Talk with CCR and chaire PARI, in Paris, on government intervention and welfare

This afternoon, I will give a brief talk on welfare and optimal policies for government intervention, at CCR, in Paris. I have some slides to present. The presentation is based on a papers we wrote a few years ago, Government Intervention in Catastrophe Insurance Markets: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

This paper designs a sequential repeated game of a micro-founded society with three types of agents: individuals, insurers, and a government. Nascent to economics literature, we use Reinforcement Learning (RL), closely related to multi-armed bandit problems, to learn the welfare impact of a set of proposed policy interventions per $1 spent on them. The paper rigorously discusses the desirability of the proposed interventions by comparing them against each other on a case-by-case basis. The paper provides a framework for algorithmic policy evaluation using calibrated theoretical models which can assist in feasibility studies.

In this paper, we used the concept of Marginal Value of Public Funds, or “MVPF, introduced in 2020 by Amy Finkelstein, Nathaniel Hendren and Ben Sprung-Keyser, in “Welfare Analysis Meets Causal Inference“, and “A Unified Welfare Analysis of Government Policies“. See some slides online, or the website https://policyinsights.org/.

Talk, Chaire ACTIONS, CNAM, Paris

Today, I will give a joint presentation with Olivier Côté at the CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) in Paris, for the chaire ACTIONS. My talk will be an introduction based on our two first joint papers, “A fair price to pay: Exploiting causal graphs for fairness in insurance” that was published early that year, and “Selection Bias in Insurance: Why Portfolio-Specific Fairness Fails to Extend Market-Wide“. Slides are now available. Olivier will present more recent work, to visualize the fairness spectrum on real data from an insurance company. Slides are available.

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