Archives du séminaire brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 18/04/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Uncovering the nature and the magnitude of the heterogeneity in the impact of a public policy is central for practitioners. Using an interactive fixed effects (IFE) model in the context of panel data to accommodate non-parallel evolutions of untreated potential outcomes across groups, I aim to provide two measures of the aforesaid heterogeneity. First and foremost, a bound of the variance of the treatment effects, and, under stronger assumptions, a characterization of the full distribution of treatment effects on the treated (QTT). I then review the available results in the literature using deconvolutions and instrumental variables in quantile regressions to estimate QTTs, and sketch some potential applications in the field of Labor Economics.
Oyon Lerga Unai () Bounding Treatment Effect Heterogeneity with an Application to Labor Economics
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 11/04/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Dousset Léa () Relative Rank Effects on Secondary Education Paths in France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/03/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
In many countries, the 1960s marked a turning point in the history of women's emancipation, with the legalization of abortion as well as the liberalization of the contraceptive pill and divorce. Focusing on France, where the movement was particularly powerful, this article first explores the impact of the reforms on the family context in which children grew up. Our identification strategy is based on the fact that the wind of reforms first affected first-born children born in the 1960s, before affecting all children born in subsequent cohorts. This strategy shows that the sixties revolution has essentially led to a sharp decline in "traditional" families (many children, stay-at-home mothers) in favor of "modern" families (two children max, working mothers). We explore the consequences of these family changes on educational trajectories and find that they have been much more favorable to children from affluent backgrounds than to those from modest ones.
Oliveira Florentine () Children of the Revolution : Women's Liberation and Children's Success
Éric Maurin
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/03/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
We provide a large-scale investigation of the relationship between social media usage and body dissatisfaction in two distinct surveys covering respectively 50,000 teenagers between 15 and 16 y.o. in 8 countries and 200,000 teenagers between 11 and 17 y.o. in 33 countries. This relation is positive and large for girls—higher use of social networks is associated with higher dissatisfaction about their body—and negative or inexistent for boys. The positive relation for girls is observed in all 8 countries included in the first study, and 30 of the countries in the second study (statistically significant in 26 of them), covering very different cultural contexts (e.g., Georgia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Panama or Hong Kong). It concerns all girls, no matter their body mass index (BMI), their academic performance, their socioeconomic background, and their age. It is driven by girls being more likely to find themselves too fat (rather than too thin). Instrumenting social networks consumption by students’ or students’ peers’ internet access at home while controlling finely for other students’ or students’ peers’ household characteristics finally suggests that the relationship between social media usage and girls' body dissatisfaction could be causal.
Breda Thomas () Intensive use of social media is associated with more body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls in two large cross-cultural surveys
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 15/02/2024 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This study examines the impact of application fees on the application behavior and admission outcomes of STEM graduate school applicants in France. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design and data from the centralized admission process to STEM graduate schools from 2015 to 2020, the findings reveal a significant reduction in the number of applications of candidates who have to pay application fees, leading to adverse admission outcomes, especially for male students, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, or with lower academic achievements. Additionally, the study shows that the design of application fees, whether decentralized or centralized, significantly impacts application patterns. The eviction effect of application fees is more pronounced in schools requiring a specific fee for each application, compared to those with a common application fee structure.
Bonneau Cécile () Price of Admission: The Impact of Application Fees on STEM Graduate Schools Applicants
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/12/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Introducing a new measure of scientific proximity between private firms and public research groups and exploiting a multi-billion euro financing program of academic clusters in France, we provide causal evidence of spillovers from academic research to private sector firms. Firms in the top quartile of exposure to the funding shock increase their R&D effort by 20% compared to the bottom quartile. We exploit reports produced by funded clusters, complemented by data on labor mobility and R&D public–private partnerships, to provide evidence on the channels for these spillovers. We show that spillovers are driven by outsourcing of R&D activities by the private to the public sectors and, to a lesser extent, by labor mobility from one to the other and by informal contacts. We discuss the policy implications of funding academic research to stimulate private R&D.
Guillouzouic Arthur (IPP) From public labs to private firms: magnitude and channels of R&D spillovers
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/12/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the consumption response of French households to unanticipated one-time money transfers of 300 Euros. Using prepaid debit cards, we consider three implementation designs: (i) a transfer without restrictions; (ii) a transfer where any unspent value expires after three weeks; (iii) a transfer subject to a 10% negative interest rate every week. We observe participants' main bank accounts, such that we can compute the impact of the transfer on their overall spending. We establish five facts about MPCs in this setting. First, we find that participants in the baseline treatment group have an average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 22 percent over one month. Second, we find that implementation design matters: the one-month MPC is substantially higher for treatment groups where any remaining balance becomes unusable after three weeks (60%) or where remaining balances are subject to the 10% negative interest rate every week (36%). Third, we document that the cumulative consumption responses are concentrated in the first weeks following the transfer and are flat thereafter. Fourth, we find that there is significant MPC heterogeneity by observed household characteristics, including by liquid wealth, current income, proxies for permanent income, gender, and age; the MPC remains high even for agents with liquid wealth exceeding twice their monthly income. Fifth, we estimate the unconditional distribution of MPCs across households and find that a large fraction of households have high MPCs. These facts are difficult to reconcile with the consumption response in standard Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian models, which is long-lived and driven by a small set of illiquid households at their borrowing constraints. Furthermore, we observe that households in the treatment groups with a short expiry date or a negative interest rate frequently use other means of payment while still having a sufficient balance on the prepaid card to cover their expenses, indicating that participants see money as non-fungible. Our finding that households consume more when presented with an urgent spending need lends support to theories where the salience of treatments affects economic choices. We conclude that implementation design and the targeting of transfers can greatly alter the effectiveness of stimulus policies
Fize Etienne Etienne (IPP) Five Facts about MPCs: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment
Johannes Boehm (SciencesPo & CEPR) and Xavier Jaravel (LSE & CEPR)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/12/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper analyzes whether inter-ethnic contact in childhood affects the hiring behavior of managers. To overcome selection bias, we exploit quasi-random variation in the share of immigrant students across cohorts within Danish schools. Using administrative employer-employee data, we find that more immigrant peers of the same gender in school lead Danish managers to hire more immigrants later in life. We do not find any evidence that this relationship is driven by economic opportunities.
WREN-LEWIS Liam (IPP) The impact of childhood inter-ethnic contact on hiring decisions
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/11/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
An occupation is usually characterized as a combination of what people do and how much they are paid for it, with little attention to the fact that work arrangements also define when people are paid for their labor. This paper contributes to this discussion by investigating how much value people assign to having a short delay between their tasks and the associated compensation. Using a national experimental survey with ridesharing drivers in Brazil, I document that this population is willing to forgo about 40 percent of their earnings, on average, to receive payment on the same day of their rides, compared to the alternative of being paid with a month's delay. Text analysis methods provide evidence that short delay-to-pay tends to be more critical if working more hours is one's primary adjustment margin in response to financial emergencies. Finally, I provide experimental evidence that increased attention to their domestic budget can make drivers marginally more likely to take up delayed compensation under large multipliers. Those three results suggest that the payment schedule can be a crucial labor market feature for workers under constrained liquidity.
Scarelli Thiago (IPP) Worker’s Preferences over Payment Schedules: Evidence from Ridesharing Drivers
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 26/10/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper explores how legislative reduction in working hours impacts firms. We exploit the Portuguese transition to the 40-hour week in the 1990s, when Portugal gradually began to reduce the length of the standard working week by means of collective agreement, and then suddenly decrease it to 40 as the result of an election. We show that firms that did not adjust voluntarily hours before the reform were experiencing higher labor demand in the pre-reform period, and then decreased both employment and output. We argue this is the result of increased labor cost, as nominal salaries did not adjust and hourly wages rose. Moreover, we show that firms in collective agreements that autonomously adjusted their hours prior to the reform had a relatively stagnant labor demand, and did not experience employment and output losses relative to unaffected firms, despite a similar increase in the labor cost.
Asai Kentaro (IPP) Firm-Level Effects of Reductions in Working Hours
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 19/10/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
We examine the effect of changing naturalization costs on the choice of second-generation migrants to become French, and the labor market effects of citizenship acquisition. We exploit the 1997 reform that abolished compulsory conscription for men born after 1978. It constitutes a drop in naturalization costs because after the reform, obtaining French citizenship is no longer tied to doing the military service. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that this sudden cost reduction induced a jump in naturalization rates. This effect is entirely driven by European Union citizens, for whom the military service cost is binding. We exploit this shock in a synthetic difference-in-differences setting and find that it raised their probability to be in employment by 2 percentage points, mainly through a reduction in inactivity rather than unemployment. We provide suggestive evidence that this effect is mainly driven by an increase in public-sector employment and a reduction in self-employment, and is associated with an enhanced sense of belonging and a reduction in perceived discrimination.
SIRUGUE Louis (IPP) To become or not to become French: Conscription, naturalization, and labor market integration
Yajna Govind
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/10/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper studies tax evasion due to consumption through the firm using a unique matching between administrative monthly micro-data of personal expenditures from an electronic invoice program in Portugal (e-Fatura) with social security registers. Drawing on this unique combination of data, we show that owner-managers shift by about 1/3 of their personal expenditures to firms and by about 1/4 of their household expenditures. The shift is driven by expenditures that lie on the border between business and personal consumption, notably expenditures in retail trade, hotels and restaurants and consultancy services. The use of business resources for final consumption is spread all over the income distribution, but it is particularly concentrated between the 5th-8th deciles. At the top income decile, consumption shifting amounts to 1/5 of household consumption. Back of the envelope computations suggest that the scale of government revenue losses due to consumption shifting amounts to 1% of the GDP.
Leite Neves David (IPP) The Firm as Tax Shelter: Using Business Resources for Final Consumption
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/09/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This article studies the role played by education in the decline of global poverty. In a companion paper, I estimate that the rise of government redistribution in the form of cash transfers, education, healthcare, and other public services accounts for 30% of worldwide poverty reduction since 1980 (Gethin, 2023). In this paper, I incorporate in this analysis the causal impact of schooling on pretax incomes, combining survey microdata covering 95% of the world's population with a simple model of education and the wage structure. Private returns to schooling account for 50-60% of global economic growth, 60-70% of income gains among the world's poorest 20% individuals, and 60-90% of the decline in global gender inequality since 1980. Combining direct redistribution and indirect investment benefits from education brings the total contribution of public policies to global poverty reduction to 50-80% or more.
GETHIN Amory (IPP) Distributional Growth Accounting: Education and the Reduction of Global Poverty, 1980-2022
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/09/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper provides evidence of the growing importance of real estate assets in offshore portfolios. We study offshore real estate investments in the UK using administrative data on real estate purchases made by foreign companies. First, we show that this market is large and highly secretive: around 5% of total UK real estate wealth was held from abroad in 2018, mostly through tax havens. We match administrative records to corporate registers and leaks to shed light on the ultimate ownership of properties, and find that most offshore investments to the UK can be traced back to individuals from the UK and from the Middle East. Second, we study the implementation of the first multilateral automatic exchange of information norm, the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), which introduces cross-border reporting requirements for financial assets but not for real estate assets. We show that for tax havens, exposure to the policy is associated to a significant increase in real estate investments. We estimate that around $45 billion has been invested in the UK real estate market between 2013 and 2016 in reaction to the CRS. This suggests that at a global scale, a substantial portion of wealth that flowed out of tax havens following the policy change was ultimately invested in properties.
Bomare Jeanne (IPP) Avoiding Transparency through Offshore Real Estate: Evidence from the UK
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 15/06/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-15
Many studies have investigated the factors that might explain students' higher education application behavior. These can broadly be categorised as financial factors (e.g., cost of tuition / financial aid, geographic distance, etc.) and behavioral factors (e.g., perceptions about the returns of education, lack of information, low aspirations, inaccurate perception about ability, etc.). In this paper we want to contribute to our understanding of behavioral factors by studying the extent to which, within the same high school, the higher education choices made by a given cohort of students affect the choices made by the following cohort. As such, a shock to the type of institutions to which a cohort is admitted could have lasting effects on the application behavior of subsequent cohorts (within the same high school) through increased awareness or raised aspirations. Our preliminary results suggest that higher education choices are highly persistent across cohorts within the same school. We thus attempt to investigate the causal effect of having a student admitted to a specific degree in the previous cohort on one's own application to such selective institutions. In the spirit of Estrada et al. (2022), our identification strategy compares high schools where a student was marginally admitted to a degree versus high schools where a student was marginally not admitted.
Kenedi Gustave (IPP) The Persistence of Higher Education Choices
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 08/06/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
We examine the effect of changing naturalization costs on the choice of second-generation migrants to become French. We exploit the 1997 reform that abolished the military service for men born after 1978. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that a decrease in the costs of naturalization led to an increase in its take-up. We find that this effect is mainly driven by low-educated Europeans for whom the military service cost is binding. There is no effect on non-Europeans in line with their higher perceived benefits, and lower effect on the higher-educated for whom the military service is less strenuous. Exploiting the shock in an instrumental variable setting, we find large positive effects of naturalization on labor market outcomes.
SIRUGUE Louis (IPP) To become or not to become French: The consequences of costly naturalization
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 27/04/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Western countries' governments have recently raised the requirements for retirement; however, how older workers respond to new rules is still an important issue and even more for women, who usually experience discontinuous careers and have lower labour market attachment.
This paper assesses the effect of a pension reform implemented in Italy in 2011, which unexpectedly and substantially increased the statutory retirement age (SRA), on women's retirement behaviour and wealth. The analysis uses administrative data from the National Social Security Institute and is based on a Regression Discontinuity (RD) and a Regression Discontinuity Differences-in-Differences (RD-DD) design. Identification exploits the facts that (i) women with a number of years of contributions just above specific thresholds are eligible for old age retirement or early retirement; (ii) women born in 1952 are the first cohort affected by the SRA increase, while women born in 1951 are unaffected. The results indicate that women affected by the pension reform, for whom SRA increased from age 60 to age 64 unexpectedly, are more likely to anticipate retirement when they have more than 35 years of contribution. As this option entails a penalization in the annuity, we also assess the reform's effect on the women's pension amount. The results (though preliminary) indicate that there is a reduction in the annuity, but the evidence is not statistically significant.
Bassoli Elena (IPP) Women's retirement behavior and pension wealth: the unintended effect of a recent pension reform
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 20/04/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Nowadays, women outnumber men in higher education, but they remain strongly underrepresented in maths-intensive fields, especially among the most competitive institutions. This difference in enrolment partly explains the gender pay gap. We show that a gender quota system could mitigate this phenomenon, using unique hand-collected historical data from 1969 to 2009 on the entrance exam to one of the most competitive elite graduate schools in France, the École normale supérieure (ENS). Before 1986, there were two single-gender schools and entrance exams, which was equivalent to a gender quota system. We document that the merger of the two schools and the introduction of mixed competition led to (i) a sharp fall in the share of female candidates admitted to the mathematics department, from 39 % on average over the ten years before the merger to 9 % on average over the twenty years that followed it, (ii) a decrease in the share of female candidates to
the entrance exam, (iii) and a change in the composition of the female candidates pool. We unveil a detrimental shying-away mechanism for female candidates. As the ENS mostly leads to high-level academic careers in France, we also explore the detrimental effect of ending these gender quotas on the gender gap in teaching and research careers for affected students
Dousset Léa (IPP) Women Under-Representation in Mathematics Studies and Careers: Historical Evidence from the Abrogation of Gender Quotas
Georgia Thebault
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 13/04/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
I explore how to design peer-to-peer sharing platforms without real money. Individuals and policymakers are reluctant to use real money in a variety of contexts and are increasingly experimenting with token-money. Examples include bidding for university classes, exchanging organ donors, trading food among food banks or time among neighbors. I focus on a popular platform for exchanging holiday homes where users earn tokens by hosting others and can only spend them on visiting other homes. The platform’s rapid growth over the last 10 years demonstrates some advantages of banning cash. Yet, as users only do a limited number of holidays per year some may become satiated. Specifically, the owners of the most expensive homes may accumulate so many tokens that they can afford all the trips they want while supplying their own house only for a few nights. Perhaps, this might even induce other users to reduce their supply in turn and lead to market unraveling, a situation where trade is inefficiently low. I illustrate with a stylized theoretical model that price caps may increase trade volume and aggregate welfare. Using proprietary data on the universe of transactions I present a range of stylized facts consistent with satiation and unraveling.
Goedde Julius (IPP) Satiation, unraveling and compressing prices. Evidence from the sharing economy
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/03/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper examines the employment and productivity effects of the working hour reform in Portugal that reduced the standard hours from 44h to 40h in 1996-7. Using the variation across establishments in the intensity of treatment, I find that the establishments that were more treated experienced lower post-reform employment growth, although to a modest degree. Despite the large reduction in the labor hour input, there is no statistically significant negative effect on sales, leading to a large improvement in labor efficiency measured by sales per hour. However, these overall effects mask substantial heterogeneity in responses: establishments in capital intensive sectors reduced employment without decline in sales, while those in labor intensive sectors rather attempted to maintain employment, but their sales were negatively affected. These results provide indirect evidence consistent with the theories that highlight the role of scale effects and capital substitution effects.
Asai Kentaro (IPP) Working Hour Reform, Labor Demand and Productivity: Evidence from 1996 Portuguese Reform
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/02/2023 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Since the beginning of the 1990s, welfare States in OECD countries have shifted towards active labor market policies (ALMPs) to (re)engage a part of the inactive population in employment and to promote their economic autonomy. Single-parent households have been an important target group for ALMPs, especially through welfare-to-work programs. This shift towards activation has been analysed through the lens of the social investment paradigm, which promotes employment as the main protection against poverty. However, disappointing poverty trends question the effectiveness of ALMPs in mitigating social risks for vulnerable target groups.
In this paper, I evaluate the effects of an intensive welfare-to-work program targeting single-parents - 96% of whom are women - on welfare for more than two years to foster employment and overall participation in society. The program consists of a year-long intensive social support, including face-to-face and group sessions with highly-trained social workers, several times per week. It costs approximately €2,900 per participant and has been rolled-out each year from 2018 to 2022 in France using a randomized encouragement design to select participants and controls.
Using the random encouragement as an instrument and a panel of monthly administrative records for the first three cohorts (± 1200 households) up to 36 months since randomization, I find no average effect of the program on the probability of being employed or receiving welfare. However, the program increases the average amount of aids received from the Family Allowance Funds (CAF) and reduces labour income for the upper-tail of the income distribution. Participants are also more likely to keep their children's custody and receive public-funded alimonies, explaining most of the increased welfare payments. Heterogeneity analysis shows evidence of substitution bias, where families who were initially registered at the unemployment agency undergo negative effects from the program, while we find evidence of positive or null effects for those unregistered. These results are among the few large-scale randomized experiments in France that estimate the causal effects of anti-poverty measures, and cast doubt on the efficacy of welfare-to-work programs for single-parent households.
Heim Arthur (PSE) Can intensive welfare-to-work programs help single parents on long-term welfare ? Experimental evidence from France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/11/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
We analyze the employment effects of directing job seekers’ applications towards estab- lishments likely to recruit, building upon an existing Internet platform developed by the French public employment service. Our two-sided randomization design, with about 1.2 mil- lion job seekers and 100,000 establishments, allows us to precisely measure the effects of the recommender system at hand. Our randomized encouragement to use the system induces a 2% increase in job finding rates among women. This effect is due to an activation effect (in- creased search effort, stronger for women than men), but also to a targeting effect by which treated men and women were more likely to be hired by the firms that were specifically recommended to them.
In a second step, we analyze whether these partial equilibrium effects translate into pos- itive effects on aggregate employment. Drawing on the recent literature on the econometrics of interference effects, we estimate that by redirecting the search effort of some job seekers outside their initial job market, we reduced congestion in slack markets. Estimates suggest that this effect is only partly offset by the increased competition in initially tight markets, so that the intervention increases aggregate job finding rates.
BEHAGHEL Luc (PSE) Encouraging and directing job search: direct and spillover effects in a large scale experiment.
Sofia Dromundo, Marc Gurgand, Yagan Hazard and Thomas Zuber
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 20/10/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
The Lubrizol explosion and the recent floods in Germany reminds that urban areas are exposed to diverse risks. Risks prevention plans (PPR) are a type of land use regulation that intend to tackle externalities deriving from inhabitants and firms choosing to locate in hazardous areas by strictly controlling construction and land use. It also provides objective information to inhabitants about existing risks. I investigate the effects of PPR implementation on local housing markets by exploiting variation in application dates in a difference-in-difference with staggered adoption framework.
Paul-Venturine Julia (PSE) Understanding the spatial impacts of land use regulations : the case of risk prevention plans in France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 13/10/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
This paper investigates the effect of pension saving incentives for self-employed workers. For this, I take advantage of the unique setting offered by the Spanish pension system, which allows the self-employed in Spain to voluntarily decide on the level of their Social Security contributions (SSC). I exploit the change in public pension saving incentives induced by the 1997 pension reform using a difference-in-differences approach. I find that the self-employed give modest saving responses relative to the magnitude of the return provided by the Spanish public pension system. I provide evidence implying that the low salience of the expected return to pension contributions is one of the main drivers of such a modest response. Overall, this paper concludes that a voluntary system without salient saving incentives does not support transferring resources across the life-cycle for self-employed workers.
Iraizoz Ander (PSE) Saving for Retirement as a Self-Employed Worker: Evidence from the Voluntary Pension Scheme in Spain
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 29/09/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
This paper estimates the wage and employment effects of worker subsidies using a nation-wide reform of in-work subsidies in France. Based on a shift-share IV design leveraging variation in exposure to the reform across distinct labor markets and quasi-random assignment of changes in tax rates, I show that employers are able to capture a significant part of the subsidy through reduced wage growth. At the labor market level, I find that more generous in-work subsidies are associated with an increase in labor supply, both for the number of hours worked and for the participation rate, and with a decrease in the hourly wage rate growth.
Gravoueille Maxime (PSE) Wage and Employment Effects of Worker Subsidies
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 22/09/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
Sexual harassment and sexists behaviors are pervasive issues in the workplace. Around 12% of women in France have been subjected to toxic behaviors at work in the last year, including sexist comments, sexual or physical harassment, or violence. Such toxic behaviors can not only deter women from entering the labor market, but can also lead them to leave toxic workplaces at their own expense. This article is one of the first to examine the relationship between toxic behaviors and worker flows. We use the #MeToo movement as an exogenous shock to France's workplace norms regarding toxic behaviors. We combine survey data on reported toxic behaviors in firms with exhaustive administrative data to create a measure of toxic behaviors risk for all French establishments. We use a triple-difference strategy comparing female and male worker flows in high-risk versus low-risk firms before and after #MeToo. We find that #MeToo increased women's relative exit rates in higher-risk workplaces, while men's worker flows remained unaffected. In particular, we see that women are more likely to quit their job and move to firms who pay 2% less on average. This demonstrates the existence of a double penalty for women working in high-risk environments, as they are not only more frequently the victims of toxic behaviors, but are also forced to quit their jobs in order to avoid them.
Coly Caroline (PSE) It's a man's world: culture of abuse, #MeToo and worker flows
Cyprien Batut et Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 08/09/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
Examining cyclical changes in the wage distribution of the U.S. over 1980-2019, I document three novel facts. In recessions, the wage distribution: (i) becomes more positively skewed, (ii) shrinks at the bottom and widens at the top, and (iii) displays a higher fraction of overall dispersion condensed at the top tail. Contrasting standard views, these facts indicate that wage inequality rises during recessions result from changes at the top rather than at the bottom of the wage distribution. I propose a wage bargaining model incorporating two-sided heterogeneity, aggregate uncertainty, on-the-job search, and targeted recruiting by firms to explain this idea. Over the cycle, firms adjust their recruiting efforts along two margins: the number of vacancies advertised and the skills required to fill these vacancies. In recessions, matches need higher skills from workers to be worth forming, so firms target their vacancies towards high-skill workers. Job offers befall disproportionately more among the high-skilled, improving their bargaining position and preventing wages at the top of the distribution from falling sharply. This mechanism prompts a higher wage inequality. The model reproduces key features of the U.S. labor market and renders a varying distribution of wages that mimics the cyclical patterns observed in the data. I further examine a series of policy interventions and document that, while certain policies, such as increased unemployment insurance, can fix labor market inefficiencies generated by the private behavior of firms, they are less effective in reducing wage inequality in economic downturns.
SALDARRIAGA Víctor (PSE) The Distributional Dynamics of Wages Over the Business Cycle
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/06/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
The literature that studies teacher effects on student outcomes has been restricted to a handful of countries because of the availability of annual standardised testing. The latter is important, as past grades are key to control for potential sorting between teachers and students based on ability. I propose an alternative method which exploits within-classroom across-subject variation and controls for sorting by exploiting networks of teachers - teachers from the same subject who are observed in classrooms with a unique link teacher from another subject. Using administrative data for the universe of middle schools in Metropolitan France, I find that for a 1 s.d. increase in the teacher value-added within school, student scores improve by 0.18 s.d. in Math and 0.16 s.d. in French. Consistent with the literature, I show that while teacher value-added estimates are positively associated with pedagogical grades, salaries and experience, no observable teacher characteristic explains a substantial part of the value-added estimates.
Tartova Desislava (PSE) Teacher value-added in the absence of annual test scores: utilising teacher networks
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/04/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper explores citizens' beliefs about how economic inequality itself changes society and how this affects their redistributive preferences. Using a representative survey of 4,371 U.S. citizens we provide the first evidence that almost every individual holds some such inequality externality beliefs, as 97% of individuals believe that economic inequality affects society in one way or another. The belief in negative externalities is widespread across income and party lines; a large majority believes that economic inequality has a negative effect on societal factors such as crime, generalized trust, social unrest, and even economic growth and innovation. We establish a causal link from these beliefs to individuals' redistributive preferences by using exogenously provided video information treatments, and estimate the importance of externality beliefs on redistributive preferences to be roughly two-thirds that of broad fairness preferences. However, inequality externality arguments are potentially less polarizing than fairness arguments and more effective across the income distribution.
STOSTAD Morten (PSE) Inequality Externalities and Preferences for Redistribution: Evidence from a Survey Experiment
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/04/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper proposes a systematic analysis of income inequality and income mobility in France over the period 2006-2017 using individual and household tax data. We find that pre-tax income inequality is high in the short-run, but tempered by income mobility in the long run. Next, using nonparametric methods, we show that the distribution of income growth exhibits substantial deviations from log-normality and varies significantly across individuals with different initial income and age. Finally, we show that the nature and magnitude of these deviations vary with the composition of pretax income, in particular with the relative importance of capital versus labor income.
Gravoueille Maxime () Anatomy of Income Inequality and Income Dynamics in France
Philippe Aghion (Collège de France, INSEAD, LSE, PSE), Vlad Ciornohuz (UCL), Stefanie Stantcheva (Harvard University)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 24/03/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper investigates whether interracial contact in childhood impacts residential choices in adulthood. We exploit quasi-random variation in the share of black students across cohorts within US schools. We find that more
black peers of the same gender in a grade induces whites to live in blacker census tracts more than 20 years after exposure. We do not find any effect on labor market outcomes or other neighborhood characteristics, suggesting the most likely mechanism is a change in preferences of respondents
Wren-Lewis liam (PSE) The long run impact of childhood interracial contact on residential segregation
LUCA PAOLO MERLINO and MAX FRIEDRICH STEINHARDT
Texte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/03/2022 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
A minimum employment history is usually an eligibility condition to receive unemployment benefits. This paper characterizes its optimal level when unemployment risks are heterogeneous. First, by modeling the trajectory of workers on the labor market, I show that the optimal requirement follows a selection versus moral hazard in employment and unemployment trade-off. Second, thanks to french administrative data, I identify the behavioral responses to a requirement variation by using a bunching method and a regression kink design. These statistics are sufficient to assess the welfare implications of an eligibility change and to bound the optimal requirement. An eligibility reform has heterogeneous welfare implications within the labor force and its overall effect depends on the risk distribution and on frictions.
Vidalenc Basile (PSE) Optimal Eligibility for Unemployment Benefits
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/12/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-01
This research studies the effects of a value added tax (VAT) reform at Mexico's international frontiers. The reform raised the VAT rate from 11 to 16 percent at localities close to the international borders. We use the traditional ``static'' difference-in-differences methodology as well as dynamic difference-in-differences. The treatment group is composed of municipalities in the area where the VAT increased, and the control group is composed of municipalities close to the treatment group. We find that the VAT hike had a positive effect on prices of around half the size of the full pass-through conterfactual. In addition, the reform had a negative effect on workers' wages and no effect on employment. The negative effect on workers' real incomes is not smoothed out with credits. We find evidence of a negative effect on consumption at Mexico's northern border due to the reform. However, we find no evidence of an increase in shopping at the United States side of the border.
Chavez Emmanuel (PSE) Who pays for a Value Added Tax Hike at an International Border? Evidence from Mexico
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/10/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
The aim of the paper is to analyze the effect of neighbors' choices on individual track choices at the end of lower secondary education. To take account of endogenous location decisions, we use within-catchment-area variation in location between small statistical units in the municipality of Paris. The results suggest that close neighbors do matter in track choices at the end of lower secondary education, but only for pupils going to a vocational track. Pupils who continue in an academic track are not influenced by their neighbors. Neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.
Garouste Manon (PSE) Neighbor Effects and Track Choices
Camille Hémet
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 01/07/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
Better integration is beneficial for both migrants and the host country. In this respect, granting citizenship could be an important policy to boost migrants' integration. In this paper, I estimate the causal impact of obtaining citizenship on migrants' labor market integration. I exploit a change in the law of naturalization through marriage in France in 2006. This reform amended the eligibility criteria for applicants by increasing the required number of years of marital life from 2 to 4, generating an exogenous shock and thus a quasi-experimental setting. Using administrative panel data, I first show evidence of the impact of the reform on naturalization rates. I then use a difference-in-differences model to estimate the labor market returns to naturalization. I find that, among those working, citizenship leads to an increase in annual earnings by 29%. This effect is driven by a significant increase in the number of hours worked, as well as a positive effect on hourly wages. While the gain in earnings is similar for both men and women, the effect for men is mostly driven by an increase in hours worked compared to an increase in hourly wages for women. I provide suggestive evidence that naturalization helps reduce informality, and discrimination. This paper thus provides strong evidence that naturalization acts as a catalyst for labor market integration
GOVIND Yajna (PSE) Is naturalization a passport for better labor market integration? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Setting
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 17/06/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
This research studies the effects of a value added tax reform at Mexico's international frontiers. The reform rised the VAT rate from 11% to 16% at localities close to the international borders. We find that the VAT hike had a positive effect on prices. The size of the effect is around half of the symetric pass-trough conterfactual. In addition, the reform had a negative effect on worker's wages with no effect on employment. This negative effect on worker's incomes does not apper to be smoothed out with credits. We also find evidence of negative effects on the demand VAT taxed products. We use a difference-in-difference approach were the treatment group is composed of localitites close to the international borders, and the control group is composed of localities close to the treated area. We test the robustness of our findings with different placebo groups.
Chavez Emmanuel (PSE) The Economic Effects of a Value Added Tax Increase at an International Frontier
Cristobal Dominguez
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/06/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
In France, women earn about 20% less than men and the cost of this discrimination against women is estimated to be substantial. Policies to decrease the gender pay gap are thus key but state intervention is often criticized as creating one-approach-for-all which is inappropriate for the specific difficulties faced by each sector and firm. In this context, France decided in November 2010 to decentralize the level of action by mandating firms of more than 50 employees to negotiate and sign agreements on professional equality between men and women. In this paper, I estimate the causal effect of the signature of such agreements on the wage gap and other measures of gender inequalities. I combine different administrative datasets to build a unique database identifying the year of signature for each firm. I exploit the staggered signature of agreements over the 2010-2013 period and find that the law had indeed an effect on the signature of those agreements but none on the gender wage gap or on any other measure of inequalities. Those results can be explained by several factors. First, the law made mandatory the signature of agreements but no obligation of results was put in place. Second, the labour inspectors would enforce only the signature of agreements but not their content. Hence, firms did sign agreements but without negotiating any constraining actions, leading to those null effects.
Paul-Venturine Julia (PSE) Reducing the gender pay gap: can we let firms take action?
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 03/06/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
Youth Neither in Employment, Education or Training (NEETs) were a severe problem in the last decade in Europe, regaining relevance with the Covid-19 crisis. Active Labor Market Policies (ALMPs) are a primary response, but effectiveness depends on the mix of services offered. Accompanying ALMPs with cash transfers could augment participation and ease financial constraints, but also decrease search effort. This paper evaluates a large French program targeting disadvantaged NEETs between 16 and 25 years old, Garantie Jeunes, which combines cash transfers, soft-skills training and intensive job-search assistance for a year. I develop a tailored diff-in-diff methodology for identifying ITT and LATE in a setting with staggered adoption and units subsequently exposed to treatment at different tenures. I highlight strong positive effects of the program on employment, earnings and hours worked: after one year of exposure to Garantie Jeunes, the probability of employment increased by 1.7 points, hours worked by 5, and earnings by 61 euros on a quarterly basis, which translates in a LATE of +28 percentage points in the probability of employment, +81 hours worked and +1004 Euros of earnings. There is no evidence of lower employability while participating to the program and receiving the cash transfer. These large effects come with a cost: the Marginal Value of Public Funds of textit{Garantie Jeunes} is estimated close to one.
Filippucci Francesco (PSE) What the NEETs need? The Effect of Activation Policies and Cash Transfers
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 20/05/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
This paper proposes to treat income inequality as an economic externality in order to introduce the societal effects of inequality into welfarist models. These effects can include (but are not limited to) changes in political efficiency, economic growth rates, or interpersonal trust levels. We introduce such effects in a simple and generalizable welfarist framework and show that they can have sizeable optimal policy consequences that cannot be captured by standard risk aversion or social welfare weights. Novel policy implications are illustrated through the classical optimal non-linear income taxation model, where the social planner must face a trade-off between revenue collection and income inequality levels. Resulting policy consequences are disproportionately located at the top; optimal top marginal tax rates are strongly and robustly dependent on the magnitude of the inequality externality. We use several real-world examples to show that tax policy previously unsupported by optimal taxation theory can be explained in our framework. The findings indicate that the magnitude of the inequality externality could be considered a crucial economic variable.
STOSTAD Morten (PSE) Inequality as an Externality: Consequences for Tax Design
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 22/04/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using Zoom
This paper evaluates the impact of a reduction in information frictions on students' enrollment in higher education and subsequent educational outcomes. We exploit the French Active Orientation policy that provides a positive, a neutral or a negative assessment on students' chances of graduating in programs based on their past academic record and a set of predetermined program-specific cutoffs. We use those multiple cutoffs in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effects of receiving a negative (positive) message relatively to a neutral one on students' enrollment decisions and on their persistence in higher education. Receiving a negative message entails a 5 percent reduction in the probability to matriculate in the program issuing the message, and encourages matriculation in a different type of program in another higher education institution. These effects are stronger for students who receive more than one negative message. We do not observe significant effect on persistence in higher education two years later. On the other hand, the 4 percent increase in matriculation in the program induced by a positive message is at the expense of enrollment in higher peer-quality programs. These effects are mostly driven by female students, and by students receiving multiple positive messages.
Monnet Marion (PSE) Does Information Provision Reduce the Student Mismatch? Evidence from University Admissions in France
Gabrielle Fack (Paris Dauphine), Julien Grenet (CNRS-PSE), Yinghua He (Rice University)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 04/03/2021 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using zoom
This paper investigates a novel international mobility channel where firms, rather than individuals, initiate the cross-border relocation of workers. Firm-led mobility (FLM) is more substantial in magnitude, and more responsive to shocks than traditional, individual-based migration. It also has radically different efficiency and equity implications for workers, firms and governments. I exploit the unique setting provided by a Europe-wide "posting" scheme, that fully liberalizes international mobility through the supply of cross-border services by companies. Assembling novel and exhaustive administrative data on this continent-wide FLM scheme, and drawing on rich quasi-experimental policy variation, I estimate that staggered FLM liberalization reforms increased overall geographical mobility by 500% without crowding-out other mobility channels. FLM is highly responsive to international cost differentials: I estimate that firm-led mobility flows have an elasticity of 1.6 with respect to wage differentials, twice as much as the standard migration elasticity. I provide suggestive evidence that firms alleviate part of the frictions constraining individual migration, thus rationalizing the magnitude of these effects. I then turn to the unequal distribution of these aggregate gains, both between and within countries. Unlike standard emigration, firm-led mobility redistributed economic activity and tax revenue to sending — mostly low-wage — countries, increasing employment in sending countries by 17% and taxes paid at home by sending firms by 30%, while employment in exposed sectors in receiving countries decreases by 6%. Firm-led mobility is also associated with benefits that mostly accrue to firms instead of workers: using detailed firm-level data, I show that workers' wage rate rise by 10%, while capital-owners increase their profits by 30%, after a firm starts posting workers abroad, suggesting that firms capture 2/3 of the overall mobility surplus.
* * (PSE) Firm-Led Mobility: Equity-Efficiency Effects of a Novel Mobility Channel
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/12/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
USING ZOOM
This paper gives a new answer to an old question in labor economics, Who matches with whom?, by introducing a setting where firms and workers are different in many dimensions and we allow workers to be over and under qualified for the jobs they end up occupying. I present a random search model with two side multidimensional heterogeneity in which firms choose and post a wage with commitment i.e. maintaining the posted wage, independent of the productivity of the new worker. Posted wages determine the set of acceptable jobs for each worker and a unique applicants pool for each firm. The composition of these sets varies in size and composition across workers and firms. The optimal posted wage level takes into consideration the requirements of each firm and the characteristics of the applicants pool. In equilibrium, sorting is assortative but mismatches can occur across all skills dimensions. Using French data on workers observed skills and matches, I calculate structural parameters associated with the model for France. I find that the disutility of non cognitive skills is higher when mismatched, while employers value more highly good matches on cognitive skills. I also find that the number of dimensions plays an important role, since it is another source for frictions.
Montana Jaime (PSE) Wage posting and multidimensional skills mismatchTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 26/11/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
USING ZOOM
How much job counselors matter? The literature has shown that job search assistance fosters faster exit from unemployment. So far, however, very little is know about the key role played by job counselors. Using several years of exhaustive administrative data from the French employment agency, we estimate a value added model. We find that that having a counselor one standard deviation higher in the distribution of value added translates into an increase of around 7.49% in the probability of being employed within 6 months and of 11.66% in the probability of being employed on an stable job within 6 months. We show that this effect is not likely to be driven by selection. Relying on a rich data set containing information on the meetings, proposed vacancies, training and job search assistance programs received by job seekers, we further document what type of practices are more often used by good counselors. We show that good counselors are not the same and do not propose the same services depending on the objective pursued. Practices associated to the activation/information role of counselors are positively correlated with good counselors at placing people fast irrespective of the quality of the match. Meanwhile this counselors neglect more long-term oriented practices. Our findings raise a potential trade-off between practices that foster a rapid exit from unemployment and others that favor better quality matches.
Dromundo Sofia (PSE) Measuring Counselor effects in job search
Antton Haramboure
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/11/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
USING ZOOM
In 2009, the French reform of the vocational track aimed at increasing the average schooling level of vocational track students. The reform tried to boost the attractiveness of the vocational baccalauréat path, by replacing the two-stage 4-year curriculum by an integrated 3-year curriculum. Using two alternative empirical strategies, we show that the reform considerably improved vocational track students' educational attainment and access to academic credentials. We estimate that the reform increased vocational track students' probability of obtaining the baccalauréat by 9.9 percentage points, from a baseline of 26.5 percent, and their rate of access to higher education by 3.0 percentage points, from a baseline of 10.9 percent. Some labour market outcomes might be available by Thursday!
Charousset Pauline (PSE) Does Time to Degree Affect Participation in Higher Education and Labour Market Outcomes? Evidence from the French Vocational Track Reform
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 29/10/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
cancelled
Better integration is beneficial for migrants and the host country. In this respect, granting citizenship is deemed to be an important policy to boost migrants’ integration. In this paper, I estimate the causal impact of obtaining citizenship on migrants’ labor market integration. I exploit a change in the law of naturalization through marriage in France in 2006. This reform amended the eligibility criteria of applicants by increasing the required number of years of marital life from 2 to 4, providing a quasi-experimental setting. Using administrative panel data, I first show evidence of the impact of the reform on the naturalization rates. I then use a dynamic triple differences model to estimate the labor market returns to naturalization. I find that, among those working, citizenship leads to an increase in annual earnings by 28%. It is driven by a significant increase in the number of hours worked, as well as an effect on hourly wages. A gender decomposition reveals that both men and women experience an increase in earnings, while the effect on number of hours worked is stronger for men. I further show that obtaining the nationality potentially helps reduce discrimination by signaling better language proficiency. This paper thus provides evidence that naturalization acts as a catalyst for labor market integration.
Govind Yajna (PSE) Is naturalization a passport for better labor market integration? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Setting
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 08/10/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
USING ZOOM
We consider the estimation of the effect of a policy or treatment, using panel data where different groups of units are exposed to the treatment at different times. We focus on parameters aggregating instantaneous and dynamic treatment effects, with a clear welfare interpretation. We show that under parallel trends conditions, these parameters can be unbiasedly estimated by a weighted average of differences-in-differences, provided that at least one group is always untreated, and another group is always treated. Our estimators are valid if the treatment effect is heterogeneous, contrary to the commonly-used event-study regression.?
Haultfoeuille Xavier (PSE) Difference-in-Differences Estimators of Intertemporal Treatment Effects
Clément de Chaisemartin
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 02/07/2020 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00
ZOOM
Despite heightened attention of the economics literature in the past decades, low take-up of social benefits remains a pervasive problem around the world. The economics literature has identified the role of complexity and information costs in driving non-take-up. However, causal evidence on the effects of stigma is currently lacking, despite extensive qualitative evidence from the sociological literature. In this paper, we focus on one driver of social-benefit stigma: the media. We use the Hillsborough disaster as a natural experiment which generated a plausibly exogenous variation in consumption of a stigmatizing media outlet, The Sun. We use event-study and difference-in-differences approaches to examine the effect of this variation on take-up of social benefits.
Loewe Simon (PSE) What Happens when The Sun goes down: The role of media in welfare take-up
Yagan Hazard
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 18/06/2020 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00
Using the fact that the Spanish self-employed voluntarily choose their contributions to social security, I study the impact of financial incentives on public pension savings for the self-employed in Spain. For this, I implement a Difference-in-Difference approach exploiting the change in financial incentives for public pension savings induced by the 1997 pension reform in Spain. I find the Spanish self-employed significantly respond to the financial incentives for public pension savings. However, the estimated response could be considered small relative to the magnitude of the return to contributions provided by pension formulas in Spain. I provide further evidence suggesting that the lack of salience of the return to contributions could be one of the main drivers of such a modest response.
Iraizoz Ander (PSE) Saving for retirement through the public pension system: Evidence from the self-employed in Spain
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 28/05/2020 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00
PSE- Using ZOOM
Skill shortages are a growing concern in the context of rapid technological change. However, little evidence exists on what is the actual cost associated with them and on the effectiveness of potential solutions. This paper evaluates whether a French policy encouraging immigration of skilled workers with highly-demanded competencies had a positive effect on the output and productivity of firms that were constrained by the lack of native candidates. The analysis is based on exhaustive administrative data and relies on a difference-in-differences approach. Results show that firms operating in the most constrained local labor markets react to the reform by hiring more workers in tight occupations. This leads to growth in their revenues and value added as well as generating some crowding-in of other types of employment. The effect is stronger in departments with lower job to job mobility, suggesting that high-skill migration can be an effective tool to relax skill constraints in the less dynamic areas of the country, where native workers are reluctant to move.
SIGNORELLI Sara (PSE) Too Constrained to Grow. Analysis of Firms' Response to the Alleviation of Skill Shortages
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/05/2020 de 00:00:00 à 00:00:00
RUIZ Celia (PSE) POSTPONED
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/04/2020 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00
Using ZOOM
We analyze the employment effects of directing job-seekers' applications towards establishments likely to recruit, building upon an existing Internet platform developed by the French public employment service. Our two-sided randomization design, with about 1.2 million job-seekers and 100,000 establishments, allows to precisely estimate supplyand demand-side effects. We find a 2% increase in job finding rates among women, while establishments advertised on the website increase their hirings on indefinite duration contracts by 4%.
BEHAGHEL Luc (PSE) Directing job search: a large scale experiment
Sofia Dromundo, Marc Gurgand, Yagan Hazard and Thomas Zuber
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 26/03/2020 de 11:00:00 à 12:00:00
PSE
I study the effect of an online job search assistance program taking advantage of an experiment made by the French public employment services, which provides some exogenous variation in the use of this platform. I focus on the heterogeneity analysis of this treatment, using two main different approaches. The first one is theory-driven, and focuses on the analysis of the heterogeneity of thetreatment with respect to various different labour market tightness indicators. Two main assessments can be made based on this analysis. (i) Tightness indicators are (surprisingly) decorrelated, making it difficult to corroborate the rare significant results obtained. (ii) The set of significant results obtained suggest that the treatment effect is increasing in labour market tightness. I suggest competing ways of interpreting the treatment that are consistent with those results. I also document some evidence of a larger treatment effect for individuals with weaker employment prospects. This is in line with other empirical evidence in the literature evaluating job search assistance programs.The second approach is more data-driven, and resorts to the new machine learning (ML) techniques developed for heterogeneity analysis. I focus on tree-based techniques and forests, which have been central in the development of these new methods. I provide applications of a large part of the existing ML techniques for exploring treatment effect heterogeneity, trying to take advantage of each of them to document which are the dimensions that are likely to be important to study treatment effect heterogeneity in my setting.
Hazard Yagan () Online Platforms and the Labour Market: Learning (with Machines) from an Experiment in France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 12/03/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper shows that firms' demand for high-skilled foreign workers partly results from their hiring difficulties. Relying on a within-firm identification strategy, I compare recruitment decisions made by a given employer for similar jobs differing in recruitment difficulties. I quantify how the time to fill a vacancy affects the employer's probability to look for recruiting a foreign worker. To identify this relationship, I have collected and assembled a new and original dataset at the job level. It matches online job postings to administrative data on H-1B visas applications in the US. I find that a standard deviation increase in job posting duration increases employers' probability to look for a foreign worker by 1.5 percentage points. This effect is mainly driven by firms sending only a few visa applications. It increases to 3 to 4 percentage points for architects, engineers and computer scientists.
Raux Morgan () Looking for the Best and Brightest: Hiring difficulties and high-skilled foreign workers
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/03/2020 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Countries around the world are increasingly expanding legal maternity leaves, with the dual objective of allowing mothers to recover from childbirth while protecting their job, and enhancing child development. Although the literature on the effects of parental leave on child development suggests positive effects for short paid leaves, for the case of extended periods the evidence is scarcer and tends to suggest no (or negative) effects. In this paper, we exploit a 3-year expansion of paid leave in France in 1994 and estimate the impact of mothers' eligibility for extended leave on long-term educational achievement of children. We find zero effects on schooling achievement (measured by high school graduation or holding junior high school certificate), that are robust to different specifications and tightly estimated. Moreover, this is true for different subpopulations, since we find no detectable impact heterogeneity.
PINTO Gustavo () Extended maternity leave and children's long-term development. Evidence from France
Luc Behaghel
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 19/12/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
We study, in an urban land use model, the inefficiencies associated with tenure insecurity and information asymmetry, and households' responses to mitigate tenure insecurity. When buyers and sellers of land plots can match along trusted kinship lines whereby deception (i.e., when sellers do not disclose competing claims on a plot to buyers) is socially penalized, information asymmetry is attenuated but overall participation in the market is reduced. When owners can make plots secure by paying to register them in a cadaster, information asymmetry is also reduced but the registration cost limits land-use conversion at the periphery of the city. We compare the overall surplus under these two models and under a hybrid version where both registration and trust relationships are available options. The analysis highlights the substitutability of trust relationships to costly registration and the gradual evolution of developieconomies towards full cadastral coverage if registration costs can be reduced.
Letrouit Lucie () From trust to registration: Alternative responses to urban land tenure insecurity in developing countries
Co-author: H. Selod
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 28/11/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R2-21
Despite massive migration flows in the past century, their long-term consequences for the communities of origin remain largely unexplored. This paper examines the impact of mass emigration on human capital accumulation over a century. The context is the Galician diaspora, one of the greatest emigration episodes of the twentieth century in Europe. I combine newly-digitized data from multiple historical sources with contemporary administrative and survey data to build a unique database of all Galician municipalities from 1860 until the present. I use data on absent men as a novel proxy for emigration that I instrument by two sources of plausibly exogenous variation: pioneer emigration caused by extreme rainfall and the economic cycle in migrant destination countries. I find that while emigration depressed literacy rates at origin in the short run, one decade later the impact became positive and led to long-run gains in human capital that persist one hundred years later. I provide empirical evidence that these long-run effects are partly due to migrants' investments at origin and cultural change. Migrants financed the construction of hundreds of schools in their hometowns that subsequently raised educational attainment. Similarly, emigrants realized that education was of major importance and transmitted these norms back home, leading to a persistent change in beliefs about the value of education and effort.
FERNANDEZ-SANCHEZ Martin () Mass Emigration and Human Capital over a Century: Evidence from the Galician Diaspora
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 24/10/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
Many studies show that management practices and the work environment contribute to corporate and state performance. However, their impact on workers' behavior and health has received little attention so far. A better understanding of their role could help designing appropriate measures to reduce absenteeism from work and health care expenditures. In this paper, I exploit a unique matched employer-employee dataset that contains all the absence episodes of secondary school teachers in France over the period 2006-2016. I take advantage of the mobility of teachers and school principals between schools to decompose teacher absences into individual, work-related and residual contributions. I classify schools and principals into quartiles according to the values of their estimated fixed effect on absenteeism. I find that the absence duration of teachers is multiplied by 3 (an increase of about 8 days per year) on average between the first and fourth quartile of school effects on absenteeism, and multiplied by 2.4 (an increase of about 6 days per year) on average between the first and fourth quartile of school principal effects on absenteeism. I find that teacher turnover increases for schools (respectively principals) that increase absenteeism, and that teachers are even more likely to leave these schools (respectively principals) if they are more absent than their colleagues. Then, I examine a subsample of schools matched to the 2013 and 2016 working conditions surveys. I find that school effects on absenteeism are positively correlated with work intensity and hostile behaviors, while school principal effects on absenteeism are negatively correlated with hierarchical support. Finally, school effects on absenteeism are negatively associated with teachers' psychological well-being as measured by the WHO-5 index.
Hillion Mélina () How school context and management influence sick leave and teacher departure
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/10/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper explores whether the way in which means-tested transfers are paid has any effect on employer’s behavior, wages, and employment. We exploit a change in the payment system that was gradually rolled out between 2003 and 2010 in Argentina. Under the old system, employers were intermediaries that paid family allowances to their employees together with their corresponding salary, and they were allowed to deduct this transfer from employer social security contributions. The new system eliminated the intermediary role played by employers and centralized the payments in a government agency that started disbursing the allowances directly to eligible workers. Using employer-employee micro-data and an event-study design, we show that the way tax credits are disbursed is not neutral. Our evidence suggests that, under the old system, employers shift part of the incidence of the transfer by paying lower wages. This result is in line with recent literature in public finance that calls into question the standard incidence model.
GARRIGA Santiago () Incidence and wage effects of means-tested transfers: Evidence from a change in the payment system
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 03/10/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
I estimate how immigrants can affect the causal relation of place on human capital mobility. I first study whether the place has a role in the test score that a primary student can achieve by studying movers across municipalities. Exploiting variation in the grade at which each child moves, I observe that students converge to the place to which they move linearly. On average, moving students converge - considering convergence as the reduction of the gap between the stayers from the origin versus destination - at approximately a rate of 10% per year. Then, I evaluate whether these results can be led by confounders by running different overidentification tests. These findings provide the basis for estimating the place effect of each municipality. Finally, I evaluate whether the role of place on human capital mobility change over time with the arrival of new immigrants.
LUKSIC Juan Diego () Can immigration affect human capital mobility? Lessons from the recent migratory wave in Chile.
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 19/09/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
This paper studies the effects of top earnings tax rates on the mobility of top ten percent employees within Europe. I use a novel detailed micro-level dataset on mobility built from the largest European survey (EU-LFS), representative of the entire population of 28 European countries. My estimation strategy exploits the differential effects of changes in top income tax rates on individuals of different propensities to be treated by these changes. I find that top ten percent workers’ location choices are significantly affected by top income tax rates. I estimate an elasticity of the number of top earners with respect to net-of-tax rate that is between 0.1 and 0.3. The mobility response to taxes is especially strong for foreigners, as I estimate an elasticity of the number of foreign top earners with respect to net-of-tax rate that is above one. Turning to tax policy implications, I uncover large heterogeneities in tax competition outcomes within Europe driven by countries’ sizes and tax bases’ compositions, that translate into large differences in incentives to implement beggar-thy-neighbour policies across member states. I formalise these country-level differences using a revenue-maximizing approach that I calibrate with my estimated parameters. Overall, these findings suggest that tax competition entails substantial welfare costs.
* * () Do European Top Earners React to Taxation Through Migration?Texte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 12/09/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
PSE- 48 boulevard Jourdan, 74014 Paris, salle R1-09
TEP Travail et économie publique () Annual group meeting
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 27/06/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
This research builds on literature examining the effects of the two most widely used policies to promote private firm’s innovation and research, namely: direct subsidies and tax credits. In particular, we analyze Mexico’s Programa de Estímulos a la Innovación (PEI) subsidy and Estímulo Fiscal a la Innovación y el Desarrollo de Tecnología (EFIDT) tax credit. PEI rules allow following a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach to identify causal inference, as they define a threshold below which no projects get the grants, and above which some projects are granted. In addition, detailed grading guidelines for both programs allow to construct controls that we can use in a difference-in-difference matching approach. Evidence indicates that the subsidy led firms to hire more innovation personnel and perform more patenting activities. As for the tax credit, estimates suggest it led to more hiring of innovation personnel but not to a change in patenting.
Chavez Emmanuel () The Effects of R&D Subsidies and Tax Credits: The Case of a Middle-Income Country
NOTE: ROOM CHANGE - R2-01
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 13/06/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Social Security Contributions (SSCs) are a major source of revenue for some countries, generating a large gap between the labor cost an employer faces and the wage effectively earned by an employee. In France, SSCs nominally paid by the employer are particularly high, representing an additional cost for labor of around one third of the gross wage. This high level of employer SSCs is combined to a large minimum wage. Altogether, the rigidities on the gross wage at the bottom of the wage spectrum and the high rate of employer SSCs have been suspected of fostering unemployment of less qualified workers. Since 1993, several reforms have reduced employer SSCs for low wages in order to favor employment. Building on previous works and implementing precise microsimulation of SSCs, I take a new look at the effect of the extension of these SSC reductions that took place between 1995 and 1997. I explore firm-level effects of this reform by implementing a dynamic difference-in-difference strategy with different levels of “treatment”. I find that reducing SSCs had a strong impact on employment, but only on a very short term. The most affected firms also increased their profits. I found however no effect on average wage progression for different wage groups.
COTTET Sophie () Reducing Social Security Contributions: More Employment, Higher Wages or Increased Profits?
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 06/06/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
We show that there exists substantial heterogeneity across occupations on the negative effect of Chinese competition. A one standard deviation increase in Chinese competition reduces total earnings over the period 1997-2015 by 24% of 1997 earnings for managers and engineers, 18% for mid-level occupation workers and only 11% for production workers. The larger earning decline suffered by high skilled workers mostly reflects a larger drop in their hourly wage (the impact of China on hours worked is comparable across occupations). These results suggest the presence of downward wage rigidities mediating trade adjustments. We confirm this mechanism using industry-variation on minimum wage agreements. We find that in more regulated industries, the impact of the China shock is more concentrated on skilled workers. Overall, this evidence show that labor market institutions can shape the link between trade and inequalities.
Smagghue Gabriel () Chinese Competition, Inequality and Collective Wage Agreement: Evidence from France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/05/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
In recent years Western countries are expressing growing concerns about the regulation of migration flows and many are considering adopting some form of selective immigration policy. This paper analyzes the labor market effects of one of such reforms introduced in France in 2008 with the aim of encouraging the inflow of foreign workers with skills that are scarce among the local labor force. The analysis relies on administrative employer-employee data and it is based on a difference-in-differences approach. Results show that the reform increased the hiring of foreign workers in target occupations without causing any harm to native employment. As a result, the overall stock of labor grew in these jobs. Entry wages are lowered by 4% among natives and by 9% among foreigners, suggesting that these two groups may not be perfect substitutes, even when they are employed for the exact same task. The effects are stronger for the occupations with the most severe lack of native candidates and for those with an average salary largely above the minimum wage, indicating that the reform was successful in attracting candidates with rare skills and relatively high productivity.
SIGNORELLI Sara () Do Skilled Migrants Compete with Native Workers? Analysis of a Selective Immigration Policy
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 11/04/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Most of the empirical literature in market design has focused on the relative performance and strategic implications of alternative matching mechanisms, taking the inputs of school choice -preferences, priorities and capacities- as exogenous. This work aims at broadening the scope of market design questions to school choice by examining how student priorities affect families choices and student sorting across schools. We test the impact of a large-scale inter-district school choice reform on families' choices for schools, and how this decision impacts school immigrant and social segregation (according to parental education). This reform expanded choice by merging previously distinct school zones within the city of Madrid. Using unique administrative data on parents’ applications to schools, the paper shows that families reacted to the reform by exerting more inter-district choice and by applying to schools located further away from home than before the reform. In particular, parents from highest education levels and parents of non-immigrant students were those who reacted the most, while parents of immigrant children did not reacted at all. We find a decrease of social segregation and an increase of immigrant segregation, showing that levels of segregation prior to the reform may matter to predict potential effects on relaxing neighborhood priorities. Results suggest that when parents' school choices exhibit a strong degree of polarization by social and immigrant background, priority structures need to be carefully designed to achieve diversity objectives.
Montalban Castilla José () School Choice, Student Mobility and School Segregation: Evidence from Madrid
Co-authors: Lucas Gortázar and David Mayor
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 04/04/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
In this paper, we test for the presence of “technology-induced” trade in France between 2000 and 2007 and assess its impact on consumer welfare. We use the staggered roll-out of broadband internet to estimate its causal impact on the importing behavior of firms. Using an event-study design, we find that broadband expansion increases imports. Our estimates imply that the increase in the value of imports in the absence of broadband expansion would have been a 15% lower. We further find that the sub-extensive margin (number of products and sourcing country per firm) is the main margin of adjustment and that the impact is higher for capital goods. Finally, we develop a firm-based model of importing and adopt a sufficient statistics approach in order to quantify the contribution of the import-channel to the overall effect of broadband on consumer welfare. Within this model, our reduced-form estimates imply that broadband internet reduced the consumer price index by 1.7% and that the import-channel accounts for a quarter of that effect.
MALGOUYRES Clement () Technology-induced Trade Shocks? Evidence from Broadband Expansion in France
Co-authors: Thierry Mayer and Clément Mazet-Sonilhac
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/03/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
In many countries, the termination of employment contracts has to be either on employer initiative or on employee initiative, there is little alternative. Furthermore, the cost of the procedure is borne mainly by the contracting party who takes the initiative and there is very little room for sharing costs and responsibilities. The implicit doctrine is that employment termination has to be the last resort, the ultima ratio. In 2008, the French government initiated a change in doctrine: it became possible to terminate employment contracts by mutual consent, at lower costs. Building on firm-level administrative data, we develop an event analysis which reveals that the reform was followed by a decline in dismissals for non-economic reasons (i.e., the contract terminations associated with the highest litigation risks) as well as by a very significant rise in overall separation rates. By promoting separation by mutual consent, the reform reduced labor litigation risks, boosted workers’ flows, but, eventually, we do not detect any significant effects on firms’ demand for labor and employment levels.
Batut Cyprien () From Ultima Ratio to Mutual Consent: The Effects of Changing Employment Protection Doctrine
Co-author: Eric Maurin
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 28/02/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Despite the extensive literature on the effects of immigration, little is known about the impact of emigration. Between 2009-2016, Spain saw a net outflow of more than 600 000 working-age foreign-born due to the severe economic crisis. Focusing on this episode, using micro-data from municipal registers and longitudinal Spanish administrative data, I study the effects of emigration of the foreign-born population on the wages and employment of the staying natives. I build a shift-share instrument based on the past settlements of the foreign-born population across Spain to argue for a causal relationship. In line with my labor market equilibrium model, I find that emigration led to an increase in the employment and wages of the low- and medium-skilled native workers, who have the highest substitutability with departing foreign-born population. Workers at the high end of the skill distribution experienced small wage increases but no significant effects on employment improvement. I further show that the emigration of the foreign-born increased the entries of the inactive low-skilled natives into the labor market, while also slowing outflows into other areas or unemployment of all skill groups.
ÖZGÜZEL Cem () Emigration and Local Labor Markets: Evidence from the Great Recession in Spain
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/02/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Urban renewal programs have been implemented in many countries in order to foster a change in deprived neighborhoods. In France, an ambitious program was launched in 2004, called PNRU (Programme National pour la Rénovation Urbaine). This program consists in demolitions and building of new housing units, mainly in public housing. Other operations affecting public facilites have also been funded as part of the program. The total budget was 47 billion euros. Using difference-in-differences estimates and matching procedures, we analyse the impact of the program on housing prices. Our results do not show any impact of the program over the 12 years following the first operations at the aggregate level. However, when focusing on neighborhoods that benefitted from a large enough investment in renovation, while being located in urban units with a dynamic housing market and not too far from the center of the urban unit, there is some evidence of a cumulative positive effect of renovation on housing values.
Letrouit Lucie () How to revitalize deprived neighborhoods? Evidence from a national urban renewal program in France
Co-authors: Florence Goffette-Nagot and Sylvain Chareyron
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/02/2019 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
FERNANDEZ-SANCHEZ Martin () Més Que Un Club: Football, National Identity and Independence
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 20/12/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
This paper revisits the local public good provision debate in a quantitative spatial equilibrium framework. We develop a model in which households are imperfectly mobile across cities that differ in their endogenous wages, rents, local public goods and taxes. Importantly, we allow for three kinds of externalities: public good spillovers (i.e. households enjoy public goods of neighbouring cities), fiscal agglomeration effects (when public goods are not fully rival, bigger cities offer more public good benefits for less taxes) and congestion effects (mobile households congest the public goods of neighbouring cities). Knowing their magnitude is crucial for measuring the inefficiency cost of fiscal decentralization and for designing optimal spatial policies. Our model identifies the key structural parameters behind these externalities and estimates them with GMM using several administrative datasets on French cities. We rely on a new identification strategy that exploits plausibly exogenous variation in investment subsidies to instrument for local public good supply. We notably find significant evidence of spillovers.
Jannin Nicolas () Behavioral responses to local public spending: theory and evidence from French cities
Co-author: Aurélie Sotura
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 22/11/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
We provide microfoundations for why worker seniority (a worker’s tenure relative to the tenure of all her co-workers inside a firm) is an optimal bargaining device in large firms with stochastic product demand and irreversible specific investments required for each new hire. The firm and its workers simultaneously bargain for a layoff order and a wage schedule, whereupon infra-marginal senior workers receive wage premia and layoff insurance relative to their more junior colleagues—extending the one firm-one worker efficient bargaining real option model by Buhai and Teulings (2014). We then validate our modeling framework on exhaustive linked-employer-employee-data from Denmark and Portugal by proving that the seniority profile in worker wages, empirically documented by Buhai et al (2014) using the same data, is a proxy for the “cost of necessary specific investments”—with the latter a structural parameter that we estimate for each narrowly defined industry.
Buhai Sebastian () Worker-Firm Dynamics with Seniority Bargaining
Co-authors: M. Portela and C. Teulings
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 18/10/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
This paper explores how two main channels explaining the gender wage
gap, namely the heterogeneity of firm pay policies and sex-specific wage consequences
of parenthood, interact. We explore the firm heterogeneity channel
by applying the model proposed by Card, Cardoso, and Kline 2016. After
controlling for individual and firm heterogeneity, we show that the sorting of
women into lower-paying firms accounts for 11 % of the average gender wage
gap in the French private sector, whereas within-firm gender inequality does
not contribute to the gap. Performing these decompositions all along workers’
life cycle, we find evidence that this sorting mechanism activates shortly after
birth. These gender-specific and dynamic firm choices generate wage losses
all along mothers’ careers, in addition to direct child wage penalties. After
birth, mothers tend to favor firms with more flexible work hours and home
proximity, which may be detrimental to their labor market opportunities, as,
within these contexts, firms may gain relative monopsonic power.
To Maxime () Family, firms and the gender wage gap in France
Co-authors: E. Coudin and S. MaillardTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 04/10/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
While a large number of studies emphasizes a negative effect of parental separation
on child development, little attention has been paid to the channels of this effect. This
paper shows that child and parental time invesments could be a driving channel of
the negative effect of parental separation. Using detailed time-use diaries from the
PSID-Child Development Supplement, I estimate an individual fixed effects model and
find that a change in family structure has a negative impact on time spent with at
least one parent present. Times with parents together and with fathers (only) are
highly affected, but mothers compensate partially for this decrease. Besides, to see if it
matters for child development, I estimate cognitive and non-cognitive skills production
functions using several specifications. I shed light on the heterogeneity of parental time
inputs for emotional and cognitive skills. Child and parental time investments appear
to be a possible driving channel of the effect of parental separation, especially at stake
for children whose parents get separated in their early childhood and children with
more highly educated parents.
Le Forner Héléne () Family Structure, Children’s Time Use and Parental TimesTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 13/09/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
TEP Travail et économie publique () Annual group meeting
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/07/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
In France, secondary school teachers are externally evaluated at regular intervals by senior officers of the national education. These external evaluations have a very direct impact on teachers’ career advancement. Besides, evaluators provide teachers with detailed feedback on the quality of their work. In this paper, we show that the external evaluation of a teacher is followed by a significant increase in the performance of her students. We also provide evidence that student performance in a district is positively affected by an increase in the number of evaluators assigned to this district. Generally speaking, the effects of external evaluation appear to be much stronger for math teachers than for French teachers.
BRIOLE Simon () Does evaluating teachers make a difference?
Co-author: Eric Maurin
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 28/06/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
WALDENSTROM Daniel (Paris School of Economics) Perceptions of wealth inequality and the support for inheritance taxation: Evidence from a randomized experiment
Co-author: Spencer Bastani
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/06/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
This paper reports the results of a large scale randomized experiment that was designed to assess whether a short in-class intervention by an external female role model can influence students’ attitudes towards science and contribute to a significant change in their choice of field of study. The intervention consists in a one hour, one off visit of a high school classroom by a volunteer female scientist. It is targeted to change students’ perceptions and attitudes towards scientific careers and the role of women in science, with the aim of ultimately reducing the gender gap in scientific studies. Using a random assignment of the interventions to 10th and 12th grade classrooms during normal teaching hours, we find that exposure to female role models significantly reduces the prevalence of stereotypes associated with jobs in science, for both female and male students. While we find no significant effect of the classroom interventions on 10th grade students’ choice of high school track the following year, our results show a positive and significant impact of the intervention on the probability of applying and of being admitted to a selective science major in college among 12th grade students. This effect is essentially driven by high-achieving students and is larger for girls in relative terms. After the intervention, their probability to be enrolled in selective science programs after graduating from high school increases by 30 percent with respect to the baseline mean.
Andreescu Marie (Paris School of Economics) Can female role models reduce the gender gap in science? Evidence from classroom interventions in French high schools
Co-authors: J. Grenet, M. Monnet, and C. Van Effenterre
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/06/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
This paper explores the role of cash transfers in workers' allocation across the formal and informal sectors. I study the impact of an unconditional grant in South Africa paid to Black and Coloured mothers, for whom a significant share of employment is informal. I use discontinuous exposure for children of adjacent cohorts to identify the labor market effects on mothers of roughly one year of grant (400 $ 2010). I show that recipients of this grant are more likely to be unemployed when receiving the transfer. Five years after the grant has stopped, the employment probability is the same, but mothers who had received the grant are more likely to work in the formal sector. I present evidence that these are possibly the results of less binding liquidity constraints when unemployed, as the grant allows to spend more on transport when looking for a job.
TONDINI Alessandro (Paris School of Economics) Cash Transfers, Unemployment and Informality: Evidence from South Africa's Child Support Grant
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 31/05/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
In this paper, I use administrative unemployment data to analyse bunching in the workers’ seniority distribution, at a notch created by an unemployment benefit schedule designed for workers laid-off for economic reasons. I exploit the discontinuity in the level of the budget set to estimate an elasticity of labour supply to unemployment benefits. I also investigate the possible channels of strategic behaviours in a context where the dismissal decision is the result of bargaining between employer, employee and representatives within the firm. I find evidence that significant bunching occurs at the relevant seniority threshold as a response to incentives created by the unemployment benefit scheme: employers and employees maximise joint surplus thanks to a third party’s - the State - transfer. I find that this bunching is concentrated in the population who has the most to gain and is the most able to implement strategic behaviours and to take advantage of unemployment compensation rules.
KHOURY Laura (Paris School of Economics) Unemployment Benefits and the Timing of Dismissals: Evidence from Bunching at a Notch in France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/04/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
DUPRAZ Yannick (Paris School of Economics) Fatherless: The Long-Term Effects of Losing a Father in the U.S. Civil War
Co-author: Andy Ferrara
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 29/03/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
How does urban form impacts households' fuel consumption and driving emissions. We answer this question using French survey data between 2001 to 2011. The use of these three rich individual surveys helps control for selection issues, as some households may live in a location consonant to their socioeconomic characteristics or travel predispositions. In addition, we also use instrumental variables to control for simultaneity between fuel consumption and population settlements. The results suggest that, by choosing to live at the fringe of a metropolitan area instead of a city-center, the sample mean-household bears an extra-consumption of approximatively six fuel tanks per year. More generally, doubling residential density results in an annual saving of approximatively two tanks per household, but this gain might be larger if compaction is coupled with smaller distances to city-centers, improved public transport and reduced pressure for road construction in the metropolitan area. Moreover, the relationship between urban population and driving emissions is bell-shaped: small cities compensate lack of either density or mass transit systems by job-housing centralization.
Carantino Benjamin (Paris School of Economics) The Carbon Footprint of Suburbanization: Evidence from French Household Data
Co-authors: M. Lafourcade and C. Blaudin du Thé
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 22/02/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Rosenbaum Philip (Paris School of Economics) Does the Timing of the First Childbirth Matter? New Approach on Danish Register Data
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 25/01/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
There are certain situations, such as those where the importance of performing well on a particular occasion, produce pressure. Events which contribute to higher levels of pressure, competition or stress, may lead to situations where women may under-perform men. In this paper we exploit the random allocation of male and female students to exams performed under different levels (external vs. internal administered tests) of pressure to understand their causal effect on gender performance gaps. We use administrative data on the performance of primary-school students in the Region of Madrid. We find that the gender gap increases with the presence of an external administered test for male-dominated subjects, such as Mathematics and Sciences. The effect is not significant for female-dominated subjects (i.e. English and Spanish).
Montalban Castilla José (Paris School of Economics) The Math Gender Gap: The Role of Test-Taking Environment
Co-author: Almudena Sevilla
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 11/01/2018 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Over the past forty years, it has become increasingly difficult for young men and women to enter the labor market, especially with a permanent contract. In parallel, men and women are waiting longer to get married or enter a first cohabiting relationship. To shed light on the connection between those two trends, this paper develops a timing-of-events analysis using Abbring and van den Berg empirical model (Abbring and van den Berg (2003)). This analysis shows that both stable and temporary jobs increase the instantaneous probability to enter a first cohabiting relationship, but the impact of a first stable job is much stronger than the impact of a first temporary job (it is about 3 times larger). Also, the impact of a first job is similar across gender for younger cohorts, while it used to be much stronger for men than women for older cohorts. Finally, among younger cohorts there are little effects that go from cohabiting relationships to employment, whereas the employment chances of women in older cohorts used to be strongly negatively impacted by cohabitation.
Landaud Fanny (Paris School of Economics) From Employment to Engagement? Stable jobs, Temporary Jobs and Cohabiting Relationships
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 21/12/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Payroll tax reductions are a popular tool to lower the minimum labor cost and encourage employment and job creation. Effects of these tax reductions go beyond the directly affected. A particular concern about such policies is that more productive jobs may be replaced with less productive ones. We examine payroll tax reductions using an equilibrium search-and-matching model estimated from the French administrative data. We find that lowering taxes on low-paid work induces low-productivity workers to enter the labor market and low-productivity firms to post more vacancies. These behaviors congest the labor market, resulting in lower employment among high-productivity workers and negative impacts on aggregate production. We find that, rather than reducing taxes for a wide range of jobs, restricting payroll tax reductions to minimum wage jobs helps low-wage workers, but the resulting congestion effect is also stronger. Taking this trade-off into account, we determine who should benefit from payroll reductions.
Wang Olivier (Paris School of Economics) Labor market responses to payroll tax reductionsTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 07/12/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Flexible partial retirement stands out among policies aimed at extending individual working lives. Because most people of retirement age are partnered and likely plan their retirement together, partial retirement of one partner may impact labor supply of the other. We exploit a 2011 pension reform in Norway that incentivized partial retirement for some workers but not for others, focusing on couples in which only one partner directly faced changed incentives. Drawing on employer-employee register data matched with records from social security and population registers and using a difference-in-differences setup, we find that, for both men and women, the reform increased own labor supply by 5 to 7 hours per week and reduced the probability of full retirement by 20 percentage points. The reform also increased labor supply of wives of treated husbands by 1 to 2 hours per week and reduced their full retirement rate by 4 to 6 percentage points. In line with asymmetries in spousal employment responses found in prior studies, we do not uncover similar indirect effects for husbands of treated wives.
STANCANELLI Elena (Paris School of Economics) Partial retirement and partners' labor supply: learning from a Norwegian retirement reform
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 23/11/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Using several administrative datasets, I study the impact of temporary tax on top wage income earners, implemented for 2013 and 2014 only and known as the "75% tax above 1 million euros''. The tax takes the form of a new marginal tax rate of 50% on gross annual salary income above one million euros, which translates into an increase by 10ppt of the overall top marginal tax rate on wage earners from 64% to 74%. About 400 employers paid the tax each year and about 1000 employees were concerned. I document that the incidence of the tax was shared among employers and employees. Yet, the bigger the firm, the more incident on employers it was. Conversely, the smaller the firm, the larger the incidence on wage. Taking advantage of the short term nature of the tax, I show that the tax triggered important optimization response of wage earners, taking the form of time-shifting. I do not see any income-shifting nor any migration response. I study the elasticity of the pre-tax labour income to the net-of-tax rate (1 minus the marginal tax rate) and find an elasticity of 0.3, that I interpret as pure optimization.
GUILLOT Malka (Paris School of Economics) Who payed the 75% tax on millionaires? Optimization of salary incomes and incidence in France
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 12/10/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
A model of labour supply is developed in which observed hours reflect both the distribution of preferences and restrictions on the choice of hours. In the absence of information on the choice set facing each individual, observed hours may appear not to satisfy the revealed preference conditions for ‘rational’ choice. We focus on the case where the choice set contains at most two offers and show that when the choice set distribution is known, preferences can be identified. We then show that, where preferences are known, the choice set distribution can be fully recovered. Conditions for identification of both preferences and the distribution of choice sets are also developed. We illustrate this approach in a labour supply setting with nonlinear budget constraints. Non-linearities in the budget constraint are used to directly reveal restrictions on the choice set. This framework is used to study the labour supply behaviour of a large sample of working age mothers in the UK, accounting for nonlinearities in the tax and welfare benefit system, fixed costs of work and restrictions on hours choices.
To Maxime (Paris School of Economics) Labour supply and taxation with restricted choicesTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 05/10/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
The fact that teachers matter for student achievement is largely documented.Yet, identifying what makes good teaching has proven difficult, in spite of the large amount of attention this question has received in the last decade. In this paper, I shift the focus from the usual observable socio-demographic characteristics to the systematic and administrative evaluations of teachers by their hierarchy. I analyze the three grades used to assess teachers in secondary school in France: the certication grades, designed to assess teacher content-knowledge, the pedagogical grade, designed to assess pedagogical skills and the administrative grade, designed to assess administrative skills. I find that neither the certication grades (written nor oral) nor the administrative grade are signicantly associated with student achievement gains. The only evaluation grade statistically significantly associated with student achievement gains is the pedagogical grade: a standard deviation increase in this grade is associated with a two percent standard deviation increase in student achievement gains. This impact is on par with replacing an average teacher with a teacher at the 40th percentile of the teacher value-added distribution. Low income students are more sensitive to the pedagogical grade than others.These results has important implications for teacher training, hiring and assignment.
HE Yinghua (Paris School of Economics) How to Identify Good Teachers? Teacher Evaluations and Student AchievementTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 14/09/2017 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Campus Jourdan - Salle R1-09
Caroli Eve (Paris School of Economics) Escaping Social Pressure on Dismissals: the Role of Fixed-Term Contracts
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 11/05/2017 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Salle R1-09, Nouveau Bâtiment, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
This paper exploits a natural experiment from an armed conflict that occurred in Mexico in 1926 to provide causal evidence on the multi-generational transmission of human capital across three generations. The study uses a unique survey that gathers retrospective information on a national representative sample of adults and their children. The analysis allows comparing medium and long-run trends of economic mobility along the 20th century and provides useful policy insights for the design of anti-poverty programs aiming to cope with the adverse effects of armed conflict under an inter-generational perspective. Results show significant effects of the grandmothers’ education (instrumented with exposure to the conflict) on their children’s years of schooling, grade repetition and earnings. The influence of the grandparents’ educative legacy remains at least until the second generation, particularly for the granddaughters’ schooling. This indicates that the persistence of some part of the current inequality can be traced back to at least three generations.
Moreno Heddie (Paris School of Economics) The effect of grandparents’ schooling on their children’s and grandchildren’s outcomes
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 27/04/2017 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Salle R1-09, Nouveau Bâtiment, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
This paper studies why PhDs in France have more difficulty entering the job market than engineers. Using data from CEREQ’s “Génération 2004” survey, we show that job finding rates of PhDs are lower than those of engineers and situate them among post-secondary graduates as a whole. We show that this phenomenon holds even when restricting attention to R & D jobs, and that the difference is mainly due to differences in the fields of study of PhDs and engineers. We also show that the relative demand for PhDs is only moderately sensitive to cost, as only the large employment subsidies inherent in the most recent reform of the “dispositif jeunes docteurs” of France’s research tax credit were able to significantly improve placement of young PhDs.
Guillot Malka () Pourquoi les docteurs s’insèrent moins bien que les ingénieurs, et que faire?
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 09/03/2017 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Salle R2-07, Nouveau Bâtiment, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated by randomized waiting lists. Applicants
are ordered randomly, and treatment offers are made following that order. Upon receiving
an offer, applicants can either accept it or decline it. Offers stop when all the seats for
treatment have been filled. We refer to applicants that accept their offer as takers.
We start by showing that there is a correlation between receiving an offer and being a
taker, because offers continue until sufficiently many applicants have accepted their offer.
Therefore, receiving an offer cannot be used as an instrument to estimate the effect of
the treatment. We then show how one can solve this problem by downweighting takers
that receive an offer. Based on this result, we propose a new estimator of the effect of the
treatment, and we show that it is consistent. We review recent articles using randomized
waiting lists to estimate treatment effects, and we show that the most commonly used
estimator is not consistent. Finally, we use our estimator to revisit Behaghel et al. (2017).
BEHAGHEL Luc () Next please! Estimating the effect of treatments allocated by randomized waiting lists
Clément de Chaisemartin
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 02/03/2017 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Salle 10, RDC Bâtiment G, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
This paper studies women's employment decisions when institutions limit their chances of having a regular working schedule. Since 1972, French children in kindergarten and primary school had no school on Wednesday. In 2013, a reform reallocates some classes to Wednesday morning. A descriptive analysis of the pre-reform period suggests that women value flexibility when children demand it. Importantly, we observe that women's decision to stay at home on Wednesday hinges on the interplay between the cost of flexibility associated with their occupation, their bargaining power at work, and their role in the household. Next, we take advantage of the 2013 reform to obtain the first estimate of women's elasticity to the value of flexibility. To measure mothers' response we exploit variation in the implementation of this policy over time and across the age of the youngest child. Our results show that, although mothers do not increase their total weekly hours of work, they do take advantage of the fall in the value of flexibility to close 1/3 of their initial gap in the probability of working on Wednesday with respect to the control group. This response is driven by mothers who are more rewarded for a regular presence at work, but also by those who have a stronger bargaining power.
Van EFFENTERRE Clémentine () Do women want to work more or more regularly? Evidence from a natural experiment
Emma Duchini (Warwick University)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 19/01/2017 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Salle 10, RDC Bâtiment G, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
We evaluate the effects of a central French reform that made the conditions for firm-level union recognition more democratic after 2008. The law gave equal chances to all unions to be recognized for bargaining, putting an end to the quasi-monopoly given to five historical unions until then. The law also introduced votes and minimal electoral requirements for union recognition. These new regulations only became effective at the first firms' work councils elections following the promulgation of the law in August 2008. Those elections occur within each firm according to a pre-defined frequency-- usually every four years--, so that election dates around August 2008 only depend on former election dates, and can be considered as quasi-random with respect to the new law, at least in firms that are old enough. The identification thus relies on a regression discontinuity design in which the running variable is the firms' work councils election date: we compare in 2011 firms that had those elections just before or just after the law was passed. We find that the democratic rules introduced in 2008 increased social capital. Namely, both employers' and workers' satisfaction and trust towards unions are increased. Union coverage and membership are also increased. The study of other outcomes (conflicts and exits) is still in progress.
Andreescu Marie, ASKENAZY Philippe () Democracy at work: A Study of the 2008 French Union Representativity Reform
Philippe Askenazy
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 01/12/2016 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
KETZ Philipp () Detailed decomposition of differences in distributions with an application to the black-white test score gap
Blaise Melly (University of Bern)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 17/11/2016 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
KUECKEN Maria () Disease and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from the Roll Back Malaria Partnership in AfricaTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 10/11/2016 de 12:30:00 à 13:30:00
Does a higher educational requirement always help to recruit more and better applicants? Many European countries have recently increased the diploma required to become a teacher, but does it contribute to “the attractiveness and excellence” of the profession as suggested by the European Commission?
I exploit the 2011 reform that introduced a mandatory masters’ degree (instead of a bachelor degree) to teach in primary schools in France to estimate the effect of a diploma increase on teacher supply, ability and diversity. I find that the reform substantially decreased the number of candidates, significantly decreased the ability of teachers and reduced the share of men among applicants and recruited teachers. The results suggest that increasing the level of education can sometimes have counterproductive effects, especially in the context of a strong labor demand.
Hillion Mélina () The effect of a mandatory master's degree on teacher supply, ability and diversity : evidence from a French reform
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 20/10/2016 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
Data-driven modeling and social mining has the potential of yielding a planetary nervous system capable of supporting the computation, monitoring and nowcasting of new indices of social well-being, a novel compass long-awaited by decision-makers and citizens, well beyond the limitations of the gross national product (GDP) per capita. The key scientific challenge is to make the different dimensions of social well-being globally measurable in real-time: besides material living standards (income, consumption and wealth), it is important to consider many other factors, such as health, education, personal activities including work, political voice and governance, social connections and relationships, environment, security. We discuss how the availability of big data sources, such as mobile phone data, retail transaction records, web search records, social media texts, social network data, together with novel social mining methods powered by network science and complex system modeling, are paving new avenues to quantify the human and social capital in our societies, and therefore to monitor and nowcast the various facets of well-being.
PEDRESCHI Dino () Nowcasting well-being in societies: at the crossroads of data science and complex systems
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 13/10/2016 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
A large fraction of the eligible workers does not claim for unemployment benefits. The existing literature, focusing on the determinants of the take-up (TU), has shown that it is sensitive to both the costs and the benefits of claiming. This paper shows that variation in TU behaviors can be used to determine the value of unemployment insurance among workers. Using Austrian data, we first estimate how eligibility for severance payments and to extended unemployment benefits affect the TU behaviors. Using a simple model, we show that these estimates can be used to compute bounds on a money metric of the value of the unemployment insurance among workers. Our results point towards a large dispersion of this value. Among the claimants the benefits are substantial since we get a lower bound around two monthly wages. On the contrary, we estimate that if we would have forced the non-claimants to collect benefits, they would have loss an equivalent of around three monthly wages in utility.
FONTAINE François () Unemployment Insurance Take-up and Cash-on-Hand
Andreas Kettemann (University of Zürich)
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 29/09/2016 de 13:00:00 à 14:00:00
WOLFF François-Charles () The effect of innovation on quality and prices: Evidence from the French fish market
Laurent GobillonTexte intégral
brown bag Travail et Économie Publique
Le 03/06/2014 de 12:30:00 à 14:00:00
test test ()