risk-taking and incentivize safe investments. The chapter further analyzes how the introduction of coverage regulations influences insurers’ portfolio choices.

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Gomes de Oliveira, Raphael http://dspace.essec.fr/handle/essec/8201 2026-02-05T04:03:27Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Essays on normative economic theory Gomes de Oliveira, Raphael This thesis contributes to the field of Normative Economic Theory by applying formal economic models to inform philosophical debates on social welfare, rationality and measurements of inequality. It is composed of three essays. The first essay revisits the debate between Harsanyi and Rawls by developing a framework that introduces ambiguity into the Impartial Observer model, thereby constructing a continuum of social welfare functions between Harsanyi’s utilitarianism and Rawls’s maximin rule. The second essay, co-authored with Marcus Pivato, contributes to normative decision theory. It investigates how a rational agent’s preferences under ambiguity evolve with new information, and shows that in the long run, preferences converge to those of an expectedutility maximizer. The third essay, also co-authored with Marcus Pivato, develops a general framework to connect social welfare functions with inequality indices. Using a welfarist Taylor series expansion, it provides a unified method for analyzing the normative foundations of multidimensional inequality indices.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Tröbinger, Matthias http://dspace.essec.fr/handle/essec/8193 2026-01-29T04:03:18Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Unleashing the power of many: three essays on harnessing collective problem-solving Tröbinger, Matthias This dissertation is grounded in a strong curiosity about how effective collaborative problem-solving can be facilitated in decentralized contexts. My interest in collective intelligence, participatory democracy through deliberation, and crowdfunding particularly stems from a broader fascination with the tremendous potential of decentralized collaboration to foster distributed, participatory decision-making while tapping into the wisdom of the collective. Despite this promise, the potential of decentralized collaboration is most often unrealized. Decentralized collaboration is fragile, prone to trade-offs, inefficiencies, and failures. For instance, most crowdfunding campaigns fail to obtain the collective buy-in needed from dispersed resource providers. Similarly, most online deliberations produce divergent, incompatible proposals, and fail to converge around valuable solutions. Importantly, these failures do not reflect a lack of diverse ideas or innovation potential of the collective. Instead, they reflect a coordination challenge: a missing or insufficient structure for aggregating and synthesizing distributed input. In fact, while diversity of input is essential for the emergence of high-quality collective problem-solving, to obtain broad buy-in from participants, it must be complemented by processes and scaffolds that facilitate aggregation and convergence. To date, most research on distributed problem-solving has primarily resorted to and focused on problems for which winning solutions can be determined through the aggregation of votes or numerical judgments. In contrast, research on how solution seekers can tap into collective problem-solving for open-ended problems—for which inputs are qualitative, such as feedback from crowd supporters on a business idea and open-text proposals to solve a problem generated by participants in online deliberation—is scant and emerging. This dissertation taps into this gap by examining how minimally invasive coordination mechanisms and process scaffolds that maintain the participatory ethos of these settings can enable decentralized groups to solve these problems more effectively. Specifically, in this dissertation, I focus on contexts where solution seekers—in my case, ventures and institutional actors—must elicit and structure input from ad hoc, selfselected, online groups with no prior collaboration history. Across these three studies, using crowdfunding and online deliberation as empirical contexts, I examine how collaboration can be structured to harness input from distributed participants and improve the quality of collective outcomes. To study these contexts, I draw on a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, including bibliometric analysis, multi-case studies, interviews, text analysis, and online experiments, selected according to the demands of the research question at hand. Together, the three dissertation chapters explore complementary facets of decentralized collaboration and examine how comparably minimal interventions can meaningfully support collective problem-solving. Two central propositions guide my work: First, with participants self-selecting into tasks, these settings transcend organizational boundaries; thus, coordination mechanisms are required, despite solution seekers holding limited central authority. Second, the effectiveness of interventions to support collective problem-solving is contingent on the nature of the problem to be solved, the context, and the depth of participant engagement.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z