rions jaune….

le Dôme des Invalides [jatp]

about French inequalities [graphs]

A first graph in Le Monde about the impact of the recent tax changes on French households as a percentage of net income with negative values at both ends, except for a small spike at about 10% and another one for the upper 1%, presumably linked with the end of the fortune tax (ISF).

A second one showing incompressible expenses by income category, with poorest households facing a large constraint on lodging, missing the fraction due to taxes. Unless the percentage is computed after tax.

A last and amazing one detailing the median monthly income per socio-professional category, not because of the obvious typo on the blue collar median 1994!, but more fundamentally because retirees have a median income in the upper part of the range. (This may be true in most developed countries, I was just unaware of this imbalance.)

French Econometrics [discussion]

This Friday, I am briefly taking part in the 10th French Econometrics Conference as a discussant of Anna Simoni’s (CREST) talk, based on a paper co-written with Sid Chib and Minchul Shin. The conference is located at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), on Paris South End, in an impressive new building. The topic of the paper is a Bayesian empirical likelihood approach to the econometrics notion of moments model. Which I discussed here during ISBA last summer since Sid spoke (twice!) there.

reactionaries behind wheels

France was hit by hundreds of blockades yesterday, sometimes with dramatic consequences, as a reaction to the planned ecological tax on gas announced by the French government. As in every occasion French drivers are impacted by new laws or taxes, from reducing the legal speed limit to installing new radars, to tolls for trucks, they react like a Swiss watch, blocking streets and highways, often with success in the end. As in the previous “bonnets rouges” movement (making me wonder why these actions are always connected with clothes!). While being highly privileged to be able to bike to work (or to use the local trains, when they run) and to shop locally, I am struck by the doubly myopic of the protesters, myopy of not seeing the larger picture of the urgent need to cut the addiction to cars  with obvious negative consequences in the short term and myopy of seeing these protests as “spontaneous” and “politically neutral” despite the immediate recuperation by the fringe political parties. And thus hope the French government will hold on that measure (despite its poor record so far in terms of ecological policy).

but it raaaains…

Bayesian biostatistics in Lyon 2019