Publications by PSE researchers

The traditional specialization of men in paid work and women in housework is rooted in the spatial separation of these activities. We examine the possible consequences of the recent expansion of Work from Home (WfH) for the gendered allocation of time. We focus on the time devoted to housework by men and women who work from home versus at the workplace, before and after the Covid pandemic. Using data on several thousand workers drawn from the American Time Use Survey, we find that the gender gap in unpaid work has declined by about 27 minutes per day, i.e. by about 40% for remote workers. Among those, women now spend more time on paid work and less on unpaid work, whereas men do more household chores.

We study vertical transmission and societal diffusion of gender norms using the large immigration wave from the former Soviet Union (FSU) to Israel in the early 1990’s. Tracking the educational choices of an entire cohort, born in 1988–89, we compare gender gaps among immigrants from the FSU versus natives and immigrants from other countries. We find smaller gender gaps among FSU immigrants in both traditionally male-dominated STEM fields and female-dominated pink collar jobs, e.g., education and social work. These patterns are largely driven by the behavior of FSU women and are not explained by early achievement levels or comparative advantage. Leveraging variation in the concentration of FSU immigrants across middle schools, we find that among natives, gender gaps narrow with the exposure to FSU immigrants, reflecting a shift in the choice patterns of native women towards STEM and away from pink collar fields.

Ce rapport de l’Observatoire du bien-être pour l’année 2023 porte sur différents aspects de la vie des Français, certains purement nationaux et d’autres affectés par des phénomènes d’échelle mondiale.

We revisit the Easterlin paradox about the flatness of the happiness trend over the long run, in spite of sustained economic development. With a bounded scale that explicitly refers to "the best possible life for you" and "the worst possible life for you", is it even possible to observe a rising trend in self-declared life satisfaction? We consider the possibility of rescaling, i.e. that the interpretation of the scale changes with the context in which respondents are placed. We propose a simple model of rescaling and reconstruct an index of latent happiness on the basis of retrospective reports included in unexploited archival data from the USA. We show that national well-being has substantially increased from the 1950s to the early 2000s, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy. We validate our new index on several datasets, and find that it captures important changes in personal life circumstances over and above nominal life satisfaction. Our model sheds light on several well-documented happiness puzzles, including why life satisfaction did not drop during the COVID-19 pandemic, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and why people take life-changing decisions -like having kids -that seem to make them less happy.

Malgré les espoirs nourris par les démocraties après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, malgré la tentative de construire un ordre international fondé sur le multilatéralisme et malgré la dissuasion nucléaire, la guerre ne cesse de se rallumer en de multiples points du monde, y compris aux portes de l'Europe. Depuis 2022, la guerre en Ukraine a réactivé d'anciens débats : rationalité et justification morale de la guerre, nature des interactions stratégiques entre acteurs du conflit, mobilisation de la population civile, légitimité et efficacité des sanctions contre l'agresseur. Elle soulève également de nouvelles questions. Du côté de la Russie, la guerre fait-elle l'objet d'un consensus au sein des élites ? Pour l'Union européenne, est-elle l'occasion d'une cohésion approfondie, à l'image de l'accueil coordonné des réfugiés ukrainiens ? Ce conflit illustre également l'étendue des armes et des cibles de guerre, des plus traditionnelles telles que l'eau aux outils de communication les plus modernes. Les douze contributions réunies dans ce volume abordent ces questionnements à l'aide des outils propres à différentes disciplines des sciences sociales et humaines. La plupart se rapportent à la guerre en Ukraine, mais certaines ramènent le lecteur au Moyen Âge ou à l'Antiquité, tandis que d'autres appréhendent la manière d'écrire l'histoire de la guerre ou de la représenter dans une œuvre picturale.

Everyone expects telework to ‘stick’, but will this make workers happier? On the one hand, work from home (WFH) is clearly desired by a majority of workers, as evidenced by their willingness to pay for this arrangement. This finding is supported by all choice experiments, either real, on a recruitment platform for example, or hypothetical, via surveys. But, on the other hand, working entirely from home seems to be detrimental to their life satisfaction and their mental health, as shown by difference-in-differences studies based on the COVID-19 natural experience. Is hybrid work the optimal solution, the ideal compromise between the pros (saving commuting time) and the cons (loosing social integration) of WFH? This seems to be the aspiration of most workers worldwide. Does the demand for hybrid work also reflect a trade-off between life satisfaction and job satisfaction?

Using a panel survey of 26,000 people living in London, Paris and Berlin during the summer months of 2011, 2012 and 2013, we exploit the quasi-natural experience of choosing London as host city. We follow a difference-in-differences approach to determine the effect of hosting the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.Our results show that the Summer Games increased Londoners’ satisfaction and happiness in the short term (i.e. during the Olympic period), particularly around the opening and closing ceremonies. The beneficial effect on Londoners is quite significant, but the monetary equivalent of this gain in terms of subjective well-being remains well below the actual cost of the event. However, the conclusion is different, if we assume that the hedonic effect extends to the whole of the UK and not just to the city of London.

We carry out a difference-in-differences analysis of a representative real-time survey conducted as part of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) study and show that teleworking had a negative average effect on life satisfaction over the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. This average effect hides considerable heterogeneity reflecting genderrole asymmetry: lower life satisfaction is only found for unmarried men and women with school-age children. The negative effect for women with school-age children disappears in 2021, suggesting adaptation to new constraints and/or the adoption of coping strategies.

Ce troisième rapport de l’Observatoire du bien-être au Cepremap rend compte des évolutions qui ont marqué la vie des Français au cours de l’année écoulée. Au premier plan des préoccupations des Français, les chocs de l’inflation et de la guerre en Ukraine se conjuguent avec le réchauffement climatique pour nourrir une forte inquiétude vis-à-vis de l’avenir. Cette anxiété s’ajoute à la tendance structurelle au pessimisme des Français. Cette dernière se lit d’ailleurs dans la manière dont ils se représentent leur société et sa stratification, souvent en décalage avec la perception de leur propre situation, ce qui fait apparaître un étonnant mélange de malheur public et de bonheur privé. Parallèlement, la société se transforme, notamment le monde professionnel, avec l’installation durable du travail à distance dans les pratiques. C’est au prisme du bien-être subjectif que nous analysons ces différentes tendances de la société française.

Using the American and the French time-use surveys, we examine whether people have a preference for a more diversified mix of activities, in the sense that they experience greater well-being when their time schedule contains many different activities rather than is concentrated on a very small number. This could be due to decreasing marginal utility, as is assumed for goods consumption, if each episode of time is conceived as yielding a certain level of utility per se. With returns to specialization, people would then face a trade-off between efficiency and diversity in choosing how to allocate time. We examine these issues and investigate potential gender differences, considering both instantaneous feelings and life satisfaction.

We study the impact of work from home (WFH) on subjective well‐being during the Covid period, where self‐selection of individuals into telework is ruled out, at least part of the time, by stay‐at‐home orders. We use a difference‐in‐differences approach with individual fixed effects and identify the specific impact of switching to telecommuting, separately from any other confounding factor. In particular, our identification strategy avoids the influence of interpersonal heterogeneity by exploiting the multiple entries into WFH, by the same individuals, at different times. On average over the period, switching to WFH, especially full‐time, worsens mental health. We also find a positive but imprecisely measured impact of part‐time WFH on life satisfaction. However, this hides a dynamic evolution, whereby the initial deterioration gives place to an adaptation process after a couple of months. We also uncover a particularly pronounced fall in subjective well‐being of women with children, especially in the first months; this could be associated with home‐schooling.