Thomas Garcia

1.1. Published Articles

Garcia T., Massoni S. and Villeval M.C. (2020), Ambiguity and Excuse-Driven Behavior in Charitable Giving, with. European Economic Review: 103412. [article]

A donation may have ambiguous costs or ambiguous benefits. Behavior in a laboratory experiment suggests that individuals use this ambiguity strategically as a moral wiggle room to act less generously without feeling guilty. Such excuse-driven behavior is more pronounced when the costs of a donation -rather than its benefits- are ambiguous. However, the importance of excuse-driven behavior is comparable under ambiguity and under risk. Individuals exploit any type of uncertainty as an excuse not to give, regardless of the nature of this uncertainty.

Charness G., Garcia T., Offerman T. and Villeval M.C. (2020), Do risk-preference measures in the laboratory predict behavior under risk in and outside of the laboratory? Journal of Risk and Uncertainty: 60(2), 99-123. [article]

We consider the external validity of laboratory measures of risk attitude. Based on a large-scale experiment using a representative panel of the Dutch population, we test if these measures can explain two different types of behavior: (i) behavior in laboratory risky financial decisions, and (ii) behavior in naturally-occurring field behavior under risk (financial, health and employment decisions). We find that measures of risk attitude are related to behavior in laboratory financial decisions and the most complex measures are outperformed by simpler measures. However, measures of risk attitude are not related to risk-taking in the field, calling into question the methods currently used for the purpose of measuring actual risk preferences. We conclude that while the external validity of measures of risk attitude holds in closely related frameworks, this validity is compromised in more remote settings

Belaïd F. and Garcia,T. (2016). Understanding the spectrum of residential energy-saving behaviours: French evidence using disaggregated data. Energy Economics, 57:204 – 214. [article]

Analysing household energy-saving behaviours is crucial to improve energy consumption predictions and energy policy making. How should we quantitatively measure them? What are their determinants? This study explores the main factors influencing residential energy-saving behaviours based on a bottom-up multivariate statistical approach using data from the recent French PHEBUS survey. Firstly, we assess energy-saving behaviours on a one-dimension scale using IRT. Secondly, we use linear regression with an innovative variable selection method via adaptive lasso to tease out the effects of both macro and micro factors on the behavioural score. The results highlight the impact of five main attributes incentivizing energy-saving behaviours based on cross-variable analyses: energy price, household income, education level, age of head of household and dwelling energy performance. In addition, our results suggest that the analysis of the inverted U-shape impact of age enables the expansion of the energy consumption life cycle theory to energy-saving behaviours.

1.2. Working papers

Working from home and corporate real estate, with Antonin Bergeaud, Jean-Benoît Eymeoud and Dorian Henricot, Under Review [working paper] ; Blog versions: [Vox EU]

We examine how corporate real estate market participants adjust to the anticipated take-off of teleworking. We develop an indicator of the exposure of counties to teleworking in France by combining teleworking capacity with incentives and frictions to its deployment. We study how this indicator relates to prices and quantities in the corporate real estate market. We find that for offices in counties more exposed, the Covid-19 crisis has led to(1) higher vacancy rates, (2) less construction, (3) lower prices. Our findings reveal that teleworking has already an impact on the office market. Furthermore, forward-looking indicators suggest that market participants are anticipating a deeper shift to teleworking in the coming years.

1.3. Work in progress

Swing pricing and investment funds' financial stability during the Covid-19 crisis, with A.Baena .

Swing pricing is a recent tool designed to reallocate the liquidity cost from remaining to redeeming investors. We identify its implementation using an innovative text-mining analysis of prospectuses to investigate how it has impacted French investment funds' financial stability during the Covid-19 crisis. We find that swing pricing only had a limited impact on fund stability during the financial turmoil. Our study highlights two new mechanisms that explain this result. First, restrictions on the swing pricing activation and intensity decrease its stabilizing effect. Second, swing pricing suffers from a stigma effect: we observe a deterioration of inflows as well as a flight of investors immediately after the implementation of swing pricing. In the absence of constraints or when the swing factor is sufficiently high, swing pricing reveals a strong stabilizing effect. The calibration of swing pricing thus appears crucial to enable the stabilizing effect to offset the stigma effect.