Development : Publications

Workers who are worried about their personal finances may find it hard to focus at work. If so, reducing financial concerns could increase productivity. We test this hypothesis in a sample of low-income Indian piece-rate manufacturing workers. We stagger when wages are paid out: some workers are paid earlier and receive a cash infusion while others remain liquidity constrained. The cash infusion leads workers to reduce their financial concerns by immediately paying off debts and buying household essentials. Subsequently, they become more productive at work: their output increases by 7% (0.11 std. dev.), and they make fewer costly, unintentional mistakes. Workers with more cash on hand thus not only work faster but also more attentively, suggesting improved cognition. These effects are concentrated among more financially constrained workers. We argue that mechanisms such as gift exchange or nutrition cannot account for our results. Instead, our findings suggest that financial strain, at least partly through psychological channels, has the potential to reduce earnings exactly when money is most needed.

Learning About Opportunity: Spillovers of Elite School Admissions in Peru

Frictional labor markets impose a fundamental trade-off: individuals may work on their own at any time, but can only take a potentially better-paid wage job after spending some time looking for it, suggesting that intertemporal considerations affect how people choose their occupation. We formalize this intuition under the job search framework and show that a sufficiently high subjective discount rate can justify the choice for own-account work even when it pays less than wage work. With this simple model, we estimate the lowest discount rate that is consistent with the occupational choice of urban own-account workers in Brazil. We find that at least 65 percent of those workers appear to discount the future at rates superior to those available in the formal credit market, which suggests constrained occupational choice.

Finally, we show that our estimated lower bound of the time preference is positively associated with food, clothing, and housing deprivation.

The Clean Development Mechanism is one of three flexible mechanisms included in the Kyoto Protocol. It enables Annex I countries to finance emission reductions in developing (non-Annex I) countries and use the credits thus obtained to meet their quantified emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. The CDM had two objectives: to reduce the costs of compliance of the Annex I countries’ emission reduction commitments, and to assist developing countries in achieving sustainable development and in contributing to the ultimate objective of the UNFCCC. The major part of certified emission reductions (CERs) comes from renewable energy investments, reduction of non-CO2 greenhouse gases (HFCs, PFCs and N2O), and energy efficiency projects. The geographical distribution of projects and emission reductions is concentrated in a few countries: China, India, Brazil, and Mexico. A substantial amount of CERs was created under the CDM, but the uneven geographical distribution of projects and the lack of consistent control of projects’ contribution to sustainable development have been arguments to contend that the CDM did not fulfil its initial objectives. The restriction by the EU in 2013 to use CERs in the EU-ETS brought down prices and the market for CERs has not recovered since. The CDM was discontinued as of 30 June 2022 and requests for exemptions were considered on a case-specific basis. Nevertheless, the CDM has continued to function while parties are waiting for the flexible mechanisms created in the Paris Agreement of 2015 to become operational, in particular the Sustainable Development Mechanism of Article 6.4 which is similar to the CDM in its objectives.

The article estimates flood risk perceptions by exploiting the different release dates of flood risk information around Paris from 2003 to 2012. This period is characterised by the absence of significant floods since 1955, making flood risk less salient. We apply a stacked event study to detailed property transaction data combined with geo-localised amenities. The results show that transaction prices for similar properties are 3-7% lower following the release of information if they are located in a flood risk zone, and that the effect persists, at least over the period we analyse. The results are robust to varying the control group to a neighbourhood at different distances from the flood risk boundary. The effect is more negative for flats on the ground floor. We find no evidence of sorting among buyers along different characteristics, in particular based on past exposure to flooding in their previous municipality. The results indicate a significant effect of flood risk information in a context where we can isolate it from the financial consequences of insurance cover and from flood damage per se.

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. This paper studies the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the timing of survey collection across respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Quasi‐experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase the news coverage of Afghanistan and the public demand for withdrawal. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

This paper exploits quasi-random variation in the share of Black students across cohorts within US schools to investigate whether childhood interracial contact impacts the residential choices of Whites when they are adults. We find that, 20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the same gender in their grade go on to live in census tracts with more Black residents. Further investigation suggests that this result is unlikely to be driven by economic opportunities or social networks. Instead, the effect on residential choice appears to come from a change in preferences among Whites.

Je tiens ici à remercier Frederick Cooper, Christelle Dumas et David Todd d’avoir consacré du temps à lire et commenter mon livre, et suis honoré qu’ils lui aient trouvé quelques qualités. Même si le nombre d’années et l’effort dédiés à un travail n’offrent aucune garantie de valeur, ce livre est le produit d’une recherche de longue haleine s’étalant sur près de vingt ans. Ce travail de longue durée a été rendu possible grâce au système de recherche publique français et a impliqué une petite équipe de collègues et co-auteurs – en particulier Yannick Dupraz et Sandrine Mesplé-Somps – à qui je souhaite une nouvelle fois rendre hommage. Si ce livre améliore, comme je l’espère, notre connaissance collective de l’histoire de la colonisation française, il ne constitue qu’une étape. Il soulève ainsi de nouvelles questions, et je rejoins mes trois commentateurs dans leur souhait que d’autres travaux, en France et ailleurs, s’attaquent à celles-ci. Plutôt que de m’adresser tour à tour à mes trois collègues, j’ai pensé utile de revenir sur les thèmes qu’ils ont abordés, regroupés en quatre sections : conquête et contrôle militaire ; peuplement et institutions ; exploitation et non-développement ; décolonisations. Avant cela, je me permets toutefois quelques remarques méthodologiques. Je suis heureux qu’à la fois un historien des empires, une économiste du développement ainsi qu’un historien de la mondialisation et de l’inscription internationale de la France saluent l’approche comparatiste que j’ai adoptée entre colonies, entre empires et entre périodes

This paper contests the traditional view of layoffs as solely reactive to negative economic conditions. Using survey and administrative French data, we provide evidence on how firms strategically utilize mass layoffs to restructure their workforce composition. First, we investigate if firms use layoffs to shift their skill requirements. Analyzing both layoff and matched non-layoff firms, we find firms significantly increase the requirements for social skills while decreasing dependence on manual and cognitive skills requirements after layoffs. This suggests a premeditated reshaping of the workforce instead of a costcutting practice. Secondly, we explore the factors influencing selection into displacement during layoffs. We focus on three key aspects: skills mismatch, relative worker quality, and perceived monetary cost. Our findings highlight the significant role of skill mismatch and worker quality in determining dismissal, suggesting firms actively select based on strategic needs. By revealing the strategic nature of mass layoffs and their impact on skills composition and worker selection, this paper offers valuable insights into the understanding of workforce adjustment. Such insights are relevant for policy design.

Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to propaganda on state TV, resulting in a switch of some of its audience to independent TV. Municipalities with access to independent TV continued to follow a long-term secularization trend, while municipalities with access only to state TV experienced a reversal of this trend. An online experiment sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of exposure to independent news on religiosity.

We study horizontal between-group cultural transmission using Stalin’s ethnic deportations as a historical experiment. Over 2 million Soviet citizens, mostly Germans and Chechens, were forcibly relocated from the western to eastern parts of the USSR during WWII solely based on ethnicity. As a result, the native population of the deportation destinations was exogenously exposed to groups with drastically different gender norms and behavior. We combine historical and contemporary data to document that present-day gender equality in labor force participation, business leadership, and fertility as well as pro-gender-equality attitudes are higher among local native population of deportation destinations with a larger presence of Protestant compared to Muslim deportees. The effects are stronger for culturally closer groups and when adopting deportee norms is less costly. The results cannot be explained by selection, vertical cultural transmission, or deportee impact on the local economy. The evidence strongly suggests that gender norms diffused horizontally from deportees to the local population through imitation and learning.

We analyze the employment effects of directing job seekers’ applications toward establishments likely to recruit. We run a two-sided randomization design involving about 800,000 job seekers and 40,000 establishments, based on an empirical model that recommends each job seeker to firms so as to maximize total potential employment. Our intervention induces a 1% increase in job finding rates for short term contracts. This impact comes from a targeting effect combining (i) a modest increase in job seekers’ applications to the very firms that were recommended to them, and (ii) a high success rate conditional on applying to these firms. Indeed, the success rate of job seekers’ applications varies considerably across firms: the efficiency of applications sent to recommended firms is 2.7 times higher than the efficiency of applications to the average firm. This suggests that there can be substantial gains from better targeting job search, leveraging firm-level heterogeneity.

How much did France pay for its colonial empire? Did colonies benefit from large transfers from French taxpayers and private investors, or were they on the contrary drained of their capital? So far, Jacques Marseille (1984) was the only attempt to investigate these questions, by deducting from the structural trade deficit of the French colonies that they were a heavy financial burden for France. We collect novel budgetary and loan data from archives and compute public monetary flows between France and the colonies between 1833 and 1962. We also provide figures of colonial private investment through the Paris Stock Exchange. Public expenditure spent by France on the empire only represented 1.3% of its GDP, of which four fifths were in the military. The persistent trade balance deficits of French colonies did not correspond to large public or private capital transfers, as they were in fact counterbalanced by military expenditure from the Metropole. Once accounting for this, the colonial drain of the French empire is comparable to British India.

This paper examines the impact of ethnic fractionalization on public service use by exploiting a major constitutional reform in Kenya. Following an important period of inter-ethnic conflict, responsibility for local health services was decentralized to 47 newly created county governments. Crucially, this changed the ethnic composition of the administrative area responsible for healthcare, while leaving the composition of the local population unchanged. Using an event-study design, we find that use of public clinics for births increased significantly after the reform, but only in counties that were relatively ethnically homogeneous. We also find a significant increase in the correlation between county ethnic fractionalization and a range of other measures of public health service use. Using within-county variation to investigate mechanisms, we find healthcare use increases were concentrated among individuals of the same ethnicity as members of the new county government executives. Overall, the results suggest that more ethnically homogeneous sub-national jurisdictions can rapidly increase public service use.

This survey discusses recent developments in the growing literature on the Russian economic history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Using novel data and modern empirical methods, this research generates new insights and provides important lessons for development economics and political economy. We organize the discussion around four strands of this literature. First, we summarize and put in comparative perspective research on the long-term trends in economic development and living standards, which shows that throughout history Russia significantly underperformed advanced economies. We also compile reliable quantifications of the human cost of Stalin’s dictatorship. Second, we discuss new studies of imperial Russia that partially confirm Gerschenkron’s classic conjecture on the institutional explanation for Russia’s relatively low level of economic development and on the causes of the revolution. The third strand of the literature focuses on the Soviet period and explains its slowdown over time and the eventual collapse of the system by the command economy’s inability to provide incentives to individual agents. The fourth strand documents the long-term economic, social, and political consequences of large-scale historical experiments that took place during both the imperial and the Soviet periods. We conclude by discussing the lessons from these four strands of the literature and highlight open questions for future research.

Ce chapitre traite de deux enjeux majeurs auxquels sont confrontés les ménages ruraux en zone tropicale : préserver les ressources naturelles et assurer la sécurité alimentaire. Relever ces deux défis simultanément requiert de développer des systèmes de production efficaces, capables à la fois de garantir la sécurité alimentaire des agriculteurs et d’assurer une gestion durable des ressources naturelles. Pour ce faire, il convient de s’interroger sur les liens directs et indirects entre la sécurité alimentaire des ménages et la biodiversité à l’échelle de l’exploitation agricole et à celle du paysage.

Countries around the world are increasingly expanding legal maternity leaves, with the dual objective of protecting mothers’ jobs during their recovery after childbirth and enhancing child development. Using exhaustive census data, we find that a three‐year paid leave in France had zero average effects on children’s long‐term schooling achievement, and no detectable impact heterogeneity. The lack of positive effects on children adds to the case against a policy that has strong adverse effects on mothers’ careers.

Les groupements d’usagers de la forêt ont contribué à la restauration des forêts au Népal.Les groupements densifient les forêts et en augmentent légèrement la surface.En plus de mieux gérer la forêt, ils modifient les choix énergétiques des ménages.

We use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires–Russia, Austria‐Hungary, and Prussia–has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the main difference in voting across Polish territories attributed by many observers to the legacy of empires is driven by omitted variables. However, empires do have a significant causal effect. The lands that belonged to Prussia (compared with those that belonged to Russia) vote more for anticommunist (post‐Solidarity) parties. This difference is largely explained by the persistent effect of infrastructure built by Prussians at the time of industrialization. The former Austrian lands (compared with former Russian lands) votes more for religious conservatives and for liberals. The difference in the vote for religious conservatives is explained by persistent differences in church attendance driven by vastly different policies of the two empires toward the Catholic Church. Higher support for liberals on the Austrian side is partly explained by a persistent belief in democracy, which is a legacy of decentralized democratic governance of the Austrian empire.

Au XIXe siècle, la France s’est lancée dans la colonisation de pays entiers en Afrique et en Asie. Quelles ont été les motivations et les méthodes de cette politique ? Comment les sociétés dominées ont-elles été bouleversées, et quel développement économique et social ont-elles connu ? La décolonisation est-elle achevée aujourd’hui ? Un Empire bon marché propose de nouvelles réponses à ces questions controversées. Grâce à un long travail d’archives et d’analyse statistique, l’ouvrage décrit ainsi avec une grande précision les États coloniaux et leur fonctionnement – à travers notamment la fiscalité, le recrutement militaire, les flux de capitaux et les inégalités. Il montre que l’empire a peu coûté à la métropole jusqu’aux guerres d’indépendance, et que les capitaux français n’ont pas ruisselé vers les colonies. La « mission civilisatrice » que la République française s’était assignée n’a donc pas débouché sur le développement des pays occupés, et c’est plutôt un régime à la fois violent et ambigu qui s’y est établi. De fait, le régime colonial a surtout bénéficié à une petite minorité de colons et de capitalistes français. Quant aux élites nationalistes, elles ont le plus souvent reconduit un État autoritaire et inégalitaire après les indépendances. En s’attachant à l’évolution des sociétés colonisées et à leur devenir, Denis Cogneau fournit une contribution majeure et un nouvel éclairage sur l’impérialisme, d’hier à aujourd’hui.

Complementarities between infrastructure projects have been understudied. This paper examines interactions in the impacts of large-scale road construction, electrification, and mobile phone coverage programs in rural India. We find strong evidence of complementary impacts between roads and electricity on agricultural production: dry season cropping increases significantly when villages receive both, but not when they receive one without the other. These complementarities are associated with a shift of cropping patterns towards market crops and with improved economic conditions. In contrast, we find no consistent evidence of complementarities for the mobile coverage program.

Since the 1960s, the increased availability of modern seed varieties in developing countries has had large positive effects on households’ well-being. However, the effect of related land use changes on deforestation and biodiversity is ambiguous. This study examines this question through a randomized control trial in a remote area in the Congo Basin rainforest with weak input and output markets. Using plot-level data on land conversion combined with remote sensing data, we find that promotion of modern seed varieties did not lead to an increase in overall deforestation by small farmers. However, farmers cleared more primary forest and less secondary forest. We attribute this to the increased demand for nitrogen required by the use of some modern seed varieties, and to the lack of alternative sources of soil nutrients, which induced farmers to shift towards cultivation of land cleared in primary forest. Unless combined with interventions to maintain soil fertility, policies to promote modern seed varieties may come at the cost of important losses in biodiversity.

Dans les pays du Sud où une grande partie de la population travaille dans l’agriculture, sortir les travailleurs du secteur agricole relativement improductif peut être une clé pour améliorer leur niveau de vie. Cette « transformation structurelle » a caractérisé la trajectoire de développement de presque tous les pays développés. Pour accélérer le processus et empêcher les zones rurales de prendre du retard en termes économiques, les pays investissent souvent massivement dans les infrastructures. De tels projets contribuent-ils à transformer les zones agricoles ? L’analyse s’appuie largement sur le cas de l’Inde. Si les investissements à grande échelle dans les infrastructures rurales, notamment les routes, ont eu des effets positifs, leur impact en termes de bien-être et de consommation est très hétérogène. En particulier, seuls les villages ayant bénéficié à la fois d’infrastructures routières et électriques semblent avoir vu leur consommation par habitant augmenter. Il faudrait donc regrouper les programmes complémentaires et les cibler sur des zones spécifiques pour que les investissements soient efficaces.

Page de couverture This book presents a synthesis of key recent advances in political-economy research on the various approaches and strategies used in the process of building nations throughout modern history. It features chapters written by leading scholars who describe the findings of their quantitative analyses of the risks and benefits of different nation-building policies. The book is comprised of 26 chapters organised into six sections, each focusing on a different aspect of nation building. The first chapter presents a unified framework for assessing nation-building policies, highlights potential challenges that may arise, provides a summary of each of the other chapters, and draws out the main lessons from them. The following chapters delve into the importance of social interactions for national identification, the role of education, propaganda and leadership, external interventions and wars, and the effects of representation and redistribution. The book offers a nuanced understanding of effective nation-building policies.

This article estimates the evolution of income inequality in Africa from 1990 to 2019 by combining surveys, tax data, and national accounts. Inequality in Africa is very high: the regional top 10% income share nears 55%, on par with regions characterized by extreme inequality, such as Latin America and India. Most of continent-wide income inequality comes from the within-country component rather than from average income differences between countries. Inequality is highest in Southern Africa and lowest in Northern and Western Africa. It remained fairly stable from 1990 to 2019, with the exception of Southern Africa, where it increased significantly. Among historical determinants, this geographical pattern seems to reveal the long shadow of settler colonialism, at least in Sub-Saharan Africa; the spread of Islam stands out as another robust correlate. The poor quality of the raw data calls for great caution, in particular when analyzing country-level dynamics.

We examine the effects of a subsidy program in Haiti that provided smallholders subsidies for inputs (rice seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and specific labor tasks) using a randomized control trial. The program led to lower input use and lower yields in the year subsidies were received, and the decline in input use and yields persisted through the following year. Using data from a complementary information intervention in which randomly selected farmers were provided clarification regarding their future receipt of vouchers, we find evidence suggesting that incorrect expectations of future transfers partially explain the disappointing outcomes. In addition, instead of increasing input use, the subsidies seem to have led farmers to pay off their loans and take fewer new ones. In complex post-emergency environments such as the one in which this program took place, input subsidies may need to be avoided, as they require considerable information to optimally design and careful coordination by many actors to achieve the expected gains.

Micro-economists are ill-equipped to analyze the behaviour of complex households. This paper advocates the construction of new theoretical and empirical tools and illustrates the benefits of adequately designed survey instruments in the case of Senegal.

Relational contracts are typically modeled as being between a principal and an agent, such as a firm owner and a supplier. Yet, in a variety of organizations, relationships are overseen by an intermediary such as a manager. Such arrangements open the door for collusion between the manager and the agent. This paper develops a theory of such managed relational contracts. We show that managed relational contracts differ from principal–agent ones in important ways. First, kickbacks from the agent can help solve the manager’s commitment problem. When commitment is difficult, this can result in higher agent effort than the principal could incentivize directly. Second, making relationships more valuable enables more collusion and hence can reduce effort. We also analyze the principal’s delegation problem and show that she may or may not benefit from entrusting the relationship to a manager.

How does identity influence economic behavior in the labor market? I investigate this question in rural India, focusing on the effect of caste identity on job-specific labor supply. In a field experiment, laborers choose whether to take up various job offers, which differ in associations with specific castes. Workers are less willing to accept offers that are linked to castes other than their own, especially when those castes rank lower in the social hierarchy. Workers forgo large payments to avoid job offers that conflict with their caste identity, even when these decisions are made in private.

Bride price is essential to marriage in West Africa, and its impact on wives’ well-being in their marital life is a matter of debate. According to our data from Senegal, transfers to the bride’s family characterize approximately 85% of marriages. Furthermore, although this is largely ignored in the literature, these marriages are also characterized by the simultaneous existence of other marriage payments, which flow in different directions between the stakeholders. This paper studies the relationship between these multiple marriage payments and the well-being of the wife in her household. We use a unique survey that asks separate questions about the different types of marriage payments. We highlight the strength of the link between what is given to the bride herself and her welfare, as opposed to the looseness of the relation between this welfare and what is given to her family.

We assess the effect of the introduction of a minimum wage policy of 8.50 EUR/hour in Germany in January 2015 on the probability of transitioning from fixed-term to open-ended contracts. Utilizing administrative data from social security records, we compare ex-ante affected (i.e., those earning below the minimum wage) workers against unaffected ones during the pre-implementation period, and find a significant decline in the probability that ex-ante affected workers employed under fixed-term contracts transition to open-ended contracts as the ending month of their fixed-term contract approaches January 2015, when the minimum wage policy was enforced. We interpret our empirical results through the lens of a job search model where firms use fixed-term contracts as a probation phase to learn about the matchspecific productivity with a given worker. In this model, firms sign open-ended contracts based on a productivity threshold rule. A sufficiently high minimum wage can push this threshold up, thus reducing the probability at which workers transition from fixed-term to open-ended contracts.

The objective of this chapter is to collect insights from different sources and different people about institutional features that may slow down economic development in Tanzania or threaten its sustainability and inclusiveness. It essentially follows three approaches presented in three separate sections. First, by exploiting the numerous institutional indicators available in international databases, insights are collected about the quality of Tanzanian institutions in comparison with a set of relevant countries. Insights aim to identify those institutional features that may possibly differentiate Tanzania. Second, an original questionnaire survey is undertaken among various types of decision-makers operating in Tanzania. The survey asks them about their own perception of how institutions work there and how they affect development. Finally, the analysis is enriched by the summary of the main points that arose in a large set of open-ended interviews with top policymakers of the country about the same questions. The final section concludes.

Comment réduire les inégalités sociales à l’école ? Comment favoriser la diffusion des meilleures approches pédagogiques ? Tout se joue-t-il vraiment avant 3 ans ? La taille des classes influence-t-elle la réussite des élèves ? Existe-t-il un ” effet enseignant ” ? Face à la carte scolaire, sommes-nous réduits à choisir entre être bons parents et bons citoyens ? Ces questions sont au cœur du débat public. Depuis trois décennies, les éléments de réponse qu’apporte l’économie de l’éducation à ces questions s’appuient sur un profond renouvellement de l’économie appliquée, visant à utiliser de façon crédible – et souvent créative – des données de plus en plus riches. L’objectif de cet ouvrage fondé sur un cours enseigné à l’École d’économie de Paris est de proposer une synthèse à jour qui donne envie d’approfondir sa réflexion personnelle.

We develop a comprehensive framework to assess policy measures aimed at curbing false news dissemination on social media. A randomized experiment on Twitter during the 2022 U.S. mid-term elections evaluates such policies as priming the awareness of misinformation, fact-checking, confirmation clicks, and prompting careful consideration of content. Priming is the most effective policy in reducing sharing of false news while increasing sharing of true content. A model of sharing decisions, motivated by persuasion, partisan signaling, and reputation concerns, predicts that policies affect sharing through three channels: (i) updating perceived veracity and partisanship of content, (ii) raising the salience of reputation, and (iii) increasing sharing frictions. Structural estimation shows that all policies impact sharing via the salience of reputation and cost of friction. Affecting perceived veracity plays a negligible role as a mechanism in all policies, including fact-checking. The priming intervention performs best in enhancing reputation salience with minimal added friction.

We study horizontal between-group cultural transmission using Stalin’s ethnic deportations as a historical experiment. Over 2 million Soviet citizens, mostly Germans and Chechens, were forcibly relocated from the western to eastern parts of the USSR during WWII solely based on ethnicity. As a result, the native population of the deportation destinations was exogenously exposed to groups with drastically different gender norms and behavior. We combine historical and contemporary data to document that present-day gender equality in labor force participation, business leadership, and fertility as well as pro-gender-equality attitudes are higher among local native population of deportation destinations with a larger presence of Protestant compared to Muslim deportees. The effects are stronger for culturally closer groups and when adopting deportee norms is less costly. The results cannot be explained by selection, vertical cultural transmission, or deportee impact on the local economy. The evidence strongly suggests that gender norms diffused horizontally from deportees to the local population through imitation and learning.

Exploring a drastic change in media landscape in Poland, we show that mainstream media can significantly affect religious participation. After nationalist populist party PiS came to power in 2015, news on state and private independent TV diverged due to propaganda on state TV, resulting in a switch of some of its audience to independent TV. Municipalities with access to independent TV continued to follow a long-term secularization trend, while municipalities with access only to state TV experienced a reversal of this trend. An online experiment sheds light on the mechanisms underlying the effect of exposure to independent news on religiosity.

The effectiveness of security operations often depends on cooperation between different national armies. Such cooperation can be particularly important when international borders are porous. In this project, we investigate how the creation of an international armed force that could operate across international borders (the G5-Sahel Joint Force) affected conflict dynamics in the Sahel region. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, we find that the G5 mission lowered the intensity of conflict locally in its zone of operation. Further analysis of geographical conflict propagation patterns indicates that the G5-Sahel force facilitated security operations in border areas.

How domestic constituents respond to signals of weakness in foreign wars remains an important question in international relations. In this paper, we study the impact of battlefield casualties and media coverage on public demand for war termination. To identify the effect of troop fatalities, we leverage the otherwise exogenous timing of survey collection across 26,776 respondents from nine members of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. Quasi-experimental evidence demonstrates that battlefield casualties increase coverage of the Afghan conflict and public demand for withdrawal, with heterogeneous effects consistent with an original theoretical argument. Evidence from a survey experiment replicates the main results. To shed light on the media mechanism, we leverage a news pressure design and find that major sporting matches occurring around the time of battlefield casualties drive down subsequent coverage, and significantly weaken the effect of casualties on support for war termination. These results highlight the crucial role that media play in shaping public support for foreign military interventions.

We study how the admission of a student to an elite secondary school changes the schooling outcomes of younger cohorts in the student’s school of origin. The context of the rapid establishment and expansion of a nationwide system of highly selective and free-of-charge secondary schools in Peru allows us to investigate information diffusion with low financial barriers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity design, our analysis shows that the admission of an older schoolmate increases the number of younger students who apply (by 16%) and are admitted (47%) to this elite school system. The effect is concentrated among students whose parents have low education levels. Moreover, admissions of older schoolmates to a selective school gives younger students the opportunity to learn about elite schools, but does not seem to encourage them to improve their learning achievement or provide an advantage in preparing the admission assessments. Our findings show that selective schools can have effects that go beyond their own students and indicate that schoolmates can be an effective channel for increasing the demand from high-achieving, low-income students for high-quality education.

How does mobile broadband internet affect approval of government? Using surveys of 840,537 individuals from 2,232 subnational regions in 116 countries in 2008-2017 from the Gallup World Poll and the global expansion of third generation (3G) mobile networks, we show that an increase in mobile broadband internet access reduces government approval. This effect is present only when the internet is not censored and is stronger when traditional media is censored. This effect is reversed in the few countries with the lowest corruption. 3G helps expose actual corruption in government: revelations of the Panama Papers and corruption incidents translate into higher perceptions of corruption in regions covered by 3G networks. The disillusionment of voters in governments had electoral implications: In Europe, the expansion of mobile broadband internet led to a decrease in the vote shares of incumbent parties and an increase in the vote shares of the antiestablishment populist opposition. The vote shares of the nonpopulist opposition were unaffected by the expansion of 3G networks.

Paris came under siege twice between September 1870 and May 1871, first by the Prussian army and then by the Versailles government’s assault on the Commune. The first resulted in a severe famine; the second in a bloodbath. We investigate the impact of this crisis on child mortality, adult height, and adult mortality, using original vital records and military register data from one of the city’s lowest-income areas. Deaths more than doubled at all ages during this period, and under-5 mortality rates increased by 30% for children born in 1869 and 1870. Those conceived and gestated during the crisis ended up significantly shorter and faced 40% higher adult mortality than unaffected cohorts born afterwards, but children aged 2–5 later recovered in height as living conditions quickly improved. A nutritional shock’s translation into short-term variations in stature and into lifetime survival thus seems to depend not only on the shock’s duration but also on preceding and subsequent living conditions, which themselves interact with selection effects and critical age windows for physiological growth.

Since 1993, Nepal has implemented one of the most ambitious and comprehensive program of decentralization of forest management in the world, which is widely considered a success story in terms of participatory management of natural resources. Using quasi-experimental methods, we first quantify the net gains in tree cover related to the program in the Hills and Mountains of Nepal, and describe their temporal evolution. We then discuss the mechanisms driving forest restoration, highlighting that, while community forestry played a role in increasing forest biomass and forest size, it also reduced demand pressures by altering energy choices.

This chapter deals with two major issues rural households face in tropical areas: preserving natural resources and guaranteeing food security. Tackling these two challenges simultaneously may require developing profitable production systems that can both guarantee food security for farmers, while also ensuring sustainable management of natural resources.

This paper exploits quasi-random variation in the share of Black students across cohorts within US schools to investigate whether interracial contact in childhood impacts the residential choices of Whites in adulthood. We find that, 20 years after exposure, Whites who had more Black peers of the same gender in their grade go on to live in census tracts with more Black residents. Further investigation suggests that this result is unlikely to be driven by economic opportunities or social networks. Instead, the effect on residential choice appears to come from a change in preferences among Whites.

Climate variability has the potential to affect both international and internal migration profoundly. Earlier work finds that higher temperatures reduce agricultural yields, which in turn reduces migration rates in low-income countries, due to liquidity constraints. We test whether access to irrigation modulates this temperature–migration relationship, since irrigation buffers agricultural incomes from high temperatures. We regress measures of international and internal migration on decadal averages of temperature and rainfall, interacted with country-level data on irrigation and income. We find robust evidence that, for poor countries, irrigation access significantly offsets the negative effect of increasing temperatures on internal migration, as proxied by urbanisation rates. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering access to alternative adaptation strategies when analysing the temperature-migration relationship.

This paper presents an analytical framework to help understand why some communities successfully manage their renewable natural resources and some fail to do so. We develop a finite-number-of-player, two-period non-cooperative game, where a community can impose an exogenous amount of sanctions. The model develops a nuanced view on Ostrom’s conjecture, stating that, in a common-pool resource it is easier to solve the within-period distributional issue than the between-period conservation problem. We first show that rules preventing dynamic inefficiencies may exist even though static inefficiencies still remain. Second, we show an increase in the initial value of the resource may lower the utility of all users when enforcement mechanisms are bounded. Third, we show that inequalities decrease static inefficiencies but increase dynamic ones.

During the 2019 European elections campaign, we exposed a random sample of French voting-age Facebook users to false statements by a far-right populist party. A randomly selected subgroup was also presented with fact-checking of these statements; another subgroup was offered a choice of whether to view the fact-checking. Participants could then share these statements on their Facebook pages. We show that (i) both imposed and voluntary fact-checking reduce sharing of false statements by about 45 percent, (ii) the size of the effect is similar between imposed and voluntary fact-checking, and (iii) each additional click required to share false statements sub stantially reduces sharing. (JEL D72, D81, D91)

Frictional labor markets impose a fundamental trade-off: individuals may work on their own at any time, but can only take a potentially better-paid wage job after spending some time looking for it, suggesting that intertemporal considerations affect how people choose their occupation. We formalize this intuition under the job search framework and show that a sufficiently high subjective discount rate can justify the choice for own-account work even when it pays less than wage work. With this simple model, we estimate a lower bound for the discount rate that is implicit in the occupational choice of urban own-account workers in Brazil. We find that at least 65 percent of those workers appear to discount the future at rates superior to those available in the credit market, which suggests constrained occupational choice. Finally, we show that the estimated lower bound of the preference for the present is positively associated with food, clothing, and housing deprivation.

Introduction End-stage renal disease (ESRD) affects 84 000 persons in France and costs an estimated €4.2 billion. Education about their disease empowers patients and allows improved management of their disease and better health outcomes. This study aims to explore whether the addition of an interactive web-based platform to patient education is effective and cost-effective and additionally whether complementing the platform with social functions and features improves its performance. Methods and analysis Patients with severe, ESRD or post-transplant will be randomised 1:1:1 to either standard therapeutic education; or education using a specific application; or the enhanced interactive app with social features. The total follow-up duration is 18 months. Primary endpoint is the cost utility of using app-based therapeutic intervention; secondary endpoints are: compliance with treatment guidelines, app use (professionals and patients), patients’ satisfaction, budget impact analysis. Ethics and dissemination The findings will inform the deployment and reimbursement of the application. The study has ethical approval by the Ile de France ethics committee. Dissemination of the results will be presented at conferences and in peer-reviewed publications.

This survey discusses recent developments in the growing literature on the Russian economic history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Using novel data and modern empirical methods, this research generates new insights and provides important lessons for development economics and political economy. We organize the discussion around four strands of this literature. First, we summarize and put in comparative perspective research on the long-term trends in economic development and living standards, which shows that throughout history Russia significantly underperformed advanced economies. We also compile reliable quantifications of the human cost of Stalin’s dictatorship. Second, we discuss new studies of imperial Russia that partially confirm Gerschenkron’s classic conjecture on the institutional explanation for Russia’s relatively low level of economic development and on the causes of the revolution. The third strand of the literature focuses on the Soviet period and explains its slowdown over time and the eventual collapse of the system by the command economy’s inability to provide incentives to individual agents. The fourth strand documents the long-term economic, social, and political consequences of large-scale historical experiments that took place during both the imperial and the Soviet periods. We conclude by discussing the lessons from these four strands of the literature and highlight open questions for future research.

Following the Age of Revolution (Osterhammel, 2014), Paris witnessed two wars at the end of the 19th century. First, in September 1870, the Prussian army besieged the French capital, and then, beginning in March 1871, so did the French government. Both sieges were waged on people perceived to be socially and politically dangerous.

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence about their effects. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals with regard to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level, this paper quantifies these various effects. In total, two opposing effects, one on mean and one on inequality, compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate, but individual poverty statuses are affected. Intra-household consumption inequalities account for 14 percent of inequality in Senegal. This study has also uncovered the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra-household inequality and individual risk of poverty.

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

We examine the effects of a subsidy program in Haiti which provided smallholders subsidies for modern inputs (rice seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and specific labor tasks) through a randomized control trial. The program led to lower input use and lower yields in the year subsidies were received, and the decline in input use and yields persisted through the following year. Using data from a complementary information intervention in which randomly selected farmers were provided clarifications regarding their status in the program, we find evidence suggesting that incorrect expectations of future transfers help explain the disappointing outcomes. In addition, instead of increasing input use, subsidies seem to have led farmers to pay off their loans and take fewer new ones. In a complex postemergency environment as the one in which this program took place, input subsidies may need to be avoided, as they require considerable information to optimally design and careful coordination by many actors to achieve the expected gains.

Migration is a common means of adaptation to weather shocks. Previous research has identified heterogeneous effects according to age, sex, and wealth, but little is still known about how marriage-related institutions affect such migration. Relying on a quasi-experimental identification strategy, we analyze marriage- and work-related migration in Malawi following large droughts, separating the effects for female and male migrants according to different age groups. The analysis based on stated motives of migration reveals marginal decreases in marriage-related migration among girls, but increases in marriage-related migration within districts for women in older age groups. We also find large increases in work-related between-district migration for boys, and to a smaller extent also for girls following severe drought. The results add to the evidence of the potentially adverse effects of migration as a coping mechanism following drought when other means of insurance do not exist.

This paper studies why PhDs in France take longer to find stable jobs 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 document the differences in their observable characteristics and fields of study. We show that this phenomenon is due to multiple factors: heterogeneity in student characteristics along observable and unobservable dimensions and fields of study, directed search toward public sector positions (especially professors) among PhDs and, in all likelihood, reservation wages of PhDs for private sector jobs that are “too high” relative to their value of marginal product.

Relational contracts are typically modeled as being between a principal and an agent, such as a firm owner and a supplier. Yet, in a variety of organizations, relationships are overseen by an intermediary such as a manager. Such arrangements open the door for collusion between the manager and the agent. This paper develops a theory of such managed relational contracts. We show that managed relational contracts differ from principal-agent ones in important ways. First, kickbacks from the agent can help solve the manager’s commitment problem. When commitment is difficult, this can result in higher agent effort than the principal could incentivize directly. Second, making relationships more valuable enables more collusion and hence can reduce effort. We also analyze the principal’s delegation problem and show that she may or may not benefit from entrusting the relationship to a manager.

How do foreign powers disengage from a conflict? We study this issue by examining the recent, large-scale security transition from international troops to local forces in the ongoing civil conflict in Afghanistan. We construct a new dataset that combines information on this transition process with declassified conflict outcomes and previously unreleased quarterly survey data of residents’ perceptions of local security. Our empirical design leverages the staggered roll-out of the transition, and employs a novel instrumental variables approach to estimate the impact. We find a significant, sharp, and timely decline of insurgent violence in the initial phase: the security transfer to Afghan forces. We find that this is followed by a significant surge in violence in the second phase: the actual physical withdrawal of foreign troops. We argue that this pattern is consistent with a signaling model, in which the insurgents reduce violence strategically to facilitate the foreign military withdrawal to capitalize on the reduced foreign military presence afterward. Our findings clarify the destabilizing consequences of withdrawal in one of the costliest conflicts in modern history, and yield potentially actionable insights for designing future security transitions.

This paper studies why PhDs in France take longer to find stable jobs 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 document the differences in their observable characteristics and fields of study. We show that this phenomenon is due to multiple factors: heterogeneity in student characteristics along observable and unobservable dimensions and fields of study, directed search toward public sector positions (especially professors) among PhDs and, in all likelihood, reservation wages of PhDs for private sector jobs that are “too high” relative to their value of marginal product.

We assess income inequality across French and British colonial empires between 1920 and 1960, exploiting for the first time income tax tabulations. As measured by top income shares, inequality was high in colonies. Europeans comprised the bulk of top income earners, and only a minority of autochthons could compete income-wise. Top income shares were no higher in settlement colonies, those territories were wealthier and the average European settler was less rich than the average expatriate. Inequality among autochthons was moderate, and inequality among Europeans was similar to that of the metropoles. The post-WWII fall in income inequality can be explained by the one among Europeans, mirroring that of the metropoles, and does not imply that the European/autochthon income gap was very much reduced. After independence, the mass recruitment of state employees induced a large increase in inequality among autochthons. Dualistic structures lost their racial dimension and changed shape, yet persisted.

Introduction L’objectif principal de cet essai randomisé multicentrique (11 centres hospitaliers) est de démontrer l’efficience (analyse coût–utilité) d’une plateforme digitale (DOCMADI©) d’éducation thérapeutique possédant une composante communautaire et destinée aux patients avec IRC stade 5, dialysés ou transplantés, dans le cadre d’une promotion AP–HP, PRME 2015 (ministère de la Santé). Description Randomisation en 3 bras (pas d’accès à la plateforme [G1], accès sans [G2] et avec [G3] fonctionnalités communautaires). Les patients complètent 3 questionnaires en ligne (M0 conditionnant l’inclusion, M9, M18). Méthodes Critère de jugement principal : différence des coûts rapportés à la différence de survie ajustée à la qualité de vie. Critères secondaires : bénéfices cliniques (survie à M18, observance), effet sur l’organisation des soins (appels au service, passages aux urgences, événements indésirables évités), analyse des coûts et conséquences de l’intervention. Résultats Entre 05/2018 et 12/2020, 815 patients ont été randomisés et 539 inclus (G1 = 180, G2 = 189, G3 = 170), dont 78 au stade 5, 67 dialysés et 394 transplantés. Au 01/06/2021, 433 patients ont complété M9 et 323 M18. Les premiers résultats indiquent des freins à l’inclusion liés aux médecins (difficulté de toute étude clinique), aux patients (non-remplissage à M0) et à des problèmes techniques (logiciel ePro). L’utilisation de la plateforme a fortement augmenté en 2020, en particulier lors de la première vague épidémique de COVID-19, validant son intérêt comme outil d’information pour les centres participants. De nombreux « likes », commentaires et questions sur les forums ont permis de mieux comprendre les préoccupations des patients durant la crise sanitaire et validé l’utilité des fonctions sociales. Chiffres clefs d’utilisation de la plateforme pour l’année 2020 : 20 787 pages lues, 4657 téléchargements et jeux-tests joués plus de 1000 fois. Conclusion Les patients ont manifesté leur intérêt pour notre outil. L’analyse coût/utilité prévue en fin d’étude permettra d’évaluer son efficacité médico-économique.

A large share of important economic interactions take place in a non-simultaneous fashion – i.e. one party takes an action in the expectation that another actor will behave as promised in the future. Such transactions occur between individuals, firms, and states. For these transactions to be undertaken, participants must believe that the counterparty will behave as promised – i.e. they need trust. The central question running through my work is “how should policy respond to a lack of trust?” Part of the answer to this question is clearly “build more trust”, and hence an important sub-theme of my work is examining which policies may be conducive to trustbuilding. In many circumstances, however, there are fundamental constraints on the extent to which parties may trust one another. In these cases the relevant question therefore becomes “how can policy mitigate the negative consequences of lack of trust?

This paper sheds light on the fiscal trajectories of 18 former French colonies in Africa from colonial times to the present. Building upon own previous work about colonial public finance (Cogneau et al., 2021), we compile a novel dataset by combining previously available data with recently digitized data from historical archives, to produce continuous and comparable public revenue data series from 1900 to 2018. This allows us to study the evolution of the level and composition of fiscal revenues in the post-colonial decades, with a special focus on the critical juncture of independence. We find that very few countries achieved significant progress in fiscal capacity between the end of the colonial period and today, if we set aside income drawn from mineral resources. This is not explained by a lasting collapse of fiscal capacity at the time of independence. From 1960 to today, the reliance on mineral resource revenues increased on average and dependence on international commodity prices persisted, with few exceptions. The relative contribution of trade taxes declined after the structural adjustments, and lost trade revenues were not compensated by a sufficient increase in domestic taxes. However, for the most recent period, we do note an improvement in the capacity to collect taxes on the domestic economy.

We review some of the recent estimates of the effect of weather and climate on migration, and articles examining the historical evidence of such links. We identify four issues that have received less attention in previous reviews on the topic. The first one is general equilibrium effects of climate change and migration. The second one concerns accounting for thresholds in the climate-migration relationship. Some of the articles that we review incorporate non-linear effects, but only in the relation between income and migration, and in the relation between weather, climate and migration. Other thresholds are not yet incorporated into the literature. A third issue where much work remains to be done relates to climate change and conflict, and their influence on migration. Finally, we conclude with some reflections on the implications of the results for economic development.

We examine the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France. Increased flood risk is one of the major consequences of climate change, and it is already a current risk for populations in some areas of Southern and Western France. The Ile-de-France region is highly exposed to the risk of a major flood of the Seine River. About 830 000 people and 620 000 jobs would be directly affected if a flood similar to the historic event of 1910 would occur (IAU, 2011; OECD,2013). A large literature has examined the impact of actual floods with a surprisingly large variation in results. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of information about flood risk (Harrison et al., 2001; Troy and Romm, 2004; Hallstrom and Smith, 2005; Pope, 2008; Rajapaksa et al., 2016), as opposed to the direct economic impact of flood damage. It is not easy to separate the effect of information on flood risk, as such, as flood prone areas by definition also are likely to suffer recurrent flooding. Since a major role of flood risk regulation is to inform actors in the real estate markets about the actual risk, it is important for policy purposes to evaluate the reaction to information on flood risk separately from any damage from actual floods. The inner suburbs around Paris offer a unique opportunity to do so, since there is high flood risk, but no major flood occurred during the period analysed in the paper. In this article, we study the impact of information on flood risk released through the implementation of the French regulation on flood risk prevention plans (PPRi). The objective of the paper is to test whether information on flood risk has an impact on the price of the real estate transactions in the inner suburbs of Paris over the period 2003 to 2012. During the period, it can be assumed that past flood events were not salient to buyers and sellers in the region, since the last major flood of the Seine river at the time was the 50-year flood of 1955. The more recent ten-year floods of 2016 and 2018 occurred after the period of the study. This avoids a confounding direct effect on prices of flood itself and permits us to argue that we identify only an effect of flood risk information on price.

We examine the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France. Increased flood risk is one of the major consequences of climate change, and it is already a current risk for populations in some areas of Southern and Western France. The Ile-de-France region is highly exposed to the risk of a major flood of the Seine River. About 830 000 people and 620 000 jobs would be directly affected if a flood similar to the historic event of 1910 would occur (IAU, 2011; OECD,2013). A large literature has examined the impact of actual floods with a surprisingly large variation in results. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of information about flood risk (Harrison et al., 2001; Troy and Romm, 2004; Hallstrom and Smith, 2005; Pope, 2008; Rajapaksa et al., 2016), as opposed to the direct economic impact of flood damage. It is not easy to separate the effect of information on flood risk, as such, as flood prone areas by definition also are likely to suffer recurrent flooding. Since a major role of flood risk regulation is to inform actors in the real estate markets about the actual risk, it is important for policy purposes to evaluate the reaction to information on flood risk separately from any damage from actual floods. The inner suburbs around Paris offer a unique opportunity to do so, since there is high flood risk, but no major flood occurred during the period analysed in the paper. In this article, we study the impact of information on flood risk released through the implementation of the French regulation on flood risk prevention plans (PPRi). The objective of the paper is to test whether information on flood risk has an impact on the price of the real estate transactions in the inner suburbs of Paris over the period 2003 to 2012. During the period, it can be assumed that past flood events were not salient to buyers and sellers in the region, since the last major flood of the Seine river at the time was the 50-year flood of 1955. The more recent ten-year floods of 2016 and 2018 occurred after the period of the study. This avoids a confounding direct effect on prices of flood itself and permits us to argue that we identify only an effect of flood risk information on price.

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830-1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intra-household decision-making process, the strategies put in place by individuals to secure their access to private resources, and the role of the changing economic environment in altering these mechanisms. This paper bridges different strands of the social sciences and exemplifies the complementarities among them. The main features of household organization are described to set the scene for the individual strategies introduced to bypass intra-household negotiations and secure access to private resources. These strategies include efforts to maintain access to income-earning opportunities and secrecy about income and savings. This paper also discusses attempts to maintain or tilt the balance of power within the household through the use of violence, on the one hand, and marital and fertility choices on the other hand. Finally, this paper describes directions for future research aimed at improving the understanding of household behaviour and responses to economic stimuli.

Using detailed panel data from the Pale of Settlement area between 1800 and 1927, we document that anti-Jewish pogroms–mob violence against the Jewish minority–broke out when economic shocks coincided with political turmoil. When this happened, pogroms primarily occurred in places where Jews dominated middleman occupations, i.e., moneylending and grain trading. This evidence is inconsistent with the scapegoating hypothesis, according to which Jews were blamed for all misfortunes of the majority. Instead, the evidence is consistent with the politico-economic mechanism, in which Jewish middlemen served as providers of insurance against economic shocks to peasants and urban grain buyers in a relationship based on repeated interactions. When economic shocks occurred in times of political stability, rolling over or forgiving debts was an equilibrium outcome because both sides valued their future relationship. In contrast, during political turmoil, debtors could not commit to paying in the future, and consequently, moneylenders and grain traders had to demand immediate (re)payment. This led to ethnic violence, in which the break in the relationship between the majority and Jewish middlemen was the igniting factor.

This chapter assesses what economists and other social scientists have learned regarding the effectiveness of various education policies that have been implemented to increase enrollment and promote learning in developing countries. The education production function, which economists often use to portray the education process, is first introduced, along with several other relationships of interest. Estimation issues are also discussed. The chapter then reviews recent research on school enrollment and learning in developing countries; several policies have been shown to raise enrollment, but less is known about how to increase learning. The final section provides recommendations for further research.

How effective is fact checking in countervailing “alternative facts,” i.e., misleading statements by politicians? In a randomized online experiment during the 2017 French presidential election campaign, we subjected subgroups of 2480 French voters to alternative facts by the extreme-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, and/or corresponding facts about the European refugee crisis from official sources. We find that: (i) alternative facts are highly persuasive; (ii) fact checking improves factual knowledge of voters (iii) but it does not affect policy conclusions or support for the candidate; (iv) exposure to facts alone does not decrease support for the candidate, even though voters update their knowledge. We find evidence consistent with the view that at least part of the effect can be explained by raising salience of the immigration issue.

How do foreign powers disengage from a conflict? We study the recent largescale security transition from international troops to local forces in the context of the ongoing civil conflict in Afghanistan. We construct a new dataset that combines information on this transition process with declassified conflict outcomes and previously unreleased quarterly survey data. Our empirical design leverages the staggered roll-out of the transition onset, together with a novel instrumental variables approach to estimate the impact of the two-phase security transition. We find that the initial security transfer to Afghan forces is marked by a significant, sharp and timely decline in insurgent violence. This effect reverses with the actual physical withdrawal of foreign troops. We argue that this pattern is consistent with a signaling model, in which the insurgents reduce violence strategically to facilitate the foreign military withdrawal. Our findings clarify the destabilizing consequences of withdrawal in one of the costliest conflicts in modern history and yield potentially actionable insights for designing future security transitions.

We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital.

Many countries are formalizing customary land rights systems with the aim of improving agricultural productivity and facilitating community forest management. This paper evaluates the impact on tree cover loss of the first randomized control trial of such a program. Around 70,000 landholdings were demarcated and registered in randomly chosen villages in Benin, a country with a high rate of deforestation driven by demand for agricultural land. We estimate that the program reduced the area of forest loss in treated villages, with no evidence of anticipatory deforestation or negative spillovers to other areas. Surveys indicate that possible mechanisms include an increase in tenure security and an improvement in the effectiveness of community forest management. Overall, our results suggest that formalizing customary land rights in rural areas can be an effective way to reduce forest loss while improving agricultural investments.

Oversubscribed treatments are often allocated using randomized waiting lists. Applicants are ranked randomly, and treatment offers are made following that ranking until all seats are filled. To estimate causal effects, researchers often compare applicants getting and not getting an offer. We show that those two groups are not statistically comparable. Therefore, the estimator arising from that comparison is inconsistent when the number of waitlists goes to infinity. We propose a new estimator, and show that it is consistent, provided the waitlists have at least two seats. Finally, we revisit an application, and we show that using our estimator can lead to a statistically significant difference with respect to the results obtained using the commonly used estimator.

The question of diverging interests and preferences within couples over the use of household resources and the consequences of these conflictual views has been present for a long time in the development literature, albeit in a somewhat scattered way. This paper selectively reviews the abundant literature that offers insights into the intra-household decision-making process, the strategies put in place by individuals to secure their access to private resources, and the role of the changing economic environment in altering these mechanisms. This paper bridges different strands of the social sciences and exemplifies the complementarities among them. The main features of household organization are described to set the scene for the individual strategies introduced to bypass intra-household negotiations and secure access to private resources. These strategies include efforts to maintain access to income-earning opportunities and secrecy about income and savings. This paper also discusses attempts to maintain or tilt the balance of power within the household through the use of violence, on the one hand, and marital and fertility choices on the other hand. Finally, this paper describes directions for future research aimed at improving the understanding of household behaviour and responses to economic stimuli.

Bride price is essential to marriage in West Africa, and its impact on wives’ well-being in their marital life is debated. According to our data from Senegal, transfers to the family of the bride characterize approximately 85% of marriages. Furthermore, although this feature is largely ignored in the literature, those marriages are also characterized by the simulta- neous existence of other marriage payments, which ow in di_erent directions between the stakeholders. This paper studies the relationship between these multiple marriage payments and the well-being of the wife in her household. We use a unique survey that enquires separately about the di_erent types of marriage payments. We highlight the strength of the link between what is given to the bride herself and her welfare, as opposed to the looseness of the relation between this welfare and what is given to her family.

The Coronavirus pandemic is imposing tremendous health impacts around the world. At the time of writing (20th July 2020) there have been nearly 15 million cases worldwide and well over half a million deaths from the Covid-19 disease caused by the virus. The fact that this statement needs to be effectively date-stamped reflects the rapid development of this pernicious virus. While several vaccines are under rapid development, so far it is unclear if any will be truly effective given the ability of the virus to mutate; already the vast majority of Covid-19 cases are caused by a virus which is no longer identical to that which appeared in Wuhan in late 2019.

How do the internet and social media affect political outcomes? We review empirical evidence from the recent political-economy literature, focusing primarily on the work that considers traits that distinguish the internet and social media from traditional offline media, such as low barriers to entry and reliance on user-generated content. We discuss the main results about the effects of the internet, in general, and social media, in particular, on voting, street protests, attitudes toward government, political polarization, xenophobia, and politicians’ behavior. We also review evidence on the role of social media in the dissemination of false news, and we summarize results about the strategies employed by autocratic regimes to censor the internet and to use social media for surveillance and propaganda. We conclude by highlighting open questions about how the internet and social media shape politics in democracies and autocracies.

Can tax regimes shape the incentives to engage in armed conflict? Indian mining royalties benefit the States, but are set by the central government. India’s Maoist belt is mineral-rich, and States are responsible for counter-insurgency operations. We exploit the introduction of a 10% ad valorem tax on iron ore that increased royalty collections of the affected states by a factor of 10. We find that the royalty hike was followed by a significant intensification of violence in districts with important iron ore deposits. The royalty increase was also followed by an increase in illegal mining activity in iron mines.

The paper examines the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France, over the period 2003 to 2012. We use unique data on property transactions and geo-localised amenities from a major European city exploiting the different dates of implementation of the flood risk zone regulation. Using an identification strategy based on a difference-in-differences specification, the results indicate that home prices for similar real estate are 3 to 7% lower when located in a flood risk zone, depending on the sub market (flats or houses). The discount is higher, the higher is the flood risk designated by the regulation. Buyers’ previous exposure to floods reduces the price discount.

The paper examines the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France, over the period 2003 to 2012. We use unique data on property transactions and geo-localised amenities from a major European city exploiting the different dates of implementation of the flood risk zone regulation. Using an identification strategy based on a difference-in-differences specification, the results indicate that home prices for similar real estate are 3 to 7% lower when located in a flood risk zone, depending on the sub market (flats or houses). The discount is higher, the higher is the flood risk designated by the regulation. Buyers’ previous exposure to floods reduces the price discount.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS–INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on October 28-31, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra), during visits I conducted, together with CIRAD researchers Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau and partners from rural development NGOs and Jambi University professors, of several places and projects related to agronomic practices in the local oil palm production sector. I also visited, with the invitation of professor Aiyen Tjoa (universities of Jambi and Palu), the EFForTS research project of universities of Jambi and Gottingen, on the effects of landscape transformation associated with the development of rubber and oil palm plantations. The subjects include the warehouse of a local input supplier, a plant nursury, an oil palm mill, the plantation of an independent smallholder (in the area, many of the recent plantations are installed not by firms, but by independent farmers), the delivery of fresh fruits by smallholders to an intermediate collector with his truck, a meteorological station installed for the EFForTS project, plantation workers transported in a truck. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series of photos was shot on November 8, 2019 during a visit I made of operations of a development project conducted by NGOs KIARA (Indonesian) and Terre Solidaire (French) and funded by the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The November 2019 earthquake in North Sulawesi caused a localised tsunami which swept shore-lying houses and buildings in Palu. The earthquake and tsunami together led to the deaths of an estimated 4,340 people (source: wikipedia). The project consisted in supporting fishermen who had lost their boats in the tsunami by granting them with new traditional wooden boats. The visit was organized by Adeline Souf from AFD, Susan Gui from KIARA and KIARA field team. The photographs show the farmers finishing the boats they recently received, tsunami destruction, and a camp of refugees where some fishermen and their families could temporarily live. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

These pĥotographs were shot on November 9, 2019 during a a visit of an observatory station of the margins of rain-forests in Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. The station was installed as part of a research project conducted by universities of Palu and Gottingen. The photos show the towers used by researchers. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu.

These pĥotographs were shot on November 9, 2019 during a a visit of an observatory station of the margins of rain-forests in Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. The station was installed as part of a research project conducted by universities of Palu and Gottingen. The photos show the towers used by researchers. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

This series was shot on November 9-10, 2019 during visits of rice cultivation areas of Central Sulawesi province, south of Palu city. These visits were organized with the support of professor Aiyen Tjoa, who invited me for giving seminars at the university of Palu. The photographs show rice farmers, their fields and some cultivation techniques. I have conducted research on the technology diffusion and the intensification of rice production in the context of Haiti together with colleagues at the Paris School of Economics.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

This series was shot on November 7-12, 2019 during a visit I made at Tadulako university in Palu. Palu city suffered destructions from the large earthquake, of magnitude 7.5, which struck North Sulawesi on September 28, 2018. Tadulako University, the only public university of Central Sulawesi, suffered major destructions. Many of the buildings on the university campus were completely destroyed, while others were inaccessible due to security concerns. The photographs capture these destructions. (The buildings remaining utilized had been inspected and declared accessible.) I was invited by professor Aiyen Tjoa, from the faculty of Agriculture, and professors from the faculty of Economics for giving two seminars. I also gave a lecture to students of the faculty of teacher training. Together with Marta Menendez (University Paris-Dauphine), I previously conducted quantitative research on the long-term effects of earthquakes on household welfare in Indonesia (see article in Journal of Development Economics, vol.118, January 2016) and am continuing this line of research.

We draw a parallel between changes in the French labour market and the evolution of its study by public statistics and labour economists. Labour economics has taken a significant turn toward empirical analysis based on recent microeconometric developments in the evaluation of public policies. This turn has not been sufficient to make decisive progress in the fight against unemployment or inequalities in the labour market. This begs the question of the difficulties faced by labour economics and the associated statistical approaches to apprehend a moving context, and perhaps also of the insufficient dialogue with public decision makers.

Nous mettons en parallèle les mutations du marché du travail en France au cours des quarante dernières années et les évolutions des regards que portent sur lui la statistique publique et les économistes du travail. Trait saillant, l’économie du travail a pris un tournant empirique en mobilisant les nouvelles méthodes micro-économétriques d’analyse des politiques publiques développées à partir des années 1990. Ce tournant n’a pas suffi pour progresser de façon décisive dans la lutte contre le chômage ou les inégalités sur le marché du travail ; on peut s’interroger en retour sur les difficultés de la discipline et de ses outils statistiques à appréhender un contexte mouvant, mais aussi peut-être sur le dialogue encore insuffisant avec les décideurs publics.

Dans son article « L’objectivité sous contrôle : analyse d’une évaluation randomisée de programmes d’accompagnement des demandeurs d’emploi », publié dans le numéro 2019, 60, 1, p. 71-92 de la Revue française de sociologie, Claire Vivès analyse l’usage par ses commanditaires (l’ANPE, l’Unédic et le ministère du Travail) d’une évaluation que nous avons menée en tant que chercheurs. Sa thèse est que la mise en place d’une évaluation randomisée suscite des comportements stratégiques des commanditaires visant à en manipuler ou à en contrôler les résultats et leur diffusion, ce qui « modifie la réalité observée ». Nous sommes d’accord avec beaucoup d’aspects de cette analyse, et il ne fait pas de doute qu’une évaluation, randomisée ou non, dans un contexte à forts enjeux politiques induit de telles intentions de la part des institutions, et elles sont clairement illustrées et analysées ici.

The paper examines the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France, over the period 2003 to 2012. We use unique data on property transactions and geo-localised amenities from a major European city exploiting the different dates of implementation of the flood risk zone regulation. Using an identification strategy based on a difference-in-differences specification, the results indicate that home prices for similar real estate are 3 to 7% lower when located in a flood risk zone, depending on the sub market (flats or houses). The discount is higher, the higher is the flood risk designated by the regulation. Buyers’ previous exposure to floods reduces the price discount.

This paper investigates whether interracial contact in childhood impacts adult romantic relationships. 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 lead whites to have more relationships with blacks as adults. While we do not find impacts on labor market outcomes, there are significant effects on reported racial attitudes. Furthermore, an increase in meeting opportunities is unlikely to explain the increased interracial relationships, since the effect is persistent across time, space, and social networks. Overall, interracial contact during childhood has important long-term behavioral consequences.

We illustrate how randomised controlled trials (RCTs) could be used to evaluate the impact of alternative designs of the common agricultural policy (CAP). We select four policy-design issues which relate to different components of the CAP and raise a wide range of economic questions: nudges, coordination failures, equity-efficiency trade-offs, contract design. Based on examples from agricultural and social policies in developing and developed countries, we show that RCTs have provided useful rigorous evidence on similar design issues, suggesting that they could also be leveraged to help improve components of the CAP.

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals as regards to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level, this paper quantifies these various effects. In total, two opposing effects, one on mean and one on inequality, compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate, but individual poverty statuses are affected. Intra-household consumption inequalities accounts for 14% of inequality in Senegal. We uncover the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra-household inequality and individual risk of poverty.

Migration is one response to climatic stress and shocks. In this article we review the recent literature across various disciplines on the effects of climate change on migration. We explore key features of the relationship between climate change and migration, distinguishing between fast-onset and slow-onset climatic events and examining the causes of heterogeneity in migratory responses to climate events. We also seek to shed light on the interactions between different types of adaptations to climate events as well as the mechanisms underlying the relationship between climate change and migration. Based on our review of the existing literature, we identify gaps in the literature and present some general policy recommendations and priorities for research on climate-induced migration.

Has massive distribution of insecticide-treated-nets contributed to the reduction in in- fant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years? Using large household surveys collected in 16 countries and exploiting the spatial correlation in distribution campaigns, we estimate the relationship between the diffusion of bednets and the progress in child sur- vival. We find no evidence of a causal link in cities, and no impact either in rural areas with low malaria prevalence. By contrast, in highly malarious rural areas where bednet coverage reached high levels, above 75% of households, infant mortality has been reduced by at least 3 percentage points, which amounts to 25% of the initial mortality. The identified impact is even higher for the children of mothers with no education. It lies at the upper bound found with RCTs, most likely because those were implemented in contexts with lower mortality and/or malaria prevalence

We examine the effect of flood risk regulation on property prices in the inner suburbs of Paris, France. Increased flood risk is one of the major consequences of climate change, and it is already a current risk for populations in some areas of Southern and Western France. The Ile-de-France region is highly exposed to the risk of a major flood of the Seine River. About 830 000 people and 620 000 jobs would be directly affected if a flood similar to the historic event of 1910 would occur (IAU, 2011; OECD,2013). A large literature has examined the impact of actual floods with a surprisingly large variation in results. Only a few studies have investigated the effect of information about flood risk (Harrison et al., 2001; Troy and Romm, 2004; Hallstrom and Smith, 2005; Pope, 2008; Rajapaksa et al., 2016), as opposed to the direct economic impact of flood damage. It is not easy to separate the effect of information on flood risk, as such, as flood prone areas by definition also are likely to suffer recurrent flooding. Since a major role of flood risk regulation is to inform actors in the real estate markets about the actual risk, it is important for policy purposes to evaluate the reaction to information on flood risk separately from any damage from actual floods. The inner suburbs around Paris offer a unique opportunity to do so, since there is high flood risk, but no major flood occurred during the period analysed in the paper. In this article, we study the impact of information on flood risk released through the implementation of the French regulation on flood risk prevention plans (PPRi). The objective of the paper is to test whether information on flood risk has an impact on the price of the real estate transactions in the inner suburbs of Paris over the period 2003 to 2012. During the period, it can be assumed that past flood events were not salient to buyers and sellers in the region, since the last major flood of the Seine river at the time was the 50-year flood of 1955. The more recent ten-year floods of 2016 and 2018 occurred after the period of the study. This avoids a confounding direct effect on prices of flood itself and permits us to argue that we identify only an effect of flood risk information on price.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

This series of photographs was shot on October 29-30, 2019, in Jambi province (Sumatra). I was invited by CIRAD researchers, Jean Ollivier and Alexis Thoumazeau, to attend a workshop in Agronomy they organized in Petaling Jaya, about 50 kilometers South of Jambi city, as part of one of their research projects on the environmental effects of different oil palm cultivation practices in the area. The workshop gathered smallholders from a cooperative, rural development NGO field workers, and University professors. The pictures show participants going through in-class discussions of the stakes of agronomic analysis and presentations of methods to analyze soils and plants, and then participating to on-field demonstrations of these methods. I coordinate the research project EXPALMIND on the effects of plantation agriculture on land use and food security, funded by the Mutalim CNRS-INRAE fund in 2019-2021, and this project involved geographers from CNRS-LETG and CIRAD-Systèmes de pérennes, and my participation was part of that project.

Agricultural input subsidies are often considered key instruments to increase adoption of new technologies in developing countries. Using unique experimental data from Equa- teur province in DRC, we document the e_ectiveness of such interventions in increasing households adoption of modern seed varieties (MVs). High subsidy levels increase adop- tion, in particular when other access constraints were also relieved. Demand is highly price sensitive, but demand curves do not display strong discontinuity at low prices. We _nd very limited spillover e_ects on adoption by non-voucher recipients. Adoption persists to some extent in the season that follows voucher distribution.

Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. We test this hypothesis in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We find that Israeli attacks are more likely to occur when U.S. news on the following day are dominated by important predictable events. Strategic timing applies to attacks that bear risk of civilian casualties and are not too costly to postpone. Content analysis suggests that Israel’s strategy aims at minimizing next-day coverage, which is especially charged with negative emotional content. Palestinian attacks do not appear to be timed to U.S. news.

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants’ nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agricultural laborers lagged behind provinces that primarily relied on free labor. The emancipation led to a significant but partial catch up. Better incentives of peasants resulting from the cessation of ratchet effect were a likely mechanism behind a relatively fast positive effect of reform on agricultural productivity. The land reform, which instituted communal land tenure after the emancipation, diminished growth in productivity in repartition communes.

We investigate the relation between economic growth, household firewood collection and forest conditions in Nepal between 2003 and 2010. Co-movements in these are examined at the household and village levels, combining satellite imagery and household (Nepal Living Standard Measurement Survey) data. Projections of the impact of economic growth based on Engel curves turn out to be highly inaccurate: forest conditions remained stable despite considerable growth in household consumption and income. Firewood collections at the village level remained stable, as effects of demographic growth were offset by substantial reductions in per-household collections. Households substituted firewood by alternative energy sources, particularly when livestock and farm based occupations declined in importance. Engel curve specifications which include household productive assets (a proxy for occupational patterns) provide more accurate predictions. Hence structural changes accompanying economic growth play an important role in offsetting adverse environmental consequences of growth.

Smart subsidy programs have been advocated in many developing countries to encourage the adoption of modern inputs and increase agricultural productivity. Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa has shown that one-time targeted subsidies can be effective at increasing adoption of fertilizer and boosting agricultural productivity. Similarly, the Technology Transfer to Small Farmers Program (PTTA) in Haiti, implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development, provided vouchers to subsidize agricultural inputs, such as certain labor tasks, seedlings, fertilizer, pesticides, and other inputs. A series of evaluations deploying a variety of methods were conducted to test the program’s effectiveness on a series of agricultural and socio-economic variables. Agroforestry incentives attracted around two-thirds of the program’s budget, whereas the remaining third was devoted to annual crops. Main findings show that PTTA agroforestry subsidies were effective at increasing the total value of production of crops and at increasing agricultural income derived from the sales of these crops. These findings provide a strong justification for further iterations of similar programs geared towards agroforestry. – See more at: https://publications.iadb.org/handle/11319/9048#sthash.lcrcLmhg.dpuf

How does a rebel group’s access to funding affect its fighting capacity? Using a district-year panel of fatal Maoist incidents in India between 2005 and 2011, I find that deficient rainfall spurs targeted Maoist violence against civilians but that the number of Maoist attacks against security forces increases only in mining districts. The relationship between income shocks and conflict depends on the type of targets and the revenue sources of the rebels. In particular, the fighting capacity of a rebel group appears to benefit more from negative income shocks if the group’s tax base is sufficiently independent from the agricultural economy.

There is solid scientific evidence predicting that a large part of the developing world will suffer a greater incidence of extreme weather events, which may increase displacement migration. We draw on the new economics of migration to model migration decisions of smallholder and rain-dependent farm households in rural Ethiopia and investigate both the ex-ante and ex-post impacts of climate variables. Using detailed household survey panel data matched with rainfall data, we show that weather variability – measured by the coefficient of variation of rainfall – has a strong positive impact on the probability of sending a migrant. This implies that households engage in migration to cope with risk ex-ante. We also find evidence suggesting that rainfall shocks have ex-post impact on households’ likelihood of migration, but the effect is not significant at the conventional levels. Instrumental variables probit regression results also show that controlling for endogeneity of income using a credible instrument is important to identify its impact on the decision to migrate. Our findings have important implications for policies aiming to improve the capacity of vulnerable households to adapt to climate change.

Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its welfare effects are scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in India we document political influence in a setting where politicians have no official role in contracting decisions. Exploiting close elections to identify the causal effect of coming to power, we show that the share of contractors whose name matches that of the winning politician increases by 83% (from 4% to 7%) in the term after a close election compared to the term before. Regression discontinuity estimates at the road level show that political interference raises the cost of road construction and increases the likelihood that roads go missing.

Population control policies keep attracting attention: by increasing the household size, having more children would directly contribute to a household’s poverty. Using nationally representative household level data from Nepal, we investigate the links between a household’s fertility decisions and variations in their size and composition. We show that the relationship between number of births and household size is positive when the mothers are young, but becomes negative as the mothers grow older. Elderly couples who had fewer children host, on average, more relatives who are outside the immediate family unit. This result sheds light on the heterogeneous relation between the number of children and household size over the life cycle. It also implies that reductions in a household’s fertility may have an ambiguous impact on its per capita consumption, which depends on how the household’s composition responds to new births and changes over time: in this sample, an old household’s per capita consumption is not affected by the number of births. We use the gender of the first-born child to instrument the total number of consecutive children.

This paper uses a novel survey to re-examine inequality and poverty levels in Senegal. In order to account for intra-household inequalities, the paper uses consumption data collected at a relatively disaggregated level within households. This data reveal that first, mean consumption is higher than measured by standard consumption surveys; and second, that consumption inequality in this country is also much higher that what is commonly thought, with a Gini index reaching 48. These findings affect global poverty estimates in opposite directions and in this context, nearly compensate for each other. Intra-household consumption inequalities are shown to account for nearly 14% of total inequality in Senegal. These results are robust to the existence of plausible measurement errors. As a result of this intra-household inequality, “invisible poor” exist with 12.6% of the poor individuals living in non-poor households.

In many cases, consumers cannot observe a single firm’s investment in environmental quality or safety, but only the average quality of the industry. The outcome of the investment is stochastic, since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external factors that may affect production. In addition, firms do not know consumers’ valuation of quality. We characterize the solution of the firms’ investment game and show that the value of stopping investments when firms are already investing in quality can be negative when the free-riding incentives dominate. The existence of systematic uncertainty on the outcome of investment slows down investment in quality, compared to a situation without uncertainty. The uncertainty on consumers’ willingness to pay for quality can speed up or slow down investment. We also obtain the counterintuitive result that information acquisition may decrease the overall level of quality.

We document substantial increases in agricultural productivity, industrial output, and peasants’ nutrition in Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Before the emancipation, provinces where serfs constituted the majority of agricultural laborers lagged behind provinces that primarily relied on free labor. The emancipation led to a significant but partial catch up. Better incentives of peasants resulting from the cessation of ratchet effect were a likely mechanism behind a relatively fast positive effect of reform on agricultural productivity. The land reform, which instituted communal land tenure after the emancipation, diminished growth in productivity in repartition communes.

Why does it seem so difficultto build a sizeable developmenta state in Africa? Agrowing literature looks at the colonial roots of differences in economic development, often using the French/British difference as asource of variation to identify which features of the colonial pastmattered. We use historical archivestobuildanewdatasetofpublicfinancesin9Frenchand4Britishcoloniesof West Africa from 1900 to in dependence.Though we find some significant differences between French and British colonies, we conclude that over all patterns of public finances were similarin both empires. The most striking fact is the greatin crease in expenditure per capitain the last decades of colonization: it quadrupled between the end o World War II and independence. This increase inexpenditure was made possible partly by an increase incustoms revenue due to rising trade flows, but mostly by policy changes: netsubsidies from colonizers to their colonies became positive, while, within the colonies, direct and indirect taxation rates increased. We conclude that the last fifteen years of colonization area key period tounderstand colonial legacies.

We illustrate how randomized controlled trials (RCTs) could be used as a learning tool to shed light on various aspects of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). RCTs are quasi-absent from the CAP evaluation toolbox, despite their frequent use to evaluate other European Union policies, or agricultural policies in developing countries. We draw upon existing debates on the role of RCTs in policy-making to derive a list of points of attention. We then consider four specific examples of evaluation questions for the CAP, and based on examples drawn from agricultural and social policies in developing and developed countries, argue that the RCT toolbox has the potential to significantly add to existing approaches to evaluating and designing components of the CAP.

The Sourdun Internat d’Excellence (boarding school of excellence) was opened in September 2009. It concentrates significant resources on lower and upper secondary pupils from poorer backgrounds and at the median of the French attainment distribution. In 2009 and 2010, the boarding school received more applications than it had places. Places were randomly allocated to the eligible pupils, leading to the formation of two perfectly comparable groups, the group attending the boarding school and a control group. This report presents the results of tracking the school careers of these pupils, now that they have all reached baccalauréat age. 47% of the pupils in the control group obtained the general baccalauréat, whereas this figure was 68% for the pupils at Sourdun. This increase of 21 percentage points is due partly to a drop in the number of pupils leaving without a qualification (this effect is observed mainly among the girls) and partly to the substitution of the technical baccalauréat with the general baccalauréat (this effect is observed mainly among the boys). The results show that it is possible to radically transform the school careers of pupils from poorer backgrounds, undermining the notion that education policy is powerless to overcome inequality. But by investing significant resources in pupils with average attainment levels, Sourdun does not answer the question of what to do for pupils with the lowest attainment levels. ASPIRATIONS SCOLAIRES ET LUTTE CONTRE LE DECROCHAGE : ACCOMPAGNER LES PARENTS Retour d’expérience n°2 Novembre 2014 Dominique Goux Marc Gurgand Eric Maurin Interrogés en fin de collège, la très grande majorité des parents d’élèves de troisième pensent que leur enfant obtiendra le baccalauréat, y compris quand ses résultats scolaires et ses chances de réussir au lycée sont en réalité très faibles. De fait, parmi les élèves les plus en difficulté et les plus exposés au décrochage, très peu envisagent la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte au lycée, ce qui reflète le déficit d’image de ces formations en France. Dans le cadre d’une expérimentation menée dans des classes de troisième dans l’académie de Versailles, nous montrons que deux réunions spécifiques entre le principal du collège et les parents des élèves les plus faibles suffisent à faire évoluer très sensiblement les projets des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. Un tel ajustement des aspirations s’accompagne par la suite d’une importante réduction du décrochage scolaire, au profit de scolarités sans redoublement dans les centres d’apprentissage ou les lycées professionnels de l’académie. Deux ans après cette intervention très simple, le décrochage qui est de 20% dans cette population d’élèves est ramené à 15%. En utilisant des données sur les groupes d’amis au sein des classes, nous montrons également que l’intervention s’accompagne d’une amélioration de l’intégration scolaire des élèves les plus faibles. Ils interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats : cette évolution des rapports entre élèves dans les classes représente sans doute l’une des clés de la réussite du dispositif expérimenté. • Les familles des élèves de troisième en difficulté scolaire surestiment souvent leurs chances de poursuivre des études jusqu’au baccalauréat et envisagent peu la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte. • Quelques réunions collectives entre les familles des élèves les plus faibles et le principal du collège, menées tôt dans l’année, parviennent à faire évoluer les projets des jeunes et des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. • En conséquence, ces réunions permettent de réduire d’un quart le taux de décrochage, et les élèves concernés réussissent leur scolarité dans les formations professionnelles courtes. • L’intervention affecte également les relations sociales : les élèves les plus faibles interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats. J-PAL, laboratoire d’action contre la pauvreté, est un réseau de chercheurs du monde entier qui utilisent la méthode de l’évaluation par assignation aléatoire. L’objectif de J-PAL est de réduire la pauvreté en contribuant à ce que les politiques publiques soient fondées sur des études scientifiques rigoureuses. www.povertyactionlab.org L’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) est développé dans le cadre d’un partenariat scientifique entre PSE et le CREST. L’IPP vise à promouvoir l’analyse et l’évaluation quantitatives des politiques publiques en s’appuyant sur les méthodes les plus récentes de la recherche en économie. www.ipp.eu ASPIRATIONS SCOLAIRES ET LUTTE CONTRE LE DECROCHAGE : ACCOMPAGNER LES PARENTS Retour d’expérience n°2 Novembre 2014 Dominique Goux Marc Gurgand Eric Maurin Interrogés en fin de collège, la très grande majorité des parents d’élèves de troisième pensent que leur enfant obtiendra le baccalauréat, y compris quand ses résultats scolaires et ses chances de réussir au lycée sont en réalité très faibles. De fait, parmi les élèves les plus en difficulté et les plus exposés au décrochage, très peu envisagent la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte au lycée, ce qui reflète le déficit d’image de ces formations en France. Dans le cadre d’une expérimentation menée dans des classes de troisième dans l’académie de Versailles, nous montrons que deux réunions spécifiques entre le principal du collège et les parents des élèves les plus faibles suffisent à faire évoluer très sensiblement les projets des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. Un tel ajustement des aspirations s’accompagne par la suite d’une importante réduction du décrochage scolaire, au profit de scolarités sans redoublement dans les centres d’apprentissage ou les lycées professionnels de l’académie. Deux ans après cette intervention très simple, le décrochage qui est de 20% dans cette population d’élèves est ramené à 15%. En utilisant des données sur les groupes d’amis au sein des classes, nous montrons également que l’intervention s’accompagne d’une amélioration de l’intégration scolaire des élèves les plus faibles. Ils interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats : cette évolution des rapports entre élèves dans les classes représente sans doute l’une des clés de la réussite du dispositif expérimenté. • Les familles des élèves de troisième en difficulté scolaire surestiment souvent leurs chances de poursuivre des études jusqu’au baccalauréat et envisagent peu la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte. • Quelques réunions collectives entre les familles des élèves les plus faibles et le principal du collège, menées tôt dans l’année, parviennent à faire évoluer les projets des jeunes et des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. • En conséquence, ces réunions permettent de réduire d’un quart le taux de décrochage, et les élèves concernés réussissent leur scolarité dans les formations professionnelles courtes. • L’intervention affecte également les relations sociales : les élèves les plus faibles interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats. J-PAL, laboratoire d’action contre la pauvreté, est un réseau de chercheurs du monde entier qui utilisent la méthode de l’évaluation par assignation aléatoire. L’objectif de J-PAL est de réduire la pauvreté en contribuant à ce que les politiques publiques soient fondées sur des études scientifiques rigoureuses. www.povertyactionlab.org L’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) est développé dans le cadre d’un partenariat scientifique entre PSE et le CREST. L’IPP vise à promouvoir l’analyse et l’évaluation quantitatives des politiques publiques en s’appuyant sur les méthodes les plus récentes de la recherche en économie. www.ipp.eu ASPIRATIONS SCOLAIRES ET LUTTE CONTRE LE DECROCHAGE : ACCOMPAGNER LES PARENTS Retour d’expérience n°2 Novembre 2014 Dominique Goux Marc Gurgand Eric Maurin Interrogés en fin de collège, la très grande majorité des parents d’élèves de troisième pensent que leur enfant obtiendra le baccalauréat, y compris quand ses résultats scolaires et ses chances de réussir au lycée sont en réalité très faibles. De fait, parmi les élèves les plus en difficulté et les plus exposés au décrochage, très peu envisagent la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte au lycée, ce qui reflète le déficit d’image de ces formations en France. Dans le cadre d’une expérimentation menée dans des classes de troisième dans l’académie de Versailles, nous montrons que deux réunions spécifiques entre le principal du collège et les parents des élèves les plus faibles suffisent à faire évoluer très sensiblement les projets des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. Un tel ajustement des aspirations s’accompagne par la suite d’une importante réduction du décrochage scolaire, au profit de scolarités sans redoublement dans les centres d’apprentissage ou les lycées professionnels de l’académie. Deux ans après cette intervention très simple, le décrochage qui est de 20% dans cette population d’élèves est ramené à 15%. En utilisant des données sur les groupes d’amis au sein des classes, nous montrons également que l’intervention s’accompagne d’une amélioration de l’intégration scolaire des élèves les plus faibles. Ils interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats : cette évolution des rapports entre élèves dans les classes représente sans doute l’une des clés de la réussite du dispositif expérimenté. • Les familles des élèves de troisième en difficulté scolaire surestiment souvent leurs chances de poursuivre des études jusqu’au baccalauréat et envisagent peu la possibilité de l’apprentissage ou d’une formation professionnelle courte. • Quelques réunions collectives entre les familles des élèves les plus faibles et le principal du collège, menées tôt dans l’année, parviennent à faire évoluer les projets des jeunes et des familles et à élargir le spectre des orientations envisagées. • En conséquence, ces réunions permettent de réduire d’un quart le taux de décrochage, et les élèves concernés réussissent leur scolarité dans les formations professionnelles courtes. • L’intervention affecte également les relations sociales : les élèves les plus faibles interagissent davantage avec leurs camarades ayant de meilleurs résultats. J-PAL, laboratoire d’action contre la pauvreté, est un réseau de chercheurs du monde entier qui utilisent la méthode de l’évaluation par assignation aléatoire. L’objectif de J-PAL est de réduire la pauvreté en contribuant à ce que les politiques publiques soient fondées sur des études scientifiques rigoureuses. www.povertyactionlab.org L’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) est développé dans le cadre d’un partenariat scientifique entre PSE et le CREST. L’IPP vise à promouvoir l’analyse et l’évaluation quantitatives des politiques publiques en s’appuyant sur les méthodes les plus récentes de la recherche en économie. www.ipp.eu • Attending the Sourdun Internat d’Excellence radically transforms pupils’ school careers by channelling more of them towards the general baccalauréat, which they often gain with high marks (avec mention) and in the Science (S) section. • The effect is particularly marked among pupils who entered Sourdun at lower secondary level (aged 11), whose orientation was less firmly fixed than for those who entered at upper secondary level (aged 15). • Among boys, the general baccalauréat mainly substituted the technical baccalauréat; among girls it substituted leaving without any qualifications. • The programme is aimed at pupils from poorer backgrounds whose attainment levels are average, but it does not answer the question of what to do for pupils with the lowest attainment levels. J-PAL, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, is a global network of researchers who use the randomised impact evaluation method. J-PAL works to reduce poverty by ensuring public policy is informed by scientific evidence.

L’internat d’excellence de Sourdun a ouvert ses portes à la rentrée 2009. Il concentre des moyens importants sur des collégiens et lycéens d’origine modeste et de niveau scolaire intermédiaire. En 2009 et 2010, l’internat a reçu plus de candidatures que de places : un tirage au sort parmi les élèves éligibles a permis de constituer un groupe admis à l’internat et un groupe témoin parfaitement comparables. Cette note présente les résultats d’un suivi de la carrière scolaire des élèves, qui ont aujourd’hui tous atteint l’âge du baccalauréat. Alors que les élèves du groupe témoin sont 47 % à obtenir le bac général, ils sont 68 % parmi les candidats admis à Sourdun. Cette augmentation de 21 points de pourcentage résulte pour partie d’une réduction des sorties sans diplôme (cet effet s’observe principalement sur les filles) et pour partie d’une substitution entre bac technologique et bac général (cet effet s’observe principalement sur les garçons). Ces résultats montrent qu’il est possible de transformer radicalement les carrières scolaires d’élèves d’origine modeste, battant ainsi en brèche l’image selon laquelle les politiques scolaires seraient impuissantes face aux inégalités. Mais en investissant des moyens importants sur des élèves de niveau intermédiaire, Sourdun laisse ouverte la question des actions à mener auprès des élèves les plus en difficulté.

How does ethnic politics affect the state’s ability to provide policing services? Using a panel of administrative personnel data on the full careers of 6,784 police officers, we show how the rise of ethnic politics around Kenya’s independence influenced policemen’s behavior. We find a significant deterioration in discipline after Kenya’s first multiparty election for those police officers of ethnic groups associated with the ruling party. These effects are driven by a behavioral change among these policemen. We find no evidence of favoritism within the police. Instead, our results are consistent with co-ethnic officers experiencing an emboldenment effect. Our findings highlight that the state’s security apparatus, at its most granular level, is not insulated from ethnic politics.

We introduce a methodology to estimate the determinants of the formation of technology diffusion networks from the patterns of technology adoption. We apply this methodology to wind energy, which is one of the key technologies in climate change mitigation. Our results emphasize that, in particular, long-term relationships as measured by economic integration are key determinants of technological diffusion. Specific support measures are less relevant, at least to explain the extensive margin of diffusion. Our results also highlight that the scope of technological diffusion is much broader than what is suggested by the consideration of CDM projects alone, which are particularly focused on China and India. Finally, the network of technological diffusion inferred from our approach highlights the central role of European countries in the diffusion process and the absence of large hubs among developing countries.

Infrastructure regulation has traditionally been conceived as a national or local policy. The increased scope for international trade in infrastructure services, observed in the last 20 years, has induced the case for their regulation at a supranational level. This is because, when regulated services cross borders, local regulatory decisions have non-local impacts. For instance, when Spain decided to stop subsidizing renewable energies, the price of electricity in France increased. When Belgium, France or Germany closes its nuclear plants, it impacts the electricity markets in many other countries. More broadly, without coordination, differences in the national regulation of infrastructure services may alter comparative advantages and risks allocation across countries and result in production and distribution location arbitrations (e.g., Crampes [2014] or Albrecht [2014] in the context of the EU energy policies). This can penalize both users and producers, as already pointed out in the fiscal federalism literature on tax or environmental competition (e.g., Oates [2005]). Differences in national regulation can also reduce the incentive for new cross-border investments, a major issue at a time when concerns for climate change are leading to major transformations in the nature and composition of the infrastructure capital stock.

Population control policies keep attracting attention: by increasing the household size, having more children would directly contribute to a household’s poverty. Using nationally representative household level data from Nepal, we investigate the links between a household’s fertility decisions and variations in their size and composition. We show that the relationship between number of births and household size is positive when the mothers are young, but becomes negative as the mothers grow older. Elderly couples who had fewer children host, on average, more relatives who are outside the immediate family unit. This result sheds light on the heterogeneous relation between the number of children and household size over the life cycle. It also implies that reductions in a household’s fertility may have an ambiguous impact on its per capita consumption, which depends on how the household’s composition responds to new births and changes over time: in this sample, an old household’s per capita consumption is not affected by the number of births. We use the gender of the first-born child to instrument the total number of consecutive children.

We match climate data to migration data from the 1991 and 2001 Indian Censuses to investigate the impact of climate variability on internal migration. The article makes four contributions to the existing literature on macro-level migration flows. First, use of census data allows us to test and compare the effect on migration of climatic factors prior to migration. Second, we introduce relevant meteorological indicators of climate variability, to measure the frequency, duration, and magnitude of drought and excess precipitation based on the Standardized Precipitation Index. Third, we estimate the total effect (direct and indirect effects) of climate variability on bilateral migration rates. Fourth, we examine three possible channels through which climate variability might induce migration: average income, agriculture, and urbanization. The estimation results show that drought frequency in the origin state increases inter-state migration in India. This effect is stronger in agricultural states, and in such states the magnitude of drought also increases inter-state migration significantly. Drought frequency has the strongest effect on rural–rural inter-state migration.

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

We exploit data on the future earnings students at high school completion expect to receive with and without a college education, together with information on learning achievement and college outcomes, to study the benefits from admission into a system of elite public high schools in Mexico City. Using data for the centralized allocation of students into schools and an adapted regression discontinuity design strategy, we estimate that elite school admission increases the future earnings and returns students expect from a college education. These gains in earnings expectations seem to reflect improvement in actual earnings opportunities, as admission to this elite school system also enhances learning achievement and college graduation outcomes. This provides evidence of the earnings benefits from attending elite schools.

Lancé en 2010, le Programme d’investissements d’avenir (PIA) a pour ambition de stimuler les activités de recherche, de développement et d’innovation dans des secteurs ciblés et porteurs de croissance, aussi divers et variés que l’enseignement supérieur et la recherche, l’économie numérique, la santé ou encore le développement durable. Près de 50 milliards d’euros de crédits ont été engagés pour les deux premiers volets des PIA qui ont été reconduits pour la troisième fois en juin 2016 et dotés de 10 milliards d’euros supplémentaires. Le PIA est ainsi devenu un instrument majeur de la politique de soutien à l’innovation en France, aux côtés du crédit d’impôt recherche (CIR).Comme pour toute politique d’aide publique en faveur des entreprises, se pose la question de l’incidence de ces aides sur les comportements des entreprises ainsi que sur leurs performances. En effet, afin de juger de la pertinence et de l’efficacité d’une telle politique de soutien aux entreprises, il est crucial de déterminer i) si ces aides viennent s’ajouter aux dépenses en R&D des entreprises tout en les incitant à investir davantage ou si au contraire elles viennent s’y substituer ; et ii) si ces aides permettent d’améliorer les performances des entreprises bénéficiaires et dans quelle mesure elles affectent les performances des entreprises non bénéficiaires. En se concentrant sur le PIA géré par l’Agence de l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie (ADEME), spécialisée dans les thématiques environnementales comme celles de la transition énergétique ou de la croissance « verte », l’objectif de la présente étude est d’évaluer ex post les effets des aides octroyées par l’ADEME sur les entreprises bénéficiaires.

Alessandro Stanziani’s article re-launches the discussion about the quality of Russian imperial statistics and the relevance of quantitative analysis for historical research at an important moment for Russia’s economic history, when a lot of new data are being compiled and used by scholars. Similar productive discussions took place at other critical junctions for the fields of history, economics, political science, and other social sciences. For example, Robert Fogel’s and Stanley Engerman’s “Time on the Cross” (1974) triggered a profound discussion of potential benefits and limitations of quantitative approach to studying the history of the United States. The punch line of that discussion can be illustrated by the justification of the 1993 Nobel Prize in economics dedicated to Fogel “for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.” In the context of Russian history, similar discussions took place in the Soviet Union in the 1970s between Ivan Koval’chenko and Boris Litvak and then later in this journal in the 1990s.

Boarding schools substitute school to home, but little is known on the effects this substitution produces on students. We present results of an experiment in which seats in a boarding school for disadvantaged students were randomly allocated. Boarders enjoy better studying conditions than control students. However, they start outperforming control students in mathematics only two years after admission, and this effect mostly comes from strong students. Boarders initially experience lower levels of well-being but then adjust. This suggests that substituting school to home is disruptive: only strong students benefit from the school, once they have adapted to their new environment.

The paper examines the levels and trends in access to education and educational outcomes across generations of Egyptian youth. Examination of four cohorts of individuals aged 25-29 shows that, although basic education has democratized, some inequities in access to general secondary and college education have persisted over the past 25 years. The analysis of test scores from TIMSS and national examinations in the late 2000s shows that more than a quarter of learning outcome inequality is attributable to circumstances beyond the control of a student, such as parental education, socioeconomic background, and birthplace. The high level of overall achievement inequality observed makes inequities in learning opportunities between Egyptian youth high compared to other countries in absolute levels. Moreover, learning gaps among pupils from different backgrounds appear at early grades. High and unequal levels of household expenditures in private tutoring and tracking into vocational and general secondary schools that depend on high stakes examination substantially contribute to unequal learning outcomes.

Tandis que la Côte d’Ivoire a renoué avec la croissance depuis 2011 et se place sous les auspices de plans de développement ambitieux, les enquêtes sur le niveau de vie des ménages couvrant les trois dernières décennies montrent tout à la fois une amélioration sensible du revenu moyen et un maintien des inégalités. La pauvreté demeure donc plus élevée qu’à la fin des années 1980. En complément, l’accès aux données originales de l’impôt sur le revenu permet de capter les hauts salaires versés dans le privé. Le salariat formel privé ou public continue de protéger de la pauvreté et demeure surreprésenté parmi les hauts revenus. Cependant, le rationnement persistant de ce type d’emploi fait que le secteur informel est devenu majoritaire chez les riches urbains comme chez les pauvres.

India’s Maoist movement is often thought to be rooted in economic deprivation. A review of the emerging literature and descriptive evidence from a district-level data set on Maoist conflict indicates that the relationship between underdevelopment andMaoist activity cannot be explained in simple economic terms. At the state level, Maoistconflict-affected states have similar growth trends and do not score lower on development measures. In a cross section of districts, the most robust predictor of Maoist activity is forest cover, which could reflect the importance of strategic terrain factors as well as the relevance of forest rights and forest produce.

We investigate the impact of IT diffusion on the stability of employment. We document the evolution of different components of job instability over a panel of 348 cities in France, from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. The evidence goes against the view that the diffusion of IT has spurred job instability. Yet, analysing long-term differences in the occupational structure, we find that IT diffusion has increased the share of high-skill occupations at the expense of low-skill occupations. This is consistent with French firms’ reliance on their internal labour market to meet the new skill requirements associated with IT diffusion.

A partir de mi 2013, la spécialisation des conseillers de Pôle emploi à différentes modalités d’accompagnement se traduit par une double différenciation de la taille et de la composition des portefeuilles de demandeurs d’emploi dont ils ont la charge. Ainsi, l’accompagnement renforcé conduit le conseiller à suivre des demandeurs d’emploi moins nombreux, mais plus éloignés de l’emploi. Lorsque les demandeurs d’emploi sont inscrits depuis peu au chômage, l’effet combiné de ce double changement sur les taux de placement en emploi est négatif (par rapport aux conseillers affectés au suivi d’un grand nombre de demandeurs d’emploi plus proches de l’emploi). Mais il est positif lorsque les demandeurs d’emploi sont inscrits au chômage depuis au moins un an. Il n’est pas possible de faire la part dans ces effets de “l’effet taille” et de “l’effet de composition”, ce dernier étant tiré en partie par des variables inobservables. Les conseillers affectés à l’accompagnement renforcé sont plus souvent des conseillers anciens à Pôle emploi. Pour autant, rien n’indique que ces conseillers aient un avantage comparatif pour ce type d’accompagnement, dans la mesure où leurs taux de placement sont impactés de la même façon par le passage en accompagnement renforcé que les conseillers moins expérimentés de Pôle emploi.

Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who have risen from low to high positions within the province they govern (“locals”) spend a higher share of budgetary resources on education and health care and invest less in construction infrastructure than party secretaries who have made their most significant career advancements in other provinces (“outsiders”). Identification comes from variation in central leadership and term limits. As the promotion mechanism rewards infrastructure investments, locals are less likely to be promoted at the end of the term. We explore various mechanisms and provide evidence that the difference between locals and outsiders is not driven by knowledge or experience. Several pieces of evidence suggest that locals cater to low-level provincial elites, who helped them rise to power. Thus, local career trajectories limit the power of career concerns by fostering competing allegiances.

We provide evidence of corruption in allocation of public procurement and assess its efficiency. Firms with procurement revenue increase tunneling around regional elections, whereas neither tunneling of firms without procurement revenue, nor legitimate business of firms with procurement exhibits a political cycle. Data are consistent with the corruption channel—cash is tunneled to politicians in exchange for procurement contracts—and inconsistent with alternative channels. Using the strength of correlation between procurement revenue and tunneling around elections as a proxy for local corruption, we reject the “efficient grease” hypothesis: in more corrupt localities, procurement contracts go to unproductive firms.

Exploiting original data from a Senegalese household survey, we provide evidence that fertility choices are partly driven by women’s needs for widowhood insurance. We use a duration model of birth intervals to show that women most at risk in case of widowhood intensify their fertility, shortening birth spacing, until they get a son. Insurance through sons might entail substantial health costs since short birth spacing raises maternal and infant mortality rates.

From September 1870 to February 1871, the Prussian army’s siege of Paris resulted in a harsh famine. Using original data from vital records and military registers, we investigate the impact of the siege in terms of both mortality and the height stature of survivors in one of the poorest areas of the city. We first estimate that deaths more than doubled at all ages during the 6-month siege and that child mortality rates increased by more than 25% (10 percentage points) for children born in 1869 or 1870. Second, we find little impact of famine on the height of individuals less than 5 years old during the siege, but a rather large deficit exists at ages 6 to 10. After having examined selection effects linked to mortality, fertility and migration, we argue that the siege was short-lived enough that many early-age survivors were able to catch up in stature.

We analyse income inequality in the UK from 1978 to 2009 in order to understand why income inequality rose very rapidly from 1978 to 1991 but then remained broadly unchanged. We find that inequality in earnings among employees has risen fairly steadily since 1978, but other factors that caused income inequality to rise before 1991 have since gone into reverse. Inequality in investment and pension income has fallen since 1991, as has inequality between those with and without employment. Furthermore, certain household types – notably the elderly and those with young children – which had relatively low incomes in the period to 1991 have seen their incomes converge with others.

Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its welfare effects is scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in India we document political influence in a setting where politicians have no official role in contracting decisions. Exploiting close elections to identify the causal effect of coming to power, we show that the share of contractors whose name matches that of the winning politician increases by 63% (from 4% to 6.4%). Regression discontinuity estimates at the road level show that political interference raises costs, lowers quality, and increases the likelihood that roads go missing.

This paper estimates the impact of military recruitment during World War I on human capital accumulation in colonial Punjab. The empirical strategy exploits the exogenous increase in recruitment by the Indian Army during the war. Higher military recruitment is found to be associated with increased literacy at the district-religion level. The observed improvement in the human capital stock appears to be driven by the informal acquisition of literacy skills by serving soldiers.

En même temps qu’elle bénéficie d’un regain d’intérêt certain, l’histoire économique de l’Afrique suscite aujourd’hui des controverses méthodologiques intenses, dont deux livres publiés récemment par Morten Jerven se font l’écho, Poor Numbers et Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong.

At the end of the 1980s, Côte d’Ivoire entered a deep macroeconomic crisis that put an end to the often-praised ‘Ivorian miracle’. After the death of the founding father Houphouet-Boigny, unrestrained political competition added to bad economic conditions and led to the nightmare of civil war. Drawing from a series of five household surveys covering two decades(1988-2008), we tell the story of this descent into hell from the standpoint of poverty and living standards. In 2008, after five years of civil war and another episode yet to come (2010-11), theextreme US$1.25 poverty headcount had reached a historical record, with Northern areas deeplyimpoverished by the partition.

Jobs are critical to poverty reduction and inclusive growth in Sierra Leone, where more than half the population is poor and most are dependent on labor earnings. The country will require substantial job creation to accommodate its young and growing population, coupled with low labor intensity in the mining sector that has been driving recent growth. Adding to this challenge is the need to improve the quality of jobs in a context where most workers are engaged in low productivity activities. Given that Sierra Leone is a post-conflict country, jobs are also central to sustained stability. Yet, despite the importance of jobs for Sierra Leone, the design of policies and interventions to promote these opportunities has been constrained by a limited knowledge base. The 2014 Labor Force Survey report seeks to contribute to solutions to the jobs challenge in Sierra Leone through a foundational analysis of the country’s first dedicated labor survey in nearly three decades. The report provides an overview of the employment situation in Sierra Leone, ranging from labor force participation to the types of employment among the working-age population. Through analysis of specialized modules, the report sheds light on key constraints to self-employment in agricultural activities and non-farm household enterprises, which are, respectively, the first-and second-largest sources of jobs in the economy. It also highlights the extent of informality in both wage employment and non-farm self-employment as well as how an individual’s status in the labor market relates to poverty. The report also presents information on skills levels and how basic skills are acquired by the working age population. Finally, the report discusses issues related to youth employment and the specific constraints faced by youth in gaining access to productive job opportunities.

This paper is about child fostering in Senegal, a practice widespread in Sub-Saharan Africa whereby children are temporarily sent to live with a host family. Using a rich household survey conducted in Senegal in 2006-7, the paper aims at describing the selection into fostering of both households and children and at examining the impact of fostering on the well-being of children (host, foster- and siblings left behind) measured through their school enrollment, labour and domestic work. Results suggest a wide heterogeneity among foster children, inducing differences in their well-being. The main sources of such heterogeneity come from the child’s gender and his duration of stay in the host household. Whether the fostering has been formally arranged between parents also seems to matter. Results are reassuring regarding the well-being of fostered children relative to their host siblings, even if they might not fare as well as children not involved in fostering. On average, education and labour outcomes of foster children are not different from those of their host siblings. In particular, results do not support the idea that fostered girls might be overloaded with domestic tasks: they do not seem to spend more time at it than their host sisters.

By applying regression discontinuity designs to a set of household surveys from the 1980–90s, we examine whether Côte d’Ivoire’s aggregate wealth was translated at the borders of neighboring countries. At the border of Ghana and at the end of the 1980s, large discontinuities are detected for consumption, child stunting, and access to electricity and safe water. Border discontinuities in consumption can be explained by differences in cash crop policies (cocoa and coffee). When these policies converged in the 1990s, the only differences that persisted were those in rural facilities. In the North, cash crop (cotton) income again made a difference for consumption and nutrition (the case of Mali). On the one hand, large differences in welfare can hold at the borders dividing African countries despite their assumed porosity. On the other hand, border discontinuities seem to reflect the impact of reversible public policies rather than intangible institutional traits.

In this paper, using an original survey, we analyze the distributional impact of international migration across two regions of Algeria. A semi-parametric descriptive analysis is complemented with a parametric model. Remittances do not significantly change the Gini coefficient in nearly any of the counterfactual scenarios. However, migration reduced poverty by 40 percent, with different effects across regions for extreme poverty. Foreign transfers, especially foreign pensions, have a strong positive impact on very poor families in one region. Poor families in the other region suffer from a “double loss”: their migrants do not provide local income and they do not send much money home.

Investment in land administration projects is often considered key for agricultural productivity and rural development in developing countries. But the evidence on the effect of such interventions is remarkably mixed. This article reviews the literature and discusses a number of challenges related to the analysis of the impacts of land administration programs, focusing on developing countries where the starting position is one of land administration systems based on the Napoleonic code, with existing individual rights that may be imperfect and insecure. We examine a set of conceptual and methodological challenges including: 1. a conceptual challenge related to the need to unbundle property rights and to establish the plausible causal chain for land administration interventions; 2. the existence of other binding constraints on productivity, implying the need to consider heterogeneities in policy impacts and the complementarity between property rights and other productive interventions; 3. the need to account for spillover effects of land interventions on non-targeted households; and 4. methodological challenges related to the causal identification of the impacts of such interventions.

Poland was divided among three empires—Russia, Austria–Hungary, and Prussia—for over a century until 1918. The partition brought about divergence in culture, institutions, and economic development. We use spatial regression discontinuity to examine, which empire effects are persistent. We find that differences in incomes, industrial production, education, corruption, and trust in government institutions disappeared with time as they were smoothed by economic forces and policy intervention. In contrast, differences in intensity of religious practices and in beliefs in democratic ideals, i.e., democratic capital, persist presumably via inter-generational within-family transmission. Differences in railroad infrastructure built by empires during industrialization persisted to this day. Cultural empire legacies have an effect on the political outcomes in contemporary Poland.

This paper investigates the interaction between corruption and governance at the sector level. A simple model illustrates how both an increase in regulatory autonomy and privatization may influence the effect of corruption. The interaction is analyzed empirically using a fixed-effects estimator on a panel of 153 electricity distribution firms across 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1995–2007. Greater corruption is associated with lower firm labor productivity, but this association is reduced when an independent regulatory agency is present. These results survive a range of robustness checks, including instrumenting for regulatory governance, controlling for a large range of observables, and using several different corruption measures. The association between corruption and productivity also appears weaker for privately owned firms compared to publicly owned firms, though this result is somewhat less robust.

This paper analyzes a tax credit program targeted at rural areas in France, including temporary and permanent wage subsidies on different types of jobs. We find no impact of the program on employment and wages, pointing to the absence of labor demand response. Comparison with a contemporaneous urban scheme suggests ways that the incentives of the rural program could be targeted more effectively

Cet article effectue une revue sélective de travaux récents d’économistes étudiant l’impact des institutions historiques sur le développement économique en Afrique. Nous discutons d’abord quelques questions conceptuelles impliquées par la mesure des institutions, puis présentons les données rassemblées par l’anthropologue G. P. Murdock et leurs principales critiques. Plusieurs travaux mobilisent à nouveau ces données pour montrer que certaines institutions « ethniques » précoloniales constituent des déterminants fondamentaux des différences de développement contemporaines. Nous commentons ces travaux puis les comparons avec d’autres qui relativisent plutôt les différences institutionnelles héritées de la période coloniale. Nous défendons en conclusion que des comparaisons d’études de cas sont plus fructueuses que des études transversales reposant sur des variations mal contrôlées.

We evaluate an experimental program in which the French public employment service anonymized résumés for firms that were hiring. Firms were free to participate or not; participating firms were then randomly assigned to receive either anonymous résumés or name-bearing ones. We find that participating firms become less likely to interview and hire minority candidates when receiving anonymous résumés. We show how these unexpected results can be explained by the self-selection of firms into the program and by the fact that anonymization prevents the attenuation of negative signals when the candidate belongs to a minority.

This paper considers how shocks to rural incomes intensify violence in India’s Naxalite insurgency. Using variation in annual rainfall in a panel of district level fatal incidents between 2005 and 2011, I find that deficient rainfall generally spurs targeted violence against civilians, but the number of Maoist attacks against security forces only increases in mining districts. This finding consistent with the idea that the relationship between income shocks and conflict depends on the type of targets and the revenue sources of the rebels. In particular, the fighting capacity of rebel groups against government forces could benefit more from negative rural income shocks if the group’s resources are sufficiently independent from the agricultural economy, as is the case in mining areas.

Exploiting original data from a Senegalese household survey, we provide evidence that fertility choices are partly driven by women’s needs for widowhood insurance. We use a duration model of birth intervals to show that women most at risk in case of widowhood intensify their fertility, shortening birth spacing, until they get a son. Insurance through sons might entail substantial health costs since short birth spacing raises maternal and infant mortality rates.

The concept of environmental migrants occurs frequently in the policy debate, in particular with regard to climate change and the incidence of such migration in low-income countries. This article reviews the economic studies of environmentally induced migration. It includes recent empirical analyses that try to link environmental change to migration flows and the spatial distribution of population. A consensus seems to emerge that there is little likelihood of large increases in international migration flows due to climate variability. The evidence to date shows that regional migration will be affected, however, either on the African continent or internally, within country borders. Theoretically, environmentally induced migration can be analyzed using different frameworks: the classical Harris-Todaro model of rural-urban migration, new economic geography models, models grounded in environmental economics of pollution externalities with free factor mobility, and the new economics of labor migration. I review some of the latest attempts to analyze environmentally induced migration theoretically and the policy-relevant conclusions that can be drawn.

We propose a novel selectivity correction procedure to deal with survey attrition in treatment effect models, at the crossroads of the Heckit model and the bounding approach of Lee (2009). As a substitute for the instrument needed in sample selectivity correction models, we use information on the number of prior calls made to each individual before obtaining a response to the survey. We obtain sharp bounds to the average treatment effect on the common support of responding individuals. Because the number of prior calls brings information, we can obtain tighter bounds than in other nonparametric methods.

This article develops a theoretical framework to analyse options for financing infrastructure in developing countries. We build a basic model that gives motivations for using a combination of public finance, private debt, and private equity. The model is then extended in a number of ways to examine factors that are important for developing countries. We focus in particular on key institutional weaknesses that are often important for infrastructure investment. Overall, we show that such weaknesses can be key in determining financing choices, but that they do not all push in the same direction. Financing schemes must therefore be adapted to consider the institutional limitations that are most pertinent in any given context.

Can tax regimes shape the incentives of governments to engage in or support counterinsurgency operations? India’s Maoist belt contains a large share of the country’s most valuable mineral deposits. Indian mining royalties benefit the States, but they are set by the central government. States are largely responsible for counter-insurgency operations within their territory. Therefore, the royalty regime could shape the incentive of states to support counter-insurgency efforts ien mining areas. This paper exploits the introduction of a 10% ad valorem tax on iron ore that was responsible for a 10-fold increase in royalty collections by the affected State governments. In a panel of district-level violence outcomes between 2007 and 2011, I find that the royalty hike was followed by a significant intensification of State violence in those districts that contain deposits of iron ore. There is no such impact for the deposits of other key minerals that were not subject to the royalty hike: bauxite and coal. These results are consistent with states taking the fiscal value of districts into account when they decide on the intensity of security operations.

How do the media affect public support for democratic institutions in a fragile democracy? What role do they play in a dictatorial regime? We study these questions in the context of Germany of the 1920s and 1930s. During the democratic period, when the Weimar government introduced progovernment political news, the growth of Nazi popularity slowed down in areas with access to radio. This effect was reversed during the campaign for the last competitive election as a result of the pro-Nazi radio broadcast following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. During the consolidation of dictatorship, radio propaganda helped the Nazis enroll new party members. After the Nazis established their rule, radio propaganda incited anti-Semitic acts and denunciations of Jews to authorities by ordinary citizens. The effect of anti-Semitic propaganda varied depending on the listeners’ predispositions toward the message. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect in places with historically low anti-Semitism.

Uncertainties persist in sub-Saharan Africa regarding both the availability of land which could be put under cultivation as well as the potential for an important improvement in yields. In order to shed light on these questions, this paper analyzes in detail the evolution of land use and agricultural productivity in Ghana over the period 1991-2005. We use data from three di erent sources, the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS), the Food and Agricultural Organisation data and satellite imagery. We document how, and under which conditions, a household survey such as the GLSS can be used to measure the evolution over time of aggregate land use, agricultural production and yields in a developing country like Ghana. We then show that the surface of land farmed per capita has increased over the period, resulting in a twofold increase of the total land under cultivation in Ghana. We provide indirect evidence that the expansion of land under cultivation is mainly shortening of fallows in the southern forest region and new land put under cultivation in the northern savannah region. Altogether we nd little evidence of an emerging land constraint in the agricultural sector in Ghana.

We examine the long-term effects on individual economic outcomes of a set of earthquakes – numerous, large, but mostly not extreme – that occurred in rural Indonesia since 1985. Using longitudinal individual-level data from large-scale household surveys, together with precise measures of local ground tremors obtained from a US Geological Survey database, we identify the effects of earthquakes, exploiting the quasi-random spatial and temporal nature of their distribution. Affected individuals experience short-term economic losses but recover in the medium-run (after two to five years), and even exhibit income and welfare gains in the long term (six to 12 years). The stocks of productive assets, notably in farms, get reconstituted and public infrastructures are reconstructed with some improvements, seemingly partly through external aid, allowing productivity to recover. These findings tend to discount the presence of poverty traps, and exhibit the potential long-term benefits from post-disaster interventions in context where disasters primarily affect physical assets.

When potential beneficiaries share knowledge and attitudes about a policy intervention, that can influence their decisions to participate and, in turn, change the effectiveness of both the policy and its evaluation. This matters notably in integrated social policies with several components. We examine neighborhood effects on the take-up of the schooling subsidy component of the Progresa-Oportunidades program in Mexico. We exploit random variations in the local densities of program beneficiaries generated by the randomized evaluation. Higher program densities in areas of 5 km radius increase the take-up of scholarships and enrollment at the junior-secondary level. These neighborhood effects exclusively operate on households receiving another component of the program, and do not carry over larger distances. While several tests reject heterogeneities in impacts due to spatial variations in implementation, we find suggestive evidence that neighborhood effects stem partly from the sharing of information about the program among eligible households.

Two related measures of educational inequality are proposed: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. Its selection is informed by consideration of two measurement issues that have typically been overlooked in the literature: the implications of the standardization of test scores for inequality indices, and the possible sample selection biases arising from the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) sampling frame. The measure of inequality of educational opportunity is given by the share of the variance in test scores that is explained by pre-determined circumstances. Both measures are computed for the 57 countries in which PISA surveys were conducted in 2006. Inequality of opportunity accounts for up to 35 percent of all disparities in educational achievement. It is greater in (most of) continental Europe and Latin America than in Asia, Scandinavia, and North America. It is uncorrelated with average educational achievement and only weakly negatively correlated with per capita gross domestic product. It correlates negatively with the share of spending in primary schooling, and positively with tracking in secondary schools.

Investment in land administration projects is often considered key for agricultural productivity and rural development in developing countries. But the evidence on such interventions is remarkably mixed. This paper reviews the literature and discusses a number of challenges related to the analysis of the impacts of land administration programs, focusing on developing countries where the starting position is one of land administration systems based on the Napoleonic code, with existing individual rights that may be imperfect and insecure. We examine a set of conceptual and methodological challenges including : 1) a conceptual challenge related to the need to unbundle property rights and to establish the plausible causal chain for land administration interventions; 2) the existence of other binding constraints on productivity, implying the need to consider heterogeneities in policy impacts and the complementarity between property rights and other productive interventions; 3) the need to account for spillovers of land interventions on non-targeted households; and 4) methodological challenges related to the causal identification of the impacts of such interventions.

Les réformes introduites en Russie dans les années 1990 n’ont pas seulement porté sur une libéralisation économique et politique. Pays ultracentralisé, la Russie a alors adopté une structure fédérale décentralisée. Cette expérience de décentralisation menée sous Eltsine est considérée comme l’un des facteurs de l’effondrement économique russe. Après 1999, l’ère Poutine a au contraire été marquée par une forte recentralisation. Revenant sur les raisons de l’échec de la décentralisation russe, et s’appuyant sur l’exemple d’autres pays où le fédéralisme s’est développé avec un certain succès (Mexique, Chine), E. Zhuravskaya montre que la centralisation actuelle est également néfaste pour la Russie. L’hétérogénéité de ce pays continent appelle à un fédéralisme qui conserverait une centralisation politique tout en garantissant à tous les niveaux (local, régional et fédéral) des élections libres dans un contexte véritablement démocratique.

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. As a second step, we estimate the impact of ICT, innovative work practices and training on employment flows by age group in the next period. Training appears to have a positive impact on the employability of older workers, but it offers limited prospects to dampen the age bias associated with new technologies and innovative work practices.

How much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor, primarily rural, economy? How much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality? We address these questions using original survey data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of consumption. While intergenerational linkages are evident, we find a relatively high degree of mobility across generations, associated with the shift from farm to non-farm sectors and greater economic activity of women. Male-dominated bequests of land and housing bring little gain to consumption and play little role in explaining inequality, though they have important effects on sector of activity. Inheritance of non-land assets and the education and occupation of parents (especially the mother) and their choices about children’s schooling are more important to adult welfare than property inheritance. Significant gender inequality in consumption is evident, though it is almost entirely explicable in terms of factors such as education and (non-land) inheritance. There are a number of other pronounced gender differences, with intergenerational linkages coming through the mother rather than the father.

We study the effects of admission into elite public high schools in Mexico City on students’ expected earnings, arguing these effects provide an indication of the value-added those schools produce. Using data for the centralized and exam-based allocation of students into schools and an adapted regression discontinuity design strategy, we find that admission substantially increases learning achievement, and also the future earnings and returns students expect from a college education, but no effect on the earnings expected with high school education alone. This suggests that students believe that the benefits from their elite education are complements to a college education.

The motivation for introducing statutory minimum wages in many developing countries is often threefold: poverty-reduction, social justice and growth. How well the policy succeeds in attaining these goals will depend on the national context and the numerous choices made when designing the policy. Institutional capacity in developing countries tends to be limited, so institutional arrangements must be adapted. Nevertheless, a statutory minimum wage appears to have the potential to help low- and middle-income countries advance toward the aforementioned development objectives, even in the face of weak enforcement capacity and pervasive informality.

In their paper “Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development” [Econometrica 81(1): 113-152], Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou claim that they document a strong relationship between pre-colonial political centralization and regional development, by combining Murdock’s ethnographic atlas (1967) with light density at night measures at the local level. We argue that their estimates do not properly take into account population effects. Among lowly populated areas, luminosity is dominated by noise, so that with linear specifications the coefficient of population density is biased downwards. We reveal that the identification of the effect of ethnic centralization very much relies on these areas. We implement a variety of models where the effect of population density is non-linear, and/or where the bounded or truncated nature of luminosity is taken into account. We conclude that the impact of ethnic-level political centralization on development is all contained in its long-term correlation with population density. We also abstract from the luminosity-population nexus by analyzing survey data for 33 countries. We show that individual-level outcomes like access to utilities, education, asset ownership etc. are not correlated with ethnic-level political centralization.

How do nationalistic media affect animosity between ethnic groups? We consider one of Europe’s deadliest conflicts since WWII, the Serbo-Croatian conflict. We show that, after a decade of peace, cross-border nationalistic Serbian radio triggers ethnic hatred toward Serbs in Croatia. Mostly attracted by nonpolitical content, many Croats listen to Serbian public radio (intended for Serbs in Serbia) whenever signal is available. As a result, the vote for extreme nationalist parties is higher and ethnically offensive graffiti are more common in Croatian villages with Serbian radio reception. A laboratory experiment confirms that Serbian radio exposure causes anti-Serbian sentiment among Croats.

How much economic mobility is there across generations in a poor, primarily rural, economy? How much do intergenerational linkages contribute to current inequality? We address these questions using original survey data on Senegal that include a sub-household measure of consumption for cells within the household. While intergenerational linkages are evident, we find a relatively high degree of mobility across generations, associated with the shift from farm to non-farm sectors and greater economic activity of women. Male-dominated bequests of land and housing bring little gain to consumption and play little role in explaining inequality, though they have important effects on sector of activity. Inheritance of non-land assets and the education and occupation of parents (especially the mother) and their choices about children’s schooling are more important to adult welfare than property inheritance. Significant gender inequality in consumption is evident, though it is almost entirely explicable in terms of factors such as education and (non-land) inheritance. There are a number of other pronounced gender differences, with intergenerational linkages appearing through the mother rather than the father.

This paper documents inequalities in access to education and educational achievements at basic and secondary education levels in Egypt. Examination of three cohorts suggests that, although basic education has democratized, some inequities in access to general secondary and college education have persisted over the past two decades. The analysis of test-scores from TIMSS and national examinations over time shows that more than a quarter of learning outcome inequality is attributable to circumstances beyond the control of a student, such as socioeconomic background and birthplace. The high level of overall achievement inequality observed makes inequities in learning opportunities between Egyptian youth high compared to other countries in absolute levels. Moreover learning gaps among pupils from different backgrounds appear at early grades. High and unequal levels of expenditures in private tutoring and tracking into vocational and general secondary schools that depends on a high stakes examination substantially contribute to unequal learning outcomes.

The partition of German Togoland after World War I provides a natural experiment to test the impact of British and French colonization. Using data of recruits to the Ghanaian colonial army 1908–1955, we find that literacy and religious affiliation diverge at the border between the parts of Togoland under British and French control as early as in the 1920s. We partly attribute this to policies towards missionary schools. The divergence is only visible in the South where educational and evangelization efforts were strong. Contemporary survey data show that border effects that began in colonial times still persist today.

This paper reports the results of a large scaled randomized controlled experiment comparing the public and private provision of counseling to job-seekers. The intention-to-treat estimates of both programs are not statistically different, but more workers were enrolled in the private program, implying an effect per beneficiary that is twice as large under the public as under the private program. We find suggestive evidence that the private firms may have insu fficiently mastered the counseling technology, and exercised less effort on those who had the best chance to find a job. This highlights the incentive problems in designing contracts for these services.

This article considers whether African utility regulators can draw useful lessons from the British experience over the past thirty years. We focus on three features that are considered key properties of the British regulatory model: price-cap incentive regulation, independent regulatory agencies and an emphasis on introducing competition where possible. For each property, we ask how relevant the model is for most African countries. Overall, we argue that although the British model probably has some lessons which can help improve utility performance in Africa, the problems that they help to solve are generally second-order. Ultimately, institutional weaknesses are the main root of regulatory failure in many African countries, and these weaknesses call for a model of regulation designed specifically to address them.

We analyze the influence of health and financial incentives on the retirement behavior of older workers in France, building upon the Stock and Wise (1990) option value approach. The model accounts for three main retirement routes: normal retirement, disability insurance (DI), and unemployment/preretirement pathways, and is estimated with a combination of microeconomic datasets that include the French data of the European SHARE survey. The estimates confirm that a decrease in the generosity of the pension and DI schemes induces people to stay longer in the labor market, and that people with better health tend to retire later. We present extreme situations simulating what an individual’s retirement behavior would have been if only one retirement route had existed and in the absence of constraints on work capabilities. We show that average years of work between 55 and 64 are nearly 14% greater when regular retirement incentives are applied to the whole population than when it is DI rules that are systematically applied.

Cet ouvrage a été rédigé juste après l’élection présidentielle contestée de novembre 2010 en Côte d’Ivoire, l’arrestation de Laurent Gbagbo et l’installation au pouvoir de son challenger au second tour Alassane Ouattara.

The Sourdun Internat d’excellence (Boarding for Excellence) programme opened its doors at the beginning of the 2009 school year. The 258 first boarders were drawn by lot from 395 eligible applicants. Over two years, we followed the interns and the 137 unsuccessful applicants. The latter constitute our “control” group. The draw guarantees that the two groups are initially identical, which allows us to isolate effects of Sourdun reliably, by comparing the interns with the control group students. Selected first for their motivation, the Sourdun students are of modest backgrounds and modest academic achievements. The boarding programme demanded some time for adaptation, so much so that little effect was seen in the first year. It was at the end of two years that a significant improvement in results in mathematics appeared among the Sourdun students compared with the others, along with increased academic ambition and a stronger desire to learn. In French, however, the interns did not have higher marks than the control group students. Several studies of other education policies have also found positive effects on results in maths but not in languages: the strengthening of verbal skills is perhaps to be conceived over the long term. A number of factors explain the impressive impact of the Sourdun programme. Two of them are likely to be connected: the enabling environment (low absenteeism, fewer acts of violence within the school) and the high investment by teachers and students in their own work, the study programme and the individual support available. By its nature, Sourdun remains an exception. But its effectiveness is a solid invitation to experiment with other measures to fight on a larger scale against academic inequalities. • Bringing together motivated middle school-level students, Sourdun clearly increases maths skills and boarders’ academic ambitions, but only after two years. • Its cost effectiveness is equal to reducing class sizes by half. • The work environment provided for the students seems essential: coaching, individual support, improvement of relations between the pupils and the teachers. • We cannot say whether the boarding programme would have the same effects on weaker or less motivated students, which leaves open the question of academic policies aimed at a wider target. J-PAL, poverty action lab, is a network of academics around the world who use the random assignment evaluation method. J-PAL’s objective is to reduce poverty by ensuring that public policy is grounded on scientific evidence.

L’internat d’excellence de Sourdun a ouvert ses portes à la rentrée 2009. Les 258 premiers internes ont été tirés au sort parmi 395 candidats éligibles. Nous avons suivi pendant deux ans les élèves internes et les 137 candidats qui n’ont pas été retenus. Ces derniers constituent notre groupe “témoin”. Le tirage au sort nous garantit que ces deux groupes sont initialement identiques, ce qui nous permet d’isoler de façon fiable les effets de Sourdun en comparant les internes et les élèves témoins. Sélectionnés d’abord pour leur motivation, les élèves de Sourdun sont d’origine modeste et de niveau scolaire intermédiaire. L’internat nécessite un temps d’adaptation, si bien que peu d’effets sont perceptibles dès la première année. C’est au terme de deux ans qu’apparaît une forte amélioration des résultats en mathématiques des élèves de Sourdun par rapport aux autres élèves, accompagnée d’une ambition scolaire accrue et d’un désir d’apprendre plus affirmé. En français cependant, les internes n’obtiennent pas de meilleurs résultats que les élèves témoins. Plusieurs études portant sur d’autres politiques scolaires trouvent aussi des effets en mathématiques mais pas en langue: le renforcement des compétences verbales s’envisage peut-être sur le plus long terme. De nombreux facteurs peuvent expliquer le fort impact de Sourdun. Deux se conjuguent vraisemblablement: le cadre propice au travail de l’internat (faible absentéisme, baisse des actes violents commis dans l’établissement), et le fort investissement des enseignants et des élèves dans le travail personnel, les études et le soutien individuel. Par nature, Sourdun reste une exception. Mais son efficacité est une ferme invitation à expérimenter d’autres dispositifs pour lutter à plus grande échelle contre les inégalités scolaires. • Réunissant des élèves motivés de niveau scolaire intermédiaire, Sourdun améliore clairement les compétences en mathématiques et l’ambition scolaire des internes, mais seulement au bout de deux ans. • Son rapport coût-efficacité est comparable à celui d’une réduction de moitié de la taille des classes. • Le cadre de travail que fournit l’internat semble essentiel : encadrement, soutien individuel, amélioration des relations entre jeunes et avec les enseignants… • On ne peut pas dire si l’internat aurait les mêmes effets sur des élèves moins motivés ou plus faibles, ce qui laisse ouverte la question des politiques scolaires à destination d’un public plus large. J-PAL, laboratoire d’action contre la pauvreté, est un réseau de professeurs du monde entier qui utilisent la méthode de l’évaluation par assignation aléatoire. L’objectif de J-PAL est de réduire la pauvreté en permettant que les politiques publiques soient fondées sur des preuves scientifiques rigoureuses. www.povertyactionlab.org L’Institut des politiques publiques (IPP) est développé dans le cadre d’un partenariat scientifique entre PSE et le CREST. L’IPP vise à promouvoir l’analyse et l’évaluation quantitatives des politiques publiques en s’appuyant sur les méthodes les plus récentes de la recherche en économie. www.ipp.eu

In this paper we discuss how the ” encouragement design “used in randomized controlled trials can be extended to a setting with two treatments and one control group. Conditions to interpret the Two-Stage Least Squares (TSLS) estimates causally are stronger than in the case with only one treatment and one control group. A rst case where a causal interpretation holds is when only those assigned to one of the two treatments can e ectively enter the corresponding program. A second case is when there are always takers. In that second case, entry rates into a given program should be the same among those assigned to the control group and those assigned to the other program; this restriction can be tested from the data. In cases where the restriction is rejected, we derive bounds to the Local Average Treatment E ect (LATE) based on weaker monotonicity conditions. We illustrate the results using data from a large randomized experiment where job seekers at risk of long term unemployment can receive a reinforced counseling scheme o ered either by the public or the private sector, or remain on a standard track.

We document the unequal enforcement of liberalization reform of business regulation across Russian regions with different governance institutions, which leads to unequal effects of liberalization. National liberalization laws were enforced more effectively in subnational regions with more transparent government, a more informed population, a higher concentration of industry, and stronger fiscal autonomy. As a result, liberalization had a substantial positive effect on the performance of small firms and the growth of the official small business sector in regions with stronger governance institutions. In contrast, in regions with weaker governance institutions, we observe no effect of reform and, in some cases, even a negative effect.

We estimate long-term effects of Jewish presence in Europe before World War II, using discontinuity at the border of the “Pale of Settlement” area where Jews were allowed to live in the Russian Empire. Current residents of the Pale have lower support for market, and are less entrepreneurial but more trusting compared to those outside the Pale. We suggest a mechanism and test for it: anti-Semitism generated persistent antimarket culture and trust among non-Jews. Consistent with this mechanism, antimarket attitudes and trust decrease with distance to pogroms controlling for historical Jewish presence. Self-identification and cohesion of majority depends on the presence of minority.

How far can the media protect or undermine democratic institutions in unconsolidated democracies, and how persuasive can they be in ensuring public support for dictator’s policies? We study this question in the context of Germany between 1929 and 1939. Using geographical and temporal variation in radio availability, we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election. After full consolidation of power, radio propaganda helped the Nazis to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews and other open expressions of anti-Semitism. The effect of Nazi propaganda was not uniform. Depending on listeners’ priors about the message, propaganda could be very effective or could backfire. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect on the support for anti-Semitic policies in places with historically low anti-Semitism.

This paper conceptualizes intergenerational occupational mobility between the farm and non-farm sectors in five African countries, measures it using nationally representative household survey data, and analyzes its determinants through a comparative method based on pooled logit regressions. We first analyze intergenerational gross mobility. Until the end of the 1980s, intergenerational flows toward the non-farm sector are high in Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, flows toward the farm sector are more often observed in Ghana and Uganda, and Madagascar displays less mobility in either direction. The pace of change in occupational structures and the magnitude of labor income dualism between the farm and non-farm sectors appear to explain those differences. We then net out structural change across generations and establish the first measurement of intergenerational net mobility in those five African countries. Ghana and Uganda stand out as relatively more fluid societies. Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea come next while Madagascar shows a particularly high reproduction of occupations. Educational mobility accounts for the Madagascar exception to a large extent, but not for the differences between the other countries. Spatial dualism of employment, i.e. the geographic segregation of farm and non-farm jobs, accounts for most of those remaining differences. We argue that the main determinants of intergenerational mobility, namely income and employment dualisms, likely reflect a historical legacy of different colonial administrations.

This chapter looks at the impact of instruments directly targeting consumers’ choices concerning food consumption, such as organic labelling and raising awareness through public information campaigns. It provides a better understanding of the main determinants for consuming organic food and products that take animal welfare into account, and examines how much more households are willing to pay for these products.

Ce rapport pr ésente les e ffets a court et moyen terme du programme Actenses, programme d’aide a l’orientation de lyc éens bas e sur le parrainage par des adultes issus du monde professionnel (actifs occup és). Le programme d’aide a l’orientation couvre les trois ann ées du lyc ée et s’adresse a des él èves entrant en seconde g én érale, en visant prioritairement des él èves de milieu social moins favoris e (lyc ées class es en programmes d’ éducation prioritaire, en particulier). Les r ésultats pr ésent és ici concernent les deux premi ères ann ées du programme (seconde et premi ère). Les donn ées au niveau de la classe de terminale n’ étant pas collect ées dans leur totalit é, mais uniquement pour la premi ère cohorte, soit un tiers de l’ échantillon, cet e ffectif est insuffi sant pour produire des r ésultats statistiquement pertinents au niveau de la terminale. L’orientation en fin de seconde constitue n éanmoins un jalon important dans la carri ère du lyc éen ainsi que l’orientation e ffective de l’ él ève en classe de premi ère.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is one of three flexible mechanisms included in the Kyoto Protocol. It enables Annex I countries to finance emission reductions in developing (non-Annex I) countries and use the credits thus obtained to meet their emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto Protocol. The CDM has two objectives: to reduce the costs of compliance of the Annex I countries’ emission reduction commitments, and to assist developing countries in achieving sustainable development and in contributing to the ultimate objective of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC). The major part of emission reductions under the CDM (certified emission reductions – CERs) comes from renewable energy investments, reduction of nonCO2 greenhouse gases (hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide), and energy-efficiency projects. Over two-third of projects and emission reductions occur in China and India. The uneven geographical distribution of projects and the lack of consistent control of projects’ contribution to sustainable development make some contend that the CDM has not fulfilled its initial objectives. On the other hand, it has brought forth a substantial amount of CERs, and it is the only Kyoto Mechanism to bring developing countries into the efforts of the UNFCCC, notably through unilateral projects developed solely by the developing host country.

Les internats d’excellence constituent une orientation nouvelle et importante au sein des politiques scolaires. Ils visent à promouvoir la réussite d’élèves motivés, mais qui ne bénéficient pas d’un environnement social ou familial favorable pour développer leur potentiel. Le régime de l’internat doit permettre à ces jeunes de travailler dans de bonnes conditions et de bénéficier d’un encadrement adapté tout au long de la journée. On peut y voir une forme très intensive et volontariste de l’éducation prioritaire. L’internat de Sourdun est le premier à avoir ouvert ses portes, à la rentrée 2009. Il a été suivi par 44 autres, si bien que 4 173 places étaient disponibles en internat d’excellence à la rentrée 2012. L’engagement budgétaire dont cette politique bénéficie, concentré sur un nombre relativement faible d’élèves, justifié les efforts mis en oeuvre pour l’évaluer.

Ce rapport présente les résultats de l’évaluation d’un programme développé par l’association Frateli visant à améliorer l’insertion professionnelles des diplômés de Master 2, en s’appuyant notamment sur la mise en relation du jeune diplômé avec un « parrain » en activité professionnelle. Le programme Frateli Université, qui regroupe parrainage, coaching collectif et mise en place d’une communauté, représente un coût moyen d’environ 280 euros par étudiant (coûts fixes exclus). La demande pour le programme s’est avérée plus faible que prévu : 637 étudiants volontaires (soit environ 16 % des étudiants éligibles) au lieu de 1000 visés. L’offre de parrains a également été difficile à mobiliser, si bien qu’un étudiant sur trois entré dans le programme n’a finalement pas eu de parrain. L’intensité réduite de l’intervention limite les effets attendus du programme et la taille des échantillons amoindrit la capacité statistique à les détecter. Dans ce contexte, le programme Frateli Université n’a pas eu d’impact statistiquement significatif sur le comportement de recherche d’emploi des bénéficiaires : temps passé à rechercher un emploi, canaux utilisés, temps passé en stage, nombre de candidatures. Il n’a pas eu non plus d’impact statistiquement significatif sur l’insertion professionnelle : taux d’emploi, type de contrat de travail, revenus d’activité.

Discipline au croisement de l’économie et de la statistique, l’économétrie reste pour beaucoup mystérieuse, alors qu’elle est de plus en plus souvent invoquée dans les débats politiques. L’objectif de ce guide est de rendre la lecture des textes économétriques accessible à des non-spécialistes. Le parcours, inspiré d’un enseignement auprès d’étudiants non économistes, comporte trois entrées. L’entrée par l’histoire montre les controverses suscitées par la discipline: l’économétrie permet-elle, conformément à son projet initial, d’expliquer les phénomènes économiques, de tester les théories et de faire des prédictions? L’entrée par la méthodologie présente les principaux outils en privilégiant l’intuition sur la technique. Enfin et surtout, l’entrée par la lecture guidée d’articles scientifiques illustre l’apport de l’économétrie dans deux débats contemporains: la générosité du RMI est-elle une des causes du chômage? Les baisses de charges patronales sur les bas salaires permettent-elles de créer davantage d’emplois ? (présentation de l’éditeur)

European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to “natural differences” as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in particular in economics, I try to sketch the lines of a research program dedicated to the politics of inequality on the one hand, to political inequalities on the other hand.

Studies of mass support for economic reform reveal a simple conclusion: Everyone hates privatization. Yet whether respondents hold this view due to a preference for state property or concerns about the legitimacy of privatization is unclear. We test these arguments using a 2006 survey of 28,000 individuals in 28 post-communist countries and find that a lack of human capital affects support for revising privatization primarily via a preference for state property over private property; whereas transition-related hardships influence support for revising privatization due to both a preference for state property and concerns about the legitimacy of privatization. These results suggest the value of analyses that not only link respondent traits with support for policy, but that also probe the motivations that underpin this support. They also indicate that opposition to privatization should not be equated with support for renationalization.

We look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Côte d’Ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers’ children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment, labor, height stature, and morbidity. Using precrisis (1985-88) and postcrisis (1993) data, we propose a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes, whereby we compare children of cocoa-producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village. This causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine. Hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context. We also provide evidence of gender bias against young girls with respect to education and health care. We finally argue that the difference-in-difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects, likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints.

La création en 2008 du Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse (FEJ) a contribué à développer en France les expérimentations sociales et accru leur visibilité. L’innovation principale du FEJ est la promotion du ” couple expérimentation – évaluation ” : le financement public de l’expérimentation requiert que soit prévue en amont la façon dont l’impact du projet pourra être évalué ex post. L’objectif est de financer ainsi un ” bien public “, à savoir, une meilleure connaissance des effets des politiques sociales.

With the development of modern information technologies, relying on nanotechnologies and remote sensing, a number of systems can be envisaged that allow for monitoring of the negative externalities generated by producers, consumers or travelers – road pricing schemes or individual emission meters for automobiles are two examples. We analyze a dynamic model of stock pollution when the regulator has incomplete information on emissions generated by heterogeneous agents. Our contribution is to explicitly study a decentralized policy for adoption of monitoring equipment over time. We determine second-best tax rates, the pattern of monitoring technology adoption, and identify conditions for the voluntary diffusion of monitoring technologies over time. Simulations show the welfare gains compared to alternative policies.

This paper provides quasi-experimental (RDD) estimates of the impact of a tax credit program targeted at less densely populated areas. The program was launched in the mid 1990s in rural France and includes corporate and payroll tax exemptions. Variations over time and across rm types allow un-bundling the overall program impact into three components: a quite restrictive, short-term (1-year) payroll tax exemption on new hires; permanent payroll tax exemptions in the non-pro t sector; and corporate tax exemptions for new rms. We nd no signi cant impact of the program on total employment or the number of plants, and no impact of the di erent program components on targeted subsets of rms. Large positive e ects can be statistically rejected.

ollowing the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), firms may react to increasing skill requirements either by training or hiring the new skills, or a combination of the two.Using matched datasets with about 1,000 French plants, we assess the relative importance of these external and internal labour market strategies. We show that skill upgrading following technological and organisational changes takes place mostly through internal labour markets adjustments. Consistently with the results in the literature, we find that the intensive use of ICT is associated with an upward shift in the occupational structure within firms. We show that about one third of the upgrading of the occupational structure is due to hiring and firing workers from and to the external labour market, whereas two-thirds are due to promotions. Moreover, we find no compelling evidence of external labour market strategies based on “excess turnover”. In contrast, French firms heavily rely on training in order to upgrade the skill level of their workforce. When looking at potential heterogeneity across firms in skill upgrading strategies, we find that all firms rely much more on promotions than on external movements in order to shift their occupational structure upward. In contrast, different training patterns are found across sectors : the use of ICT is strongly correlated with training for all occupational groups in manufacturing sectors, whereas this is not the case in services. This difference is robust to controlling for other sources of heterogeneity and may be explained by the fact that labour turnover is much higher in services than in manufacturing.

This issue of Regional Science and Urban Economics is the special conference issue of the 3rd AFD-World Bank Migration and Development Conference, which took place at the Paris School of Economics on September 10-11, 2010.

Environmentally-induced migration can be analyzed through several theoretical frameworks: the new economics of labour migration, models grounded in environmental economics that analyze pollution externalities under the assumption of free factor mobility, international trade models as well as new economic geography models of the spatial distribution of population. This review surveys some of the latest attempts to analyze environmentally-induced migration, both empirically and theoretically, and aims at identifying the policy-relevant extensions that can be done. The topic is important given evidence on the current and future impact of climate change, and its incidence on low-income countries in particular. The review includes the recent empirical analyses that tries to link evidence on environmental change, in particular climate variability, to migration flows and the spatial distribution of population. A consensus seems to emerge that there is little likelihood of large increases in international migration flows due to climate variability. The evidence to date shows that regional migration will be affected, though, either on the African continent or internally, within country borders. The results have implications for urbanization trends and the sharing of common resources.

We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two-month increments per year of birth. We find strong evidence that the spike in the benefit claiming hazard at 65 moved in lockstep along with the FRA. Results on self-reported retirement and exit from employment go in the same direction. The responsiveness to the new FRA is stronger for people with higher cognitive skills. We interpret the findings as evidence of reference dependence with loss aversion.

The French pattern of early transitions out of employment is basically explained by the low age at “normal” retirement and by the importance of transitions through unemployment insurance and early-retirement schemes before access to normal retirement. These routes have exempted French workers from massively relying on disability motives for early exits, contrarily to the situation that prevails in some other countries where normal ages are high, unemployment benefits low and early-retirement schemes almost non-existent. Yet the role of disability remains interesting to examine in the French case, at least for prospective reasons in a context of decreasing generosity of other programs. The study of the past reforms of the pension system underlines that disability routes have often acted as a substitute to other retirement routes. Changes in the claiming of invalidity benefits seem to match changes in pension schemes or controls more than changes in such health indicators as the mortality rates. However, our results suggest that increases in average health levels over the past two decades have come along with increased disparities. In that context, less generous pensions may induce an increase in the claiming of invalidity benefits partly because of substitution effects, but also because the share of people with poor health increases.

This paper addresses the question of intergenerational schooling mobility in Senegal. We use an original survey conducted in 2003 that provides instruments to deal with the endogeneity of parent’s education. In Senegal, school supply has been increasing a lot over the last decades, individuals who are now adults had different exposure to the schooling system, depending on where they lived when they were young and on their birth cohort. Hence, a first set of instruments describes the infrastructures available in the environment in which parents lived when they were 10 years old. Moreover, variation in education demand for a child is also driven by his/her position among his/her siblings, since older children tend to be less educated in West Africa. Being the first born is random but implies different educational outcomes than other birth ranks. Hence, the second set of instruments describes whether the parents were the first born among their same sex siblings. The estimated effect of father’s education is more than double when its endogeneity is accounted for. Unexpectedly, mother’s education comes out as a lesser determinant. We then focus on the understanding of the channels through which parental education affects children’s schooling. We present the results pointing at the importance of the direct impact of parental education relative to the effect passing through wealth or household activity choices.

The French pattern of early transitions out of employment is basically explained by the low age at “normal” retirement and by the importance of transitions through unemployment insurance and early-retirement schemes before access to normal retirement. These routes have exempted French workers from massively relying on disability motives for early exits, contrarily to the situation that prevails in some other countries where normal ages are high, unemployment benefits low and early-retirement schemes almost non-existent. Yet the role of disability remains interesting to examine in the French case, at least for prospective reasons in a context of decreasing generosity of other programs. The study of the past reforms of the pension system underlines that disability routes have often acted as a substitute to other retirement routes. Changes in the claiming of invalidity benefits seem to match changes in pension schemes or controls more than changes in such health indicators as the mortality rates. However, our results suggest that increases in average health levels over the past two decades have come along with increased disparities. In that context, less generous pensions may induce an increase in the claiming of invalidity benefits partly because of substitution effects, but also because the share of people with poor health increases.

We provide a new compilation of data on ethnic, linguistic, and religious composition at the subnational level for a large number of countries. Using these data, we measure segregation of groups within the country. To overcome the endogeneity problem that arises because of mobility and endogenous internal borders, we construct an instrument for segregation. We find that more ethnically and linguistically segregated countries, i.e., those where groups live more spatially separately, have a lower quality of government; there is no relationship between religious segregation and governance. Trust is an important channel of influence; it is lower in more segregated countries.

This paper considers a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households in small rural villages and studies the effects of the geographic proximity between villages on individual enrollment decisions. Exploiting variations in the treatment status across contiguous villages generated by the randomized evaluation design, the paper finds that the additional effect stemming from the local density of neighboring recipients amounts to roughly one third of the direct effect of program receipt. Importantly, these spatial externalities are concentrated among children from beneficiary households. This suggests that the intervention has enhanced educational aspirations by triggering social interactions among the targeted population.

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on the impact of IT diffusion on the stability of employment relationships. We document the evolution of the different components of job instability over a panel of 350 local labor markets in France, from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s. Although workers in more educated local labor markets adopt IT faster, they do not experience any increase in job instability. More specifically, we find no evidence that the faster diffusion of IT is associated with any change in job-to-job transitions, and we find that it is associated with relatively less frequent transitions through unemployment. Overall, the evidence goes against the view that the diffusion of IT has spurred job instability. Combining the local labor market variations with firm data, we argue that these findings can be explained by French firms’ strong reliance on training and internal promotion strategies in order to meet the new skills requirement associated with IT diffusion.

This paper proposes two related measures of educational inequality: one for educational achievement and another for educational opportunity. The former is the simple variance (or standard deviation) of test scores. It is selected after careful consideration of two measurement issues that have typically been overlooked in the literature: the implications of the standardization of test scores for inequality indices, and the possible sample selection biases arising from the PISA sampling frame. The measure of inequality of educational opportunity is given by the share of the variance in test scores which is explained by pre-determined circumstances. Both measures are computed for the 57 countries in which PISA surveys were conducted in 2006. Inequality of opportunity accounts for up to 35% of all disparities in educational achievement. It is greater in (most of) continental Europe and Latin America than in Asia, Scandinavia and North America. It is uncorrelated with average educational achievement and only weakly negatively correlated with per capita GDP. It correlates negatively with the share of spending in primary schooling, and positively with tracking in secondary schools.

Survey data reveals that the pace of increase in height stature experienced by successive cohorts born in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana during the late colonial period (1925-1960) is almost as high as the pace observed in France and Great Britain during the period 1875 to 1975, even when correcting for the bias arising from old-age shrinking. By contrast, the early post-colonial period (1960-1985) is characterised by stagnation or even reversion in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. This article argues that the selection effects linked for instance to measuring the height of women rather than men, mothers rather than women, and, most importantly, the interactions between height and mortality, cannot account for these figures. It then disaggregates these national trends by parental background and district of birth, and match individual data with district-level historical data on export crop (cocoa) expansion, urban density and colonial investment in health and education. Finally, it provides evidence that a significant share of the increase in height stature may be related to the early stages of urbanisation and cocoa production.

We test the premise of the theoretical literature that M-form political hierarchies are effective in creating yardstick competition between regional divisions only when those divisions have sufficiently diversified or similar industrial composition. The reason for this is that the competition among poorly diversified inter-related divisions creates incentives for regional leaders to pursue policies that inhibit industrial growth in neighboring regions in order to make their own region look better from the point of view of the center. We use a unique episode in Soviet history, when a traditional Soviet unitary-form (U-form) hierarchy was replaced by a multidivisional-form (M-form) organization, namely, Khrushchev’s Sovnarkhoz reform. First, we demonstrate that during this reform regional leaders were subjected to relative performance evaluation, which created incentives to generate industrial growth. Second, we show that these career concerns resulted in higher growth in regions with sufficiently diversified and, therefore, self-contained economies, and lower growth in highly specialized regions.

The measurement of inequality of opportunity has hitherto not been attempted in a number of countries because of data limitations. This paper proposes two alternative approaches to circumventing the missing data problems in countries where a demographic and health survey (DHS) and an ancillary household expenditure survey are available. One method relies only on the DHS, and constructs a wealth index as a measure of economic advantage. The alternative method imputes consumption from the ancillary survey into the DHS. In both cases, we compute a lower bound estimator of the share of (ex-ante) inequality of opportunity in total inequality. Parametric and non-parametric estimates are calculated for each method, and the parametric approach is shown to yield preferable lower-bound measures. In an application to the sample of ever-married women aged 30-49 in Turkey, inequality of opportunity accounts for at least 26% (31%) of overall inequality in imputed consumption (the wealth index).

Building on the existing literature, this paper constructs a simple scalar measure of inequality of opportunity and applies it to six Latin American countries. The measure–which captures between-group inequality when groups are defined exclusively on the basis of predetermined circumstances–is shown to yield a lower-bound estimate of true inequality of opportunity. Absolute and relative versions of the index are defined, and alternative parametric and non-parametric methods are employed to generate robust estimates. In the application to Latin America, we find inequality of opportunity shares ranging from one quarter to one half of total consumption inequality. An opportunity-deprivation profile that identifies the worst-off types in each society is also formally defined, and described for the same six countries. In three of them, 100 percent of the opportunity-deprived were found to be indigenous or Afro-descendants.

Ce texte résume l’expérience de la taxe carbone en Suède : son efficacité environnementale, ses effets distributifs, et les recettes générées par le dispositif.

Nous analysons dans quelle mesure la formation peut atténuer les effets défavorables, pour l’emploi des seniors, des changements technologiques et organisationnels. À partir d’un panel d’entreprises françaises suivies sur la seconde moitié des années 1990, nous confirmons le caractère biaisé à l’encontre des salariés âgés des nouvelles technologies et de certaines nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail. Internet et l’adoption d’ordinateurs connectés en réseau ainsi que l’élargissement des responsabilités confiées aux opérateurs tendent à réduire la part des seniors dans l’emploi. En revanche, le raccourcissement de la chaîne de commandement sous la forme d’une réduction du nombre de niveaux hiérarchiques est favorable aux seniors. La formation continue contribue à protéger les seniors, sans néanmoins annuler les effets défavorables des changements organisationnels et technologiques.

We show how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure mean income (growth) component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to ‘non-income’ factors and differences in the model linking outcomes to income and non-income characteristics. The income effect at the micro level is modelled non-parametrically, so as to flexibly reflect potentially complex distributional changes. Our proposed method is illustrated using data for Morocco and Vietnam, and the results offer some surprising insights into the observed aggregate gains in schooling attainments.

We look at the drastic cut of the administered cocoa producer price in 1990 Cote d’Ivoire and study to which extent cocoa producers’ children suffered from this severe aggregate shock in terms of school enrollment, labor, height stature and morbidity. Using pre-crisis (1985-88) and post-crisis (1993) data, we propose a difference-in-difference strategy to identify the causal effect of the cocoa shock on child outcomes, whereby we compare children of cocoa-producing households and children of other farmers living in the same district or the same village. This causal effect is shown to be rather strong for the four child outcomes we examine. Hence human capital investments are definitely procyclical in this context. We also argue that the difference-in-difference variations can be interpreted as private income effects, likely to derive from tight liquidity constraints.

En 2008, les quatre plus gros destinataires de remises parmi les pays à revenu faible ou intermédiaire sont l’Inde, la Chine, le Mexique et les Philippines, avec des flux atteignant respectivement 50, 49, 26 et 19 milliards de dollars.

Why and when do businessmen run for public office rather than rely upon other means of influence? What are the implications of their participation for public policy? We show formally that “businessman candidacy” and public policy are jointly determined by the institutional environment. When institutions that hold elected officials accountable to voters are strong, businessmen receive little preferential treatment and are disinclined to run for office. When such institutions are weak, businessmen can subvert policy irrespective of whether they hold office, but they may run for office to avoid the cost of lobbying elected officials. Evidence from Russian gubernatorial elections supports the model’s predictions. Businessman candidates emerge in regions with low media freedom and government transparency, institutions that raise the cost of reneging on campaign promises. Among regions with weaker institutions, professional politicians crowd out businessmen when the rents from office are especially large.

Using survey data of 10,000 households from 10 OECD countries, we identify the driving factors of household adoption of water-efficient equipment by estimating Probit models of a household’s probability to invest in such equipment. The results indicate that environmental attitudes and ownership status are strong predictors of adoption of water-efficient equipment. In terms of policy, we find that households that were both metered and charged for their water individually had a much higher probability to invest in water-efficient equipment compared to households that paid a flat fee.

L’entrée dans la seconde décennie du XXIe siècle est l’occasion de procéder à des évaluations et à des bilans rétrospectifs, dans la mesure où le tournant du siècle a été marqué par d’importantes réformes. De l’introduction du revenu minimum d’insertion (RMI) à la fin des années 1980 à celle du revenu de solidarité active (RSA) vingt ans plus tard, en passant par l’instauration de l’abaissement des cotisations sociales sur les bas salaires – dont le dispositif a été plusieurs fois réformé – et de la prime pour l’emploi, la politique publique en direction des bas salaires et des bas revenus a été particulièrement active en France au cours des vingt dernières années. Ce numéro rassemble des travaux qui abordent tous, dans une perspective d’évaluation et d’étude d’impact, un dispositif public intervenant sur ce segment du marché du travail. Cette introduction se propose de les replacer dans le contexte plus large des travaux et des débats qui ont porté sur cette thématique au cours des dix dernières années. Adoptant une classification simple, nous examinerons successivement l’impact des dispositifs publics sous l’angle de la demande – avec, notamment, les évaluations de la réforme de 2003 portant sur les exonérations de cotisations sociales – puis du côté de l’offre – avec l’évocation de l’impact des minima sociaux sur les comportements d’activité et d’emploi. Au-delà de l’impact quantitatif – effectif ou potentiel – sur l’offre et la demande, une troisième série de travaux abordent les effets de certains dispositifs publics sur la qualité de l’emploi par le biais de la question de l’existence d’éventuelles trappes à bas salaire.

In Africa, boundaries delineated during the colonial era now divide young in-dependent states. By applying regression discontinuity designs to a large set of surveys covering the 1986-2001 period, this paper identities many large and significant jumps in welfare at the borders between five West-African countries around Cote d’Ivoire. Border discontinuities mirror the differences between country averages with respect to household income, connection to utilities and education. Country of residence often makes a difference, even if distance to capital city has some attenuating power. The results are consistent with a national integration process that is underway but not yet achieved.

We investigate the long-term effects of the important presence of Jews in Eastern Europe before the Second World War and their disappearance during the Holocaust. The Pale of Settlement, the area which Jewish residents were confined to in the Russian Empire, is used as a source of exogenous variation in the size of the Jewish population before the Second World War. Based on election and survey data, we find that current residents of the Pale, compared to their counterparts outside the Pale, vote more for socialist anti-market parties, have lower support for market economy and democracy, are less engaged in entrepreneurship, but exhibit higher levels of trust. At the same time, the Pale has no lasting effects on average consumption, income, and education levels. Regression discontinuity at the Pale border helps identification. We show that the effect of the Pale is related to the former presence of Jews rather than the inflow of new migrant population into the formerly-Jewish areas. We suggest a possible mechanism and present evidence consistent with it: non-Jewish population, at the time when two groups lived together side-by-side, developed persistent anti-market culture and bonding trust, rooted in ethnic hatred towards Jews. We show that, consistent with the mechanism, current residents of towns closer to places of pogroms exhibit higher trust and anti-market attitudes even controlling for the historical share of Jews in the population and the Pale.

The optimal degree of decentralization depends on the importance of inter-state externalities of local policies. We show that inter-state externalities are determined by the spatial distribution of interest groups within the country. Interest groups who have multi-state scope internalize inter-state externalities to a larger extent than the lobbyists with interests within a single state. We use variation in the geographic boundaries of politically-powerful industrial interests to estimate the effect of inter-state externalities on firm performance. Using firm-level panel data from a peripheralized federation, Russia in 1996-2003, we show that, controlling for firm fixed effects, the performance of firms substantially improves with an increase in the number of neighboring regions under influence of multi-regional business groups compared to the number influenced by local business groups. Our findings have implications for the literatures on federalism and on international trade as trade restrictions are a common source of inter-state externalities.

We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two month increments per year of birth for cohorts born from 1938 to 1943. We find strong evidence that the spike in the benefit claiming hazard at 65 moved in lockstep along with the FRA. Results on self-reported retirement and exit from employment are less clear-cut, but go in the same direction. The responsiveness to the new FRA is stronger for people with higher cognitive skills. We interpret the findings as evidence of reference dependence with loss aversion. We develop a simple labor supply model with reference dependence that can explain the results. The model has potentially important implications for framing of future Social Security reforms.

Using a matched employer-employee dataset on the French manufecturing sector in the 1990s, we investigate how training incidence responds to technical and organizational changes. Using a difference-in-difference approach across age groups and types of firms, we find that older workers in low-skill occupations lag behind in terms of training (in computer skills and in teamwork) when firms implement advanced information technologies. By contrast, there is no significant difference between age groups in the training response to advanced IT among workers in high-skill occupations, or in the training disadvantage of older workers with regard to training in computer skills may be one cause of age-biased technical change. It severly affects low-skill older in firms implementaing advanced information technologies.

This paper studies the impact of changes in educational opportunities on various definitions of labour market inequalities in Brazil over two decades (1976-96). Using four editions of the nationally representative PNAD survey, we analyze the evolution of overall inequalities and inequalities of opportunity in 40-49 year old males’ earnings. We design and implement semiparametric decompositions of the respective effects of (i) schooling expansion, (ii) changes in the structure of earnings, and (iii) changes in intergenerational educational mobility. Earnings inequalities varied little over the period, with a peak in the late 1980s that can be imputed to hyperinflation. First of all, the decompositions show that changes in the distribution of education contributed to the increase in both overall earnings inequalities and inequalities of opportunity among the oldest generations, before sharply reducing them among the post-WWII cohorts. Secondly, the decrease in returns to education also contributed to equalizing labour market opportunities in the 1988-96 period. Thirdly and lastly, the changes in educational mobility were not large enough to significantly affect earnings inequalities, whereas it is shown that they should play a prominent role in equalizing opportunities in the future.

Questions about the relationship between equity and growth, which lie at the heart of every chapter in this volume, are at least as old as economics itself. In the preface to his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, David Ricardo wrote: “The produce of earth—all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labor, machinery and capital—is divided among three classes of the community, namely the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the laborers by whose industry it is cultivated. But in different stages of society, the proportions of the whole produce of the earth which will be allotted to each of these classes … will be essentially different … To determine the laws which regulate this distribution is the principal problem in Political Economy.

Les remises des migrants ont cru régulièrement dans les 20 dernières années, jusqu’à représenter des pourcentages élevés par rapport à la richesse des pays pauvres. La crise économique et financière mondiale de 2008, contrairement aux craintes exprimées par certains, ne se traduira pas par une chute massive des remises des migrants vers les pays du Sud. A la baisse effectivement observée en 2009 devrait succéder un redressement rapide dès 2010.

Following the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT), firms may react to increasing skill requirements either by training or hiring the new skills, or a combination of the two. Using matched datasets with about 1,000 French plants, we assess the relative importance of these external and internal labour market strategies. We show that skill upgrading following technological and organisational changes takes place mostly through internal labour markets adjustments. Consistently with the results in the literature, we find that the intensive use of ICT is associated with an upward shift in the occupational structure within firms. We show that about one third of the upgrading of the occupational structure is due to hiring and firing workers from and to the external labour market, whereas two-thirds are due to promotions. Moreover, we find no compelling evidence of external labour market strategies based on “excess turnover”. In contrast, French firms heavily rely on training in order to upgrade the skill level of their workforce. When looking at potential heterogeneity across firms in skill upgrading strategies, we find that all firms rely much more on promotions than on external movements in order to shift their occupational structure upward. In contrast, different training patterns are found across sectors: the use of ICT is strongly correlated with training for all occupational groups in manufacturing sectors, whereas this is not the case in services. This difference is robust to controlling for other sources of heterogeneity and may be explained by the fact that labour turnover is much higher in services than in manufacturing.

The randomized trial literature has helped to renew the field of microeconometric policy evaluation by emphasizing identification issues raised by endogenous program participation. Measurement and attrition issues have perhaps received less attention. This paper analyzes the dramatic impact of sample attrition in a large job search experiment. We take advantage of two independent surveys on the same initial sample of 8,000 persons. The first one is a long telephone survey that had a strikingly low and unbalanced response rate of about 50%. The second one is a combination of administrative data and a short telephone survey targeted at those leaving the unemployment registers; this enriched data source has a balanced and much higher response rate (about 80%). With naive estimates that neglect non responses, these two sources yield puzzlingly different results. Using the enriched administrative data as benchmark, we find evidence that estimates from the long telephone survey lack external and internal validity. We turn to existing methods to bound the effects in the presence of sample selection; we extend them to the context of randomization with imperfect compliance. The bounds obtained from the two surveys are compatible but those from the long telephone survey are somewhat uninformative. We conclude on the consequences for data collection strategies.

Despite strong growth performance in transition economies in the last decade, residents of transition countries report abnormally low levels of life satisfaction. Using data from the World Values Survey and other sources, we study various explanations of this phenomenon. First, we document that the disparity in life satisfaction between residents of transition and nontransition countries is much larger among the elderly. Second, we find that deterioration in public goods provision, an increase in macroeconomic volatility, and a mismatch of human capital of residents educated before transition (which disproportionately affects the aged population) explain a great deal of the difference in life satisfaction between transition countries and other countries with similar income and other macroeconomic conditions. The rest of the gap is explained by the difference in the quality of the samples. As in other countries, life satisfaction in transition countries is strongly related to income; but, due to a higher nonresponse of high-income individuals in transition countries, the survey-data estimates of the recent increase in life satisfaction, driven by 10-year sustained economic growth in transition region, are biased downwards. The evidence suggests that if the region keeps growing, life satisfaction in transition countries will catch up with the “normal” level in the near future.

Cette intervention résume l’expérience de la taxe carbone suédoise, ses effets et son efficacité.

We analyze the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, our empirical analysis confirms that new technologies and some innovative workplace practices are biased against older workers. The use of the Internet and the adoption of computer networks tend to increase the wage share of middle-aged workers and to reduce the share of workers older than 50. By contrast, the reduction of the number of hierarchical layers is favourable to older workers. Training contributes to protect older workers in terms of employment and/or of wages.

Ce rapport analyse l’impact de deux dispositifs d’accompagnement renforc é des demandeurs d’emploi : la prise en charge d él égu ée a des opérateurs priv és de placement (OPP) par l’Un edic, et le dispositif Cap vers l’entreprise (CVE) mis en oeuvre par l’ANPE. Ces deux programmes ont et e d eploy és à titre exp érimental pendant l’ann ée 2007 et le 1er trimestre de l’ann ée 2008, pour concerner environ 40 000 demandeurs d’emploi chacun.

Ce rapport analyse l’impact de deux dispositifs d’accompagnement renforcé des demandeurs d’emploi : la prise en charge déléguée a des opérateurs privés de placement (OPP) par l’Unedic, et le dispositif Cap vers l’entreprise (CVE) mis en œuvre par l’ANPE. Ces deux programmes ont été déployés à titre expérimental pendant l’année 2007 et le 1er trimestre de l’année 2008, pour concerner environ 40 000 demandeurs d’emploi chacun.

Les pays en transition ont considérablement réduit leurs émissions de CO2 entre 1995 et 2003. Cette performance est-elle due à l’application d’une politique volontariste de la part des gouvernements, ou bien est-elle un simple effet collatéral de la transformation industrielle majeure subie par ces pays ? Nous tentons de répondre à cette question en développant deux équations structurelles pour la demande (émissions) et l’offre (politique) de pollution. L’équation de l’offre prend en compte la qualité institutionnelle du pays, aussi bien que les préférences des consommateurs pour la qualité de l’environnement. Nos résultats montrent que, toutes choses égales par ailleurs, l’effet d’échelle de la production seul aurait expliqué une augmentation de 31 % des émissions industrielles de CO2 dans les pays en transition entre 1995 et 2003, et l’effet de structure de la production aurait contribué à une augmentation de 8,4 % de ces émissions. Cependant, l’effet technique, qui découle de la sévérité de la politique environnementale, s’est traduit par une réduction de 58 % des émissions industrielles de CO2, et a permis ainsi une réduction nette des émissions industrielles de CO2 de 18 % en 2003 par rapport à 1995. Enfin, notre étude confirme l’importance des facteurs institutionnels dans l’explication des émissions dans les pays en transition.

Dans de nombreux pays du Sud, le travail des enfants est un phénomène de grande ampleur. Pour les en protéger, faut-il tenter de l’interdire, en faisant au besoin pression de l’extérieur sur les échanges internationaux de certains biens manufacturés ? L’impact d’un tel boycott sera-t-il nécessairement bénéfique pour les enfants ? Sinon, quels sont les autres types dinterventions possibles ? Cet opuscule s’attache à restituer la réalité du travail des enfants dans le monde, parfois bien éloignée des clichés. Si l’on veut agir efficacement, il faut identifier correctement les enfants concernés et se demander quels seraient leurs activités et leur niveau de vie s’ils ne travaillaient pas. En discutant la pertinence des différentes politiques visant à réduire le travail enfantin, C. Dumas et S. Lambert suggèrent que la piste la plus prometteuse serait la mise en place de transferts de revenu conditionnels à la scolarisation des enfants.

Following technical and organisational changes, firms may react to increasing skill requirements either by training or hiring the new skills, or a combination of the two. Using matched datasets with about 1,000 French plants, we assess the relative importance of these external and internal labour market strategies. We show that skill upgrading following technological and organisational changes takes place mostly through internal labour markets adjustments. Consistently with the results in the literature, we find that new technologies and organisational changes are associated with an upward shift in the occupational structure within firms. We show that about one third of the upgrading of the occupational structure is due to hiring and firing workers on the external labour market, whereas two-thirds are due to promotions. Moreover, we find no compelling evidence of external labour market strategies based on “excess turnover”. In contrast, French firms heavily rely on training in order to upgrade the skill level of their workforce. When splitting the sample across sectors, this pattern of results appears to be particularly strong for manufacturing firms whereas, in services, external labour market strategies tend to be more widespread. We then consider the determinants of the strategies chosen by firms. We argue that the relative cost of internal versus external labour market flexibility is likely to be critical and that it can be partly captured by firm size and by the density on the local labour market. We find that external labor market strategies tend to be more important when firms are located on high-density labor markets.

French firms laying off workers aged 50 and above have to pay a tax to the unemployment insurance system, known as the Delalande tax. We evaluate the impact of this tax on layoffs as well as on hiring, taking advantage of several changes in the measure since its introduction in 1987. A legislative change in 1992 exempted firms from the tax for workers who were hired after age 50. Following this change, the transition rate from unemployment to employment increased significantly for workers over 50 compared to workers under 50. The difference is sizeable: between one third and one half of the initial transition rate. Evidence on the effect on layoffs is less clear cut. The impact is sizeable only for the most stringent tax schedule, after 1998.

Retirement from the labour market is a critical transition on which the political debate has focused in many European countries during the last few years, raising the issue of the sustainability of pension systems. One of the most striking features of the French labour market is the very low participation rate of older workers. This coincides with the intensive use of early retirement public funded schemes (ERS) – which are usually considered as “bad transitions”. But the necessary reform does not rely only on the suppression of ERS. One must analyse why firms so intensively used early exits in the past years, i.e. what economic – and also social – factors contribute to explain the use of ERS. The paper intends to provide both theoretical insights and empirical evidence on this issue – referring to the French case. It relies on both quantitative and qualitative (i.e. case studies) empirical work. It claims that changes in technology, in organisational practices and more globally in internal labour markets are key factors to explain the low employment rates of older workers. These changes were facilitated by ERSs, but, in turn, they also increased the demand for these schemes. This path dependency phenomenon may reveal hard to counter.

Book review of “The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Growing Economy”. By Pierre Cahuc and André Zylberberg.

This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France’s main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d’Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary incentives for employment among welfare recipients. Based on the estimated joint distribution of wages and hours potentially offered to each individual, we compute potential gains from working in a very detailed manner. Relating these gains to observed employment, we then estimate a simple structural labor supply model. We find that potential gains are almost always positive but very small on average, especially for single mothers, because of the high implicit marginal tax rates embedded in the system. Employment rates are sensitive to incentives with extensive margin elasticities for both men and women usually below one. Conditional on these elasticities, simulations indicate that existing policies devoted to reducing marginal tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution, such as the intéressement earnings top-up program, have little impact in this population due to their very limited scope. The recently introduced negative income tax (Prime pour l’emploi), seems to be an exception.

This paper uses a unique data set of linked employer-employee data in which asset transfers between firms can be identified to study the manner in which employment policy changes in the aftermath of a merger or acquisition (M&A). Using parametric duration models with unobserved heterogeneity, it appears that the employment policy of the firm changes radically after an M&A with respect to the “steady state”. Not only do various observed characteristics impact the probability of continued employment in a different manner after an M&A, but the distribution of unobserved characteristics that affect employment changes – reflecting differences in the stock of previous employees and the flow of new hires – as does the impact of this heterogeneity on employment durations.

We investigate the European food market in two selected European countries, Great Britain and Denmark, identifying main differences and similarities. We focus particularly on consumer perceptions and priorities, labelling schemes, and sales channels as a basis for assessing market stability and prospects for future growth. We employ a unique set of household panel data that includes information on stated values and concerns as well as registered purchasing behaviour. Most organic food on both markets is produced and processed by large-scale industrialised units and distributed through mainstream sales channels, consumer confidence being sustained at present by organic labelling schemes that appear to function well. However, a parallel market, based on the supply of goods through various direct sales channels to heavy users, prevails. We find that organic food purchase decisions are primarily motivated by ‘private goods’ attributes such as freshness, taste and health benefits, attributes that may be perceived as being compatible with modern production and sales structure. Mature markets for organic foods nevertheless appear to be vulnerable to consumer dissatisfaction, particularly among heavy users of organic food products.

We estimate hurdle rates for firms’ investments in pollution abatement technology, using ex post data. The method is based on a structural option value model where the future price of polluting fuel is the major source of uncertainty facing the firm. The empirical procedure is illustrated using a panel of firms from the Swedish pulp and paper industry, and the energy and heating sector, and their sulfur dioxide emissions over the period 2000-2003. The results indicate that hurdle rates of investment vary from 2.7 to 3.1 in the pulp and paper industry, and from 3.4 to 3.6 in the energy and heating sector depending on econometric specification.

L’étude de la pauvreté est au centre des préoccupations des économistes du développement. De façon traditionnelle, on mesure la pauvreté grâce à des enquêtes qui tentent de comptabiliser les dépenses faites par les ménages, puis les rapportent au nombre d’individus pour avoir une dépense par tête. Un seuil est fixé, en deçà duquel un individu est déclaré ” pauvre “. La structure du ménage est éventuellement prise en compte par l’utilisation d’échelles d’équivalence qui ramènent les besoins d’un enfant, d’une femme ou d’un vieillard à la norme de consommation d’un homme adulte actif. Dans cette approche, la composition du ménage est considérée comme une donnée stable qui ne joue de rôle que par le biais de la définition des besoins du ménage. Le fait que les ménages connaissent des recompositions régulières est alors ignoré, et de ce fait, les causes et conséquences de ces recompositions, non seulement en termes de pauvreté mais aussi pour nombre d’autres dimensions du bien-être des ménages, ne peuvent être étudiées. Dans cet article, l’importance de la prise en compte de cette flexibilité de la structure familiale est montrée, ainsi que les raisons de l’incapacité des enquêtes ménages existantes à traiter cette question. Un nouveau concept d’enquête est présenté, l’enquête Pauvreté et Structure Familiale (PSF), réalisée pour la première fois au Sénégal en 2006-2007 et dont la conception novatrice permettra de progresser sur ces questions d’intérêt.

La stabilité globale des écarts de revenu (après transferts et avant impôt) observée en France, entre 1984 et 2002, masque des évolutions significatives au sein du territoire. Tout d’abord, hors Île-de-France, l’écart se résorbe systématiquement entre pôles urbains, d’une part, et entre espaces périurbain et rural, d’autre part. Ensuite, au sein de ces trois différents espaces, les inégalités semblent prendre des trajectoires différentes : elles croissent davantage dans les pôles urbains que dans les communes des espaces périurbain et rural. Le rattrapage effectué par les espaces périurbain et rural s’explique statistiquement par la convergence des trois types d’espaces en termes de composition socioprofessionnelle et par le fait que les statuts d’emploi évoluent plus favorablement pour les ménages périurbains et ruraux que pour les ménages des pôles urbains. Il est plus difficile de rendre compte statistiquement des évolutions contrastées de la dispersion des revenus au sein de chaque espace : ces évolutions sont plus ténues, plus erratiques et la part attribuée aux différentes composantes dépend de l’ordre dans laquelle la décomposition est menée. Un résultat ressort néanmoins avec robustesse : la tendance plus inégalitaire au sein des pôles urbains tient en partie à la composition de plus en plus contrastée de la population en termes de catégories socioprofessionnelles et d’accès à l’emploi.

This paper uses a unique data set of linked employer-employee data in which asset transfers between firms can be identified to study the manner in which employment policy changes in the aftermath of a merger or acquisition (M&A). Using parametric duration models with unobserved heterogeneity and modeling the status of the employer with respect to M&A activity, it appear that the employment policy of the firm changes radically after an M&A with respect to the “steady state”. Not only do various observed characteristics impact the probability of continued employment in a different manner after an M&A, but the distribution of unobserved characteristics that affect employment changes – reflecting differences in the stock of previous employees and the flow of new hires – as does the impact of this heterogeneity on employment durations.

We study the nature of judicial bias in bankruptcy proceedings following the enactment of the 1998 bankruptcy law in Russia. The two main findings are as follows. First, regional political characteristics affected judicial decisions about the number and types of bankruptcy proceedings initiated after the law took effect. Controlling for indicators of firms’ insolvency and the quality of the regional judiciary, reorganization procedures were significantly more frequent in regions with politically popular governors and governors who had hostile relations with the federal center. Poor judicial quality was also associated with higher incidence of reorganizations. Second, the quality of the regional judiciary affected performance of firms under the reorganization procedure: in regions with low quality judges, firms that were reorganized according to the 1998 law had significantly lower growth in sales, labor productivity, and product variety compared to firms not subject to bankruptcy proceedings. In contrast, in regions with high quality judges, firms in reorganization outperformed firms not in bankruptcy proceedings. This effect of judicial quality on the performance of reorganized firms was stronger when governors were politically popular. These findings are consistent with the view that politically strong governors subverted enforcement of the 1998 bankruptcy law. Journal of Comparative Economics35 (2) (2007) 254-277.

Commentaire de l’article de Sévane Ananian et Patrick Aubert : Travailleurs âgés, nouvelles technologies et changements organisationnels : un réexamen à partir de l’enquête ” Réponse “. Economie et statistique, n° 397, pp 21-49, 2007. Français

Cet article quantifie les effets contradictoires sur l’emploi de la contribution Delalande, taxe sur le licenciement des seniors, dans sa version initiale de 1987. Le modèle prédit une réduction du taux de chômage moyen des plus de 50 ans. Même si le chômage augmente pour les travailleurs de 50-54 ans, non protégés par la contribution, cet effet est plus que compensé par la forte baisse du chômage après 55 ans.

Corporate governance and bankruptcy are about ensuring that market signals are channeled into corporate decisions, and corporations do not abscond with resources entrusted them by investors. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how market and government failures influence the design of institutions supporting corporate finance in emerging market economies. Weaknesses in these institutions are an important part of the explanation for why more capital is not flowing from the capital-rich to the capital-poor economies. Even in countries that now enjoy large inflows of direct investment may find weak corporate governance and poorly functioning bankruptcy procedures to be critical if these flows were to corporate governance and bankruptcy laws are generally believed to be critical to investment and growth, they are particularly important in emerging market economies where corporations often are hugely influential in the economy-at-large and in politics. We propose a general framework for thinking about the challenges of designing these institutions in emerging market economies and draw some policy implications. In particular, we emphasize the importance of enforcement and the impact of weak enforcement on corporate governance and bankruptcy design.

We study the nature of judicial bias in bankruptcy proceedings following the enactment of bankruptcy law in Russia in 1998. We find that regional political characteristics affected judicial decisions about the numbers and types of bankruptcy procedures initiated after the law took effect. In particular, controlling for indicators of firms’ insolvency and the quality of the regional judiciary, reorganization procedures were significantly more frequent in regions with politically popular governors and governors who had hostile relations with the federal government. Poor judicial quality was also associated with higher incidence of reorganizations. In addition, the quality of the regional judiciary affected performance of firms in reorganization procedure: in regions with poor judicial quality firms in reorganization significantly underperformed firms not in bankruptcy; while the opposite was true in regions with high-quality judges. The effect of judicial quality on restructuring is particularly strong in regions with politically popular governors because the judicial bias in governor’s favor is the highest in poor-quality courts when governors are popular. This evidence is consistent with previously reported anecdotes that suggested that politically strong regional governors used bankruptcy proceedings to protect firms from paying federal taxes.