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The Commission des études of the Université du Québec à Montréal awards the status of Professor Emeritus to Professors Steven Ambler and Louis Phaneuf.

This honorary mention testifies to the University's gratitude for all their achievements and their professorial careers, which have made a substantial contribution to the fulfillment of UQAM's mission and influence.

The Department of Economics extends its most sincere congratulations.

New Article for Alessandro Barattieri The article “Self-Harming Trade Policy? Protectionism and Production Networks” written by Alessandro Barattieri (ESG UQAM) and Matteo Cacciatore (HEC Montreal), has been published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Using high frequency data on temporary trade barriers (TTBs), this article explores the impact of protectionism on employment. Importantly, the authors look both at the impact of protectionism on the employment of protected industries (i.e. Steel) and of the employment of downstream industries, which use protected industries’ output as intermediate inputs (i.e. engines or cars). The authors find that protectionism has small and insignificant beneficial effects in protected industries. The effects in downstream industries are negative, sizable, and significant. The employment decline follows an increase in prices, and a decline in stock market returns. The article has an important implication for economic policy: the increasing role of production networks makes protectionism even more harmful.

Mélissa Coissard, doctoral student in economics under the research
supervision of professors Marie Connolly and Catherine Haeck, won three new scholarships this spring:
– merit scholarship from the Quebec Society and Culture Research Fund (FQRSC), ($21,000 / 3 years)
– merit scholarship from the J.-A. DeSève Foundation – Doctorate ($5,000)
– scholarship from the Association étudiante de l’École des sciences de la gestion (AéESG) – Engagement (1000 $)

Her research project aims to identify the impact and economic spinoffs of Quebec political interventions on the cognitive and non-cognitive development of young children. In particular, it will analyze the impact of two Quebec public policies: the preschool for four-year-olds-program, as well as the impact of the school interruption caused by the pandemic, as part of a study carried out for the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEES).

Congratulations Mélissa!

Pavel Sevcik has published his article "Do Multi-plant Firms Reduce Misallocation? Evidence from Canadian Manufacturing" a in the Journal of Industrial Economics. Using Canadian plant-level data, this paper shows that, depending on the industry, the differences in the average plant-level productivity and cross-plant allocation of resources between multi-plant and single-plant firms account for 1 to 15 per cent of the industry-level TFP. A large part of this contribution stems from more efficient cross-plant allocation of resources, measured by the covariance between plant size and productivity, in the pool of plants in multi-plant firms compared to the pool of plants in single-plant firms. There is less dispersion in the marginal products of the inputs, and thus less misallocation, in industries in which multi-plant firms account for a larger share of output. The patterns found in the cross-plant distribution of productivity and size are also consistent with better allocative efficiency among plants in multi-plant firms than among plants in single-plant firms.

Do Multi-plant Firms Reduce Misallocation? Evidence from Canadian Manufacturing [ lien: dx.doi.org/10.1111/joie.12132 ], Journal of Industrial Economics, Vol. 65, Issue 2, 2017, pages 275-308.

Our colleagues Wilfried Koch and Julien Martin have just published a paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics.

In their paper entitled “Knocking on Tax Haven's Door: Multinational Firms and Transfer Pricing” Julien Martin, with Ron Davies, Mathieu Parenti and Farid Toubal, provide direct evidence that multinational firms manipulate their transfer prices to shift profits toward low-tax countries. They show that tax avoidance through transfer pricing is economically sizable and extremely granular: The bulk of the loss for tax authorities is driven by the exports of 450 firms to ten tax havens. The fiscal outcomes are therefore sizable.

The paper of Wilfried Koch, written with B. Diallo (former PhD student in our Department), entitled "Bank concentration and Schumpeterian Growth : theory and international evidence » and investigates the relationship between economic growth and bank concentration. Using the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, the authors theoretically and empirically show that the effects of bank concentration plays no role on the most advanced economies, but plays a negative role on developing countries farther from the frontier especially those with a certain level of their financial development.

The Economics Department continues its expansion with the recruitment of five new professors!

Following an exceptional recruitment campaign, which lasted some four months, we are happy to announce the arrival of five new professors among our ranks.  Our new colleagues are:

Marie Louise Leroux (Toulouse)— Having completed her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Helmut Cremer, Marie Louise is currently at CORE at the Catholic University of Louvain.  Her areas of specialization are public finance, health economics and political economy.  She has several publications to her name with various co-authors, in journals including the Journal of Public Economics, the European Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Health Economics. Marie Louise has devoted particular attention to the study of population ageing, optimal taxation and pension plans, topics that are of particular interest to policymakers.

Alessandro Barattieri (Boston College)— Following a PhD thesis under the direction of James Anderson, Susanto Basu and Fabio Ghironi, Alessandro works in the fields of international economics (finance and trade) and macroeconomics.  His recruitment seminar was impressive in its dynamism, clarity and depth, and it dealt with the topics of comparative advantage, the balance of trade in services and global disequilibria.  He is co-author with Susanto Basu and Peter Gottschalk of a recent NBER working paper (No. 16130) on the frequency of adjustment of nominal wages, drawing on microeconomic data.

Sean Horan (Boston University)—  Having completed his doctorate under the supervision of Barton Lipman, Sean works mainly in the areas of decision theory, microeconomics, and law and economics.  He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Princeton University and a Master’s in law from the University of Toronto.  His original research in decision theory, which draws on choices expressed in the form of lists, is likely to give rise to several interesting applications.

Dalibor Stevanovic (Université de Montréal)—  Currently a visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Dalibor completed his doctorate in the fields of econometrics and macroeconomics under the supervision of Jean Boivin and Jean-Marie Dufour.  He works on the development of methods for the estimation of so-called “factor” structural models, which can be used in order to measure monetary policy and credit shocks more precisely and make relevant macroeconomic predictions.  He has also worked on the estimation of open-economy models, particularly for Canada.  He is co-author of several papers with Jean Boivin, Jean-Marie Dufour and Marc Giannoni.

Pierre-Yves Yanni (UCLA)— Following a Master’s in economics from UBC, Pierre-Yves completed his PhD under the direction of Hugo Hopenhayn.  He works in the field of applied economics, macroeconomics and industrial organization.  His research deals with incentives for risk-taking in the financial markets.  In a context of dynamic general equilibrium with adverse selection, he has shown that the incentives for risk-taking by agents are interconnected.  These complementarities amongst agents in the choice of risk level lead to multiple equilibria and, in certain situations, to sub-optimal risk choices.

The Department extends a warm welcome to all our new colleagues, and thanks the members of this year’s Recruitment Committee: Kristian Behrens, Marie Connolly-Pray, Yvon Fauvel, Stéphane Pallage and Louis Phaneuf.

CIRANO is pleased to announce that the UQAM team has won the first CIRANO Budget Policy Challenge. The team, supervised by Jean-Denis Garon, professor in the Department of Economics, is composed of Amor Aniss Benmoussa, Philippe Jacques, Pierre-Loup Beauregard and Samuel Mignault. The Université de Sherbrooke team finished second.

Congratulations to the team!

https://www.cirano.qc.ca/fr/actualites/715

Our colleague Till Düppe received the ESHET Young Researcher Award. This prize recognizes scholarly achievements of historians of economic thought at an early stage of their career. The prize is awarded to scholars below the age of 40 at the time of the annual conference in recognition of outstanding publications in the history of economic thought.

Congratulations Till !

http://www.eshet.net/index.php?a=47

The Department is delighted to announce the recruitment of three new faculty members in 2017 :

• Philippe De DONDER;
• Étienne LALÉ;
• Florian MAYNERIS.

The Department would like to extend these new colleagues a warm welcome and also thank the members of this year’s recruitment committee: Marie-Louise Leroux, Arnaud Dellis, Alain Guay, Julien Martin, Alain Paquet, Louis Phaneuf and Dalibor Stevanovic.