Publications des chercheurs de PSE

This paper draws on political attitudes surveys to document the evolution of political cleavages in Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal, four African countries that have held regular multi-party elections in the past two decades. We discuss how colonialism, the politicization of ethnic identities, and the structure of social inequalities have differentially shaped party politics in these countries. Ethnic cleavages are tightly linked to ethnic inequalities, and are highest in Nigeria, at intermediate levels in Ghana, and lowest in Botswana and Senegal. We find evidence of strong educational and rural-urban divides, which cannot be explained by ethnic or regional affiliations. Our results suggest that in these four countries, electoral politics are not only explained by patronage, valence, or leader effects, but also clearly have a socioeconomic dimension. At a time when class cleavages have partly collapsed in old Western democracies, these African democracies could well be moving towards class-based party systems.

We derive wage equations with individual specific coefficients from a structural model of human capital investment over the life cycle. This model allows for interruptions in labour market participation and deals with missing data and attrition problems. We propose a new framework that deals with missingness at random and is based on factor decompositions that allow for flexible control of selection. Our approach leads to an interactive effect wage specification, which we estimate using long administrative panel data on male wages in the private sector in France. A structural function approach shows that interruptions negatively affect average wages. Interestingly, they also negatively affect the inter-decile range of wages after twenty years. This is only partly due to the fact that interruptions are endogenous.

We explore the consequences of the development of home working for wages, hours worked and employee health in the post COVID era. We base our research strategy on a French law passed in 2017 to encourage telework agreements between employers and employees. In the months following the law, many establishments signed telework agreements, and we show that this subsequently led to a much greater development of home working in these establishments after the epidemic shock in 2020. This increase was particularly significant in mid-level occupations, and was followed by a deterioration in the health of the employees concerned, particularly men.

In an increasingly uncertain environment, firms are differently exposed to shocks and may or may not bear the costs of reorganizing their value chain by reshoring or offshoring. This paper is based on a survey of French firms on the decision to reorganize part of their value chain between January 2018 and December 2020, in order to study the prevalence and the modalities of such reorganizations. Such decision turn out to be rare, carried out by firms with a higher share of skilled workers, in manufacturing rather than in services, and dominated by multinational firms. Although high-skilled firms reorganize more, the reorganized business functions are less skillintensive and more intensive in routine tasks. Activities that are more intangibles-intensive are more likely to be reorganized within the firm. Finally, apart from reshoring in France, activities that are offshored are located close to France. India, which combines low average wages with a large pool of highly skilled labour, receives a disproportionate share of skill-intensive activities.

Le gouvernement français a mis en place en septembre 2018 un ensemble de mesures pour réduire les écarts de salaire entre femmes et hommes. Parmi ces mesures, toutes les entreprises privées de plus de 50 salariés sont tenues de calculer l’index d’égalité professionnelle. Elles doivent atteindre un seuil minimal à cet index, sous peine de sanctions. Nous étudions l’efficacité de cet index pour rendre compte des inégalités de rémunération entre les femmes et les hommes. Après avoir expliqué ses règles de calcul, nous analysons les résultats des entreprises en 2020 et les comparons avec les inégalités de rémunération femmes-hommes mesurées à l’aide d’autres indicateurs. Nous constatons que l’indicateur d’écart salarial tel que mesuré par l’index a tendance à minimiser les inégalités réelles, ce qui résulte de l’exclusion de certains salariés, de la possibilité pour les entreprises de déclarer l’index comme non calculable, et des choix méthodologiques adoptés.

Compensating agents against substantial and sudden shocks requires both targeting tax policies and taking behavioral responses into account. Based on transaction-level data from France, this article exploits quasi-experimental variation provided by 2022 fuel price inflation and excise tax cuts. After disentangling anticipation from price effects, we estimate a price elasticity of fuel demand of -0.31, on average, which varies little with respect to income and location but substantially decreases with fuel spending, in absolute value. Using targeted transfers only achieves imperfect compensation, yet a budget-constrained policy-maker seeking to alleviate excessive losses relative to income prefers income-based transfers to price subsidies.

France has experienced a clear reversal of older workers’ labor force par-ticipation (LFP) and employment rates over the last 15 years. These two rates had continuously declined in the 1970s and the 1980s for the 60–64 age group, bringing employment rates at a low 10 percent for both genders.

We decompose the “China shock” into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: an output shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods, and an input supply shock affecting firms using inputs similar to the imported Chinese goods. Combining French accounting, customs, and patent information at the firm level, we show that the output shock is detrimental to firms’ sales, employment, and innovation. Moreover, this negative impact is concentrated in low-productivity firms. On the other hand, the impact of the input supply shock is reversed.

We analyze how demand conditions faced by a firm in its export markets affect its innovation decisions. We exploit exogenous firm-level export demand shocks and find that firms respond by patenting more; furthermore, this response is driven by the subset of initially more productive firms. The patent response arises two to five years after the shock, highlighting the time required to innovate. In contrast, the demand shock raises contemporaneous sales and employment for all firms regardless of their productivity. This skewed innovation response to common demand shocks arises naturally from a model of endogenous innovation and competition with firm heterogeneity.

We report on two nationwide experiments with job seekers in France. We first show that a meeting with social services to assess eligibility and help with application to social benefits increased new benefit take-up by 31 %. By contrast, an online simulator that gave personalized information on benefit eligibility did not increase take-up. Marginal treatment effects show that individuals who benefit the most from the meetings are the least likely to attend. Overall, without ruling out information frictions, our results suggest that transaction costs represent the main obstacle to applying for benefits or accessing government's assistance to help apply.

Statistical agencies typically impute inflation for disappearing products based on surviving products, which may result in overstated inflation and understated growth. Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Timo Boppart & Simon Bunel use the theory and methodology developed by Aghion et al. (2017) to quantify in the case of France how much of productivity growth is missed by statistical offices because of this. Using the census of plants in France, they find that from 2004 to 2015, about 0.5 percentage point of real output growth per year is not taken into account, which is about the same as what was found in the U.S. While this result suggests that missing growth from creative destruction could structurally be the same in different countries, the authors show that they in fact hide different underlying establishment and firm's lifecycle dynamics in the two countries.

This paper explores the extent to which workers are willing to trade hours worked for leisure time shared with their spouse. We use the fact that the number and timing of paid vacation days to which French employees are entitled vary in a quasi-random way from year to year along with the dates of public holidays. Self-employed workers do not benefit from public holidays, but we show that a large fraction of them substitute a day of unpaid leisure for a day of paid work whenever their spouse gets an extra day of paid leave.