Publications des chercheurs de PSE

Even though place-based policies involve large transfers toward low-income neighborhoods, they may also produce territorial stigmatization by spotlighting the targeted areas. This paper appeals to the quasi-experimental discontinuity in a French reform that redrew the zoning map of subsidized neighborhoods on the basis of a sharp poverty cut-off to assess the “net" effect of place-based policies on school outcomes. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find strong evidence of stigma effects from policy designation on public middle schools located in neighborhoods below the policy cut-off, which saw a significant decrease in their post-reform pupil enrollment compared to their counterfactual analogues in unlabeled areas lying just above the poverty threshold. This "zone-and-shame" effect is immediate, it persists up to five years after the reform, and it is triggered by the reactions of parents from all socioeconomic backgrounds, who avoided public schools in policy areas and shifted to those in other areas or, only for wealthy parents, to private schools. There is also evidence of a short-lived decrease in pupils’ test-scores associated with this spatial resorting. We uncover, on the contrary, only weak evidence of stigma reversion after an area loses its designation, suggesting hysteresis in bad reputations conveyed by policy labeling.

Objectives This study aimed to analyze the behavioral determinants of breast cancer (BC) diagnosis delays in France. To do so, we investigated whether time discounting, risk tolerance, and personality traits influenced the BC diagnosis delay of patients. Methods We used original retrospective data collected on 2 large online patient networks from 402 women diagnosed of BC. The BC diagnosis delay was measured by the difference between the date of diagnosis and the date of first symptoms. Time discounting and risk tolerance are measured with both self-reported questions and hypothetical lotteries. Personality traits are measured with the 10-item Big Five indicator. Ordinary least square and probit models were used to analyze whether these behavioral characteristics influenced the BC diagnosis delay. Results Results showed that risk tolerance and time discounting were not significantly associated with the BC diagnosis delay. However, we found a longer diagnosis delay for women with a neuroticism personality trait (standardized coefficients ranged from 0.104 [P-value = .036] to 0.090 [P-value = .065]). Conclusions Overall, our findings underline the need for an increased consideration of cancer screening public health policy for women with mental vulnerabilities since such vulnerabilities were found to be highly correlated with a neuroticism personality trait.

This paper focuses on the determination and estimation of the optimal size of hospitals. To determine the optimal size of a production unit, we use the measurement of returns to scale (RTS) at the decision-making unit level. When the RTS are constant, the unit is deemed of optimal size as the average total cost is at its minimum. As we deal with public service in a non-market environment, we have to take into account the fact that hospitals may not operate efficiently. To estimate the required production frontier we adapt the α-returns to scale method (a DEA type algorithm compatible with non-convexity of the production set) to include quasi-fixed factors. This methodology is applied to Québec hospitals at different points in time in order to capture the effect of the restructuring of the public health system over the last three decades. We conclude that by relying more on larger institution the scale efficiency of the public system has increased. However, in spite of the large reduction in the number of small hospitals and their replacement by very large structures, the movement may have gone too far, as most of the large institutions tend to exhibits decreasing returns to scale.

The choice between vocational and academic education at the end of secondary school has important long-run effects, and is made at an age where peers’ influence might be paramount. In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbors’ track choices on 9th graders choices at the end of lower secondary education, in Paris. This question is central to understand the extent to which residential segregation can reinforce social segregation across vocational and academic tracks. We rely on neighbors from the preceding cohort in order to bypass the reflection problem, and use within-catchment-area variation in distance between pairs of students to account for residential sorting. We use a pair-wise model that enables us to carefully study the role of distance between neighbors, and to perform detailed heterogeneity analysis. Our results suggest that close neighbors do influence track choices at the end of 9th grade, particularly for pupils pursuing a vocational track. This effect is driven by neighbors living in the same building, and is larger for pairs of boys and for pairs of pupils from low social background. Overall, our results suggest that neighbor effects tend to accentuate social segregation across high school tracks.

A better understanding of the resource allocation across ages is fundamentalto put in place welfare reforms in the context of population ageing.In times of major demographic change, the redistribution of resourcesbetween age groups and the funding of the economically inactive aged remainsa recurring topic of public debate and a major public policy concern inOECD countries. Governments search for a policy mix that will improve thequality of life of the elderly, while at the same time investing in the futureof the young and reducing the fiscal burden on the working population.Life expectancy and education requirements are increasing while budgetconstraints are tightening. This potentially creates tension in the allocationof resources between age groups (Preston 1984; Lee and Mason 2011a).By applying the methodology of National Transfer Accounts (NTA),this article analyzes for France (1) how the funding of consumption (publicand private) is secured at each age; (2) how the funding of consumptionhas changed over recent decades; and (3) how the consumption is financedcompared to that of other countries (China, Germany, Japan, Sweden,United Kingdom, and United States). We consider three sources for financingconsumption: the State (net transfers and in-kind services), individualsthemselves (income and assets), and families (inter vivos transfers, excludingbequests, following the NTA methodology) (United Nations 2013b).

By analyzing a French program that targeted low-achieving and socially disadvantaged junior high schools we provide evidence that school-based compensatory education policies create sorting effects. We use geocoded original data and a regression discontinuity framework to show that the program decreases the individual probability of attending a treated school and symmetrically increases the probability of attending a private school. The effects are driven by pupils from high socioeconomic backgrounds, resulting in an increase in social segregation across schools.