Pierre Dubois

Toulouse School of Economics | TSE · Economics

The adoption of barcode scanning technology in the 1970s gave rise to a new form of data: scanner data. Soon afterwards, researchers began using this new resource, and since then a large number of papers have exploited scanner data. The data provide detailed price, quantity, and product characteristic information for completely disaggregate product...

We investigate how the prescribing behavior of physicians reacts to scientific information and recommendations released by public authorities. Taking the example of antidepressant drugs, we use French panel data on exhaustive prescriptions made by a representative sample of general practitioners to more than 110,000 depressed patients between 2000...

We use data from seven low and middle income countries with diverse drug procurement systems to assess the effect of centralized procurement on drug prices, and provide a theoretical mechanism that explains this effect. Our empirical analysis is based on exhaustive data on drug sales quantities and expenditures over three years for forty important...

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who is most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual-specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and s...

Differences in regulated pharmaceutical prices within the European Economic Area create arbitrage opportunities that pharmacy retailers can access through parallel imports. For prescription drugs under patent, parallel trade affects the sharing of profits among an innovating pharmaceutical company, retailers, and parallel traders. We develop a stru...

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1,266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA nutrient profiling score. Effect sizes were 17 times small...

To examine whether four pre-selected front-of-pack nutrition labels improve food purchases in real-life grocery shopping settings, we put 1.9 million labels on 1266 food products in four categories in 60 supermarkets and analyzed the nutritional quality of 1,668,301 purchases using the FSA nutrient profiling score. Effect sizes were 17 times smalle...

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market - the potato chips market. We exploit consumer level exposure to adverts to estimate demand, allowing advertisin...

The paper argues that the emergence of private labels can be partially explained by the new information technologies available at the retail level. In our approach, the owner of a brand has “decision rights” on product design, while the details of the production and distribution are left to contractual negotiation. Manufacturers have privileged inf...

In this paper we study the effects of the change in contract length on the agents' incentives to invest and exert effort. We present an agent's dynamic decision model that explicitly deals with two types of investments and directly allows for contract regime switching by varying the probability of contract renewal parameter. The fact that the unobs...

Variability in regulatory frameworks, industrial policy, physician/pharmacy autonomy, brand/generic distinctions, and the practice of medicine contribute to ambiguous interpretations of cross-country pharmaceutical cost comparisons. Here, we report cross-country comparisons that: (i) focus on ten therapeutic classes experiencing patent expiration a...

Food purchases differ substantially across countries. We use detailed household level data from the US, France and the UK to (i) document these differences; (ii) estimate a demand system for food and nutrients, and (iii) simulate counterfactual choices if households faced prices and nutritional characteristics from other countries. We find that dif...

We develop a structural model to investigate the effects of pharmaceutical price regulation on demand and on manufacturers' price- setting behavior in France. We estimate price- cost margins in a regulated market with price constraints and infer whether these constraints are binding, exploiting cost restrictions across drugs, which come from observ...

Cross-country variability in regulatory frameworks, industrial policy, physician/pharmacy autonomy, brand/generic distinctions, and in the practice of medicine contributes to ambiguous interpretations of pharmaceutical cost comparisons. Here we report cross-country comparisons that: (i) focus on 11 therapeutic classes experiencing patent expiration...

We semiparametrically estimate the impact of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program Oportunidades on the time mothers and older sisters spend taking care of children aged under 3, using the randomization of the program placement and the methodology in Lewbel (2000). Results support the existence of substitution effects: mothers in treatment...

This paper quantifies the relationship between market size and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. We estimate the elasticity of innovation, as measured by the number of new chemical entities appearing on the market for a given disease class, to the potential market size represented by the willingness of sufferers of diseases in that class (...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively imple-mented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public discontent with such policy in the region. This paper performs a systemati...

This paper studies spousal peer effects on the smoking behaviour and their implication for the health of children through passive smoking. Smoking decisions are modeled as equilibrium strategies of an incomplete information game within the couple. Using data from the French Health Survey 2002-2003, we identify two distinct effects linked to spousal...

Using an exhaustive database on academic publications in mathemat-ics all over the world, we study the patterns of productivity by mathe-maticians over the period 1984-2006. We uncover some surprising facts, such as the weakness of age related decline in productivity and the rela-tive symmetry of international movements, rejecting the presumption o...

We present the first empirical estimation of a structural model taking into account explicitly the endogenous buyer power of downstream players facing two part tariffs contracts offered by the upstream level. We consider vertical contracts between manufacturers and retailers where resale price maintenance may be used with two part tariffs and allow...

Using data from the French Health Survey 2002-2003, this paper looks at spousal peer effects on smoking and their implication on the health of children through passive smoking. We include in our sample both individuals that play a game with their partner (couples) and people whose smoking behavior is determined individually (singles). Smoking decis...

We propose a structural empirical approach à la Olley and Pakes (1996) to disentangle the effect of experts' grades from the effect of unobserved quality on the pricing of experience goods. Using a panel data set of 108 châteaux selling wine on the "en primeur" market of Bordeaux, we confirm that experts' grades affect producers' choice of "en prim...

We present a model of vertical contracts between manufacturers and retailers with nonlinear pricing strategies. Using home-scan data on bottled water produced by manufacturers and sold by retail chains in France, we estimate a structural demand and supply model allowing for two-part tariff contracts between manufacturers and retailers. Using price-...

We develop a model of competition between retailer chains with a structural estimation of the demand and supply in the supermarket industry in France. In the model, supermarkets compete in price and brand offer over all food products to attract consumers, in particular through the share of private labels versus national brands across all their prod...

Using an exhaustive database on academic publications in mathematics, we study the patterns of productivity by world mathematicians over the period 1984-2006. We uncover some surprising facts, such as the absence of age related decline in productivity and the relative symmetry of international movements, rejecting the presumption of a massive ”brai...

Using data on individual consumption from farm households in the Philippines, we construct a direct test of risk-sharing within the household. We contrast the efficient outcomes predicted by the unitary household model with the outcomes we might expect if food consumption delivers not only utils, but also nutrients affecting future productivity. Th...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively imple-mented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public discontent with such policy in the region. This paper performs a systemati...

We show how to use a long period of observation of all food purchases at the household level to infer the profile of average individual caloric intakes according to the gender, age and the body mass index of household members. Using data from France, we apply this method to analyze the relationship between obesity and individual food consumption. T...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

We develop and implement a collocation method to solve for an equilibrium in the dynamic legislative bargaining game of Duggan and Kalandrakis (2008). We formulate the collocation equations in a quasi-discrete version of the model, and we show that the collocation equations are locally Lipchitz continuous and directionally differentiable. In numeri...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and informal agreements, that is, self-enforcing agreements spec...

A methodology is presented allowing manufacturers and retailers vertical contracting in their pricing strategies on a differentiated product market to be introduced. This contribution allows price-cost margins to be recovered from estimates of demand parameters both under linear pricing models and two part tariffs. Two types of nonlinear pricing re...

We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and informal agreements, that is, self-enforcing agreements spec...

Sharecropping is a form of land leasing contract between a tenant and a landlord who share the production. It has a variety of forms and is sometimes linked with credit, lending, or insurance. The apparent inefficiency of sharecropping due to the fact that the tenant receives only a share of the marginal productivity of his labour has attracted eco...

Mention d'édition : 2nd ed.

This paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the French market of academic journals. After merging several databases, we estimate an aggregated nested logit demand system combined simultaneously with a pricing equation, taking into account theevolution of impact factors of journals. We identify the structural parameters of this market and f...

We study the effects of a conditional cash transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance at school (passing grades) and the effect of a cash transfer program conditional on school attendance....

This paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the French market of academic journals, taking into account its intermediary role between researchers, who are both producers and consumers of knowledge. This two sidedness feature will echoes similar problems already observed in electronic markets - payment card systems, video game consoles, etc...

The objective of this paper is to develop an analytical framework for the estimation of parameters of a structural model of an incentive contract under moral hazard, taking into account agents heterogeneity. We show that allowing the principal to strategically distribute the production inputs across heterogenous agents as part of the contract desig...

This paper analyzes the demand and cost structure of the French market of academic journals, taking into account its intermediary role between researchers, who are both producers and consumers of knowledge. This two sidedness feature echoes similar problems such as the chicken and egg problem Here readers don't buy a journal if they do not expect i...

Les contrats jouent un rôle de plus en plus important en agriculture. Ils restent peu étudiés en France et en Europe sur le plan microéconomique. A partir de l'analyse de tous les contrats passés entre une coopérative et ses producteurs de blé pendant quatre 4 ans, la mise en oeuvre d'un modèle microéconomique structurel de contrat permet de montre...

Le secteur de la distribution française est l'un des plus réglementés d'Europe. La dernière réforme dite loi Dutreil II, qui succède à la loi Galland de 1996 a pris effet au 1er janvier 2006. L'un de ses principaux articles impose la réintégration d'une partie des marges arrière (la part excédant 20% du prix unitaire facturé) dans le seuil de reven...

Recent studies argue that the spread-adjusted Taylor rule (STR), which includes a response to the credit spread, replicates monetary policy in the United State. We show (1) STR is a theoretically optimal monetary policy under heterogeneous loan interest rate contracts in both discretionay and commitment monetary policies, (2) however, the optimal r...

Publiée par la Commission européenne, l’étude examine l’évolution économique et technique du marché de l’édition scientifique en Europe. Elle a été commandée dans le cadre du débat public actuel sur les conditions d'accès aux publications scientifiques et sur leur diffusion. Des changements importants se sont produits dans ce domaine au cours des 3...

Collection : Ashgate studies in environmental and natural resource economics

Using data on individual consumption expenditures from a sample of farm households in the Philippines, we construct a direct test of the risk-sharing implications of the collective house-hold model. We are able to contrast the efficient outcomes predicted by the collective household model with the outcomes we might expect in environments in which f...

In this paper, we study the determinants of the value of informal risk sharing groups. In particular, we look at the effects of heterogeneity of preferences and of limited commitment constraints that restrict feasible allocations differently if individuals can deviate form risk sharing agreements in coalitions or not. We test impirically several pr...

L'introduction résume les contributions du numéro spécial de la revue sur l'organisation industrielle de l'agroalimentaire et donne des directions de recherche futures dans ce domaine.

We show that taking into account the consequences of child labor on both childhood welfare and human capital investment, instead of focusing exclusively on the human capital dimension, brings new insights on the economic analysis of child labor. In particular, there are new sources of potential inefficiencies that appear when we assume that labor i...

The use of contracts to vertically coordinate the production and marketing of agricultural commodities has become common practice in many agricultural sectors. To solve the apparent asymmetric information problems between processors and independent farmers that universally plague these relationships, the majority of contracts use high-powered incen...

We address the problem of optimal regulation of an industry where the production of a polluting output is contracted with independent agents. The provision of inputs is divided between the principal and the agent such that the production externality results from their joint actions. The main result shows that in the three-tier hierarchy (regulator-...

Using data on individual consumption expenditures from a sample of farm households in the Philippines, we construct a direct test of the unitary household model. We are able to contrast the e#cient outcomes predicted by the unitary household model with the constrained e#cient outcomes we might expect if there was a hidden action problem within the...

We study the effects of a conditional transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational decision and process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance (passing grades) and the effect of a conditional cash transfer program for children enrolled at...

In this paper we address the problem of the optimal regulation of a vertically integrated industry where the production of an environmentally polluting output is contracted with independent agents. The provision of production inputs is divided between the principal and the agents such that the resulting production externality is the consequence of...

We present a theoretical model which shows how households can insure through formal and informal contracts when some verifiable production takes place in an en-vironment of incomplete markets. We construct a theoretical setting which nests the case of complete markets when all risks can be insured by formal contracts (because all states of nature w...

Résumé L’étude du partage optimal des risques dans une économie, soit au niveau agrégé, soit au niveau d’un village, a été profondément renouvelée par les résultats des articles empiriques rejetant pour la plupart les théories existantes. Le rejet de l’hypothèse de revenu permanent et de l’assurance complète a conduit à modéliser les imperfections...

Cette revue de la littérature sur les contrats agricoles dans les pays en développement met en évidence les hypothèses et les limites des modèles théoriques utilisés, ainsi que la relative faiblesse des questions empiriques abordées. Les critiques exposées soulignent les difficultés des recherches mais aussi montrent quelques voies peu ou pas explo...

Sharecropping theory generally does not take into account land fertility. We develop a repeated Principal-Agent model under moral hazard where the Principal delegates the use and maintenance of a productive asset. In a multitask framework, we characterize the optimal spot contract focusing on the best incentives in the contract design. One of the m...

This paper estimates mortality and fertility rates prevailing in Ireland during the 25-year period before the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1849. A technique is developed to estimate the age-specific mortality level during the Famine and the number of Famine-related deaths. The paper concludes that fertility rates were declining during the period 1821...

Empirical tests of the complete markets hypothesis generally reject full insurance and stimulated the study of optimal risk sharing. However, most of the empirical tests of the complete markets hypothesis make strong assumptions concerning the specification of preferences. In particular, the usual rejection of full insurance may be affected by the...

Most of the empirical tests reject the complete markets hypothesis, but have serious methodological problems concerning the identification of preferences, the direction of the tests and their power. We study the risk sharing and consumption insurance achieved by rural households from three provinces of Pakistan dealing with these methodological pro...

[fre] Aléa moral, fertilité de la terre et choix de contrats aux Philippines. . Une application importante des modèles d'aléa moral concerne l'étude des contrats agricoles de fermage et de métayage. En tenant compte de l'évolution de la fertilité de la terre de manière endogène dans un modèle Principal-Agent, le contrat optimal arbitre entre partag...

Introducing concerns about land fertility for landlords in a Principal–Agent model of sharecropping with moral hazard, we show that the optimal contract under limited commitment reflects a trade-off between production and land quality maintenance. Using data from the Philippines, a model where the leasing out and contract choices are simultaneous i...

Moral hazard, land fertility and contract choices in the philippines An important application of moral hazard models concerns land leasing contracts in agriculture like fixed rent contracts or sharecropping. In a Principal-Agent model with endogenous fertility evolution, the optimal contract results of a trade off between risk sharing, production i...

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Using data on individual consumption and earnings from the Philippines, we test for efficient or constrained-efficient risk sharing within the household by constructing a dynamic model of intrahouse-hold food allocation under uncertainty distinguishing between the nu-trients supplied by a particular food bundle and the quality of that bun-dle. We c...

In this paper, we study the determinants of the value of informal risk sharing groups. In particular, we look at the effects of heterogeneity of preferences and of limited commitment constraints that restrict feasible allocations differently if individuals can deviate form risk sharing agreements in coalitions or not. We test empirically several pr...

In this paper we study the effects of the change in contract length on the agents' incentives to invest and exert effort. We present an agent's dynamic decision model that explicitly deals with two types of investments and directly allows for contract regime switching by varying the probability of contract renewal parameter. The fact that the unobs...

The production contracts between integrator firms (principals) and independent growers (agents) in most agricultural settings are governed by short term contracts. Recently, some firms converted their short-term into long-term contracts. This change in contract duration represents a natural experiment that enables us to isolate the effect of the ch...

Using data on individual consumption expenditures fromasampleoffarmhouseholdsinthePhilippines,weconstruct a direct test of the unitary household model. We are able to con- trast the e-cient outcomes predicted by the unitary household model with the constrained e-cient outcomes we might expect if there was a hidden action problem within the househol...

We present a methodology allowing to introduce manufacturers and retailers vertical contracting in their pricing strategies on a differentiated product market. We consider in particular some non linear pricing relationships, where resale price maintenance may be used or not with two part tariffs contracts. When agreeing with these two part tariffs...

The objective of this paper is to identify the causal effects between food consumption, calories intakes and body mass index (BMI) and then the effects of food prices on consumption. We then analyze the relevance of policies of taxation for the reduction of obesity in the population. Actually, the price elasticity of BMI can be decomposed into the...

Price dispersion is prevalent in the French market, even after controlling for observable and unobservable store and market characteristics. Reduced-form test show that search costs explain, at least partially, the observed price di¤erences. We then develop a model of individual purchase behaviour with search costs and structurally estimate the sea...

Thesis (doctoral)--Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1999.