Lionel Ragot

Should the U.S. Have Locked the Heaven's Door? Reassessing the Benefits of the Postwar Immigration

This paper examines the economic impact of the second great immigration wave (1945–2000) on the US economy. Our analysis relies on a computable general equilibrium model combining the major interactions between immigrants and natives (labor market impact, fiscal impact, capital deepening, endogenous education, endogenous inequality). Contrary to recent studies, we show that immigration induced important net gains and small redistributive effects among natives. According to our simulations, the postwar US immigration is beneficial for all natives cohorts and all skill groups. Nevertheless, the gains would have been larger if the US had conducted a more selective immigration policy.

Carbon Tax and OPEC's Rents Under a Ceiling Constraint

We study the Markov-perfect Nash equilibrium (MPNE) of a game between oil-importing countries, who seek to maintain the atmospheric carbon concentration under a given ceiling, and oil-exporting countries. The oil-importing countries set a carbon tax and the oil-exporting countries control the producer price. We obtain implicit feedback rules and explicit non-linear time paths of extraction, carbon tax, and producer price. Consumers are always able to reap some share of the scarcity and monopoly rents, whereas producers partially pre-empt the carbon tax only if the marginal damage under the ceiling is small. We compare the MPNE to the efficient, open-loop, and cartel-without-tax equilibria.

The Impact of Life Stages on Parent-Child Transfers

In France, a substantial share of public financial transfers takes the form of collective support for individuals affected by events in their private and working life which entail new needs or a drop in income. Conversely, private transfers, from parents to children in this case, are often viewed as a uniform whole which does not respond mechanically to well-identified needs and which depends on the generosity of the givers.

French Presidential Election: A Field Experiment on the Single Transferable Vote

In this paper, we expose the results of a voting experiment realized in 2007, during the French Presidential election. This experiment aimed at confronting the single transferable vote (STV) procedure with two criteria: simplicity and the selection of a Condorcet-winner. Building on our electoral sample’s preferences, we show that this voting procedure can design a different winner, depending on the vote counting process. With the vote counting process advocated by Hare, the winner is Nicolas Sarkozy, while the Coombs vote counting process has Francois Bayrou as winner. For these two vote counting processes, the details of the experiment are the same and it is shown that the simplicity criterion is respected. However, with regard to the Condorcet-winner criterion, the Coombs method is the only one to elect the Condorcet-winner, i.e., Francois Bayrou.