When the Department was created a little over 10 years ago, it simultaneously created its own collection of working papers – the Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series. Our goal is to make our latest research available to fellow economists, scholars and institutions all over the world as soon as possible.

The collection is available online on our website and will soon be completely available as well on the new the Sciences Po-HAL Institution Repository (former SPIRE) where it is linked to RePEC’s EconPapers.

As you will discover, the collection attests to the broadening of the Department’s topics, along with the recruitment of new, brilliant researchers, to include a theoretical economics research cluster, development economics and the extension of its expertise in macroeconomics, dealing notably with informational frictions – without neglecting its core fields in political economy, international economics, labour economics and econometrics.

Under the scientific direction of Department Head Thierry MAYER and permanent faculty member Benjamin MARX, our discussion papers have been flourishing – they are almost systematically taken up by international research networks and institutions in their working paper series (CEPR, IZA, NBER, …), and, of course, finally published.

If you are looking for something to read over the holidays and weekends, we are spotlighting a few recent Sciences Po Economics Discussion Papers from our younger researchers that have been picking up traction.

Michele FIORETTI joined the permanent faculty of the Department in 2019, just after defending his thesis at the University of Southern California (USC).

Specialised in empirical industrial organization, behavioural economics, and applied microeconomics, his work focuses on understanding firms' strategies with applications on social impact firms and sectors with a social dimension such as the health and the energy sectors.

His paper Performance Pay in Insurance Markets: Evidence from Medicare (Sciences Po Economics DP 2021-02, May 2021), co-authored with Hongming WANG (Center for Global Economic Systems, Hitotsubashi University), was recently accepted for future publication in the MIT Press’ Review of Economics and Statistics.

Exploiting the introduction of the quality bonus payment initiative in the U.S. Medicare Advantage market, where Medicare services are provided by private insurers who receive subsidies from the government, Michele Fioretti and Hongming Wang test whether the pay-for-performance ultimately had the hoped-for effect, i.e. improvement of the quality of service at a lower cost.

In a CEPR VoxEU column, they framed their problem in the following manner: “As health spending continues to rise globally, pay-for-performance can be an attractive policy tool for promoting high-quality services at lower costs. But there are concerns that it weakens the finances of poor-performing hospitals in low-income areas."

They will discover that because the quality rating of private insurers relies heavily on health outcome measures, insurance companies preferred to reduce their risks. They offered lower premiums in healthier, low-risk counties and simultaneously raised premiums in riskier ones to select healthier enrollees, thus worsening regional disparities in healthcare access.

To find out why, read the paper !

More about Michele FIORETTI and his research 
Discover the full Sciences Po Economics Discussion Paper series