Des études surprenantes tendent à prouver que les employeurs accordent un salaire plus élevé aux salariés physiquement attrayants (voir stlouisfed et slate).
L’enquête de Daniel Hamermesh et Jeff Biddle consiste à rassembler les résultats d’auto-évaluation des salariés sur leur apparence physique. Ceux qui se notent plus attrayants gagnent plus que ceux qui se notent peu attrayants. Si la beauté récompense, la laideur pénalise. Mais pas de façon homogène. La laideur (below average looking) diminue le salaire horaire de 9% alors que la beauté (above average looking) augmente le salaire horaire de 5%, même après contrôle des variables comme l’éducation et l’expérience. En outre, les femmes souffriraient plus d’être grosse que d’être laide, puisque la pénalité est une diminution de 17% du salaire par rapport aux femmes à l’Indice de Masse Corporelle recommandée; néanmoins, l’échantillon révèle que la laideur n’affecte que le salaire des femmes blanches, mais pas le salaire des femmes noires et hispaniques (il n’y avait pas de femmes asiatiques dans l’échantillon étudiée de Susan Averett et Sanders Korenman ou de John Cawley). Et s’il existe une prime à la beauté, il existe aussi une prime à la hauteur. D’autres groupes d’économistes ont mené une étude dont le résultat estime que chaque pouce de hauteur supplémentaire accompagne 1,8% d’augmentation de salaire. Cette étude prenait en compte les variables comme le niveau d’éducation et l’emploi des parents, ainsi que le nombre de frères et sœurs.
Si l’on y regarde de plus près, on peut être surpris de trouver que les hommes moches gagnent 10% moins que les autres hommes, alors que les femmes laides gagnent 5% moins que les autres femmes. Pourquoi la pénalité est-elle plus forte pour les hommes ? Steven E. Landsburg pense que l’explication serait que les femmes les plus laides se retirent du marché du travail. Les femmes mariées les plus laides seraient 8% moins susceptibles de chercher un emploi que les femmes mariées en général.
Archives mensuelles : juin 2011
The Experience of Free Banking – Kevin Dowd
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Chapter 3: Free banking in Australia – Kevin Dowd
The Early History of Money and Banking in Australia
Branching enabled banks to economize on operating costs (e.g., by holding fewer reserves per branch, and operating an inter-branch reserve market) and enabled them to provide specialist services (such as the provision of foreign exchange) at lower cost. Branch banks were also likely to have a more stable capital value because branching enabled them to protect themselves against adverse conditions in one locality or region by diversifying their risks.
Australian Banking From The 1850s to the 1880s
“The eight trading banks operating in Australia when gold was discovered, had grown to fifteen by the end of the fifties. At the end of 1850 there was a total of twenty-four branches (including head offices); at the end of 1860 there were 197.” (Butlin 1986:8)
Interest rates were lower in Britain than in Australia, so deposits in Australian banks were attractive to British investors and a comparatively cheap source of funds for the banks.
1. The banks formed a hierarchy. By 1892 there were 7 large banks with 100 branches or more spread across at least 2 colonies, there were 5 intermediate banks which tended to be concentrated in a single colony, and which had 50–99 branches each, and there were 11 small banks which tended to be concentrated in a single region, and to have less than 50 branches each (Schedvin 1989:3; Merrett 1989:73).
2. Concentration rates were very high — four banks issued about half the deposits throughout this period (Pope 1989:29) — but no one of these banks ever looked as though it would win the others’ market shares. There was therefore no tendency towards natural monopoly. [...]
3. The note-issuing banks accepted each others’ notes from a relatively early stage, and mutual acceptance seems to have facilitated the reflux mechanism whereby notes were returned to issuers, but clearing was often carried out on a bilateral basis. A (multilateral) clearing-house was established in Melbourne in 1867, but Sydney only followed suit at the comparatively late date of 1895. The explanation appears to be that the small number of banks involved implied that the gain from moving from bilateral to multilateral clearing was relatively unimportant.
4. Profit rates appear to have fallen over this period, presumably because of increased competition (Pope 1987:7–8). [...]
5. [...] Note too that Australian interest rates were only about half as volatile as interest rates in the UK or the USA (Pope 1989:24–5), and the most obvious cause of this greater interest stability would seem to be the comparative freedom of the Australian banks from disruptive government or central bank interference.
An interesting feature of the Australian free banking system is that the note issue was never particularly important for Australian banks except in their very early years. The bank note/deposit ratio was 26.1 per cent in 1851, and fell subsequently to 7.4 per cent in 1881, 4.5 per cent in 1891, and 3.9 per cent in 1901 (Pender et al., 1989:8). These figures are well below contemporary note/deposit ratios for the UK or the USA, and seem to indicate a more mature banking system in which greater use was made of cheques and deposits.
“There is … in England and Wales a banking office for every 12,000 persons; in Scotland, one for every 4,000; and in Ireland, one for every 11,000 of the inhabitants. Now in Victoria … we have a branch of a bank for every 2,760 colonists.” (Quoted in Pope 1988:2)
The Depression of The 1890s and The Bank Crash
The suspensions were also prompted by government intervention. In Victoria the government imposed a five-day banking holiday from 1 May.
The Australasia, the Union and the Bank of New South Wales had all received substantial deposit inflows since late 1892 — so many deposits flowed in, in fact, that the two Melbourne banks were embarrassed by this ‘sign of public confidence’ (Butlin 1961:305) — and this ‘flight to quality’ was to continue until the final bank failures later in May (Blainey 1958:145, n. 1). For the weaker banks, however, an agreement was tantamount to the provision of a credit facility at interest rates generally below what they would have had to pay on the market. An agreement was thus equivalent to a transfer from the stronger banks to the weaker ones, and the stronger banks were naturally reluctant to consent to it.
The two banks’ willingness to remain open shored up public confidence in them, and the withdrawals they faced soon abated. The Bank of New South Wales re-opened the next day, and also stood the storm, but the remaining banks that had closed had effectively lost public confidence and were consequently unable to reopen (Butlin 1961:303–4).
One of the key issues here is the banks’ liquidity and Merrett goes on to argue that the ‘inescapable conclusion is that the long decline in liquidity standards seriously undermined the banks’ ability to cope with the growing problem of higher risks’ (1989:77). However, as George Selgin points out
“the facts tell a different story. Merrett (1989, p. 75) reports that the aggregate reserve ratio … fell from .3217 in 1872 to .2188 in 1877; but his figures for later five-year intervals show no further downward trend … . Even the lowest figure compares favorably to those from other banking systems, both regulated and free. It is much higher than Scottish bank reserve ratios for the mid-nineteenth century … and about the same as ratios for free Canadian banks in the late nineteenth century and for heavily regulated US banks today.”
(Selgin 1990a: 26–7)
He also notes that
“Pope’s annual data, presented graphically … are more plainly inconsistent with [the falling reserve] hypothesis … in the seven years preceding the crisis … the average ratio of the thirteen suspended banks rose steadily from about .15 to .16 … . Pope’s reserve figures also show a minor difference only — perhaps two percentage points — between the reserve holdings of failed Australian banks and those that weathered the crisis. This also suggests that ‘overexpansion’ was not the root cause of the banking collapse.”
(Selgin 1990a: 27)
And note, finally, that the difference between the capital ratios of banks that were to fail and banks that were not is relatively small — under 3 percentage points, and usually considerably less — and shows no tendency to grow as the dates of the failures approach (1989: figure 8).
One might note too that there was no indiscriminate running of financial institutions; there was instead a ‘flight to quality’ in which depositors withdrew funds from institutions perceived as weak to re-deposit them in stronger institutions such as the big banks, and it is significant that at no time were the big three banks — the Australasia, the New South Wales and the Union — ever in serious danger.
The bungling attempts of the Victorian Treasurer to pressurize the Associated Banks in to bailing out the weaker banks backfired at a critical point and needlessly undermined public confidence. The Victorian banking holiday had a similar impact.
… the claim that banks’ risks were becoming more concentrated only receives very weak support. Pope’s figure 8 indicates only a barely perceptible increase in the suspended banks’ risk-concentration, and the fact that the risk-pooling variable always has an insignificant coefficient in Pope’s estimates (1989:20) indicates that it had little effect on the bank failures anyway.
Reaganisme et Thatchérisme : entre légende et réalité
On raconte souvent que Reagan et Thatcher ont été les chantres de l’ultra-libéralisme. Dévots du capitalisme satanique, ils ont baissé les impôts, opéré des vagues de privatisations et déréglementations, déclenché des émeutes, etc. Toutes ces histoires sont largement exagérées, et si cette vérité ne date pas d’aujourd’hui, un petit rappel à l’ordre est toujours utile, tant le mythe perdure, encore et toujours.
C’est dire que le marché a bon dos.
Lorsque Reagan est entré en fonction en 1981, les objectifs affichés étaient les suivants : réduire le niveau de taxation pour tous les niveaux de revenu, réduire la taille du gouvernement et réduire la réglementation du secteur privé. Reagan a échoué sur tous les plans.
Si la taille du gouvernement a été réellement réduite, les dépenses publiques devraient être revues à la baisse. En 1980, le gouvernement Carter a dépensé 591 milliards de dollars. En 1986, le gouvernement Reagan a enregistré 990 milliards de dollars, soit une hausse 68%. En 1980, les dépenses fédérales représentaient pour 21,6% du PNB. En 1986, les dépenses s’élevaient à 24,3% du PNB.
S’il est vrai que le taux d’imposition pour les revenus élevés a subi une ‘coupe’, l’impôt a augmenté pour la classe moyenne, plutôt que diminué. La baisse des taux d’imposition a été plus que compensée par deux formes de hausse d’impôt. La première est le “bracket creep”. Qu’est-ce que le bracket creep ? Tout simplement, une situation où l’inflation pousse le revenu dans les tranches d’imposition plus élevées. La conséquence évidente est une augmentation des impôts sur le revenu. La deuxième est l’augmentation continue de l’impôt de Sécurité Sociale.
Since the tax cut of 1981 that was not really a cut, furthermore, taxes have gone up every single year since, with the approval of the Reagan administration. But to save the president’s rhetorical sensibilities, they weren’t called tax increases. Instead, ingenious labels were attached to them: raising of “fees,” “plugging loopholes” (and surely everyone wants loopholes plugged), “tightening IRS enforcement,” and even “revenue enhancements.”
Selon une étude du National Bureau menée par Hausman et Poterba sur la Tax Reform Act de 1986, plus de 40% des contribuables ont souffert des hausses du taux marginal d’imposition (ou des taux tout aussi élevés que sous le régime fiscal antérieur), et parmi ceux qui bénéficiaient d’une réduction d’impôt marginal, seulement 11% ont obtenu des réductions de 10% (ou plus). Les auteurs ajoutent que le TRA de 1986 tend à réduire (même légèrement) l’épargne grâce aux taxes sur les plus-values, notamment. La TRA n’a pas amélioré le sort des plus démunis.
Un détail qui a son importance, les recettes fiscales. Celles-ci s’élevaient à 517 milliards de dollars en 1980, sous Carter. En 1986, les recettes ont plafonné à 769 milliards de dollars, soit une augmentation de 49%. La réalité est que l’impôt dans son ensemble n’a que légèrement diminué :
Taxes fell from 18.9% of the GNP to 18.3%, or for a better gauge, taxes as percentage of net private product fell from 27.2% to 26.6%.
Et si les “user fee” (frais d’utilisation) ne sont pas considérés comme des impôts, mais un droit d’utiliser un service public, comme les parcs et les voies navigables, Reagan a élargi la définition du “user fee” pour y inclure les droits d’accise. Les “user fee” ont ensuite pris pour cible les compagnies aériennes internationales, les tarversées maritimes, les producteurs de charbon, l’essence et l’autobus. Et dans le sillage de l’effondrement du marché boursier, à l’époque, Reagan a affirmé qu’il était prêt à examiner les propositions de hausses d’impôts.
To greet a looming recession with a tax increase is a wonderful way to bring that recession into reality.
