Les échecs successifs des négociations internationales sur le réchauffement climatique, dont l'objectif est d'établir un cadre global de lutte contre le réchauffement climatique, ont contribué à l'émergence d'initiatives locales de lutte contre les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, notamment à l'échelle urbaine. Les initiatives locales sont porteuses d'espoir, parce que les pouvoirs locaux ont la charge de décisions influençant les émissions : les décisions relatives à l'aménagement de leurs territoires, au développement des transports en commun, à la construction de logements. Cependant, les politiques locales à mettre en place pour réduire efficacement les émissions de gaz à effet de serre au niveau mondial ne sont pas, aujourd'hui, bien définies. Cette thèse présente un modèle qui permet de comprendre le rôle que peuvent jouer les politiques locales dans la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique, et leurs interactions avec une échelle plus globale. La plupart des modèles existants utilisés pour évaluer le coût des politiques d'atténuation du changement climatique ne tiennent compte que des déterminants technologiques et négligent le rôle des dynamiques urbaines. Le modèle développé représente les liens entre la consommation d'énergie des ménages, les émissions de gaz à effet de serre et l'organisation spatiale des villes / The failure of the international community, pointed out in the successive annual Conferences of the Parties, to implement global climate policies has fostered supports for local initiatives, in particular at the urban levels. Local action is believed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions as local communities are at the cutting edge of the climate change challenge because they have responsibility for a wide range of decisions that affect emissions: land use planning, urban transport and housing policies. However, how to use efficiently local policies to reduce gas emissions at a global scale remains unclear. In this thesis, we developed some tools that can give insights on the role of local policies in climate change mitigation and their interaction with the global scale. The overwhelming majority of energy-economy-environment models conventionally used to assess mitigation costs of climate change focus essentially on the technological determinants of energy trends but do not capture explicitly the role of urban dynamics. We propose a step forward to the representation of the interplay between energy consumption, carbon emissions and the spatial organization of cities

L'étude des processus de création de connaissances souligne la complexité des interactions individuelles au sein des organisations productives. Cette complexité est telle que les théories de l'entreprise basées sur les incitations, focalisées sur les problèmes de traitement de l'information, peuvent ignorer une part substantielle des facteurs de décision individuels intervenant dans le contexte de l'apprentissage organisationnel, et plus largement dans les processus de production collectifs. Nous utilisons dans cette thèse la méthode expérimentale pour étudier les déterminants de la coopération, afin d'affiner les hypothèses comportementales sur lesquelles sont basées les théories économiques de la production collective. Nous montrons que les deux visions de la coopération portées par les théories de l'entreprise - un comportement devant être extrait d'intérêts divergents et une propriété émergente découlant des interactions sociales entre agents – sont étayées par les résultats expérimentaux. Par conséquent, nous concluons que les deux approches devraient être retenues et éventuellement intégrées dans un cadre d'analyse plus large. / The study of knowledge creation processes has pointed to the complexity of individual interactions within productive organizations. This complexity appears to be such that incentive-based theories of the firm, which focus on information processing issues, may fail to grasp a substantial part of the individual decision-making involved in the context of organizational learning, and more broadly in collective production processes. In this thesis we use experimental methods to study the determinants of cooperation, in order to refine the behavioral assumptions on which economic theories of collective production are based. We show that the two visions of cooperation embodied in competing theories of the firm - a behavior to be elicited from diverging interests and an emergent property stemming from social interactions among agents - find support from the laboratory experiments. Accordingly, we conclude that both approaches should be upheld and possibly combined in a broader, integrative, analytical framework.

L’estimation structurelle des modèles de demande sur des marchés de produits différenciés joue un rôle important en économie. Elle permet de mieux comprendre les choix des consommateurs et, entre autres, de mesurer les effets d’une fusion d’entreprise, de l’introduction d’un nouveau produit sur le marché ou d’une nouvelle régulation. L’approche traditionnelle consiste à spécifier un modèle d’utilité, typiquement un modèle d’utilité aléatoire additif, à en calculer ses demandes et à inverser ces dernières pour obtenir des équations de demande inverse qui serviront de base pour l’estimation. Toutefois, en général, ces demandes inverses n’ont pas de forme analytique. L'estimation exige donc une inversion numérique et l’emploi de procédures d’estimation non-linéaire, qui peuvent être difficiles à mettre en oeuvre et chronophages.Cette thèse adopte une approche différente, en développant de nouveaux modèles de demande inverse qui sont cohérents avec un modèle d’utilité de consommateurs hétérogènes. Cette approche permet de capter de façon plus flexible les substitutions entre les produits, grâce à de simples régressions linéaires basées sur des données incluant les parts de marché, les prix et les caractéristiques des produits. Le premier chapitre de cette thèse développe le modèle inverse product differentiation logit (IPDL), qui généralise les modèles logit emboîtés, permettant ainsi de capter de façon flexible les substitutions entre les produits, y compris de la complémentarité. Il montre que le modèle IPDL appartient à une classe de modèles de demande inverse, nommée generalized inverse logit (GIL), laquelle inclut une grande majorité de modèles d’utilité aléatoire additifs qui ont été utilisés à des fins d'estimation de la demande. Le second chapitre développe le modèle flexible inverse logit (FIL), un modèle GIL qui utilise une structure de nids flexible avec un nid pour chaque pair de produits. Il montre que le modèle FIL, projeté dans l’espace des caractéristiques des produits, permet d’obtenir des élasticités-prix qui dépendent directement des caractéristiques des produits et, en utilisant des simulations de Monte-Carlo, qu’il est capable de reproduire celles du "flexible" modèle logit à coefficients aléatoires. Le troisième chapitre étudie la micro-fondation du modèle GIL. Il montre que les restrictions que le modèle GIL impose sur la fonction de demande inverse sont des conditions nécessaires et suffisantes de cohérence avec un modèle de consommateurs hétérogènes maximisant leur fonction d’utilité, connu sous le nom de perturbed utility model (PUM). Il montre également que tout modèle GIL génère une fonction de demande qui satisfait une légère variante des conditions de Daly-Zachary, laquelle permet de combiner substituabilité et complémentarité en demande. / Estimation of structural demand models in differentiated product markets plays an important role in economics. It allows to better understand consumers’ choices and, amongst other, to assess the effects of mergers, new products, and changes in regulation. The standard approach consists in specifying a utility model, typically an additive random utility model, computing its demands, and inverting them to obtain inverse demand equations, which will serve as a basis for estimation. However, since these inverse demands have generally no closed form, estimation requires numerical inversion and non-linear optimization, which can be painful and time-consuming. This dissertation adopts a different approach, developing novel inverse demand models, which are consistent with a utility model of heterogeneous consumers. This approach allows to accommodate rich substitution patterns thanks to simple linear regressions with data on market shares, prices and product characteristics. The first chapter of this dissertation develops the inverse product differentiation logit (IPDL) model, which generalizes the nested logit models to allow for richer substitution patterns, including complementarity. It also shows that the IPDL model belongs to the class of generalized inverse logit (GIL) models, which includes a vast majority of additive random utility models that have been used for demand estimation purposes. The second chapter develops the flexible inverse logit (FIL) model, a GIL model that uses a flexible nesting structure with a nest for each pair of products. It shows that the FIL model, projected into product characteristics space, makes the price elasticities depending on product characteristics directly and, using Monte Carlo simulations, that it is able to mimic those from the "flexible" random coefficient logit model. The third chapter studies the micro-foundation of the GIL model. It shows that the restrictions that the GIL model imposes on the inverse demand function are necessary and sufficient for consistency with a model of heterogeneous and utility-maximizing consumers, called perturbed utility model. It also shows that any GIL model yields a demand function that satisfies a slight variant of the Daly-Zachary conditions, which allows to combine substitutability and complementarity in demand.

My thesis focuses on the risk-taking behavior of financial agents, aiming particularlyat better understanding how risk attitudes can change over time. It alsoexplores the implications that these changes have on financial markets, and on theeconomy as a whole.The first paper, which is a joint work with Kim Oosterlinck and Andrey Ukhov,studies how risk aversion of financial markets’ participants is affected by the SecondWorld War. The literature links extreme events to changes in risk aversion but failsto find a consensus on the direction of this change. Moreover, due to data limitationsand difficulties in estimation of risk aversion, the speed of the change in risk aversionhas seldom been analyzed. This paper develops an original methodology to overcomethe latter limitation. To estimate changes in attitude toward risk, we rely on thedaily market prices of lottery bonds issued by Belgium. We provide evidence on thedynamic of risk attitude before, during and after the Second World War. We findsubstantial variations between 1938 and 1946. Risk aversion increased at the outbreakof the war, decreased dramatically during the occupation to increase again afterthe war. To our knowledge, this finding of reversal in risk attitude is unique in theliterature. We discuss several potential explanations to this pattern, namely changesin economic perspectives, mood, prospect theory, and background risk. While theymight all have played a role, we argue that habituation to background risk mostconsistently explains the observed behavior over the whole period. Living continuouslyexposed to war-related risks has gradually changed the risk-taking behavior ofinvestors.In the second paper, I derive a measure of risk aversion from asset prices andanalyze what are its main drivers. Given the complexity of eliciting risk aversionfrom asset prices, few papers provide empirical evidence on the dynamics of riskaversion in a long-term perspective. This paper tries to fill the gap. First, I providea measure of risk aversion that is original, both because of the length of its sampleperiod (1958- 1991) and the methodology used. I study the relationship betweenthis new measure of risk aversion and several key economic variables in a structuralvector autoregression. Results show that risk aversion varies over the period. Aworsening of economic conditions, a decrease in stock prices or a tighter monetarypolicy lead to an increase in risk aversion. On the other hand, an increase in riskaversion is linked to a larger corporate bond credit spread and has an adverse effecton stock prices.The third paper explores the impact of asset price bubbles on the riskiness offinancial institutions. I investigate the effect of a real estate boom on the financialstability of commercial banks in the United States using exogenous variations intheir exposure to real estate prices. I find that the direction of the effect dependson bank characteristics. Although higher real estate prices have a positive impacton bank stability on average, small banks and banks that operate in competitivebanking markets experience a negative effect. I reconcile these findings by providingevidence that higher real estate prices benefit commercial banks by raising the valueof collateral pledged by borrowers but at the cost of an increase in local bankingcompetition. This increase in competition affects banks that have a low marketpower more severely, which explains why small banks and banks facing a high degreeof competition display relatively lower stability during a real estate boom. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Cette thèse étudie l'impact à long terme de politiques menées en Tanzanie et en URSS sur le développement économique et les représentations sociales et culturelles. Les deux premiers chapitres s'intéressent aux politiques de développement tanzaniennes connues sous le nom d'ujamaa. Le troisième aux déportations ethniques ordonnées par Staline pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Le chapitre 1 s'intéresse à l'impact à long terme du statut "en développement" d'un village. Le chapitre 2 étudie l'impact de la diversité ethnique sur la confiance inter-ethnique, toujours en utilisant les ujamaa en Tanzanie. Le chapitre 3 étudie la propagation des valeurs et des cultures entre des populations différentes mises en contact par les déportations ethniques ordonnées par Staline. / This dissertation studies historical experiments and their impact on contemporaneous economic development and attitudes. The first chapters explore different aspects of the big-push policies known as the ujamaa in Tanzania. The third chapter focuses on the ethnic deportations that were carried out under Stalin's orders during WWII. Chapter 1 studies the long-term impact of having been designated as developmental during the time of the ujamaa on local economic development, as proxied by night light luminosity. Chapter 2 examines the effect of ethnic diversity on inter-ethnic trust, exploiting the ujamaa-induced exposure of groups as part of the policy's villagization program. Chapter 3 studies cultural diffusion using an episode in history in which close co-existence of different cultural groups was exogeneously imposed in a real-word setting without constraints on the interaction between them: Stalin's ethnic deportations during WWII.

HTA et Institutions: 3 réseaux internationaux d'HTA permettent aux agences de collaborer afin de réduire la consommation de ressources des agences au niveau global et améliorer l'efficience de l'HTA. L'Economie des réseaux enseigne sur l'importance d'une taille minimale, la structure en 3 couches informationnelles, les risques d'engouement ou d'inertie pour un standard donné et les enjeux de qualité - du fait de la structuration en réseau HTA et laboratoires : les consultations précoces des agences d'HTA sont un outil de minimisation du risque pour les laboratoires. Du point de vue des agences, l'activité peut être développée de façon concurrentielle, selon les leçons de l'Economie Industrielle / HTA and institutions: 3 international networks of HTA agencies aim at increasing the efficiency of HTA globally. The theories of Network Economics provide tools to describe and analyse issues around the optimal size of the networks, the informational structure, the risks of early standard adoption of inertia and quality deficiencies.HTA and companies: early advice provided by HTA agencies to pharmaceutical firms in a means for companies to mitigate risks. From the agencies perspective this activity could be developped in a competitive fashion according to the theories of industrial econmics

Cette thèse aborde le thème de la rationalité limitée à travers quatre chapitres, associant modèles théoriques, expériences en laboratoire et analyses statistiques et économétriques. Dans les deux premiers chapitres, nous testons la validité de nouveaux modèles en économie qui utilisent le formalisme mathématique de la mécanique quantique pour rendre compte de biais cognitifs. Au sein du chapitre 1, nous considérons des modèles expliquant l'effet d'ordre et en dérivons de nouvelles prédictions expérimentales. Dans le chapitre 2, nous proposons une expérience originale pour tester une large gamme de modèles quantiques qui rendent compte de l'erreur de conjonction. Les deux groupes de modèles échouent à nos tests empiriques. Nous discutons alors de possibles pistes d'améliorations de ces modèles. Le chapitre 3 explore la façon dont les individus traitent des informations économiques successives, complexes et abondantes. Nos résultats expérimentaux montrent l'inaptitude des sujets à combiner de telles informations, ce qui confirme la théorie de la trace floue. Enfin, le chapitre 4 relève de la finance expérimentale. Il étudie comment l'achat sur marge (respectivement la vente à découvert) augmente (diminue) le niveau des prix, la volatilité, l'hétérogénéité des marchés et les anticipations de prix des traders ainsi que la façon dont il modifie les stratégies de trading. Nos résultats mettent en évidence les nettes conséquences de chacune de ces techniques prises séparément, et identifient des phénomènes inattendus lorsqu'elles sont combinées. Nos analyses ouvrent la voie à une meilleure prise en compte de ces interactions déstabilisatrices par les autorités de régulation. / This thesis studies bounded rationality through four chapters, combining theoretical models, laboratory experiments and statistical and econometric analyzes. In the first two chapters, we test the validity of new models in economics which rely on the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics to account for cognitive biases. In chapter 1, we consider models explaining the order effect and we derive new experimental predictions. In chapter 2, we propose an original experiment to test a wide range of quantum models that account for the conjunction fallacy. Both groups of models fail in our empirical tests and we then discuss possible ways to improve these models. The third chapter explores how individuals deal with successive, complex and abundant economic information. Our experimental results show the subjects' inability to combine such information, which confirms the fuzzy trace theory. Finally, the fourth chapter deals with experimental finance. It studies how margin buying (respectively short selling) increases (decreases) price levels, volatility, heterogeneity of markets, and traders' price expectations, as well as how it changes trading strategies. Our results highlight the clear consequences of each of these techniques used alone, and point to unexpected phenomena when both are combined. Regulatory authorities could take advantage of our analyzes to reduce the destabilization introduced by these techniques.

In Chapter 1, which is co-authored with Rossella Calvi and Arthur Lewbel, we show that a local average treatment effect (LATE) can sometimes be identified and consistently estimated when treatment is mismeasured, or when treatment is estimated using a possibly misspecified structural model. Our associated estimator, which we call Mismeasurement Robust LATE (MR-LATE), is based on differencing two different mismeasures of treatment. In our empirical application, treatment is a measure of empowerment: whether a wife has control of substantial household resources. Due to measurement difficulties and sharing of goods within a household, this treatment cannot be directly observed without error, and so must be estimated. Our outcomes are health indicators of family members. We first estimate a structural model to obtain the otherwise unobserved treatment indicator. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations. We find no evidence of negative effects on men's health. Then, using changes in inheritance laws in India as an instrument, we apply our new MR-LATE estimator. We find that women's empowerment substantially decreases their probability of being anemic or underweight, and increases children's likelihood of receiving vaccinations.In Chapter 2, which is co-authored with Alexander Wolf, we take the Dunbar et al (2013) (DLP) model and explore its strength and weaknesses at recovering information regarding household sharing of resources. DLP develop a collective model of the household that allows to identify resource shares, that is, how total household resources are divided up among household members. We show why, especially when the data exhibit relatively flat Engel curves, the model is weakly identified and induces high variability and an implausible pattern in least squares estimates. We propose an estimation strategy nested in their framework that greatly reduces this practical impediment to recovery of individual resource shares. To achieve this, we follow a shrinkage method that incorporates additional (or out-of-sample) information on singles and relies on mild assumptions on preferences. We show the practical usefulness of this strategy through a series of Monte Carlo simulations and by applying it to Mexican data. The results show that our approach is robust, gives a plausible picture of the household decision process, and is particularly beneficial for the practitioner who wishes to apply the DLP framework.Finally, in Chapter 3, which is co-authored with Bram De Rock and Tom Potoms, we exploit the experimental set-up of a conditional cash transfers (CCT) program in Mexico to estimate a collective model of the household and to investigate how parents allocate household resources. This is important to understand because the success of policies aimed at fighting poverty depends crucially on how parents respond to monetary incentives. If parents allocate resources inefficiently (or non-cooperatively), the resulting level of well-being is likely to fall behind the socially efficient optimum. This is undesirable given the prevalence of CCT programs over the last two decades which have occupied a large percentage of governments' annual anti-poverty budgets. Although there is evidence that they have been beneficial, their effectiveness may still be limited. Our aim is to tackle this research question by estimating a theoretically-consistent demand system and by applying at best a powerful test of household efficiency developed by Bourguignon et al (2009). Contrary to previous results, we show that households make efficient decisions only at the beginning of the program, but fail to cooperate later on. In order to rationalize these results, we propose a simple model of household behaviour where decision makers may change their preferences as a result of a treatment that gives information about the importance of a public good. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Opaqueness is inherent to financial institutions but contributes to the fragility of the banking system. The archetypal assets held by banks, loans, have a value that cannot be properly communicated outside of a banking relationship (Sharpe 1990; Rajan 1992). Because they are relationship specific and raise adverse selection concerns, these assets are illiquid (Diamond and Rajan 2001). However, these assets are financed with liquid deposits; uncertainty about their value can cause depositors to withdraw their funds and banks to topple (Calomiris and Kahn 1991; Chen 1999). Additionally, the combination of opaqueness and leverage creates moral hazard incentives, exacerbated by government guarantees, as well as other agency conflicts that are detrimental to stability (Jensen and Meckling 1976).This dissertation presents three original contributions on the consequences of bank opaqueness. The first contribution concerns financial analysts. We show that, unlike in other industries, the most talented sell-side analysts are no more likely than their peers to issue recommendation revisions that influence bank stock prices. However, star analysts appear to maintain influence by uncovering firm-specific bad news that induces sharp negative revaluations of bank stock prices. In the second contribution, we find that the persistence of bank dividend policies increases with agency conflicts between shareholders and managers and decreases in the presence of large institutional shareholders who have an incentive to monitor banks and to mitigate agency conflicts. Our third contribution assesses the competitive distortions in bond markets since the recent reforms of the European Union bank safety net. We find that nationalized systemic banks, and those that benefit from high bailout expectations, do not benefit from funding advantages compared to their peers. Our findings also suggest that bailout expectations for these banks have diminished, consistent with new regulatory frameworks enacted after the financial crisis being effective.Overall, our findings suggest that opaqueness presents formidable challenges for public authorities but that its consequences can be mitigated by credible regulation. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Ce travail de thèse traite différents aspects de la conception basse consommation. Tout d’abord, le concept du calcul réversible, considéré comme le premier essai pour un calcul sans dissipation, est présenté. Puis, je me suis intéressée aux dissipations des circuits complémentaires MOS puisque c’est la logique la plus couramment utilisée dans les circuits numériques. J’ai proposé deux approches pour réduire la consommation de ces circuits numériques. La première approche porte sur la réduction de la dissipation due aux glitchs. J’ai proposé une nouvelle méthode qui consiste à adapter les tensions de seuil des transistors pour assurer un filtrage optimal de ces glitchs. Les résultats de simulation montrent que nous obtenons jusqu’à16% de réduction des glitchs, ce qui représente une amélioration de 18% par rapport à l’état de l’art sur la base des circuits de référence ISCAS85. La deuxième approche porte sur la réduction de la dissipation obtenue en faisant fonctionner les transistors MOS en régime d’ inversion faible (sous-seuil). Les circuits fonctionnant dans ce régime représentent une solution idéale pour les applications ultra-basse-consommation. Par contre, l’une des préoccupations majeures est qu’ils sont plus sensibles aux dispersions des processus de fabrication, ce qui peut entraîner des problèmes de fiabilité. Je propose un modèle compact qui détermine le point d’énergie minimum de façon analytique, donc sans recourir à une simulation type SPICE, tout en étant suffisamment précise vis-à-vis de la variabilité(due à la dispersion). L’écart de résultat entre le modèle compact et un modèle SPICE complet est de 6%. / This thesis focuses on different aspects of ”Low Energy Design”. First, reversible logic, as it is the first attempt for low energy computing, is briefly dis- cussed. Then, we focus on dynamic energy saving in the combinational part of CMOS circuits. We propose a new method to reduce glitches based on dual threshold voltage technique. Simulation results report more than 16% average glitch reduction. We also show that combining dual-threshold to gate-sizingtechnique is very interesting for glitch filtering as it brings up to 27 % energy savings. In the third part of this dissertation, we have been interested in sub-threshold operation where the minimum energy can be achieved using a reduced supply voltage. Sub-threshold operation has been an efficient solution for energy-constrained applications with low speed requirements. However, it is very sensitive to process variability which can impact the robustness and effective performance of the circuit. We propose a model valid in sub and near threshold regions in order to correctly estimate the circuit performance in a variability aware analysis. We provide an analytical solution for the optimum supply voltage that minimizes the total energy per operation while considering variability effects. Spice simulations matches the analytical result to within 6%.