Jacques Drèze

Biografia

Nato a Verviers (Belgio) nel 1929, Jacques Drèze si laureò in economia alla vicina Université de Liège, e poi ottenne un Ph.D. alla Columbia University nel 1958, con una tesi su “Individual Decision Making under Partially Controllable Uncertainty” relata da William Vickrey.

Dopo un primo lavoro accademico presso la Carnegie Mellon University di Pittsburgh, egli raggiunse la Université Catholique de Louvain nel 1958, ed vi è sempre rimasto da allora in poi - eccetto per alcune visite presso la Northwestern University, la University of Chicago, e la Cornell University - fino al raggiungimento della pensione nel 1989. Nonostante il pensionamento egli rimane ancora molto attivo nella ricerca economica.

È stato uno studioso di teorie decisionali, dell'ottimo peretiano, di teoria dei giochi e delle teorie del second best. Ha ricevuto oltre 15 dottorati onorari tra i quali, il 27 febbraio 1988, la laurea honoris causa in scienze politiche dall'Università di Bologna durante le celebrazioni del IX centenario dell'Alma Mater Studiorum. Nel 1996 è stato tra i fondatori del CORE - Centre for Operations Research and Econometrics dell'Université catholique de Louvain presso Louvain-la-Neuve. Ha inoltre partecipato alla fondazione dellEuropean Doctoral Program in QuantitativeEconomics (EDP).

Jacques Drèze era padre di cinque figli. Uno di questi è l'economista Jean Drèze, famoso per i suoi scritti sulla povertà e fame in India (alcuni dei quali sono stati redatti in collaborazione con Amartya K. Sen); un altro figlio, Xavier Drèze, è professore di Marketing alla UCLA.

Decisioni informate dalla teoria economica, statistica e ottimizzazione La visione economica di Drèze enfatizza il ruolo normativo di teoria economica nella forma dell'economia politica, con l'uso dell'econometria Bayesian e dell'ottimizzazione matematica. Questa visione è illustrata in un comunicato di Dreze indirizzato in qualità di presidente alla Econometric Society nel 1970:

Core Queste frasi descrivono il programma di ricerca di un istituto di ricerca che fu fondato da Drèze, CORE, Il Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, presso la Université catholique de Louvain. Presso il CORE operano economisti, econometricisti, game theorist w operations research. Per far crescere questi tre punti, Drèze si è concentrato sulla teoria economica ma ha anche contribuito all'econometria ed ottimizzazione. Il lavoro principale di Drèze verte per lo più sull'economia teoretica e applicata, estendendosi alle questioni di microeconomia e macroeconomia. Il suo lavoro teorico spesso usa la general equilibrium theory. Il lavoro di macroeconomia si rifà alla teoria neokeynesiana, all'econometria empirica, e all'economia politica.

Drèze ha contribuito con il suo lavoro alla decision theory e Bayesian econometric metodo. Drèze ha anche scritto articoli sulla game theory (37, 53, 75), mathematical programming (14, 35) e stability di dynamical systems (45, 47).

Contributi all'economia I contributi di Drèze all'economia combinano rilevanza politica e tecniche matematiche.

Economia dell'incertezza e assicurazione

Preferenze dipendenti dallo stato di natura Tra games of strategy e games against nature, rimane una terra di mezzo nella quale le incertezze sono parzialmente controllabili dal decision-maker---situazioni etichettate come “games of strength and skill” da von Neumann e Morgenstern, o “moral hazard” nei lavori susseguenti. Tali problemi di moral hazard sono stati discussi da Jacques Drèze nella sua dissertazione, giungendo al paper (8) del 1961, la cui analisi fu generalizzata nel 1987 (76), e semplificata nel 2004 (123). La teoria di Drèze permette le preferenze dipendenti dallo stato dell'ambiente. Il comportamento razionale è ancora caratterizzato da subjective expected utility massimizzazione, in cui la utility è stato-dipendente, e la mathematical optimization comprende la scelta di un'ottima probabilità soggettiva da un sottostante set fattibile.

Pubblicazioni Libri di Jacques Drèze Citazioni e commenti tratti dal c.v. di Jacques Drèze (6 marzo 2009):

1. Allocation under Uncertainty: Equilibrium and Optimality (Ed.), Macmillan, London, 1974. 2. Essays on Economic Decisions under Uncertainty, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. Twenty reprinted papers, organised under 7 headings: individual decision theory, markets and prices, consumer decisions, producer decisions, theory of the firm, human capital and labour contracts, public decisions. 3. Labour Management, Contracts and Capital Markets, A General Equilibrium Approach, Oxford, 1989. An extended version of the 1983 Yrjö Jahnsson Lectures, dealing with the pure theory of labour-managed, then stock-market economies; stock-market economics with labour contracts; labour management versus labour contracts under incomplete capital markets; and some macroeconomic aspects. 4. Europe's Unemployment Problem (Ed.), MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1990. (With C. Bean, J.P. Lambert, F. Mehta and H. Sneessens, Eds) Papers prepared under the European Unemployment Program, a 10-country research initiative supervised by Richard Layard and Drèze in 1986-88. The country papers adopted a common econometric framework inspired by work on Belgium by Drèze and Henri Sneesens (see article ). Includes a 65-page synthesis by Charles Bean and Drèze. 5. Underemployment Equilibria: Essays in Theory, Econometrics and Policy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. Eighteen reprinted papers, organised under 8 headings: overview, equilibria with price rigidities, efficiency of constrained equilibria, public goods and the public sector, price adjustments, wage policies, econometrics, and policy. 6. Money and Uncertainty: Inflation, Interest, Indexation, Edizioni Dell'Elefante, Roma, 1992. An extended version of the 1992 Paolo Baffi Lecture at Banca d'Italia, dealing successively with a positive theory of positive inflation, with interest rates policies and with wage indexation. 7. Pour l'emploi, la croissance et l'Europe, De Boeck Université, 1995. Ten papers (some initially written in French, some translated from English) dealing successively with growth and employment, technical progress and low-skilled employment, European macroeconomic policies, work sharing, Europe's capital city and a status for regions within a Europe of nations. Most papers are based on lectures addressed to non-specialist audiences.

Articoli selezionati di Jacques Drèze

7. "Quelques réflexions sereines sur l'adaptation de l'industrie belge au Marché Commun", Comptes Rendus de la Société d'Economie Politique de Belgique, Bruxelles, 275, 3-37, 1960; translated as "The Standard Goods Hypothesis" in The European Internal Market: Trade and Competition, Eds. A. Jacquemin and A. Sapir, 13-32, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. Product differentiation and economies of scale as a new source of comparative advantage---a pillar of the extensive theory of "intra-industry trade", and of some more recent developments following the paper by Krugman in AER 1970. 8. "Les fondements logiques de l'utilité cardinale et de la probabilité subjective", in La Decision, Colloques Internationaux du CNRS, Paris, 73-97, 1961. Extension of individual decision theory to moral hazard and state-dependent preferences, based on unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, revised and more systematically presented in . 12. "L'utilité sociale d'une vie humaine", Revue Francaise de Recherche Opérationnelle, 23, 93-118, 1962. Introduces the "willingness to pay" approach to the demand for safety. 13. "Some Postwar Contributions of French Economists to Theory and Public Policy", American Economic Review, 54, 2, 1-64, 1964. An extensive review (with some extensions) of the work of the French marginalist school (Allais, Boiteux, Massé. . .), with additional sections on intertemporal allocation (Allais, Malinvaud...) and French planning. 21. "Market Allocation under Uncertainty", European Economic Review, 2, 2, 133-165, 1971. Interpretation of the Arrow-Debreu contingent-markets model. An early statement and demonstration of the martingale property of prices for contingent claims. 23. "A Tâtonnement Process for Public Goods", Review of Economic Studies, 38, 2, 133-150, 1971. (With D. de la Vallèe Poussin.) Introduces the well-known MDP process for public goods, demonstrates convergence and provides an early analysis of incentive compatibility. 25. "Discount Rates for Public Investments in Closed and Open Economies", Economica, 38, 152, 395-412, 1971; reprinted in Cost-Benefit Analysis, A.C. Harberger and G.P. Jenkins Eds, Edward, 2002, and in Discounting and Environmental Policy, J. Scheraga, Ed., Ashgate, 2002. (With A. Sandmo.) Second-best analysis of the choice of a discount rate for public investment (previously confined to partial analysis). The social discount rate should be a weighted average of rates of return on specific investments, with weights reflecting marginal shares. 26. "Cores and Prices in an Exchange Economy with an Atomless Sector", Econometrica 40, 6, 1090–1108, 1972. (With J. Jaskold Gabszewicz, D. Schmeidler and K. Vind.) For an exchange economy with both an atomless sector and atoms, the paper gives alternative sufficient conditions for a core allocation to have a competitive restriction to the atomless sector. 27. "Econometrics and Decision Theory", Econometrica, 40, 1, 1-17, 1972. Presidential address to the Econometric Society; summarises Drèze's work on Bayesian Econometrics (see also ) and expounds complementarities between economic theory, decision theory, econometrics and mathematical programming. 28. "Consumption Decisions under Uncertainty", Journal of Economic Theory, 5, 3, 308-335, 1972. (With F. Modigliani.) Clearly distinguished time preferences from risk preferences and temporal versus timeless uncertainty, while expounding results on savings and portfolio choices under uncertainty. 33. "Investment under Private Ownership: Optimality, Equilibrium and Stability" in Allocation under Uncertainty: Equilibrium and Optimality, Macmillan, chap. 9, 1974. Develops the "incomplete markets" model of general equilibrium under uncertainty, with a single commodity per state, as an extension of the special model (fixed coefficients) introduced in the seminal paper by Diamond in AER 1967; proves basic results (most notably non-convexity, but also existence of stockholders equilibria, their inefficiency, and stability of stock-market valuation of investments.) 34. "Bayesian Theory of Identification in Simultaneous Equations Models" in Studies in Bayesian Econometrics and Statistics, Eds. S.E. Fienberg and A. Zellner, North-Holland, 1974. Based on an unpublished manuscript of 1962. Introduces the Bayesian concept of identification and applies it to SEM; together with [39, 41, 44], forms the core of the material summarised in and outlined in . 36. "Existence of an Exchange Equilibrium under Price rigidities", International Economic Review, 16, 2, 301-320, 1975. Introduces an equilibrium concept for market economies operating under price rigidities (the so-called Drèze equilibrium) and a now widely used method of proving existence. Covers both real and nominal rigidities defined by upper and/or lower bounds on individual prices. 38. "Pricing, Spending and Gambling Rules for Non-Profit Organisations" in Public and Urban Economics, Essays in Honor of William S. Vickrey, Ed. R.E. Grieson, Lexington Books, 59-89, 1976. (With M. Marchand.) Second-best theory applied to non-profit organisations, including Ramsey-Boiteux pricing, criteria for capital accumulation or consumption and guidelines for risk-taking. 39. "Bayesian Limited Information Analysis of the Simultaneous Equations Model", Econometrica 44, 5, 1045–1075, 1976. The fundamental paper on Bayesian methods for SEM, including the use of ratio-form poly-t densities. 40. "Some Theory of Labour Management and Participation", Econometrica, 44, 6, 1125–1139, 1976.