GUESNERIE Roger

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Socioeconomic evaluation of a public investment helps to understand its value for the community, and it also improves an investment by analyzing its different components, and the risks inherent in its completion. The Act of 31 December 2012 about Public Finance Planning makes it mandatory in France for project sponsors to conduct an ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation of all public civil investments made by the State and its public institutions. An independent counter-expert assessment of the ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation is conducted for the largest projects. A permanent committee of experts has been established to specify the methodological rules for socioeconomic evaluation and define the studies and research necessary.

This paper offers a new interpretation for possible destabilizing effects of opening futures markets. In our model, adapted from Stein (1987), speculation on future markets reduces the likelihood of occurrence of a Rational Expectation Equilibrium. Although the equilibrium rice is less volatile after the futures market is opened ( which is usually viewed as a stabilizing effect), traders may find more difficult or even impossible to coordonate their expectations in order to implement this equilibrium.

This topic is not really new. Every economist or person interested by economic activity knows the crucial direct or indirect importance of the forecasts or views that decision makers hold about future prices, sales, incomes, profitability or other key microeconomic or macroeconomic magnitudes. As many commentators (see, for instance, Leijonhufvud [1986: 4]) mentioned, the central difference between economics and natural sciences precisely lies in the forward-looking predictions and decisions made by economic agents since certainty and determinism do not often prevail in the working of the economic system. Therefore, the analysis of the contents and the impact of expectations on the micro- and the macro-economic variables is complex and often requires sophisticated reflections and tools as well as the use of the contributions of other natural (mathematics, physics) or social (psychology, sociology, philosophy) sciences. This is the reason why expectations provide a basic building block of economic theory. Notably they lie at the core of economic dynamics as they usually determine, not only the behavior of the agents, but also the main properties of the economy related to the evolution of these behavior in time. A central aspect of economic theories is indeed that expectations influence the time path of the economy, and conversely it must be the case that time path influences expectations.

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The paper puts emphasis on the so-called “eductive” approach for a critical assessment of the Rational Expectations hypothesis. Section 2 makes an intuitive unformal presentation, aimed at comparing the approach and the results of “eductive” learning and ”real time” learning in two polar models, (a two period partial equilibrium model and a simple Real Business Cycle mode). A segment of theoretical literature, taking an eductive view of stability in the fields of finance, trade, general equilibrium, short term or long term macroeconomics….is reviewed in Section 3.

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This thesis covers two topics: the design of pollution permits and waste management. The first chapter analyzes the implementation of pollution permits. The chapter focuses on the distributional impacts associated with the stringency of the free allocation based on current production when two sectors are covered by the permit market and the cap remains constant. A new type of profit increase in sectors that are not exposed to international competition has been theoretically demonstrated. The second chapter deals with the issue of differentiation in the allocation of permits in different regions, linked to the possibility of firms to relocate. The conditions under which welfare decreases with offshoring are determined. In this case, free distributions of permits can be used to prevent firms from offshoring. The third chapter compares the effectiveness of extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs with the effectiveness of an ex-ante tax. The tax allows more ex-ante flexibility with respect to market conditions, but EPR allows more ex-post adjustment to cost realizations. Thus, the relative effectiveness of EPR increases with cost uncertainty and market competitiveness.

Within the standard real business cycle model, we examine issues of expectational coordination on the unique rational expectations equilibrium. We show sensitivity of agents’ plans and decisions to their short‐run and long‐run expectations is too great to trigger eductive coordination in a world of rational agents who are endowed with knowledge of the economic structure and contemplate the possibility of small deviations from equilibrium: eductive stability never obtains. We conclude adaptive learning must play a role in real‐time dynamics. Our eductive instability theorem has a counterpart under adaptive learning: even with asymptotic stability, transition dynamics can involve large departures from rational expectations.

This thesis is composed of three independent chapters. The first chapter concerns the formation of expectations. I show that agents are likely to use a misspecified model rather than the "true" model of the economy. I consider a simple economy with two types of agents. Rational agents learn the rational expectation solution while "consistent" agents use an autoregressive model. I show that a long-run equilibrium in which coherent agents are dominant exists. Simulations show that the economy can converge to this equilibrium. The second chapter concerns intertemporal choice. I consider a model in which wealth enters into utility. I study the non-separable case, separating the income effect on labor supply from the intertemporal substitution effect. I deduce implications for economic policy and then estimate the two parameters introduced by this specification of utility. I find positive and high values for both. The third chapter presents a model of investment in the presence of adverse selection. My contribution is to provide a simple solution, easy to integrate in a macroeconomic model. Borrowers differ by the risk of their investment project as in Stiglitz and Weiss (1981). They signal the risk of their project by borrowing a fraction of the profits set aside. I obtain an analytical solution for the incentive constraint. I integrate it into a dynamic model and derive some implications.

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This thesis studies different aspects of firm dynamics, both theoretically and empirically. All chapters make extensive use of different microeconomic databases to test the theoretical predictions. The first chapter focuses on the innovation premium, i.e. the response of the wages of employees of a firm that increases its R&D intensity and thus becomes closer to the technological frontier. The evaluation of this response is done using a database on the wage of 1% of the UK-based workers. The second chapter looks at the response of firms' innovation and productivity to an export demand shock, considering French firms with at least one patent, and using both tax and customs databases. Finally, the third chapter studies the role of adjustment costs of production factors, and in particular of corporate real estate, on the employment dynamics of firms following a productivity shock. This chapter uses a large sample of French single-establishment firms. All three chapters study different dimensions of the response of firms to a demand or productivity shock, whether it is a response in terms of employment, wages, innovation or size.

The economists' perspective on the health debate is reductive. But as reductive as it is, this point of view is also inevitable. In health care, as elsewhere, our societies have to make choices that are usually described as economic. The question of the proper allocation of resources among the various health needs is therefore "inescapable". Arbitrating between these needs is as difficult as it is inevitable. One may wonder about the deep-seated reasons for the introduction and growth of a competition issue in areas where it was perhaps not initially present. We are no longer in subsistence societies. We are in societies in which the number of goods and services that are provided has multiplied considerably. This situation exacerbates the difficulties of any planning. The "central" intervention to decide what should be is increasingly difficult: how to decide from above what is good for a given person, in a world where this person makes complex arbitrations between the items of his consumption. Of course, this diversity of possible choices is unequally accessible according to income. But we live in a world of multiplied goods, many of which belong to what used to be called the superfluous and not the necessary. The legitimacy of decentralized mechanisms is growing, and with it the taboo on the profit motive is weakening. This is true, albeit in a mitigated way, for the health sector, not only because part of the care is what is sometimes called comfort, but because progress is accompanied by an increase in the goods made available, such as treatments, and an increasing indeterminacy of the register of the necessary. Three texts open this book, the second in a cycle on health: by Roger Guesnerie, L'inévitable regard économique . by Pierre-Yves Geoffard, La santé et ses " marchés " . by Julian Le Grand, La question du choix dans les systèmes de santé : illusion ou solution ? In the "Counterpoints" section, Claudine Attias-Donfut, Marie-Odile Bertella Geffroy, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, Jean-Marc Ferry, Maurice Godelier, Joseph Maïla, and Serge Marti debate the proposed analyses. In the postface, Roger Guesnerie reviews the proposals, questions and criticisms to which they gave rise.

The risk of capture is little studied outside the context of economic regulation in which it has been theorized. Although American doctrine has shown that this risk is inherent in any normative process, legal studies on the question remain rare, even if the risk of capture is sometimes mentioned in the course of a sentence or a footnote. The present study aims at better identifying the risks of capture that may affect the making of international trade law within UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT . The study aims not only to identify these risks of capture, but above all to propose a legal framework capable of controlling the twofold dynamic that can be observed within UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT, between, on the one hand, the participation of international trade operators in their standard-setting activities - an essential aspect conditioning the quality and commercial acceptability of their legal norms - and, on the other hand, the prevention of the risks of capture, a phenomenon that is detrimental because of the detour of the standard-setting process that it entails to the benefit of certain economic operators.

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The economists' perspective on the health debate is reductive. But as reductive as it is, this point of view is also inevitable. In health care, as elsewhere, our societies have to make choices that are usually described as economic. The question of the proper allocation of resources among the various health needs is therefore "inescapable". Arbitrating between these needs is as difficult as it is inevitable. One may wonder about the deep-seated reasons for the introduction and growth of a competition issue in areas where it was perhaps not initially present. We are no longer in subsistence societies. We are in societies in which the number of goods and services that are provided has multiplied considerably. This situation exacerbates the difficulties of any planning. The "central" intervention to decide what should be is increasingly difficult: how to decide from above what is good for a given person, in a world where this person makes complex arbitrations between the items of his consumption. Of course, this diversity of possible choices is unequally accessible according to income. But we live in a world of multiplied goods, many of which belong to what used to be called the superfluous and not the necessary. The legitimacy of decentralized mechanisms is growing, and with it the taboo on the profit motive is weakening. This is true, albeit in a mitigated way, for the health sector, not only because part of the care is what is sometimes called comfort, but because progress is accompanied by an increase in the goods made available, such as treatments, and an increasing indeterminacy of the register of the necessary. Three texts open this book, the second in a cycle on health: by Roger Guesnerie, L'inévitable regard économique . by Pierre-Yves Geoffard, La santé et ses " marchés " . by Julian Le Grand, La question du choix dans les systèmes de santé : illusion ou solution ?

We present our contribution on the control and optimization of electricity production. The first part concerns the optimization of the management of a micro grid. We formulate the management program as an optimal control problem in continuous time, then we solve this problem by dynamic programming using a solver developed for this purpose: BocopHJB. We show that this type of formulation can be extended to a stochastic modeling. We end this part with the adaptive weights algorithm, which allows a management of the micro network battery integrating its aging. The algorithm exploits the two time scale structure of the control problem. The second part concerns networked market models, and in particular those of electricity. We introduce an incentive mechanism to decrease the market power of energy producers, to the benefit of the consumer. We study some mathematical properties of the optimization problems faced by market agents (producers and regulators). The last chapter studies the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibria in pure strategies of a class of Bayesian games to which some network market models belong. For some simple cases, an equilibrium computation algorithm is proposed. An appendix gathers a documentation on the numerical solver BocopHJB.

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The 4th cover states: "The market is more than ever an inescapable reality, which weighs on our social organization and on our daily life. Does this mean that the market, by itself, provides the keys to the future? To answer this question, Roger Guesnerie takes on the challenge of drawing up an objective and enlightening panorama of market economies. He looks at their construction over the course of history, at the intellectual debates and political controversies that their operation, in both calm periods and periods of crisis, has provoked. He then examines some of the challenges facing market economies in the twenty-first century."

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This thesis studies the interactions between C02 emissions regulation and fossil fuel extraction. It addresses various questions: what is the optimal pathway for the extraction of these fuels? What is the optimal carbon tax to implement? When to deploy carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) or renewable technologies? What are the effects of optimal carbon taxation on the profits of fossil fuel producers? In the five chapters of this thesis, we explore Hotelling-style models of resource extraction, following Chakravorty et al. (2006b). The basic model is modified according to the questions posed, and changes concern the environmental constraint (a cap on C02 concentration and/or a damage function), the availability of CCS technology and its scope, the lifetime of non-polluting energy infrastructure, the natural dilution of C02 in the atmosphere (constant, proportional to the stock, or negligible), and the existence of several polluting resources. The first part studies the optimal use and deployment of CCS and renewable energies when a cap on C02 concentration is introduced. The second part deals with the optimal taxation of carbon and the use of CCS when marginal damages increase with the C02 stock and a cap is introduced. The last part studies how the owners of a polluting exhaustible resource (oil, gas) can benefit from carbon taxation if this resource is (or will be) in competition with a more polluting resource.

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More than ever, the market is an inescapable reality that weighs on our social organization and on our daily lives. Does this mean that the market alone provides the keys to the future? In order to answer this question, which more often than not provokes reactions that are as partial as they are biased, Roger Guesnerie takes up the challenge of drawing up an objective and enlightening panorama of market economies. He looks at their construction throughout history, at the intellectual debates and political controversies that their operation has provoked. It then examines some of the challenges facing market economies in the 21st century. In this way, a retrospective and a prospective view complement each other to serve the public debate. A third part comments on the major contemporary problems of market economies: globalization, sustainable development and the role of the State.

This thesis addresses several diverse issues related to climate policy. The first chapter examines the optimal extraction of a polluting non-renewable resource in the presence of environmental regulation and when a clean technology can be developed through research and development activities. The second chapter studies the introduction of carbon capture and storage technology. Where technical constraints do not allow all emissions to be captured, this technology should be used before environmental damage occurs. The third chapter studies the changes in the optimal tax system when an externality is discovered, in a Mirlees-like framework with heterogeneous agents. If productivity and the cost of access to a substitute good are negatively correlated, then no good should be taxed in the absence of an externality. With externality, it is optimal to tax the dirty good at a rate lower than the piggyback rate and to tax the clean good. In the fourth chapter, we build, calibrate and simulate a stylized model designed to evaluate the magnitude of the carbon tax that would allow the French economy to divide its CO2 emissions by four over a forty year horizon. The magnitude of the required carbon tax is completely unrealistic. The fifth chapter discusses the ecological discount rate that should be used to evaluate projects to improve the environment. We study the properties of the standard discount rate, as well as the ecological discount rate. We also discuss a form of the precautionary principle.

We study an economic model composed of a continuum of agents and an aggregate state of the world on which agents have negligible influence. We propose a reminder of the links between the approach that emphasizes Strongly Rational Anticipatory Equilibria, and the concepts of rationality. We then explore the scope and limits of these links, both locally and globally, or depending on whether rationality is conventional or ad hoc. In particular, we define and characterize the set of (Punctually-) Rationalizable states. The role of belief heterogeneity in the general context of expectations coordination is explained. While in the case of strategic complementarities, the study of a certain best response operator is essential for the analysis, in the case of unambiguous strategic substitutabilities the study of the second iteration and the second-order cycles allow to describe the set of Rationalizable States.

This thesis focuses on the economics of uncertainty and its applications to financial markets and the international economy. In the first part, we study the theoretical conditions for observing a crowding-out effect of the stock market for households with more uncertain labor income, under the positive hypothesis of substitution of exogenous risk by endogenous risk. The degree of correlation between labor income and the evolution of the stock market is essential to empirically determine the existence and importance of a crowding-out effect. The second part studies the conditions for international trade to be mutually beneficial in a competitive framework where producers must anticipate the market-clearing price. When there is uncertainty about the fundamentals, i.e. about consumer preferences, we show that welfare (and occupation) outcomes depend on the structure of financial markets. If, on the other hand, the need to form an expectation about the price stems from strategic uncertainty about what other producers will do, then trade openness may reduce producers' ability to predict the price and explain their support for protectionist policies. In the epilogue, a synthesis of the conditions allowing for the coordination of expectations in a sequential N-goods trading economy is put forward.

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This thesis studies the influence on the information revealed by prices of the ability of agents to coordinate their decisions. Coordination (or its failure) results from a divinatory learning process consisting in the iterated elimination of dominated strategies, i.e. in the exploitation by each agent of the common knowledge (everyone knows x, everyone knows that everyone knows jc, etc.) of the rationality of all and of the economy. In an economy of exchange at a given period, it is therefore a question of applying an assumption of individual rationality to its limit. Divinatory learning is based on strategic reasoning in a game of excess demand, and not on progressive reasoning or on the accumulation of observations. It succeeds when a single solution is compatible with the double hypothesis of common knowledge. This solution is then by construction a rational expectations equilibrium (ear) which is the traditional equilibrium in the competitive framework with asymmetric information. The success of the coordination thus defines a criterion of robustness of an ear that is added to the existing criticisms of the ear. In particular, learning solutions are similar to variants of the ear and its success presupposes the existence of a strategic basis for the ear, which we know does not always exist in the game of excess demand. After a review of the main results of the ear model, we show, in two simple models of exchange of a risky asset with a single ear, that learning succeeds if and only if all agents have private information of "better quality" than that revealed by the price of the ear. These conditions provide a theoretical justification for the influence of agents' confidence in their private information and the sensitivity of their demand to their expectations of aggregate demand on the information revealed by prices.

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This paper develops three formal models of collective choice, and in particular tries to show that it can be useful to consider political conflicts as not only conflicts of interests but also conflicts of beliefs. The first model attempts to account for an empirical regularity that has been rigorously established but never explained theorically: the tendency for political conflicts to be one-dimensional. It considers a populated world of agents characterized by identical preferences but different initial beliefs about the effects of different possible collective choices, and analyzes the strategic communication of information about this uncertainty. The repetition of this communication allows to consider the distribution of beliefs as a stochastic process whose asymptotic properties are studied. The main result establishes the convergence of the beliefs to a unidimensional distribution, whatever the geometry of the initial conflict. The second model studies the transmission of information about a unidimensional collective decision in a world where individuals have divergent interests. It shows that information transmission tends to be perfect when preferences tend to coincide. On the contrary, it tends to become very imprecise when the population grows, to the point that agents use only two messages. The third model deals with the political economy of federalism. It mainly studies the extent of redistribution in a federation as a function of the type of federal institution - federal democracy or intergovernmental bargaining - and shows that the extension of available fiscal tools can make it more difficult to form a federation if it facilitates the expropriation of one nation by the others.

This thesis focuses attention on several aspects of contract theory concerning the principal-agent relationship. Chapter 1 is a review of the literature that analyzes the basic principal-agent framework of pure moral hazard. It includes three marginal contributions. Chapter 2 examines competition between hierarchies with one principal and several agents, when contracts are signed under symmetric infromation. The agents hired by the same principal are the only ones to observe the realization of a random state, correlated or not with those of rival agents. We present hypotheses that guarantee the absence of the hiring effect in the agency game. Chapter 3 analyzes games where principals (firms) choose the number of agents (independent divisions) they will hire (create) prior to the choice of contracts, when the hiring effect is zero in each possible agency subgame. We also study the number of principals in equilibrium when there is an entry cost. Chapter 4 analyzes the antiselection relation when a principal is interested in hiring a number of agents with continuous and independent types. We prove that, under certain conditions, there is no loss of generality if the principal considers only veridical mechanisms in dominant strategies. The optimal mechanism can require a higher individual performance than the optimal one of complete information to the most productive agents.

The subject of my thesis is a continuation of the principal-agent literature with adverse selection, in insurance, we study a more general model than the Rothschild-Stiglitz model, assuming only the continuity of the agents' preferences and the semi-continuity of the principals' profit functions. This model retains certain analogies with the standard model, and in particular the existence of a dominant revealing mechanism. But it allows us to obtain a multiplicity of equilibria, or even a continuum, whereas the standard model gives only a single equilibrium. The existence of new types of equilibrium in which the two agents obtain contracts that are indifferent to each other is emphasized. This eventuality imposes to distinguish between nash equilibria in contracts and in schedules. These results are obtained from a detailed analysis of the properties of the revealing mechanisms. We finally show, under the hypotheses of quasi-concavity of the utility and profit functions of the agents, that a separating equilibrium always exists for at least a certain average composition of the population. A second line of research applies the above general model to several specific economies. To this end, we develop a mathematical algorithm that converges to the contracted equilibrium that dominates in a pareto sense all equilibria in the model. The double sequence of individually profitable contracts that we construct, starting from the top-ranking contracts, and, by successive bullying of the agents whose contract induces jealousy, converges to a mechanism revealing a potential separating equilibrium. Let us point out a particularly new result when we relax the hypothesis of agents with the same risk aversion in the framework of the utility expectation model: the possibility of a competitive equilibrium with free entry and strictly positive profit.

The existence of "sunspot" equilibria is studied in several models of dynamic economies with an infinite horizon. The existence of such equilibria highlights a problem of indetermination of the rational expectations equilibrium and plays a role of first order in the explanation of fluctuations and instability of the economy. Three specific questions are addressed: (1) the existence of "sunspot" equilibria in economies with generations of debt. (2) the actual number of states between which the "sunspot" equilibria detected by the poincare-hopf theorem fluctuate. (3) the existence of local finite sunspot equilibria around a rest state of a dynamical system with "memory" or predetermined variables. All the results found coincide in showing the robustness of the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecies in these economies.

This theoretical public economics thesis distinguishes four fundamental areas of inquiry that make up the general theory of wealth redistribution: the institutional problem, the normative problem, the positive economic problem, and the positive political problem. The first problem is that of pareto-optimal institutions for redistributing income and wealth: we show how making individual transfers dependent on the distribution of income predicted by the rest of society allows us to redistribute without disincentive costs, and thus to enlarge considerably the set of possible redistributions. The second problem is that of distributive justice: a fair redistribution of work and wealth is defined by a property of "maximum equal freedom" with respect to work and consumption, and a plausible restriction on individual preferences avoids any impossibility paradox. The third problem is that of the spontaneous generation and evolution of inequality: in the presence of imperfections in the capital market, there may be several stationary distributions of wealth associated with different interest rates. The fourth problem is that of the redistributive policy actually followed: in the absence of a majority winner, the political equilibrium may be the product of political conservatism, which is a source of discontinuity.

We study successively five developments in the economics of location. The first one concerns the economics of transportation and shows by application of the Pigou principle that the equilibrium conditions on a road network are equivalent to a convex maximization program. The second paper deals with economic calculation from a land use planning perspective and introduces the concept of effective externalities. The third deals with decentralization under the assumption that local authorities behave cooperatively: it is shown that even in this case state intervention can be justified. The fourth development establishes the principle of minimal differentiation in a context of horizontal differentiation where prices are set collusively. Finally, the fifth development characterizes the optimal form of organizations when they are constrained by the costs of coordination.

This thesis studies different aspects of the economics of research and development (r&d). It is particularly interested in industrial research with a commercial goal. The remuneration mechanism that governs this type of R&D is the patent system. The thesis is articulated around two main areas of interest. The first is the analysis of the behavior of firms in the search for and diffusion of innovations. The first part of the thesis, "search for and diffusion of innovations", presents an overview of recent developments in the theoretical literature in this field. It allows to situate the framework of analysis of the second part, "industrial structure and research incentives". This part studies three particular problems: the industrial structure in a patent race when firms face both fixed and variable costs in the research process, subsidies to innovative firms in a perfect information framework, and the form of licensing contracts when information asymmetries exist between buyer and seller. The third part, "labor market of researchers", constitutes the second focus of the thesis. It analyzes the particular characteristics of this market and focuses on two essential aspects: the instability of the researchers' labor market, and the optimal strength of researchers' contracts.

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