Van Ypersele

Publications

Can workers still climb the social ladder as middling jobs become scarce? Evidence from two British cohortsJournal articleCecilia Garcia-Peñalosa, Fabien Petit et Tanguy van Ypersele, Labour Economics, Volume 84, pp. 102390, 2023

The increase in employment polarization observed in several high-income economies has coincided with a reduction in inter-generational mobility. This paper argues that the disappearance of middling jobs can drive changes in mobility, notably by removing a stepping stone towards high-paying occupations for those from less well-off family backgrounds. Using data from two British cohorts who entered the labour market at two points in time with very different degrees of employment polarization, we examine how parental income affects both entry occupations and occupational upgrading over careers. We find that transitions across occupations are key to mobility and that the impact of parental income has grown over time. At regional level, using a shift-share IV-strategy, we show that the impact of parental income has increased the most in regions experiencing the greatest increase in polarisation. This indicates that the disappearance of middling jobs played a role in the observed decline in mobility.

Tax competition in the presence of profit shiftingJournal articleSteeve Mongrain, David Oh et Tanguy van Ypersele, Journal of Public Economics, Volume 224, pp. 104940, 2023

The popular view is that governments should crack down on tax avoidance by multinational corporations, but in practice, lax anti-profit-shifting policies are common. Here, we analyze how controlling profit shifting influences fiscal competition. Equilibrium tax rates are determined by the elasticities of two components: retained profit and capital mobility. Anti-profit-shifting policies decrease the elasticity of the first, but increase the elasticity of the second. The impact of these policies on equilibrium tax rates is then ambiguous. We show that there are cases in which laxer policies increase equilibrium tax rates and countries’ well-being by favoring investments. We use estimates of different elasticities to show that our model can support lax enforcement.

Property crime and private protection allocation within cities: Theory and evidenceJournal articleBruno Decreuse, Steeve Mongrain et Tanguy van Ypersele, Economic Inquiry, Volume 60, Issue 3, pp. 1142-1163, 2022

Canada exhibits no correlation between income and victimization, rich neighborhoods are less exposed to property crime, rich households are more victimized than their neighbors, and rich households and neighborhoods invest more in protection. We provide a theory consistent with these facts. Criminals within city choose a neighborhood and pay a search cost to compare potential victims, whereas households invest in self-protection. As criminals' return to search increases with neighborhood income, households in rich neighborhoods are likelier to enter a race to greater protection driving criminals toward poorer areas. A calibration reproduces the Canadian victimization and protection pattern by household/neighborhood income.

Private protection and public policingJournal articleRoss Hickey, Steeve Mongrain, Joanne Roberts et Tanguy van Ypersele, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Volume 23, Issue 1, pp. 5–28, 2021

This paper looks at situations in which public and private protection are complementary, that is, when private protection must be coordinated with public protection to be effective. For example, home alarms deter theft by being connected to a local police station: if the police do not respond to a home alarm, the home alarm on its own is virtually useless in halting a crime in action. We make a distinction between gross and net complementarity and substitution, where the latter takes into account the effect on the crime rate. We show that when public and private protection are complements, the optimal provision of public protection trades off the manipulation effect of encouraging private protection with the compensatory effect of providing protection to households that do not privately invest. We discuss the implications of our results for policy and empirical research in this area.

An Economic Analysis of Violent CrimJournal articlePetros G. Sekeris et Tanguy van Ypersele, Revue d'economie politique, Volume 130, Issue 6, pp. 975-999, 2020

In this article we propose a theoretical model to better comprehend the effect of gun laws on violent property crime. We assume that a violent encounter between a criminal and a victim is costly to both, and we uncover two types of equilibria: a pure strategy violent equilibrium and a mixed strategy equilibrium where the criminal is deterred with strictly positive probability. The effect of a relaxation of gun laws is shown to be conditional on both initial gun laws and on the relative improvement of the victims’ defense capacity relative to the criminals’ offense capacity. We uncover a potentially inverted U-shaped relationship between gun laws leniency and investments in violent activities which helps reconciling seemingly contradictory empirical findings.

Job protection, housing market regulation, and the youthJournal articleAntoine Bonleu, Bruno Decreuse et Tanguy van Ypersele, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Volume 21, Issue 6, pp. 1017-1036, 2019

Young Europeans experience high unemployment rates, job instability, and late emancipation. Meanwhile, they do not support reforms weakening protection on long-term contracts. In this paper, we suggest a possible rationale for such reform distaste. When the rental market is strongly regulated, landlords screen applicants with regard to their ability to pay the rent. Protecting regular jobs offers a second-best technology to sort workers, thereby increasing the rental market size. We provide a model where nonemployed workers demand protected jobs despite unemployment and the share of short-term jobs increases, whereas the individual risk of dismissal is unaffected. Our theory can be extended to alternative risks and markets involving correlated risks and commitment under imperfect information.

The origins of human prosociality: Cultural group selection in the workplace and the laboratoryJournal articlePatrick François, Thomas Fujiwara et Tanguy van Ypersele, Science Advances, Volume 4, Issue 9, pp. eaat2201, 2018

Human prosociality toward nonkin is ubiquitous and almost unique in the animal kingdom. It remains poorly understood, although a proliferation of theories has arisen to explain it. We present evidence from survey data and laboratory treatment of experimental subjects that is consistent with a set of theories based on group-level selection of cultural norms favoring prosociality. In particular, increases in competition increase trust levels of individuals who (i) work in firms facing more competition, (ii) live in states where competition increases, (iii) move to more competitive industries, and (iv) are placed into groups facing higher competition in a laboratory experiment. The findings provide support for cultural group selection as a contributor to human prosociality.
As predicted by cultural group selection, increases in firm-level competition raise the generalized trust of workers.

Scrambled Questions Penalty in Multiple Choice Tests: New Evidence from French Undergraduate StudentsJournal articleMorgan Raux, Marc Sangnier et Tanguy van Ypersele, Economics Bulletin, Volume 37, Issue 1, pp. 347-351, 2017

This note evaluates the scrambled questions penalty using multiple choice tests taken by first-year undergraduate students who follow a microeconomics introductory course. We provide new evidence that students perform worse at scrambled questionnaires than at logically ordered ones. We improve on previous studies by explicitly modeling students individual skills thanks to a fixed effects regression. We further show that the scrambled questions penalty does not differ along gender but varies along the distribution of students' skills and mostly affects students with lower-intermediate skills.

Tax Competition in Imperfect Labor MarketsJournal articleMathias Hungerbühler et Tanguy van Ypersele, Annals of Economics and Statistics, Volume -, Issue 113-114 Special issue on the Economics of Taxation, pp. 99-120, 2014

We introduce imperfect labor markets into the tax competition framework. Countries set tax rates on profit and income. Labor is immobile across countries, while capital is mobile. We show the importance of asymmetries in labor market institutions for the optimal tax policy. While most of the labor market variables play no role for the tax rates in autarchic countries, they become important when tax competition is introduced. Especially, we find that a country with “better” labor market institutions taxes capital at a higher rate and income at a lower rate compared to a country with “bad” labor markets.

Market Games in Successive OligopoliesJournal articleJean J. Gabszewicz, Didier Laussel, Tanguy van Ypersele et Skerdilajda Zanaj, Journal of Public Economic Theory, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 397-410, 2013

In this paper we first introduce an approach relying on market games to examine how successive oligopolies operate between downstream and upstream markets. This approach is then compared with the traditional analysis of oligopolistic interaction in successive markets. The market outcomes resulting from the two approaches are analysed under di¤erent technological regimes, decreasing vs constant returns.

The determinants of political selection: a citizen-candidate model with valence signaling and incumbency advantageJournal articleSusana Peralta et Tanguy van Ypersele, INTERNATIONAL TAX AND PUBLIC FINANCE, Forthcoming

We expand the theory of politician quality in electoral democracies with citizen candidates by supposing that performance while in office sends a signal to the voters about the politician's valence. Individuals live two periods and decide to become candidates when young, trading off against type-specific private wages. The valence signal increases the reelection chances of high valence incumbents (screening mechanism of reelection), and thus their expected gain from running for office (self-selection mechanism). Since self-selection improves the average quality of challengers, voters become more demanding when evaluating the incumbent's performance. This complementarity between the self-selection and the screening mechanisms may lead to multiple equilibria. We show that more difficult and/or less variable political jobs increase the politicians' quality. Conversely, societies with more wage inequality have lower quality polities. We also show that incumbency advantage blurs the screening mechanism by giving incumbents an upper-hand in electoral competition and may wipe out the positive effect of the screening mechanism on the quality of the polity.