Publications des chercheurs de PSE

During the last century, fertility has exhibited, in industrialized economies, two distinct trends: the cohort total fertility rate follows a decreasing pattern, while the cohort average age at motherhood exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This paper proposes a Unified Growth Theory aimed at rationalizing those two demographic stylized facts. We develop a three-period OLG model with two periods of fertility, and show how a traditional economy, where individuals do not invest in education, and where income rises push towards advancing births, can progressively converge towards a modern economy, where individuals invest in education, and where income rises encourage postponing births. Our findings are illustrated numerically by replicating the dynamics of the quantum and the tempo of births for cohorts 1906-1975 of the Human Fertility Database.

Cette étude réalisée sur données expérimentales de testing met en évidence une discrimination significative et robuste au motif d’un handicap moteur (être en fauteuil roulant) dans les métiers de la comptabilité en Île-de-France. Être en fauteuil roulant réduirait de 17,3 points de pourcentage la probabilité d’obtenir une réponse positive de la part de l’employeur à une demande d’information sur un poste vacant. Cette discrimination, bien que plus élevée dans les établissements de moins de 20 salariés non assujettis à l’obligation d’employer 6 % de travailleurs handicapés, reste forte dans les établissements de 20 salariés et plus, soumis à ce cadre légal, ce qui révèle l’efficacité insuffisante de cette politique publique. Elle est également plus importante dans le secteur privé et pour les femmes en situation de handicap.

We develop a 3-period overlapping generations (OLG) model where individuals borrow at the young age in order to finance their education. Education does not only increase future wages, but also raises the duration of life, which, in turn, can affect education, in line with Ben-Porath (1967). We examine the conditions under which the Ben-Porath effect prevails. Although the existence of a positive Ben-Porath effect requires, under exogenous longevity, a change in lifetime hours of work, we find, under endogenous longevity, that a positive Ben-Porath effect arises even when old-age labor is fixed. It is also shown that the Ben-Porath effect may not be robust to allowing for adjustments in production factor prices. On the policy side, we show that the social optimum can be decentralized provided the capital stock is set to the Modified Golden Rule level. Finally, we introduce intracohort heterogeneity in learning ability, and we show that, under asymmetric information, the second-best optimal non-linear tax scheme involves a downward distortion in the education of less able types, which reinforces the longevity gap in comparison with the first-best.

During the last century, fertility has exhibited, in industrialized economies, two distinct trends: the cohort total fertility rate follows a decreasing pattern, while the cohort average age at motherhood exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This paper proposes a Unified Growth Theory aimed at rationalizing those two demographic stylized facts. We develop a three-period OLG model with two periods of fertility, and show how a traditional economy, where individuals do not invest in education, and where income rises push towards advancing births, can progressively converge towards a modern economy, where individuals invest in education, and where income rises encourage postponing births. Our findings are illustrated numerically by replicating the dynamics of the quantum and the tempo of births for cohorts 1906–1975 of the Human Fertility Database.

We examine the redistributive impact of working time regulations in an economy with unequal lifetimes. We first compare the laissez-faire equilibrium with the ex post egalitarian optimum, where the realized lifetime well-being of the worst off (usually the short-lived) is maximized, and show that, unlike the laissez-faire, this social optimum involves an increasing working time age profile and equalizes the realized lifetime well-being of the short-lived and the long-lived. We then examine whether working time regulations can compensate the short-lived. It is shown that uniform working time regulations cannot improve the situation of the short-lived with respect to the laissez-faire, and can only reduce well-being inequalities at the cost of making the short-lived worse off. However, age-specific regulations involving lower working time for the young and higher working time for the old make the short-lived better off, even though such regulations may not fully eradicate well-being inequalities.

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the short- and medium-term impact of road accidents on the career paths of French electricity board employees (EDF-GDF), with special emphasis on those coming to the end of their professional careers, based on the Gazel cohort for the period 2002–2014. This study analyzes the adaptation strategies developed by firms and victims following such an exogenous shock. It sheds light on the ability of stakeholders to adjust, in a context marked by a political desire to reform retirement, in particular for special arrangements such as those of EDF-GDF. The Gazel database makes it possible to characterize the different types of road accidents in order to analyze their impacts on the changes in the careers paths of professionals coming to the end of their careers. The econometric strategy is based on the difference-in-differences method with propensity score matching. In total, 4,066 people were victims of road accidents during the study period. On average, victims were older, from lower socioeconomic groups, and were more likely to be male. The analysis shows that victims who suffer serious physical or material consequences exit the labor market earlier, likely due to a reclassification mechanism that offers the right to early retirement. Victims of road accidents whose health is not impacted face fewer changes to their career paths.

Following Kanbur and Mukherjee (Bull Econ Res 59(4):339–359 2007), a solution to the “missing poor” problem (i.e., selection bias in poverty measures due to income-differentiated mortality) consists in computing hypothetical poverty rates while assigning a fictitious income to the prematurely dead. However, in a dynamic general equilibrium economy, doing “as if” the prematurely dead were still alive is likely to affect wages, output and capital accumulation, with an uncertain effect on poverty. We develop a three-period OLG model with income-differentiated mortality and compare actual poverty rates with hypothetical poverty rates that would have prevailed if everyone faced the survival conditions of the top income class. Including the prematurely dead has an ambiguous impact on poverty, since it affects income distribution through capital dilution, composition effects, and horizon effects. Our results are illustrated by quantifying the impact of income-differentiated mortality on poverty measures for France (1820–2010).

This paper emphasizes the role of land and technological progress in economic and population growth. The model is calibrated using historical data on England concerning both economic growth rate and the factor shares (land, capital, and labor) in total income, as well as mortality tables. It is able to reproduce the dynamics of population since 1760. Moreover, it is possible to disentangle the relative effect of technical changes and mortality fall on the evolution of population. We conduct a counterfactual analysis eliminating successively the increase in life expectancy and the technological bias. With no increase in life expectancy, population would have been respectively 10% and 30% lower in 1910 and in the long run. The figures would have been respectively 40% and 60% lower, with no bias in the technical progress. Finally, population would have been 45% smaller in 1910 and 70% smaller in the long run, neutralizing both the effect of life expectancy and technological bias. So the major part of population increase is due to the technological bias evolution between land and capital.

Higher mortality among the poor prevents standard poverty measures from quantifying the actual extent of old-age poverty. Whereas existing attempts to deal with the ”missing poor” problem assume the absence of income mobility and assign to the prematurely dead a fictitious income equal to the last income enjoyed, this paper relaxes that assumption in order to study the impact of income mobility on the size of the missing poor bias. We use data on poverty above age 60 in 12 countries from the EU-SILC database, and we compare standard poverty rates with the hypothetical poverty rates that would have prevailed if (i) all individuals, whatever their income, had enjoyed the same survival conditions, and if (ii) all individuals within the same income class had been subject to the same income mobility process. Taking income mobility into account has unequal effects on corrected poverty measures across countries, and, hence, affects international comparisons in terms of old-age poverty.

We examine the e¤ects of the postulated metric on the measurement of well-being, by comparing, in the (income, lifetime) space, two indexes: the equivalent income index and the equivalent lifetime index. Those in- dexes are shown to satisfy di¤erent properties concerning interpersonal well-being comparisons, which can lead to contradictory rankings. While those incompatibilities arise under distinct indi¤erence maps, we also ex- plore the e¤ects of the metric while relying on a unique indi¤erence map, and show that, even in that case, the postulated metric matters for the measurement of well-being. That point is illustrated by quantifying, by those two indexes, the (average) well-being loss due to the Syrian War. Relying on a particular metric leads, from a quantitative perspective, to di¤erent pictures of the deprivation due to the War.

This study examines the impact of trade openness on job quality, measured by the share of informal and irregular employment in total employment. By combining a microeconomic dataset (the Egyptian Labor Market Panel Survey) with macroeconomic variables (tariffs), we assess the effect of trade reforms on informal/irregular workers in Egypt. Our main findings show that there is a positive association between tariffs and both informal and irregular employments in Egypt. This effect is likely because the least productive informal firms will be forced to exit the industry and only the most productive (formal) firms will export to the international markets. This will increase the demand for formal (and eventually regular) workers that are usually more skilled and, in turn, lead to a likely decline in informal (and irregular) employment. While this effect on informality is robust, the one on irregularity is not.