Raphaël Jananji

I am a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Montreal, specializing in macroeconomics. My research focuses on household heterogeneity in income risk, with applications to public policies, monetary economics, and climate economics.

Working Papers

• Stabilization Effect of Government Employment (Job Market Paper)
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  This paper studies the macroeconomic stabilization role of government employment using U.S. micro data and a two-asset Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model with sector-specific income and unemployment risk. Public-sector employment features persistently lower and less cyclical income risk than private employment. These differences generate higher marginal propensities to consume and greater illiquid asset holdings among public-sector households, consistent with PSID evidence. By embedding low-risk income ex ante in the labor market, government employment stabilizes aggregate demand and capital accumulation, and amplifies monetary policy through asset-return and labor-market spillovers. This mechanism is distinct from standard automatic stabilizers and highlights the macroeconomic importance of public sector employment security. An extension incorporating endogenous wages and search frictions will permit structural estimation using SIPP-based income risk and CPS employment transition data.

• Social Optima of Government Employment
  Companion to “Stabilization Effect of Government Employment”
• Optimal Correction of Environmental Stochastic Externalities (with Alexandre Pavlov)
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  We study the optimal correction of environmental externalities when pollution shifts the distribution of climate shocks. Motivated by the extreme event attribution literature, which argues that emissions alter not only the frequency but rather also the full distribution of weather events, we model what we call stochastic externalities. In our framework, the parameters of a distribution of climate shocks are functions of the pollution stock rather than fixed values. Unlike prior work in the economic literature that models endogenous climate risk through increasing arrival rates of catastrophic events, our framework captures the continuous shift of the entire shock distribution. We solve the social planner's problem in a representative agent economy, first in a three-period model and then in an infinite-horizon recursive framework, and derive the optimal corrective carbon tax. The optimal tax adds a stochastic externality correction term to the standard Pigouvian term, which equals to the covariance between future utility and the derivative of the score of the shock distribution with respect to the pollution stock. For normally distributed shocks, this correction decomposes into a mean-shift channel, a risk-aversion channel, and a damage-curvature channel, each with a distinct economic interpretation. In a numerical example, we show how the stochastic externality channel significantly increases the optimal corrective tax beyond the standard Pigouvian tax and how much welfare can be gained from considering this channel. Our framework accommodates any parametric family of continuous distributions satisfying mild regularity conditions and nests both the standard deterministic model and the "exogenous" stochastic framework as special cases.

Work in Progress

• Kinked Progressive Taxation in Heterogeneous-Agent models (with Nora Traum)
• Idiosyncratic Environmental Stochastic Externalities
  Extension of “Optimal Correction of Environmental Stochastic Externalities”
• Heterogeneous Complementarity between Transportation and Consumption: Studying Carbon Tax Under Regional Differences (with Noémie Vert Martin)

Supervisors

Nora Traum — Associate Professor, Department of Applied Economics, HEC Montréal
nora.traum@hec.ca · Website

Hyejin Park — Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Université de Montréal
hyejin.park@umontreal.ca · Website