Séminaires LEMMA

"Neighbor Effects and Early Track Choice"

Camille Hémet (Paris 1 et Paris School of Economics)
Mardi 17 septembre 2024, 11h-12h

Lemma - 4 rue Blaise Desgoffe, 75006 Paris. Salle Maurice Desplas

Camille Hémet est Professeure d'économie à Paris 1 et à Paris School of Economics. Elle est aussi CEPR research affiliate. Ses recherches portent sur les interactions sociales locales (comme les effets de voisinage) et leur rôle dans divers aspects de l'activité économique individuelle (décisions scolaires, conditions de logement, marché du travail, criminalité, résultats électoraux). Elle s'intéresse également à l'économie du crime. Voir ses travaux en cours ici.  

Abstract : The choice between vocational and academic education at the end of  secondary school has important long-run effects, and is made at an age where peers’ influence might be paramount. In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbors’ track choices on 9th graders choices at the end of lower secondary education, in Paris. This question is central to understand the extent to which residential segregation can reinforce social segregation across vocational and academic tracks. We rely on neighbors from the preceding cohort in order to bypass the reflection problem, and use within-catchment-area variation in distance between pairs of students to account for residential sorting. We use a pair-wise model that enables us to carefully study the role of distance between neighbors, and to perform detailed heterogeneity analysis. Our results suggest that close neighbors do influence track choices at the end of 9th grade, particularly for pupils pursuing a vocational track. This effect is driven by neighbors living in the same building, and is larger for pairs of boys and for pairs of  pupils from low social background. Overall, our results suggest that neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.

"Sorting Fact from Fiction when Reasoning is Motivated"

Jean-Robert Tyran (Universität Wien)
Mardi 10 septembre 2024, 11h-12h

Lemma - 4 rue Blaise Desgoffe, 75006 Paris. Salle Maurice Desplas

Abstract : How is sorting fact from fiction and updating from news shaped by motivated reasoning, cognitive ability, and overconfidence? In an online experiment, we present subjects with news items on immigration, inequality, climate change and science that (to the best of our knowledge) are true or false. As predicted by our model, we find that motivated reasoning reduces acknowledging “inconvenient truths” (i.e., news that are counter to one’s identity), while cognitive ability promotes it. Motivated reasoning and overconfidence limit updating after fact checking (i.e. subjects receive informative but noisy signals about the veracity of the news), cognitive ability promotes updating. Surprisingly, higher cognitive ability is strongly negatively related to accuracy in news discernment on science and (to a lesser degree) on climate change. The reason seems to be that those with higher cognitive ability are more motivated to believe that anti-science and anti-climate change news are false.