Professeur titulaire d’une chaire à PSE
Lunch séminaire d’économie appliquée
Séminaire
Lieu 48 Boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris, France
Lieu R2-21
Présence Sur place
Le Lunch séminaire d’économie appliquée a lieu tous les mardis de 12h30 à 13h30.
Son objectif est de fournir un cadre convivial et régulier dans lequel des recherches en cours, réalisées à Paris School of Economics, peuvent être discutées de façon informelle. Il est ouvert à tous les doctorants et enseignants-chercheurs du site. Le séminaire est prioritairement consacré à des présentations de doctorants, mais il peut également accueillir occasionnellement des présentations de travaux en cours : chercheurs jeunes ou moins jeunes.
Si vous souhaitez faire une présentation au cours de l’année et réserver une date, vous pouvez contacter Thomas Piketty, Valentina Gabrielli et Pietro Geuna .
Organisateurs
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Doctorante
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Contact administratif : No Rakotovao
Pour commander votre lunch, veuillez remplir le document suivant avant le mercredi 18:00.
Pour vous abonner à la liste de diffusion, veuillez envoyer un mail à No Rakotovao .
Ce séminaire bénéficie d’une aide de l’État gérée par l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche au titre du programme d’Investissement d’avenir portant la référence ANR-17-EURE-0001.
Dates d’événements multiples
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Many social programs aim to target the poor. However, while poverty is dynamic, recipient lists are often updated infrequently. We consider the implications for targeting performance, how to measure it, and how to improve it, in the context of a targeting method widely used in developing countries: Proxy Means Tests (PMTs). Using panel data in seven developing countries, we show large annual movements of households into and out of observed poverty. This churn implies rapid deterioration in the performance of perfect targeting, based on observed poverty in time zero. In contrast, the performance of PMTs, while initially poor (consistent with the literature), only deteriorates slowly over time, and is as good as perfect targeting after only one year. Targeting future poverty does no better, while updating PMTs improves performance over time, but only when done comprehensively. We argue that distinguishing chronic poverty, transient poverty, and measurement error is central to measuring and improving targeting performance, and investigate mechanisms using high-frequency data.
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Localized innovation effects on German Labor Markets
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The role and effects of innovation on wage distributions have been widely studied at the regional level, but its sectoral dynamics have received far less attention. In this study, we address this gap by combining a large administrative panel dataset of the German labor market with patent data from PatStat to examine the causal impact of innovation on labor market outcomes at the local-sectoral level from 2005 to 2019. Our findings show that more innovative sectors not only offer higher wages but also exhibit lower wage dispersion and smaller increases in wage inequality. This can be attributed primarily to the differing composition of the workforce in these sectors, with a higher proportion of workers benefiting significantly from innovation. Finally, despite the overall positive impact on wage distribution, we observe that the benefits of innovation are not shared equally among all workers. -
Older Schoolmate Spillovers on Higher Education Choices
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How do students choose where to apply to higher education? Answering this question is important because the returns to higher education differ greatly across majors and institutions. This paper examines a previously overlooked factor shaping students’ higher education choices: the high school environment. Specifically, we analyze how students’ applications and enrollments are influenced by the higher education trajectory of recent graduates from the same high school. We exploit admission cutoffs randomly generated by France’s centralized application system and compare high schools with a marginally admitted older schoolmate to a degree (subject-institution combination) to high schools with a marginally rejected older schoolmate. We find that students are about 6 percentage points (+19%) more likely to apply to the same degree as a marginally enrolled older schoolmate, and 2 percentage points (+45%) more likely to enroll. These effects are large: they correspond roughly to 45% of the magnitude of spillovers across siblings. We explore two mediating factors for these spillovers across cohorts, teacher influence, and student homophily/role models effects, and find evidence for both effects playing a role. Lastly, we quantify the extent to which differences in older schoolmate exposure could explain the application gap to top degrees between high-achieving students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. We find that equalizing exposure to high-achieving older schoolmates would narrow this gap by around 10%. These results highlight the important role of students’ high school environment in shaping their higher education choices.
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Unions are diverse institutions with varying ideologies, yet little is knownabout how these ideological differences influence economic outcomes. This paper exploits the ideological divide of French unions between radical anticapitalists and cooperative reformists, to investigate the relationship between union ideology and worker and firm outcomes. Using a worker-level database of union presence in French establishments from 2013 to 2020, which we construct from multiple administrative sources, we derive a set of results based on regressions that incorporate AKM-style worker and establishment fixed effects. We find that low wage workers are sorted into radical unions, while high wage workers are sorted into reformist unions. Additionally, radical unions are associated with a 0.5% wage penalty in the hourly wage, while reformist unions are linked with a 0.5% wage premium. To assess whether the relationships observed reflect causal effects of union ideology, we use a regression discontinuity design based on electoral thresholds that determine which unions can bargain with employers. Our results confirm that behave in line with their ideology: the entry of radical unions leads to more strikes and disagreements during negotiations. We also identify wage effects associated with two unions. The entry of the largest radical union results in a reduction in average hourly wages due to compositional effects: a reduction of the wages at the top of the distribution and a higher retention of lower-paid employees. In contrast, the entry of a large white-collar reformist union leads to wage increases across the entire earnings distribution. The effects on firm outcomes are neutral.
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This study examines the long-term social and political impacts of mass media exposure to religious content in India. We study the impact of Ramayan,’ the massively popular adaptation of the Hindu epic televised in 1987-88. To identify causal effects, we conduct difference-in-difference analyses and exploit variations in TV signal strength driven by the location of TV transmitters and topographical features inhibiting electromagnetic TV signal propagation. We find that areas with higher exposure to Ramayan (higher TV signal strength when the show aired) experienced significant cultural and political changes. First, we document a strengthening of religious identity among Hindus through two markers: parents in these areas became more likely to give their newborn sons traditionally Hindu names, and households (particularly those from lower castes) showed increased adherence to orthodox Hindu dietary practices. In the short term, this cultural shift led to an increase in Hindu-Muslim communal violence through 1992. Over the longer term, through 2000, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became more likely to win state assembly elections in areas with greater Ramayan exposure. Analyses of changes in local TV signal strength in India over decades indicate that these effects are not due to general access to TV but are due to exposure to the Ramayan TV show in 1987-1988. Our findings reveal that media portrayal of religious narratives can have lasting effects on cultural identity, intergroup violence, and electoral outcomes.
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Taxi Market Deregulation: Effects on Market Outcomes, Tax Evasion and Crime
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We study the effects of taxi market deregulation in Finland that removed price control and lowered barriers to entry. We find a surge of new entry to the taxi market and a slight increase exit rates, suggesting large market structure effects after the deregulation. There is a slight increase in average taxi ride prices according to price indices, while monthly reported firm-level sales declined by more than 10 percent. We observe only a negligible effect on operating costs or mileage suggesting no demand responses. These results suggests that the decline in reported sales was due to increased tax evasion. -
Preventive Care, Land Use, and Undernutrition: Unravelling the Colonial Mechanism in India
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This paper examines the anthropometric health indicators of infants and women across different regions of postcolonial India, focusing on the impact of (in)direct British rule. Utilizing novel data on colonial state capacity, the study reveals new mechanisms behind the persistence of health disparities. By controlling for selective annexation through an exogenous policy that divided India into directly ruled British territories and Native States, the analysis shows that regions under direct British rule exhibit worse health outcomes today. These disparities are attributed to the lack of preventive care during British rule. Moreover, the findings highlight how deteriorating demographics, material conditions, and food production continue to reflect the enduring negative legacy of British colonialism on public health.
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The impact of industrial automation on political outcomes, as well as its relationship with the China shock, is a multifaceted question. Both phenomena have had profound effects on labor markets. Furthermore, addressing the political consequences of automation without considering the simultaneous China shock is difficult. This paper aims at providing a simultaneous estimate of the two shocks, using state-of-the-art econometric methodologies applied in an innovative fashion. The results show that not only the estimation process of the simultaneous shocks is possible, but also that Industrial Automation and Trade exposure have had profoundly different effects on political outcomes.
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Pricing in Markets without Money: Theory and Evidence from Home Exchanges
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A growing number of markets use token money instead of real money to allocate resources, such as class seats, food donations or holiday homes. Agents earn token money by supplying and can only spend tokens by consuming within the system. A platform decides how to set goods’ token prices. Should it i) clear the market, as assumed in canonical competitive equilibrium frameworks, or ii) compress prices and ration excess demand? I characterize in a two-type, two-period model under which preference structures compressing prices increases supply and utilitarian welfare. Intuitively, this is possible when income effects are strong, and participation effects are weak. I confirm the models’ predictions on a large home exchange platform, combining proprietary data on the universe of transactions with several natural experiments. I demonstrate large income effects and show that a reform that reduced the price of attractive homes increased their supply and did not reduce their participation. I show that many users have a strong preference against for-money platforms, allowing the exchange platform to set non-market-clearing prices. Broader insights are that lessons from traditional markets may not easily extend to token economies and that market designs without real money can have advantages even in settings where money is common. -
This paper examines how firms learn changes in the tax code and the implications for their behavioral responses. To do so, I use a 30-years panel of tax administrative data on French companies. I leverage a policy reform which reduced the marginal corporate income tax (CIT) rate for firms below a threshold in addition with the firm’s reported tax liability allowing to know which firms do or don’t understand the reform. On average, it takes 4 years for firms to be correct on their tax liability. The reform also allows to measure the elasticity of corporate income and thus the contribution of learning to the elasticity. The learning process explains up to 37% of the elasticity. Finally, the reform created tax avoidance responses mitigating the positive welfare effects.
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Co-authors: Germain Gauthier (Bocconi University), Debora Nozza (Bocconi University) & Paola Profeta (Bocconi University) With the rise of generative AI — such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT — there has been a proliferation of websites offering CV generation services for job seekers, as well as CV screening services for employers. We study the use of generative AI to produce and screen CVs of job applicants and make wage recommendations. We run a series of online experiments inspired by classical correspondence studies. Four main findings emerge. First, leading open-source and proprietary models typically produce gender-stereotyped CVs. Second, they discriminate against women. Consistent with theories of systemic discrimination, the bias against women increases if the models are used to produce and screen applicant packages. Third, when making wage recommendations, generative AI consistently suggests lower earnings for women. Fourth, these effects are particularly pronounced in male-dominated or highly unequal occupations. Lastly, we also explore ways to mitigate these effects.
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Who leaves and who stays? Teacher compensation and the quality of education
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Teacher salaries have declined relative to private-sector alternatives, coinciding with rising teacher exit rates. This has spurred the question of whether the quality of education has fallen. This paper contributes to this debate by examining how wages influence the turnover of high-productivity teachers. I leverage a reform in France that raised wages in highly disadvantaged schools and effectively acts as both an increase in the wage gap between disadvantaged and advantaged schools, and a decrease in the wage gap between disadvantaged schools and private sector outside options. Using administrative data on middle school teachers and students in France, I find that increasing the salary at disadvantaged schools improved the average teacher productivity in these schools relative to advantaged schools by as much as 20 percent. The effect is driven by an increase in the inflow and retention of high-productivity teachers and a break in the priorly increasing relative trend in exits from the teaching profession of high-productivity teachers in disadvantaged schools. To validate that wage sensitivity within the educational sector translates to outside options, I use employer-employee matched data to build occupational transition matrices between teaching and alternative occupations. Using a shift-share instrument of local outside options salary, I confirm that teachers are more likely to exit when outside options salaries are higher. -
Who’s your landlord? Heterogeneous returns and assortative matching in rental markets
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Rental yields vary enormously across real estate assets. By matching exhaustive administrative data on individual owners, tenants, units, actual rents and transaction prices, we provide evidence that the portfolio choices of heterogeneous investors — and their resulting matching to heterogeneous renters — account for most of this dispersion. Both across and within cities, wealthier investors invest in more expensive units, with lower rent-price ratios and lower overall returns. Because these units are occupied by wealthier tenants with lower rent-to-income ratios, they also exhibit lesser non-payment and vacancy risk. Even after accounting for price appreciation, total returns still decline with landlords’ income. We also find that landlords and tenants’ incomes display positive assortative matching within rental markets. To explain these findings, we develop a two-sided assignment model where landlords are time-constrained and can own only a limited number of dwellings, leading them to prefer high-rent properties over high-return ones and predicting assortative matching between tenants’ and landlords’ incomes. Finally, using the capitalization method, we demonstrate that abstracting from these heterogeneous returns would lead to an underestimation of the degree of wealth inequality. -
The lack of data on matches between self-employed workers and client firms presents a significant obstacle to understanding the labor market implications of freelance labor. This paper develops a novel framework to address data challenges in studying the gig economy, focusing on the labor market implications of self-employment (SE). Leveraging methodological insights from the Al literature on occupational exposure, I construct a dynamic index of occupational exposure to SE growth, linking SE activities to occupations through a data-driven matrix of occupational relevance scores. The resulting indices enable robust analyses of SE trends across occupations and firms, laying the groundwork for analyzing a wide array of micro-founded research questions at the intersection of labor market dynamics and structural change.
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Networks and Persistence of Elite Wealth through Critical Junctures
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How do wealthy elites persist through critical junctures such as epidemics, expropriation, or the emancipation of labour? This paper studies the mechanisms of wealth persistence by collecting uniquely detailed ownership records of all landed wealth in Estonia and Latvia from 1207 to 1919. We document extreme and persistent levels of wealth inequality concentrated by descendants of German crusaders. Wealth inequality was only temporarily reduced by several quasi-exogenous plague epidemics, expropriation by new rulers and the emancipation of ethnic Estonians and Latvian serfs after 1816. Collecting extensive genealogical data, we aim to demonstrate how elite networks mitigate the impact of critical junctures, thus uncovering a potentially key mechanism of elite wealth persistence. We further aim to demonstrate how wealth inequality relates to outcomes such as agricultural productivity and profits, industrialization, and voting. -
Can organisational reforms improve research performance at French universities?
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In a context of growing importance of research in a knowledge-based economy and effort towards reorganising public institutions to increase their performance without increasing public spending, in 2007, the French government passed a reform changing the governance of public universities, aimed at increasing their autonomy in particular in recruitment. I analyze the impact of this reform on individual-level productivity of researchers working at public university-affiliated research facilities using bibliometric data from OpenAlex and find that there is no evidence that their research performance increases. I then show by looking at lab-to-lab flows of researchers that it also led to little reallocation. Finally, I show using techniques from the labour market ranking literature that although the overall allocation of researchers to institutions in the system is not more efficient after the reform, the reform seems to have positively selected into research more productive researchers at the bottom of the distribution. -
Labor market imbalances, job search scopes and job finding
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This paper investigates how jobseekers adjust the breadth of their search across different segments of the labour market and how such adjustments affect employment outcomes. Imbalances often exist between jobseekers and vacancies in certain occupations or regions, potentially creating opportunities for jobseekers to adjust their search strategies and target segments where demand for them is high. I use a unique dataset that combines administrative unemployment records with detailed click data on job postings to measure search scope. I focus on two dimensions of breadth: the distance between a jobseeker’s residence and the posted job, and the local labour market tightness in the commuting zone–occupation segments. A key challenge is that jobseekers self-select into their search strategies. To address this, I exploit exogenous variation in the assignment of jobseekers to caseworkers, whose distinct tendencies influence jobseekers’ subsequent search patterns. I then link these caseworker-induced shifts in search scope to unemployment duration and job quality. My findings suggest that encouraging broader job search or targeting sectors with high labour demand surpluses has measurable effects on reemployment prospects and can alleviate mismatches between labour supply and demand. These results provide policy-relevant insights on how targeted counselling can shape jobseekers’ behaviour and improve labour market efficiency. -
This paper shows that bargaining over tax payments is an important feature of tax compliance and enforcement in lower income countries. Analyzing the universe of administrative tax filings from Zambia, we document sharp bunching in (i) dominated regions above tax schedule discontinuities, inconsistent with standard models of tax compliance and (ii) at round number tax payments, implying that certain payments are being targeted. Additional evidence from our own survey suggests that discussing tax payments with tax officials before filing taxes is widespread, in line with tax payments being the outcomes of bargaining. Such bargaining over taxes is consistent with fact (ii), as bargaining outcomes are often round and salient numbers, and with fact (i), because tax schedule discontinuities restrict the set of feasible bargaining outcomes. Finally, we generalize the conventional Allingham & Sandmo (1972) model to allow for bargaining as a mode of tax compliance. We show that bargaining leads to Pareto-improvements for both taxpayers and the state as long as state capacity is sufficiently low.
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Spread the Word: Mass Media, Language and Propaganda in Fascist Italy
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This paper provides microeconomic evidence on the effect of radio exposure on language convergence and cultural homogenization. Building on archival data on radio station transmitters, I focus on the expansion of a politically-controlled radio network in fascist Italy. I combine predicted measures of radio signal strength with metrics of linguistic convergence computed using a unique collection of nearly 500,000 linguistic entries. Exploiting quasi-random variation in radio exposure due to spatial differences in ground conductivity, I provide causal evidence on both signal strength and duration of coverage positively shaping the process of linguistic homogenization. Regarding possible mechanisms, I find that regions distant from the political capital, literacy rate and business-related occupations were key drivers of language convergence. Additionally, I explore the mass persuasion effects of propaganda in molding cultural values, by documenting positive effects of fascist radio coverage on fertility rates. Heterogeneous results suggest that linguistic proximity to the broadcasting language plays a significant role in determining the effectiveness of propaganda absorption. -
Tax Incentives or Political Motivations? Evidence from Corporate Contributions
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Joint with Agathe Denis, Malka Guillot, Simon Muchardt, and Camille Urvoy. Corporate philanthropy has been increasing in Western democracies in recent decades, a rise often explained by the development of tax policies offering substantial incentives to donate to charities. Yet, corporate philanthropy is also increasingly perceived as a means to influence politics. In this paper, we estimate the tax price elasticity of corporate donations, and investigate how it differs depending on the recipients’ purposes. To do so, we use an exhaustive administrative panel dataset on firms’ tax returns in France from 2013 to 2022, including the identity of the charities that benefit from the donations. We exploit two reforms that affect the price of donations for firms. We document significant bunching around two major regulatory thresholds, and show that there is heterogeneity depending on the identity of the beneficiary. -
Associations Between Income, Biomarkers, and Mortality: Evidence from Population-Wide Korean Health Exams
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We leverage population-wide, individual-level health exams from 2009-2012 linked to income tax data and subsequent mortality for a random 8 percent of the prime age (47-57 year year old) Korean population to examine the relationship between income, biomarkers, and survival. We observe clinical measures of high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and high body mass index, as well as subsequent 8-year mortality overall and by condition. For both men and women, there is a negative disease-income gradient for all these measures but high cholesterol, with the gradient particularly pronounced in the top half of the income distribution. For example, between the median and 95th percentile, the probability of high blood pressure falls by about 15 percent for men and 20 percent for women, the probability of obesity falls by about 15 percent for men and 35 percent for women, the probability of high blood sugar falls by about 20 percent for men and women, and the probability of high cholesterol falls by about 1 percent for men and women. There are also corresponding mortality-income gradients of about 10 percent for men and 20 percent for women, and the biomarkers are highly predictive of this subsequent mortality. Yet the biomarker-income gradient generates only about a 2 percent gradient in predicted mortality between the 5th and top decile, even when narrowed in on cardiovascular-related mortality causes. Our findings suggest that something other than differences in disease-burden at prime age drives most of the mortality-income gradient at older ages. -
Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations. Evidence from Global Trade Flows and the World Balance of Payment, 1800-2025
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(joint with Gaston Nievas, PSE). This paper constructs a new database on global trade flows and the world balance of payment (including goods, services, income and transfers) covering 57 core territories (48 main countries + 9 residual regions) over the 1800-2025 period. This allows us to analyze patterns of global imbalances, current account surplus/deficit and net foreign wealth accumulation over more than two centuries. We quantify the role of colonial transfers and low commodity prices (due to forced labor and other factors) in the build-up of Europe’s foreign wealth during the 1800-1914 period. We compare this experience to the global imbalances which developed during the 1970-2025 period. We stress the persistent role of unequal bargaining power and terms of exchange and the need for collective rules. We also provide counterfactual simulations on foreign wealth accumulation under alternative trade & monetary regimes.
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Skill Obsolescence in Senior Workers: Evidence from a Correspondence Study
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Age discrimination remains a significant barrier in the French labor market, despite policies aimed at extending working lives. This paper provides the first experimental evidence on the role of human capital stereotypes in hiring decisions for senior workers. Using a large-scale correspondence study, we examine how distance to retirement, inter-firm mobility, and training influence callback rates. Our preliminary findings indicate that age, rather than proximity to retirement, drives hiring discrimination, with senior workers facing a 7 percentage-point lower callback rate than younger applicants. While distance to retirement has a limited effect overall, it becomes an obstacle for long-term contracts for older workers. Moreover, recent training increases callback rates by 2.3 percentage points, suggesting that reskilling can mitigate hiring disadvantages, though its impact diminishes closer to retirement. These results highlight the need for targeted policies, such as flexible contracts and expanded access to training programs, to improve labor market outcomes for older workers. -
Political Responses to Adverse Labor Market Shocks: Evidence from Mass Layoffs
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(with Max Doerfler). How do political preferences respond to adverse labor market events? In this paper, we examine the political consequences of large layoffs in the United States, studying their impact on electoral outcomes. We document a significant shift in electoral support toward Democratic candidates in both presidential and gubernatorial elections. Analyzing donations to political parties, we confirm these findings and uncover the dynamics of the response, showing that the effects persist six months following a large layoff. Further, we detect no increase in voter turnout or new donor engagement, suggesting that the observed shift arises from a realignment among existing voters. Moreover, we find no evidence that voters punish incumbents, indicating instead an increased voter demand for redistributive policies. By exploring how local economic shocks reshape political preferences, our study advances understanding of the relationship between economic conditions and political engagement. -
Understanding adaptation to environmental change – Evidence from Viet Nam
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This paper examines how rising freshwater salinity—a growing consequence of environmental change—affects household livelihoods, adaptation strategies, and structural transformation in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Using panel data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey and detailed salinity estimates from a hydrological model, we identify how salinity shocks impact incomes, labor allocation, and migration behavior. We find that salinity significantly reduces rice and aquaculture income, prompting households to reduce cropping intensity and input use rather than exit agriculture entirely. While migration declines overall, labor force participation rises, particularly through female employment, indicating a reallocation of labor within the household as a key margin of adaptation. These findings reveal that salinity-induced environmental stress can initiate processes of structural transformation, but the pace and direction are shaped by frictions such as limited migration opportunities and local employment constraints. -
The Unpromised Land: Elites and Human Capital Development in 20th-Century Peru
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(joint with Mauricio Espinoza – Wageningen University) Can landed elites prevent mass education? If so, under what conditions? This article examines the long-term human capital impacts of the Spanish hacienda, the predominant system of agrarian estates with coerced labor granted to local elites during the colonial era in Latin America. Using original district-level data on the rollout of haciendas in Peru since 1876 and over a century of population census records,we exploit variation in hacienda crop-suitable areas and age-cohort groups to show that districts with higher hacienda prevalence persistently exhibited lower literacy rates throughout the 20th century. Consistent with a supply-side mechanism, we provide evidence on hacienda-dominated districts receiving lower public investments in education, without similar reductions in other public goods, and experiencing negligible impacts on local economic activity, agricultural modernization, or broader development outcomes. Notably, we show that the negative educational impacts were increasingly severe in larger and more consolidated haciendas, precisely where landed elites had both the economic and political capacity to obstruct mass education. While potential mitigating factors such as industrialization and top-downland redistribution later emerged,we show that they were ultimately insufficient to counterbalance the long-term adverse impacts of hacienda elites on human capital development. -
Bribe Me One More Time? Electoral Accountability, Political Turnover, and Public Procurement in Chile
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(co-authored with: Sebastián García Cornejo (PSE)) This paper contributes to the political economy debate on term limits and the associated trade-off between electoral accountability and political turnover. While political agency models predict that reelection incentives discipline politicians, empirically isolating this effect is challenging due to confounding selection and competence dynamics. We address this identification problem by leveraging a natural experiment: the unexpected and retroactive introduction of term limits in Chile, which abruptly barred a subset of incumbents from running for reelection mid-term. This reform provides within-term variation in reelection eligibility, allowing us to isolate incentive effects while holding selection and experience constant. Using detailed municipal procurement data from 2007 to 2022, we construct red-flag indicators of discretionary spending as proxies for misuse of public resources. We find that the removal of reelection incentives leads to a 9–15% increase in discretionary procurement. Turnover reverses the effect but does not lead to further improvements, likely because the three-consecutive-term limit allows politicians to return, sustaining their indirect influence. These findings highlight the importance of term limit design—including the number of permissible terms, whether bans are consecutive or permanent, and the extent of continuity within political parties. More broadly, the results demonstrate how institutional rules structuring political careers can shape political incentives and influence the effectiveness of public resource management.
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From Grades to Grins: The Effect of Standards-Based Grading on Students’ Academic Achievements and Socio-emotional Skills
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(Co-authors: Elise Huillery, Florentine Oliveira). Over the past decade, many French middle schools have transitioned from numerical to standards-based grading. This change aims to foster students’ confidence and well-being while enhancing skills acquisition, ultimately promoting overall academic success. However, it may also dampen students’ ambition, potentially leading to a decline in academic performance. As a result, the overall impact of this shift remains uncertain. Using a matching approach combined with a difference-in-differences strategy, this paper seeks to evaluate the effect of standards-based grading on French students’ performance in middle school, as well as its influence on high school track choices. Additionally, survey data collection will provide insights into how this assessment method affects students’ motivation, self-confidence, and well-being at school. -
Factory Location: Resistance to Technology Adoption and Local Institutions
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What explains the geography of new technology adoption? This paper studies technology adoption and factory location in England during the Industrial Revolution. First, we document a negative relationship between industrialization in the 19th century and preindustrial economic activities. Second, we show that while cities with self-governing institutions displayed higher preindustrial economic growth, they failed to adopt new industrial technologies during the 19th century. We argue that because local self-governance led to the development of representative institutions, this facilitated collective action and enabled workers threatened by labor mechanization to resist technology adoption. Higher resistance to technology adoption, in turn, resulted in the relocation of economic activities away from traditional centers of production. Results suggest that while institutions facilitating collective action foster Smithian growth, they may hinder Shumpeterian growth by increasing resistance to technology adoption. -
(joint with Mathieu Parenti) This paper proposes an economic analysis of extraterritorial tax policy. We consider a country imposing a top-up profit tax to foreign firms accessing its market. We analyze the effects of this tax on firm behavior and welfare and derive conditions for optimal policy in a flexible monopolistic competition model. Extraterritorial taxation generates additional tax revenues but leads to domestic price increases. In the most stripped-down analysis, extraterritorial taxation follows a simple s > t logic. For a country accounting for a fraction s of a firm’s sales, it is welfare-increasing to introduce an extraterritorial tax as long as s is greater than the foreign tax rate t. When foreign firms are not taxed abroad, tax revenue gains dominate consumer surplus losses even for small countries. The larger the consumption market the higher the ability to tax, with gains that are convex in market size. These intuitions generalize in more sophisticated settings, where the minimum sales share needed to implement an extraterritorial tax depends on a terms-of-trade externality and a profit-displacement effect. A top-up profit tax on foreign firms has better welfare effects than a tariff, both unilaterally and in the Nash equilibrium. Extraterritorial tax collection turns the logic of tax competition on its head: large consumer market countries (for which revenue gains swamp price increases) have incentives to tax the undertaxed profits of foreign firms, encouraging foreign countries to increase their own tax rates, leading to a race to the top.
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On the Other Side of the Creek: Historical segregation, neighborhood identity and human capital accumulation
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This paper examines the long-term effects of historical within-city segregation on human capital accumulation, focusing on neighborhood identity as a mediating mechanism. Using a historical natural experiment in Guadalajara, Mexico, I investigate how colonial-era ethnoracial segregation created persistent disparities in education and economic outcomes. First, I employ a highly localized Spatial Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) with fine-grained, geolocated census data to estimate the causal impact of residing on the historically marginalized side of the city. Individuals on this side exhibit significantly lower educational attainment, even after controlling for economic and geographic factors such as housing price sorting. The sharp discontinuity within a 750-meter window from the colonial boundary—under the same municipal jurisdiction and legal framework—provides strong evidence that persistent neighborhood effects cannot be attributed solely to contemporary structural differences. I hypothesize that salient neighborhood identities reinforce these disparities. Historical evidence and qualitative interviews suggest that individuals view their neighborhood as a key reference for economic choices, potentially shaping norms around human capital investment. To test this mechanism, I propose a survey and field experiment that manipulates the salience of neighborhood identity. The experiment randomizes information about neighbors’ educational choices to assess whether individuals adjust their own investment in response to perceived group norms. The study contributes to the literature on neighborhood effects, social identity, and historical persistence, showing how segregation-driven identities shape contemporary economic outcomes.
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Can We Rebuild a City? The Dynamics of Urban Redevelopment
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Cities increasingly rely on redevelopment—the demolition and reconstruction of buildings—to grow and reallocate land uses. This paper studies this process and how it is influenced by land use regulation. I build a dynamic general equilibrium model of the supply and demand of floorspace in a city, which I estimate using a novel parcel-level panel dataset of land use and zoning in New York City. I validate the model using quasi-experimental variation from recent zoning reforms and use it to simulate the effects of zoning changes on construction and prices. I find that zoning is the primary determinant of local supply elasticities and substantially constrains the city’s growth, particularly in areas where prices are high and existing density is low. However, because the fixed costs of redevelopment are high and increase sharply with the size of buildings to demolish, relaxing zoning in inexpensive or densely built neighborhoods has limited effects. Furthermore, the welfare gains of relaxing zoning only materialize slowly and largely accrue to households outside of the rezoned area. -
Populism, defined by a rhetoric of “the people” versus “the elite,” has gained traction across Western democracies. This paper examines the relationship between populist attitudes and both subjective beliefs about social mobility and objective measures of social mobility in individuals’ local areas. Through a new US survey, I collect 3,451 respondent-generated narratives of upward mobility and classify them as “luck-based” or “effort-based” using a large language model. I then link this data with electoral outcomes and social mobility measures at the commuting zone-level. Lower local mobility is associated with higher support for populist attitudes and Trump vote shares. Moreover, individuals in low-mobility areas are more likely to perceive national social mobility as limited, suggesting that local conditions shape broader economic beliefs. Those who perceive mobility as low are more likely to emphasize luck in the narrative they provide. To identify the causal effect of such beliefs on populism, I conduct a survey experiment in which 2,000 respondents are randomly exposed to luck-based ascent narratives. Exposure raises populist attitudes by weakening beliefs in merit, particularly among men, individuals without a college degree, and those without upward mobility experience. These findings suggest that low social mobility fosters populism by shifting beliefs about economic fairness and opportunity.
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Paris School of Economics
Paris School of Economics
Adresse : 48 boulevard jourdan 75014 Paris