Globalisation, économie politique, commerce : Publications

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

While job polarization was a salient feature in European economies in the decade up to 2010, this phenomenon has all but disappeared, except in a handful of Southern-European economies. The decade following 2010 is characterized by occupational upgrading, where low-paid jobs shrink and high paid jobs expand. We show that this is associated with automation: employment shares in low paid, highly automatable jobs shrinks, while employment shares of better paid jobs that are unlikely to be automated expands. Techies (engineers and technicians with strong STEM skills) help explain cross country variation in occupational upgrading: economies that are abundant in techies or exhibit high growth of techies see strong skill upgrading; in contrast, polarization is observed in economies with few techies. Robotization is associated with skill upgrading in manufacturing. We discuss the additional roles of globalization, structural change and labor market institutions in driving these phenomena. Hitherto, artificial intelligence (AI) seems to have similar impacts as other automation technologies. However, there is uncertainty about what new AI technologies harbor.

Au 1er janvier 2024, la France comptait 68,4 millions d’habitants, soit 230 000 de plus qu’au 1er janvier 2023. Le solde naturel a atteint un niveau historiquement bas depuis l’après-guerre et depuis 2018, et le solde migratoire est le principal moteur démographique du pays. Deuxième pays le plus peuplé de l’UE27 (15,2 % de la population), la France présente toutefois un accroissement légèrement inférieur à celui de la moyenne européenne et demeure un peu plus jeune que la moyenne de l’UE, mais vieillit plus rapidement. En 2022, les flux d’entrées de ressortissants de pays tiers ont augmenté et atteignent le niveau le plus élevé depuis 2000 (282 957 personnes). L’année 2022 est marquée par une augmentation conséquente de la part des flux pour raisons professionnelles (+ 4 points) et par une féminisation de ces derniers (+ 15 points). La France est le 5e pays de l’UE27 pour le flux migratoire, mais se trouve seulement en 21e position si l’on tient compte de la taille de la population. En 2023, la baisse historique du nombre de naissances est la conséquence de celle de la fécondité (1,67 enfant par femme), niveau le plus faible observé depuis l’après-guerre. La baisse concerne tous les groupes d’âges. Le profil de la fécondité par âge en France est proche de celui des pays d’Europe de l’Ouest et du Nord, et la proportion de naissances hors mariage y est la plus élevée d’Europe (65,2 %). En 2023, le nombre d’avortements augmente pour la deuxième année consécutive, et 8 avortements sur 10 sont désormais médicamenteux. Quand on rapporte ce chiffre au nombre de femmes de 15 à 49 ans, la France enregistre, avec la Suède, le taux de recours à l’avortement le plus élevé d’Europe, mais c’est aussi un des pays où la réglementation est la moins restrictive. Le nombre de mariages augmente très légèrement en 2023, tout comme celui des pacs en 2022 (année la plus récente disponible), mais le rattrapage post-Covid n’est que partiel. La part des pacs et des mariages entre personnes de même sexe reste relativement stable en 2023 et, avec un âge moyen au mariage qui continue d’augmenter, la France se rapproche des pays du Sud et de l’Ouest de l’Europe, où le mariage est moins précoce que dans les pays de l’Est. En baisse depuis 3 ans, le nombre de décès reste plus élevé que celui observé avant la pandémie (2019). En revanche, l’espérance de vie en 2023 est supérieure à celle de 2019, pour les hommes comme pour les femmes, même si le rebond en France est inférieur à celui observé dans d’autres pays d’Europe. Comparée aux autres pays européens, la mortalité française reste relativement basse aux âges plus élevés, mais le pays montre un retard important et croissant pour la mortalité infantile. L’écart de mortalité entre les hommes et les femmes est plus élevé que dans la moyenne européenne, même s’il continue de baisser. Le cancer est la première cause de mortalité en France, alors qu’il s’agit des maladies cardiovasculaires à l’échelle européenne.

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.

Looking for the Bright Side of the China Syndrome: Rising Export Opportunities and Life Satisfaction in China

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.

This study contributes to the growing literature on Work from Home (WfH), focusing on the responsiveness of the phenomenon to the business cycle. In particular, the Great Recession led many states to implement unprecedented and expansionary unemployment benefit measures (Extended Benefit, EB), which were often revoked when the recession resumed. EB measures differ widely in generosity and timing across states. We exploit this, for identification purposes, by linking the interview date of the respondents to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to the dates of implementation of EB programs, in the respondent’s state of residence. ATUS provides unique cross-sectional information on WfH for a representative sample of Americans. Taking an approach inspired by a Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that recessions, as proxied by EB expansionary measures, significantly increase women’s commuting. In contrast, women’s remote work increases with economic recovery, as captured by EB contractionary measures. The evidence for men is less clear-cut.

This paper identifies export accelerations at the country pair-product level that are large enough to drive aggregate export growth in the medium run. In a sample of 100 countries, these export “big hits” are rare, less than 2 percent of all export spells, yet account for over two-thirds of export growth in a given country. The paper then explores their microfoundations using matched customs-census firm-level data for France. We find that typically, two firms are sufficient to generate a big hit and these firms’ access to external financing is key to their ability to drive export success. Moreover, big hits spread within firms across destinations and products. Our results offer new evidence on the granularity of export growth by linking micro-level entrepreneurial decisions with country-level export outcomes.

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.

This article analyzes the effects of the acquisition of the Port of Piraeus by the Chinese shipping operator COSCO in July 2016 on the organization of container traffic in Europe. Using real-time container ship positions provided by vessel tracking systems between 2015 and 2019, we study the impact of the privatization of the Greek port on its attractiveness and on that of competing ports for the ships of the various operators, and more particularly of COSCO. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the number of container ship calls to the Port of Piraeus has increased following its privatization, but that this increase in attractiveness corresponds mainly to vessels operated by COSCO with a capacity of more than 3000 twenty-foot equivalent units, and in particular to the largest of them. We do not identify any crowding out effect between operators in Piraeus: the use of Piraeus by the vessels of other operators remains relatively unchanged. The privatization of Piraeus seems to have imposed the Greek port as COSCO’s transhipment hub for the European market without this being to the detriment of ports in any other particular European area.

This paper disentangles the relationship between COVID-19 propagation and mobility. In a theoretical model allowing mobility to be endogenously determined by the COVID-19 prevalence rate, we show that an exogenous epidemic shock has an immediate effect on mobility whereas an exogenous mobility shock influences epidemic variables with a delay. In the long run, exogenous disease contagiousness and mobility jointly shape epidemiological outcomes. The short-run theoretical result allows us to recover, empirically, the causal impacts of mobility and COVID-19 hospitalisations on each other in France. We find that hospitalisations are highly sensitive to mobility whereas mobility is little influenced by hospitalisations. In France, it seems therefore that voluntary social distancing would not have been effective to control the epidemic, in the absence of social distancing mandates.

We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999–2011. Increases in upstream, forward GVC integration directly reduce labor shares, mostly through reductions in fabrication, but also via other business functions. We do not find any direct effects of robot adoption; robotization affects labor only indirectly, by increasing upstream, forward GVC integration. In this sense robotization is “upstream-biased”. Rapid robotization in China shaped robotization in Europe and, therefore, relative demand for labor there.

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.

Export growth affects individuals through numerous and contradictory channels. In China, the development of exports has promoted economic development and income growth, but it has also disrupted social structures and work environments. This paper explores the overall effect of exports on perceived well-being by combining responses from a large longitudinal survey covering over 45,000 Chinese with a shift-share measure of local export opportunities. Results show that individuals’ perceived life satisfaction increases significantly in prefectures that benefited from greater export opportunities, despite a negative effect on self-reported health. The positive well-being gains go beyond a simple income effect. These non-monetary gains are related to the individuals’ professional life: export-related well-being gains are stronger for working-age individuals (especially men and low-skilled workers), are largest for workers in the manufacturing sector (which produces the vast majority of China’s exports), and are found when the satisfaction indicator focuses on work but not on other aspects of daily life.

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.

This paper provides a simple model of identity salience that is applied to the phenomenon of the recent rise in right-wing populism in the Western world. Trade and capital flows, skill-biased technological change, and migration have led to declining employment and wages in these economies and a parallel rise in economic and cultural populism, tapping into nativist sentiments. We argue that when long-term income stagnation for most of the population and decline for some go together with high rates of income growth at the very top, one has zero-sum economics and that naturally raises the possibility of using various kinds of social identities to claim a bigger share of a fixed sized pie. We show that in ethnically or racially polarized societies this naturally leads to the salience of social identities that enable majority ethnic groups to vote for policies that exclude minority groups so that they get a greater share of a dwindling surplus. In contrast, in more ethnically and racially homogeneous societies, this would instead lead to the demand for more pro-redistribution policies that involve greater provision of public goods.

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.

This paper elucidates the willingness of an autocrat to push through institutional reforms in a context where traditional authorities represented by religious clerics are averse to them and where the military control the means of repression and can potentially stage a coup. We show that although the autocrat always wants to co-opt the military, this is not necessarily true of the clerics. Exclusive co-option of the military obtains where the loyalty of the autocrat’s army is strong while the organizational strength of religious movements is rather low. Radical institutional reforms can then be implemented. Empirically, the dominant regime in contemporary Muslim countries is the regime of double co-option where the autocrat resorts to a double-edged tactic: pleasing the official clerics by slowing the pace of reforms and ensuring the loyalty of the military so as to put down clerics-led rebellions.

Nous présentons un modèle d’investissement en recherche et développement (R&D) dans le domaine alimentaire, en prenant en considération les nouvelles techniques d’ingénierie végétale (NTIV) et les méthodes d’hybridation traditionnelles. Le modèle intègre une innovation alimentaire incertaine et coûteuse, ainsi que les consentements à payer des consommateurs (CAP) pour le nouvel aliment. Ce cadre conceptuel est appliqué au cas de nouvelles pommes se conservant plus longtemps et brunissant moins vite, en prenant en compte les CAP des consommateurs français et américains pour ces nouvelles pommes. Il est montré que les NTIV peuvent être socialement bénéfiques dans un contexte d’information complète, et lorsque la probabilité de succès avec ces NTIV est relativement élevée. Sinon, l’hybridation traditionnelle est socialement optimale. Une menace importante sur la production des pommes conventionnelles augmente la désirabilité sociale de nouvelles pommes générées par les NTIV ou l’hybridation traditionnelle.

We provide one of the first formalizations of a vaccination campaign in a decisiontheoretic framework. We analyse a model where an ambiguity-averse individual must decide how much effort to invest into prevention in the context of a rampant disease. We study how ambiguity aversion affects the effort and the estimation of the vaccine efficacy in clinical trials and immunization campaigns. We find that the behaviours of individuals participating in a clinical trial differ from individuals not participating. Individuals who are more optimistic toward vaccination participate more in trials. Their behaviours and efforts are also affected. As a result, because vaccine efficacy depends on unobserved behaviours and efforts, the biological effect of the vaccine becomes difficult to evaluate. During the scale-up phase of a vaccination campaign, provided that vaccine efficacy is established, we show that vaccine hesitancy may still be rational.

En janvier 2023, la France comptait 68 millions d’habitants, soit 200 000 de plus qu’en janvier 2022. Les naissances ont diminué et les décès augmenté : le solde naturel baisse, atteignant un niveau historiquement faible et inférieur au solde migratoire. En 2022, la France fait partie des 6 pays européens parmi les 27 dont le solde naturel est positif, mais son solde migratoire est relativement faible : l’accroissement de la population française est deux fois moindre que celui de l’UE27. En 2021, les flux d’entrées de personnes venant de pays tiers avec un titre de séjour augmentent par rapport à 2020, pour retrouver leur niveau d’avant la crise sanitaire. En 2022, l’indice conjoncturel de fécondité diminue (1,8 enfant par femme) et atteint son niveau le plus bas depuis 20 ans. Toutefois, le renouvellement des générations nées jusqu’en 1992 semble assuré. La fécondité des hommes est plus forte que celle des femmes, principalement du fait des enfants nés après leur 50 ans. Le recours à l’avortement est en augmentation entre 2021 et 2022, et plus fréquent dans les groupes d’âges auxquels la fécondité est élevée. La part des IVG réalisées par la méthode médicamenteuse continue sa progression, tout comme celles pratiquées par les sages-femmes. En 2022, le rattrapage des mariages qui n’ont pas pu être célébrés en 2020 et 2021 se poursuit. Le nombre de mariages augmente ; en revanche, le nombre de pacs diminue dans les couples hétérosexuels. Cependant, le nombre de pacs augmente pour les couples de même sexe et n’a jamais été aussi élevé. L’écart d’âge entre les conjoints diminue légèrement, mais subsiste notamment pour les couples d’hommes. Le nombre de décès reste important en 2022 malgré une amélioration de la situation sanitaire : 2 épidémies de grippe et 3 épisodes caniculaires expliquent une surmortalité de 45 800 décès. L’espérance de vie à la naissance augmente en 2022 pour les hommes et pour les femmes, mais ne retrouve pas son niveau d’avant la pandémie. La France reste l’un des pays d’Europe de l’Ouest dont l’écart d’espérance de vie entre les hommes et les femmes est parmi les plus importants (6 ans), même si cet écart diminue constamment depuis 1980.

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.

We study the evolution of labor shares in 1995-2014, while taking into account international trade based on value added concepts. Declines in labor shares accelerate in 2001-2007, concurrently with global value chain (GVC) participation, after which there is no trend for both. We develop a gravity-based instrument for GVC participation and find that the acceleration in the decline in labor shares is caused by increased intensity of forward GVC participation. The insertion of China into GVCs has a disproportionally large effect through this mechanism. Declines in labor shares are shouldered mostly by less skilled workers in fabrication functions. Relatively capital abundant countries participate more in forward GVCs linkages, which is associated with greater upstreamness within GVCs and increases in capital intensity. Forward GVC participation is associated with international vertical integration of both upstream intermediate input production and of offshoring of downstream assembly.

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.

Many recent studies show that Europe has had a lower mortality inequality for most ages than the United States over the last thirty years. However, the evolution of the income gradient in mortality all along the twentieth century remains poorly understood. This article uses a unique dataset that gives the annual lifetables and fiscal income for the 90 administrative regions of mainland France from 1922 to 2020. The income gradients in mortality are computed across regions using a traditional method with calendar ages and, alternatively, with mortality milestones to control for the increase in life expectancy over time. The study reveals a systematic reversal of the gradient that occurred around the 1970s for both sexes and all ages or mortality groups when calculated at an aggregated level. Inequality in mortality amongst the oldest age groups has however returned to a level observed at least ten years earlier because of Covid-19, even after controlling for mortality improvements over the period.

We propose a model of intergenerational transmission of education wherein children belong to either highly educated or low-educated families. Children choose the intensity of their social activities, while parents decide how much educational effort to exert. Using Add Health data, we find that, on average, children’s homophily acts as a complement to the educational effort of highly educated parents but as a substitute for the educational effort of low-educated parents. We also find that policies that subsidize kids’ socialization efforts can backfire for low-educated students because they tend to increase their interactions with other low-educated students.

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 paper explores the impact of a health shock and changes in survival probability on the savings and portfolio choices of older individuals. Using a theoretical framework featuring a portfolio choice that incorporates imperfect annuity markets, we analyze how elderly individuals, whose survival probability has been altered by a health shock, allocate their resources. A difference-indifferences approach complements the theoretical approach by taking into account the effect of age and cohort, and controlling for selection bias related to health events at older ages. Our analysis utilizes a panel of 5570 observations from the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE, 2011 and 2017). Both theoretical and empirical findings converge, indicating that experiencing a health accident such as a stroke or heart attack leads to a decrease in safe savings. Consequently, investing in annuities becomes crucial in enabling individuals to mitigate the consequences of poor health in aging economies.

This paper disentangles the relationship between COVID-19 propagation and mobility. In a theoretical model allowing mobility to be endogenously determined by the COVID-19 prevalence rate, we show that an exogenous epidemic shock has an immediate effect on mobility whereas an exogenous mobility shock influences epidemic variables with a delay. In the long run, exogenous disease contagiousness and mobility jointly shape epidemiological outcomes. The short-run theoretical result allows us to recover, empirically, the causal impacts of mobility and COVID-19 hospitalisations on each other in France. We find that hospitalisations are highly sensitive to mobility whereas mobility is little influenced by hospitalisations. In France, it seems therefore that voluntary social distancing would not have been effective to control the epidemic, in the absence of social distancing mandates.

The participation of older workers in the labor market has increased in most high-income countries since the mid-1990s. This can be explained by changes in the characteristics of recent generations of older workers. The labor supply is healthier and better trained and includes more women. This can also be explained by reforms of retirement systems and of health and unemployment insurance systems, even if modifications may still be required to guarantee sustainability. In addition, recurring concerns about the productivity of older workers and their ability to adapt to technological change seem unfounded and likely to stem from prejudice against them. Finally, the promises associated with greater flexibility in working conditions have not, to date, led to a significant increase in the work of older individuals.

In this paper we survey recent advances in the economic theory of cultural transmission. We highlight three main themes on which the literature has made great progress in the last ten years:the domain of traits subject to cultural transmission, the micro-foundations for the technology of transmission, and feedback effects between culture, institutions, and various socio-economic environments. We conclude suggesting interesting areas for future research.

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.

Introduction There is a lack of quantitative evidence on the role of food innovations—new food ingredients and processing techniques—in the nutrition transition. Objective Document the distribution of food innovations across 67 high-income (HIC) and middle-income (MIC) countries between 1970 and 2010, and its association with the nutritional composition of food supply. Methods We used all available data on food patents, as compiled by the European Patent Office, to measure food innovations. We considered innovations directly received by countries from inventors seeking protection in their territories, and those embedded in processed food imports. Food and Agricultural Organization data were used to estimate the associations between international diffusion of food innovations and trends in total food supply and its macronutrient composition, after adjusting for confounding trends in demand-side factors. We identified the role of trade by simulating the changes in average diet due to innovations embedded in food imports. Results Trends in food innovations were positively and significantly associated with changes in daily per capita calorie supply available for human consumption in MIC between 1990 and 2010 (elasticity of 0.027, 95% CI 0.019 to 0.036). Food innovations were positively correlated with the share of animal and free fats in total food supply (elasticities of 0.044, 95% CI 0.030 to 0.058 for MIC between 1970 and 1989 and 0.023, 95% CI 0.003 to 0.043 for HIC between 1990 and 2010). Food innovations were associated with substitutions from complex carbohydrates towards sugars in total food supply for MIC after 1990 (elasticities of −0.037, 95% CI −0.045 to −0.029 for complex carbs, 0.082, 95% CI 0.066 to 0.098 for sugars). For these countries, the trade channel capturing access to innovations through imports of processed food played a key role. Conclusion Policy-makers should consider the impacts of the international diffusion of food innovations in assessing the costs and benefits of international trade regulations.

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.

Les normes améliorent‐elles la qualité des produits échangés? Nous nous demandons si les normes augmentent la qualité des produits échangés. En appariant un ensemble de données sur les exportations entreprise‐produit‐destination françaises avec un ensemble de données sur les mesures sanitaires et phytosanitaires et les obstacles techniques au commerce, nous constatons que les normes de qualité appliquées aux produits par les pays de destination i) favorisent la probabilité d’exportation des entreprises de haute qualité à condition que leur productivité soit suffisamment élevée, ii) augmentent les ventes à l’exportation des entreprises de haute qualité à forte productivité au détriment des entreprises à faible productivité et de faible qualité, et iii) augmentent la qualité fournie par les entreprises si leur productivité est suffisamment élevée. Nous élaborons ensuite un nouveau modèle commercial simple en cas d’incertitude sur la qualité du produit, dans lequel des entreprises hétérogènes peuvent investir stratégiquement dans l’indication de la qualité afin de rationaliser ces résultats empiriques sur la qualité et les effets de sélection.

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.

En janvier 2023, la France comptait 68 millions d’habitants, soit 200 000 de plus qu’en janvier 2022. Les naissances ont diminué et les décès augmenté : le solde naturel baisse, atteignant un niveau historiquement faible et inférieur au solde migratoire. En 2022, la France fait partie des 6 pays européens parmi les 27 dont le solde naturel est positif, mais son solde migratoire est relativement faible : l’accroissement de la population française est deux fois moindre que celui de l’UE27. En 2021, les flux d’entrées de personnes venant de pays tiers avec un titre de séjour augmentent par rapport à 2020, pour retrouver leur niveau d’avant la crise sanitaire. En 2022, l’indice conjoncturel de fécondité diminue (1,8 enfant par femme) et atteint son niveau le plus bas depuis 20 ans. Toutefois, le renouvellement des générations nées jusqu’en 1992 semble assuré. La fécondité des hommes est plus forte que celle des femmes, principalement du fait des enfants nés après leur 50 ans. Le recours à l’avortement est en augmentation entre 2021 et 2022, et plus fréquent dans les groupes d’âges auxquels la fécondité est élevée. La part des IVG réalisées par la méthode médicamenteuse continue sa progression, tout comme celles pratiquées par les sages-femmes. En 2022, le rattrapage des mariages qui n’ont pas pu être célébrés en 2020 et 2021 se poursuit. Le nombre de mariages augmente ; en revanche, le nombre de pacs diminue dans les couples hétérosexuels. Cependant, le nombre de pacs augmente pour les couples de même sexe et n’a jamais été aussi élevé. L’écart d’âge entre les conjoints diminue légèrement, mais subsiste notamment pour les couples d’hommes. Le nombre de décès reste important en 2022 malgré une amélioration de la situation sanitaire : 2 épidémies de grippe et 3 épisodes caniculaires expliquent une surmortalité de 45 800 décès. L’espérance de vie à la naissance augmente en 2022 pour les hommes et pour les femmes, mais ne retrouve pas son niveau d’avant la pandémie. La France reste l’un des pays d’Europe de l’Ouest dont l’écart d’espérance de vie entre les hommes et les femmes est parmi les plus importants (6 ans), même si cet écart diminue constamment depuis 1980.

Le 1er janvier 2022, la France comptait 67,8 millions d’habitants soit 187 000 de plus qu’au 1er janvier 2021. Les nombres de naissances, d’IVG et de mariages en 2021 ont augmenté si on les compare à 2020, sans toutefois retrouver les niveaux observés avant la crise sanitaire (2019). Il en est de même pour les décès dont le nombre a diminué, mais reste encore supérieur à celui observé en 2019. En 2021, la France fait partie des 9 pays européens parmi les 27 dont le solde naturel est positif. Son solde migratoire l’est également et, en 2021, est supérieur au solde naturel. Au total, la population de la France continue d’augmenter, mais à un rythme plus faible qu’avant la pandémie. En 2020, les flux d’entrées de personnes venant de pays tiers avec un titre de séjour ont très fortement diminué du fait de la crise sanitaire. Ce sont les titres pour raison professionnelle qui ont le plus baissé. Les demandes se concentrent en Île-de-France. En 2021, l’indice conjoncturel de fécondité augmente très légèrement (1,83 enfant par femme), principalement du fait de la hausse des taux entre 30 et 39 ans. Le profil par âge varie selon les régions. Le recours à l’avortement est plutôt stable entre 2020 et 2021, mais la part des IVG réalisées par la méthode médicamenteuse augmente d’année en année (77 % en 2021), surtout celles pratiquées en cabinet de ville. Cependant, on observe d’importantes différences territoriales, du fait d’une offre de soins inégale au niveau local. En 2021, le rattrapage des mariages qui n’ont pu être célébrés en 2020 n’a été que partiel. Pour la première fois en 2020, le nombre de pacs dépasse celui des mariages. Les mariages sont plus fréquents sur le flanc est du pays et les pacs sur la façade atlantique et dans le Sud- Ouest. Le nombre de décès reste important en 2021 malgré une amélioration par rapport à 2020. L’espérance de vie en 2021 reste inférieure de 4,6 mois pour les hommes par rapport à 2019, et de 1,4 mois pour les femmes. La surmortalité est estimée à 6,3 % en 2021 après avoir été de 7,5 % en 2020. Les régions les plus touchées ne sont pas nécessairement celles où la mortalité était initialement forte.

Les nouvelles techniques d’ingénierie végétale (NTIV) peuvent améliorer considérablement la production et la qualité des aliments. Certains consommateurs et régulateurs du monde entier pourraient être réticents à accepter de tels produits et l’introduction de ces produits sur le marché mondial pourrait rester faible. Nous développons un modèle économique prenants en compte l’investissement en R&D dans les innovations alimentaires afin d’identifier les conditions dans lesquelles la technologie NTIV émerge dans un contexte de commerce international. Le cadre intègre le consentement à payer des consommateurs (CAP) pour le nouvel aliment, l’incertitude des processus de R&D, le coût réglementaire associé à l’approbation et la concurrence entre les produits nationaux et étrangers. Le modèle permet l’analyse quantitative de l’apparition de nouveaux aliments qui pourraient être introduits sur les marchés puis commercialisés au-delà des frontières. Nous appliquons le modèle à un cas hypothétique de pommes améliorées avec des NTIV. Les résultats de la simulation suggèrent que les interdictions d’importation et les valeurs élevées de coûts fixes peuvent réduire les investissements en R&D dans les NTIV à des niveaux sous-optimaux.

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.

Background: Influenza mortality has dramatically decreased in France since the 1950s. Annual death rates peaked during two pandemics: the Asian flu (1956–1957) and the Hong Kong flu (1969–1970). Objective: This study’s objective is to evaluate whether the second pandemic created a structural change in the dynamics of influenza mortality in France. Methods: We employ a new database on influenza mortality since 1950 at the subnational level (90 geographic areas) to estimate statistical models to find out whether a structural change happened and to explain the differences in mortality rates across geographic areas. Influenza mortality increased between 1950 and 1969 and decreased from 1970 onward. Conclusions: The Hong Kong flu is identified as the event of a structural break. After the break, geographical differences are less explained by regional characteristics such as income, density, or aging ratio. The Hong Kong flu was found to be associated with a major change in influenza mortality in France. Change in health practices and policies induced a decline in mortality that started in 1970, just after the pandemic. The health benefits are notably important for senior citizens and for the poorest regions. Contribution: We employ a new database on influenza mortality since 1950 at the subnational level (90 geographic areas). Change in health practices and policies induced a decline in mortality that started in 1970, just after the pandemics. The health benefits are notably important for senior citizens and for the poorest regions.

This paper adds to the scant literature on the impact of terrorism on consumer behavior, focusing on household spending on goods that are sensitive to brain-stress neurocircuitry. These include sweet- and fat-rich foods but also home necessities and female-personal-hygiene products, the only female-targeted good in our data. We examine unique continuous in-home-scanner expenditure data for a representative sample of about 15,000 French households, observed in the days before and after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert-hall. We find that the attack increased expenditure on sugar-rich food by over 5% but not that on salty food or soda drinks. Spending on home maintenance products went up by almost 9%. We detect an increase of 23.5% in expenditure on women’s personal hygiene products. We conclude that these effects are short-lived and driven by the responses of households with children, youths, and those residing within a few-hours ride of the place of the attack.

Our study shows that China’s export value-added tax (VAT) rebate system is a major industrial policy that affects its exports. We use export data at the HS6 product level for a panel of 329 Chinese cities over the 2003-2012 period to assess how changes in the export VAT tax have affected China’s export performance. We consider different trade margins in terms of volumes, prices, and the number of countries served. To counter endogeneity, we exploit variations in the expected impact of the export VAT rebates by trade regime, which come from an eligibility rule disqualifying certain export flows from the rebates. Our results suggest that a 1 percent decline in the export VAT tax leads to a 7.2 percent relative increase in eligible export values at the city level. This effect is due to an adjustment of quantities and the number of foreign markets served while the average unit values of exports remain unchanged.

We revisit the standard theoretical model of tax competition to consider imperfect mobility of both capital and labor. We show that the mobility of one factor affects the taxation of both factors and that the ”race-to-the-bottom” narrative (with burden shifting) applies essentially to capital-exporting countries. We validate our predictions using a panel of 29 OECD countries over the period of 1997–2017. The quantitative contribution of rising capital mobility to the decline of corporate income tax rates over our sample period is nonetheless less than that of population ageing.

Intra-generational inequalities focus on the distributions within age groups. On the basis of French household income surveys carried out from 1996 to 2014, the Gini coefficient and D9/D1 inter-decile ratio were calculated so as to evaluate intra-generational income inequality before and after redistribution by the tax and welfare system. Age-Cohort-Period models were then estimated in order to disentangle age and generation effects. Over a life cycle, intra-generational inequality displays a hump-shaped curve peaking at age 55-59. This inequality is significantly lower among the youngest, whichever inequality indicator is used, and among the oldest, when measured by the inter-decile ratio. Comparison of pre-and postredistribution income reveals that the tax and welfare system particularly reduces inequality among the young. Intra-generational inequality measured by the Gini coefficient increases significantly from one generation to the next. Measured by the inter-decile ratio, the increase is considerable for the gross income of those generations born from the 1970s on. However, the tax and welfare system has compensated for this increase, because analysis of the interdecile ratio applied to disposable income shows no significant difference between generations.

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.

Intra-generational inequalities focus on the distributions within age groups. On the basis of French household income surveys carried out from 1996 to 2014, the Gini coefficient and D9/D1 inter-decile ratio were calculated so as to evaluate intra-generational income inequality before and after redistribution by the tax and welfare system. Age-Cohort-Period models were then estimated in order to disentangle age and generation effects. Over a life cycle, intra-generational inequality displays a hump-shaped curve peaking at age 55–59. This inequality is significantly lower among the youngest, whichever inequality indicator is used, and among the oldest, when measured by the inter-decile ratio. Comparison of pre- and post-redistribution income reveals that the tax and welfare system particularly reduces inequality among the young. Intra-generational inequality measured by the Gini coefficient increases significantly from one generation to the next. Measured by the inter-decile ratio, the increase is considerable for the gross income of those generations born from the 1970s on. However, the tax and welfare system has compensated for this increase, because analysis of the inter-decile ratio applied to disposable income shows no significant difference between generations.

This paper contributes to the literature on firms’ export pricing by assessing whether and to what extent firms take into account the expected future evolution of the exchange rates while setting their prices. Using French micro-level trade data, our empirical analysis reveals that by adjusting their export prices, firms partly absorb information about future exchange rate variations. The extent to which individual exporters absorb future exchange rate fluctuations is found to depend on their market power, in accordance with theoretical dynamic demand-side models encompassing mechanisms creating an inter-temporal relationship between current market shares and future profits. The analysis also shows that the strength of such expectation-related mechanism is considerably reduced with greater future exchange rate uncertainty, in line with an interpretation of pricing-to-market as an investment decision under uncertainty. In a comparative perspective our results are shown to drive asymmetric responses across destinations of aggregate bilateral export flows to expected exchange rate movements.

Dans l’arène où sévissent les populistes, la question économique est au cœur de la dénonciation des élites et de « leur » politique : dictée par les intérêts bien compris des banques et des marchés, elle serait favorable à une globalisation tous azimuts, européenne avant d’être française, indifférente aux effets de la désindustrialisation, de la pauvreté, des inégalités. Or l’argumentaire économique des populistes n’est jamais analysé comme tel, jamais confronté non plus aux expériences politiques que ces derniers ont pu soutenir. C’est pourquoi ce livre fait le pari, avec dix-sept économistes, tous reconnus dans leur domaine, d’analyser et de déconstruire toute une palette de thématiques chères aux populistes, du protectionnisme aux migrations. Ainsi se trouvent démontés des « faits », des « données », voire des « analyses », qui relèvent en réalité du storytelling, de la mauvaise foi, d’éléments chiffrés piochés çà et là en fonction de leur capacité à conforter des a priori et des ambitions politiques.

This paper adds to the scant literature on the impact of terrorism on consumer behavior, focusing on household spending on goods that are sensitive to brain-stress neurocircuitry. These include sweet-and fat-rich foods but also home necessities and female-personal-hygiene products, the only female-targeted good in our data. We examine unique continuous in-homescanner expenditure data for a representative sample of about 15,000 French households, observed in the days before and after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert-hall. We find that the attack increased expenditure on sugar-rich food by over 5% but not that on salty food or soda drinks. Spending on home maintenance products went up by almost 9%. We detect an increase of 23.5% in expenditure on women’s personal hygiene products. We conclude that these effects are short-lived and driven by the responses of households with children, youths, and those residing within a few-hours ride of the place of the attack.

A significant literature in the social sciences addresses the impact of child-bearing and rearing on marital stability and on mothers’ labour market outcomes. Much less is known about older mothers’ employment and marriage patterns when the adult children leave the parental nest. This study aims to shed light on these issues using longitudinal labour force data for France. Exploiting retirement laws for identification purposes, and taking a regression discontinuity approach, we find that older women’s retirement probability is positively associated with an empty nest. We also conclude that an empty nest is negatively associated with older mothers’ marriage probability. There is scope for better targeting of both family and retirement policies for older mothers during those critical years when adult children leave the parental nest.

Une manière entièrement nouvelle d’aborder l’emploi des seniors, qui prenne en compte les évolutions des métiers et dépasse les débats sur l’âge de la retraite. Les fins de carrière sont rarement perçues comme des périodes d’épanouissement professionnel pour les intéressés et comme une chance pour l’économie. Beaucoup plus nombreux que les générations précédentes et comptant davantage de femmes dans leurs rangs, les travailleurs seniors sont en meilleure santé et généralement plus qualifiés. Pourtant les préjugés et les discriminations persistent à leur endroit : leurs compétences sont jugées obsolètes, leurs facultés déclinantes, leurs demandes négligées. Une manière entièrement nouvelle d’aborder leur emploi s’impose, qui prenne en compte les évolutions des métiers et dépasse les débats sur l’âge de la retraite. Une insertion professionnelle correcte, valorisante et productive des seniors ne peut s’obtenir qu’au moyen d’une politique globale qui inclut une qualification tout au long de la vie et une adaptation de l’environnement et du temps de travail à leurs besoins.

Migration and migration-related diversity are likely to remain key topics of the European policy and research agenda for the foreseeable future. This asks for a rethinking of the research agenda on migration, from a strategic perspective as well as from a research perspective. The objective of this chapter is to suggest applications that are useful in shaping the next funding opportunities for migration research, and to provide roadmaps for the optimisation of research efforts in order to avoid overlapping and, where possible, to close the gaps in the global spectrum and national initiatives on migration. Questions such as How to benefit from and get access to available knowledge and expertise? How to promote the accumulation of knowledge and expertise? and How to address gaps in knowledge? have been at the heart of the Horizon 2020 CrossMigration research project and have led to the definition of its strategic research agenda . This chapter considers the need for a future agenda on migration studies, addressing methodological issues; what funding to focus on; how funding might be organised; who should be involved in funding (and procedures); and what prospects there are for the future. We will also propose three strategies to consider how an agenda might help provide towards: (1) keeping the road safe for achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals in 2030, (2) contrasting current and future pandemic/epidemic disease, and (3) establishing a fruitful dialogue with the African scientific community.

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 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.

This paper analyzes the effects of a major reputational shock affecting textile importers from Bangladesh. The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in April 2013 generated a surge of activism and media coverage specifically targeting the firms that sourced from the factories affected by the disaster. Using monthly firm-level import data from French Customs, we study any potential disruption in these firms’ imports from all origins, and specifically from Bangladesh. We use a difference-in-differences approach. French textile imports from Bangladesh rose continuously after the shock, and the overall imports of retailers sourcing from the Rana Plaza show no drop after the event. Our results do reveal a relative decline in Bangladeshi imports for those retailers named for sourcing from the collapsed factories. This effect is mirrored by a relative increase in these exposed firms’ imports from four particular countries, which are non-Asian and are geographically closer to France.

Influenza mortality has dramatically decreased in France since the 1950s. Annual death rates peaked during two pandemics: the Asian flu (1956-57) and the Hong-Kong flu (1969-1970). This study’s objective is to evaluate whether the second pandemic created a structural change in the dynamics of influenza mortality in France. We employ a new database on influenza mortality since 1950 at the subnational level (90 geographic areas) to estimate statistical models to find whether a structural change happened and to explain the differences in mortality rates across geographic areas. Influenza mortality increased between 1950 and 1969, and decreased from 1970 onward. The Hong-Kong flu is identified as the event of a structural break. After the break, geographical differences are less explained by regional characteristics such as income, density or aging ratio. Hong Kong flu was found to be associated with a major change in influenza mortality in France. Change in health practices and policies induced a decline in mortality that started in 1970, just after the pandemics. The health benefits are notably important for senior citizens and for the poorest regions.

We provide one of the first formalizations of a vaccination campaign in a decisiontheoretic framework. We analyse a model where an ambiguity-averse individual must decide how much effort to invest into prevention in the context of a rampant disease. We study how ambiguity aversion affects the effort and the estimation of the vaccine efficacy in clinical trials and immunization campaigns. We find that the behaviours of individuals participating in a clinical trial differ from individuals not participating. Individuals who are more optimistic toward vaccination participate more in trials. Their behaviours and efforts are also affected. As a result, because vaccine efficacy depends on unobserved behaviours and efforts, the biological effect of the vaccine becomes difficult to evaluate. During the scale-up phase of a vaccination campaign, provided that vaccine efficacy is established, we show that vaccine hesitancy may still be rational.

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)

This article quantifies the effects of increasing global geopolitical uncertainty on the size of migration flows to Western Europe. Uncertainty is measured by the number of victims of terrorist attacks worldwide. The effect on migration flows is quantified through the estimation of vector autoregressive models on a panel of 15 European countries and on France, thanks to an original migration dataset. The estimations suggest that the flows of permanent migrants are generally reduced by global terrorism. In particular, the increase in uncertainty that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, caused an 8% drop in flows to Europe and a 19% drop in flows to France. The effect of global uncertainty on the flow of asylum seekers depends on the country: on average in Europe, asylum applications increase with terrorism, but for France, they decrease with terrorism. This difference can be explained by the geographical position and border control policies of France.

Le 1er janvier 2022, la France comptait 67,8 millions d’habitants soit 187 000 de plus qu’au 1er janvier 2021. Les nombres de naissances, d’IVG et de mariages en 2021 ont augmenté si on les compare à 2020, sans toutefois retrouver les niveaux observés avant la crise sanitaire (2019). Il en est même pour les décès dont le nombre a diminué, mais reste encore supérieur à celui observé en 2019. En 2021, la France fait partie des 9 pays européens parmi les 27 dont le solde naturel est positif. Son solde migratoire l’est également et, en 2021, est supérieur au solde naturel. Au total, la population de la France continue d’augmenter, mais à un rythme plus faible qu’avant la pandémie. En 2020, les flux d’entrées de personnes venant de pays tiers avec un titre de séjour ont très fortement diminué du fait de la crise sanitaire. Ce sont les titres pour raison professionnelle qui ont le plus baissé. Les demandes se concentrent en Île-de-France. En 2021, l’indice conjoncturel de fécondité augmente très légèrement (1,83 enfant par femme), principalement du fait de la hausse des taux entre 30 et 39 ans. Le profil par âge varie selon les régions. Le recours à l’avortement est plutôt stable entre 2020 et 2021, mais la part des IVG réalisées par la méthode médicamenteuse augmente d’année en année (77 % en 2021), surtout celles pratiquées en cabinet de ville. Cependant, on observe d’importantes différences territoriales, du fait d’une offre de soins inégale au niveau local. En 2021, le rattrapage des mariages qui n’ont pu être célébrés en 2020 n’a été que partiel. Pour la première fois en 2020, le nombre de pacs dépasse celui des mariages. Les mariages sont plus fréquents sur le flanc est du pays et les pacs sur la façade atlantique et dans le Sud-Ouest. Le nombre de décès reste important en 2021 malgré une amélioration par rapport à 2020. L’espérance de vie en 2021 reste inférieure de 4,6 mois pour les hommes par rapport à 2019, et de 1,4 mois pour les femmes. La surmortalité est estimée à 6,3 % en 2021 après avoir été de 7,5 % en 2020. Les régions les plus touchées ne sont pas nécessairement celles où la mortalité était initialement forte.

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.

In this work we introduce a general equilibrium model with landlords, indebted owner-occupiers and renters to study housing markets’ dynamics. We estimate it by using standard Bayesian methods and match the US data of the last decades. This framework is particularly suited to explain current trends on housing markets. We highlight the crucial relationship between interest rates, house prices and rents, and argue that it helps understanding the main driving forces. Our analysis suggests that current developments on housing markets can play a role for a recovery from the Covid pandemic as they have an expansionary effect on aggregate output. Moreover, we account for the heterogeneous impact of crisis-induced policies depending on agents’ status on the housing market. We show how, despite an increase in housing prices, the welfare of landlords has been negatively hit. This is associated to the joint decrease in returns on housing and financial assets that reduces their financial incomes.

New Plant Engineering Techniques (NPETs) have path-breaking potential to improve foods by strengthening their production, increasing resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, and by bettering their appearance and nutritional quality. Can NPETs-based foods succeed in the marketplace? Providing answers to this question, we first develop a simple economic model for R&D investment in food innovations based on NPETs and traditional hybridization methods, to identify which technology emerges under various parameter characterizations and associated economic welfare outcomes. The framework combines the cost of food innovation with consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the new food, highlighting the uncertain and costly nature of R&D processes as well as the role of consumer acceptance of technology, and the cost of ignorance, and regret, if consumers are not fully informed on the technology used to generate the new food. We then apply the framework to a case of NPETs-based new apples using recently elicited WTP of French and US consumers. Our simulation results suggest that NPETs may be socially beneficial under full information, and when the probability of success under NPETs is significantly higher than under traditional hybridization. Otherwise, the innovation based on traditional hybridization is socially optimal. A probable collapse of conventional apples raises the social desirability of new apples generated by NPETs and traditional hybridization.

In this paper we discuss the role of explicit formal dynamic models in our understanding of socio-economic history. Specifically, to illustrate the methodological issue, we center our analysis on studies of institutional and cultural change. Finally, we study in detail a dynamic model of institutions for property rights protection and culture of conflict as an example.

Gender inequality in the labour market is interconnected with unequal sharing of care responsibilities by gender at home. While the unequal treatment of men and women in the labour market is illegal, gender gaps in employment and earnings are a persistent feature of labour markets. It is challenging to distinguish women’s true preferences for combing work and family life from employers’ discrimination against women. Women’s preferences for staying at home, working part-time, or in non-standard employment forms are often believed to drive gender inequalities in the labour market. This view contradicts the finding that gender imbalances in combing work and care are often reflected in lower well-being of mothers and children. This article reviews a selection of papers on gender gaps in employment, earnings and well-being published recently by JFEI and prospects avenues for future research.

In this study, we ask whether the U-shaped relationship between life satisfactionand age is flatter for individuals who are partnered. An analysis of cross-sectionalEU-SILC data indicates that the decline in life satisfaction from the teens to thefifties is almost four times larger for non-partnered than for partnered individuals,whose life satisfaction essentially follows a slight downward trajectory with age.However, the same analysis applied to three panel datasets (BHPS, SOEP andHILDA) reveals a U-shape for both groups, albeit somewhat flatter for the partneredthan for the non-partnered individuals. We suggest that the difference between thecross-sectional and the panel results reflects compositional effects: i.e., there isa significant shift of the relatively dissatisfied out of marriage in mid-life. Thesecompositional effects tend to flatten the U-shape in age for the partnered individualsin the cross-sectional data.

Le 1er janvier 2021, la France comptait 67,4 millions d’habitants soit 120 000 de plus qu’au 1er janvier 2020. Contrairement à de nombreux pays européens, la population de la France n’a pas diminué, mais marque un très fort ralentissement, du fait principalement de la crise sanitaire engendrée par la pandémie de Covid qui a eu des effets sur toutes les composantes démographiques. L’année 2020 devrait voir diminuer le nombre de titres de séjours d’au moins un an délivrés à des personnes des pays tiers (– 10 000), notamment ceux en provenance de pays d’Afrique et ceux pour causes « familiale » et « humanitaire ». Le nombre de naissances a également fortement baissé, particulièrement 9 mois après le confinement. Cette baisse s’explique par une diminution du nombre de conceptions et non une augmentation des interruptions volontaires de grossesses qui sont en recul, notamment les mois suivant le premier confinement. Mais les deux phénomènes les plus fortement affectés sont, d’une part, les mariages rendus impossibles du fait des règles sanitaires (– 70 000) et, comme on pouvait s’y attendre, la mortalité avec une diminution de l’espérance de vie de 0,56 an pour les hommes et 0,45 an pour les femmes, soit un retour au niveau de mortalité observé 6 ans auparavant.

In this article, we study the impact of demographic changes on the inequality between capital and labor incomes. More precisely, we analyze the impact of exogenous changes in both the rate of natural increase and the net migration rate on labor income as a share of total income. We estimate a structural vector autoregression (VAR) model on a panel of 18 OECD countries with annual data for 1985–2018. We find that the response of the labor income share to an exogenous change in the rate of natural increase is significantly negative a few years after the shock, whereas its response to an exogenous change in the net migration rate is significantly positive. This suggests that in addition to the factors usually introduced in the literature, demographic factors play a role in the observed variation in the labor income share.

This article studies the optimal intertemporal allocation of resources devoted to the prevention of deterministic infectious diseases that admit an endemic steady- state. Under general assumptions, the optimal control problem is shown to be formally similar to an optimal growth model with endogenous discounting. The optimal dynamics then depends on the interplay between the epidemiological characteristics of the disease, the labour productivity and the degree of inter- generational equity. Phase diagrams analysis reveal that multiple trajectories, which converge to endemic steady-states with or without prevention or to the elimination of the disease, are feasible. Elimination implies initially a larger prevention than in other trajectories, but after a .nite date, prevention is equal to zero. This .sooner-the-better. strategy is shown to be optimal if the pure discount rate is su¢ ciently low.

We revisit the standard theoretical model of tax competition to consider imperfect mobility of both capital and labor. We show that the mobility of one factor affects the taxation of both factors, and that the « race-to-the-bottom » narrative (with burden shifting) applies essentially to capital-exporting countries. We validate our predictions using a panel of 29 OECD countries over the period 1997-2017. The quantitative contribution of rising capital mobility to the decline of corporate income tax rates over our sample period is nonetheless less than that of population ageing.

What determines whether or not multinational firms transplant the mode of organisation to other countries? We embed the theory of knowledge hierarchies in an industry equilibrium model of monopolistic competition to examine how the economic environment may affect the decision of multinational firms about transplanting the mode of organisation to other countries. We test the theory with original and matched parent and affiliate data on the level of decentralisation of 660 Austrian and German multinational firms and 2,200 of their affiliate firms in Eastern Europe. We find that market competition in both home and host markets is an important driver of organisational transfer to host countries: an increase in competition in the home (host) market by ten percentage points lowers (increases) the probability of transplanting by nine (seven) percentage points.

This article studies the optimal intertemporal allocation of resources devoted to the prevention of deterministic infectious diseases that admit an endemic steady-state. Under general assumptions, the optimal control problem is shown to be formally similar to an optimal growth model with endogenous discounting. The optimal dynamics then depends on the interplay between the epidemiological characteristics of the disease, the labor productivity and the degree of intergenerational equity. Phase diagrams analysis reveals that multiple trajectories, which converge to endemic steady-states with or without prevention or to the elimination of the disease, are feasible. Elimination implies initially a larger prevention than in other trajectories, but after a finite date, prevention is equal to zero. This “sooner-the-better” strategy is shown to be optimal if the pure discount rate is sufficiently low.

A significant literature in the social sciences addresses the impact of child-bearing and rearing on marital stability and on mothers’ labour market outcomes. Much less is known about older mothers’ employment and marriage patterns when the adult children leave the parental nest. This study aims to shed light on these issues using longitudinal labour force data for France. Exploiting retirement laws for identification purposes, and taking a regression discontinuity approach, we find that older women’s retirement probability is positively associated with an empty nest. We also conclude that an empty nest is negatively associated with older mothers’ marriage probability. There is scope for better targeting of both family and retirement policies for older mothers during those critical years when adult children leave the parental nest.

We compare consumers’ attitude towards and willingness to pay (WTP) for gene-edited (GE) apples in Europe and the US. Using hypothetical choices in a lab and different technology messages, we estimate WTP of 162 French and 166 US consumers for new apples, which do not brown upon being sliced or cut. Messages center on (i) the social and private benefits of having the new apples, and (ii) possible technologies leading to this new benefit (conventional hybrids, GE, and genetically modified (GMO)). French consumers do not value the innovation and actually discount it when it is generated via biotechnology. US consumers do value the innovation as long as it is not generated by biotechnology. In both countries, the steepest discount is for GMO apples, followed by GE apples. Furthermore, the discounting occurs through “boycott” consumers who dislike biotechnology. However, the discounting is weaker for US consumers compared to French consumers. Favorable attitudes towards sciences and new technology totally offset the discounting of GE apples.

L’immigration professionnelle des ressortissants des pays ne faisant pas partie de l’Espace économique européen a représenté en moyenne un peu plus de 13 200 personnes par an entre 2000 et 2018. Les flux annuels, qui sont sensibles aux alternances politiques, sont en hausse constante depuis 2012. L’immigration professionnelle est très majoritairement masculine et très concentrée sur Paris et quelques départements limitrophes. Depuis 2008, deux inflexions majeures sont constatées. Premièrement, l’immigration professionnelle très qualifiée progresse à un rythme soutenu et a dépassé le nombre de 6 500 personnes en 2018. Deuxièmement, une part significative de l’immigration professionnelle relève d’une politique de régularisation par le travail de personnes en situation irrégulière, dont des déboutés du droit d’asile.

Le premier déplacement officiel en Afrique de la nouvelle directrice générale du FMI, Kristalina Georgieva, a eu lieu à Dakar le 2 décembre 2019, pour participer à une conférence internationale organisée par la République du Sénégal et le Cercle des économistes, en partenariat avec le FMI, la Banque mondiale et l’Organisation des Nations unies. Intitulée « Développement durable et dette soutenable : trouver le juste équilibre », cette rencontre fut exceptionnelle du fait de la participation de six chefs d’État (représentant le Sénégal, le Togo, le Burkina Faso, le Niger, la Côte d’Ivoire et le Benin) et du Premier ministre du Mali qui ont entamé un dialogue ouvert et symétrique avec les dirigeants des organisations internationales et les nombreux experts et universitaires venus pour l’occasion. Fait peu courant, les voix africaines ont clairement dominé les débats, plaçant les autres participants dans une position d’écoute et de réaction aux analyses et suggestions qui leur étaient faites.

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 seeks to explain why annuity purchases are postponed to a later age. We consider an overlapping generations model with uncertain lifetime and two types of annuities. It is shown that, if the economy is dynamically inefficient, individuals demand annuities without delay. However, if it is efficient, annuity purchases are postponed. We also show that these results are robust to several extensions.

New Plant Engineering Techniques (NPETs) may significantly improve both production and quality of foods. Consumers and regulators around the world might be reluctant to accept such products, which may cripple adoption and global market penetration of these products. We develop a parsimonious economic model for R&D investment in food innovations to identify conditions under which NPET technology emerges in a context of international trade. The framework integrates consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the new food, the uncertainty of R&D processes, the associated regulatory cost of approval, and the competition between domestic and foreign products. With generic applicability, the model enables the quantitative analysis of new foods that could be introduced in markets and then traded across borders. We apply the framework to a hypothetical case of apples improved with NPETs. Simulation results suggest that import bans and high values of sunk costs can reduce R&D investment in NPETs to suboptimal levels.

Using administrative employee-firm-level data on the entire private sector from 1994 to 2007, we show that the labor market in France has polarized: employment shares of high and low wage occupations grew, while middle wage occupations shrank. At the same time, the share of technology-related occupations (“techies”) grew substantially. Aggregate polarization was driven mostly by changes in the composition of firms within industries. Within-firm adjustments and changes in industry composition were much less important. Polarization occured mostly within urban areas, with roughly equal contributions of men and women. We study the role of technology adoption in shaping firm-level outcomes using a new measure of the propensity of a firm to adopt new technology: its employment share of techies. We find that techies were an important force driving aggregate polarization in France, as firms with more techies grew faster.

Cet article analyse l’évolution des inégalités spatiales de revenu entre les départements de la France métropolitaine depuis 1922. La contribution la plus notable est la reconstruction du revenu fiscal moyen par département, avant et après paiement de l’impôt sur le revenu, grâce à une exploitation inédite d’archives du ministère des Finances. Nous observons les faits stylisés suivants : (i) une très forte baisse des inégalités interdépartementales de revenu fiscal moyen sur un siècle, avec deux périodes de baisse continue, entre 1922 et 1939 et depuis 1948 ; (ii) une contribution significative, mais variable dans le temps, de l’impôt sur le revenu à la baisse des inégalités interdépartementales ; (iii) une amélioration de la situation relative de tous les départements se trouvant sous une ligne allant du Calvados au Gard depuis 1948.

La migration étudiante représente une part non négligeable du flux migratoire des ressortissants de pays tiers vers la France. Depuis 2000, leur contribution est d’environ 25% si l’on comptabilise ceux qui restent au moins un an en France et d’environ 15% si l’on ne retient que ceux qui, après leur arrivée comme étudiants, obtiennent un titre de séjour pour un autre motif.

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.

Public procurement represents a substantial share of gross domestic product (GDP) in many countries, and is notoriously home-biased as a result of often opaque practices. However, little is known about the determinants of restrictions on public procurement policies. To explore this issue, we map information from the Global Trade Alert (GTA) database on regulatory obstacles to public procurement alongside international trade flows at the country pair-product level and applied bilateral tariffs. Considering the universe of restrictions introduced over the period 2009-2016 by importers on exporters and products, we highlight three novel facts. First, the main foreign providers are not the most targeted, suggesting long-term contractual relationships between buyers and sellers in public markets. Second, the ear of retaliation is alleviating the protectionist pressure in the importer country. Third, we document substitutability between public procurement restrictions and tariffs.

This article analyses the development of inequalities across the lifespan and generations in France using a pseudo-panel developed from successive waves of the French Household Expenditure Survey that took place between 1979 and 2011. The standard of living of individuals, evaluated using individualised disposable income or private consumption, including housing costs, is decomposed by sex and educational attainment. Our Age-Period-Cohort models reveal that men with lower education levels who were born after 1950 experienced a significant decline in disposable income compared to those born between 1918 and 1950. Conversely, we observe no decline in disposable income when the whole population of men is considered. The evolution is rather different for women: those with lower education levels did not experience any decline, whereas the overall population of women benefitted from a strong increase in disposable income across generations.

This paper presents a new theory of crime where leaders transmit a crime technology and act as a role model for other criminals. We show that, in equilibrium, an individual’s crime effort and criminal decisions depend on the geodesic distance to the leader in his or her network of social contacts. By using data on friendship networks among U.S. high-school students, we structurally estimate the model and find evidence supporting its predictions. In particular, by using a definition of a criminal leader that is exogenous to the network formation of friendship links, we find that the longer is the distance to the leader, the lower is the criminal activity of the delinquents and the less likely they are to become criminals. We finally perform a counterfactual experiment that reveals that a policy that removes all criminal leaders from a school can, on average, reduce criminal activity by about 20% and the individual probability of becoming a criminal by 10%.

An estimation of the impact of climatic conditions—measured with an index that combines temperature and humidity, the IPTCC—on the hospitalizations and deaths attributed to SARS-CoV-2 is proposed. The present paper uses weekly data from 54 French administrative regions between March 23, 2020 and January 10, 2021. Firstly, a Granger causal analysis is developed and reveals that past values of the IPTCC contain information that allow for a better prediction of hospitalizations or deaths than that obtained without the IPTCC. Finally, a vector autoregressive model is estimated to evaluate the dynamic response of hospitalizations and deaths after an increase in the IPTCC. It is estimated that a 10-point increase in the IPTCC causes hospitalizations to rise by 2.9% (90% CI 0.7–5.0) one week after the increase, and by 4.1% (90% CI 2.1–6.4) and 4.4% (90% CI 2.5–6.3) in the two following weeks. Over ten weeks, the cumulative effect is estimated to reach 20.1%. Two weeks after the increase in the IPTCC, deaths are estimated to rise by 3.7% (90% CI 1.6–5.8). The cumulative effect from the second to the tenth weeks reaches 15.8%. The results are robust to the inclusion of air pollution indicators.

Les causes, les motifs et les temporalités des séjours des étudiants internationaux les distinguent des autres immigrés – mais avec quelles conséquences, pour le devenir de ces étudiants, pour l’immigration qualifiée en France, et pour notre compréhension des flux migratoires ?

In this article, we study the impact of demographic changes on the inequality between capital and labor incomes. More precisely, we analyze the impact of exogenous changes in both the rate of natural increase and the net migration rate on labor income as a share of total income. We estimate a structural vector au- toregression (VAR) model on a panel of 18 OECD countries with annual data for 1985-2018. We find that the response of the labor income share to an exogenous change in the rate of natural increase is signi_cantly negative a few years after the shock, whereas its response to an exogenous change in the net migration rate is significantly positive. This suggests that in addition to the factors usually introduced in the literature, demographic factors play a role in the observed variation in the labor income share.

We use the National Transfer Accounts methodology to calculate private asset income by age for the years 1979–2011. We analyze age profiles using three indicators of intergenerational equity. Monetary asset income shows no evidence of generational breaks to the benefit of the baby‐boom generation. On the contrary, baby‐boomers suffered from the high interest rates that they paid to become homeowners. Imputed rents show an obvious breakdown of intergenerational equity when we use an inter‐age and intergenerational indicator. This indicator compares the per capita asset income at a given age with the average asset income of people aged 18‐85. It gives the relative situation of one age group compared to its contemporaries and it also gives the relative situation of one generation when we compare birth cohorts over time. We find that the cohort born in 1950 benefited from a better position than their successors. Moreover, the cohorts born before the war and during the war appear to be even more favored than the baby‐boomers. The cohorts born in 1930 and in 1940 have a better situation than the previous generations and a better position than the following generations.

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.

In a life-cycle model with a bequest motive, we study the impact of smooth ambiguity aversion to uncertain survival probabilities on the optimal demand for annuities. We implement a theory-driven laboratory experiment. First, a subject’s ambiguity attitude is elicited in a simple experimental setting able to make the smooth ambiguity model operational. Then, in a two-period annuity-bequest decision problem, the subject’s bequest in the second period is presented as a donation to a previously chosen charity, contingent to the subject being active after the first period. In line with the theoretical predictions, we find that ambiguity-averse (resp., loving) subjects invest less (resp., more) in annuities than ambiguity-neutral ones. Furthermore, subjects’ contingent donation to the chosen charity increases in their investment in annuities only for sufficiently high levels of warm-glow altruism.

D’Albis and Boubtane provide empirical evidence on the macroeconomic and fiscal consequences of international migration for OECD countries. The authors use a panel of 19 countries over the period 1980–2015 to study the effects of increases in the net migration rate on per capita GDP and on both the employment rate and the share of working-age in total population. Moreover, the effect of exogenous changes in fiscal balance is studied by decomposing the effects of net taxes and public spending. The empirical evidence is discussed using recent findings of the theoretical literature.

En utilisant les données d’entreprise et d’industrie, nous mettons e évidence deux régularités empiriques : (i) L’incertitude de la demande étrangère réduit les ventes à l’exportation, la probabilité d’exporter, et l’efficacité des politiques commerciales; (ii) Les grandes entreprises sont les exportateurs les plus affectés par l’incertitude. Nous rationalisons ces régularités à l’aide d’un nouveau modèle de commerce international dans lequel les entreprises agissent dans un environnement incertain. On montre qu’une plus grande incertitude induit une réallocation des parts de marché des entreprises productives vers les moins productives. Cependant, des barrières aux échanges élevés réduit ce phénomène de réallocation. Nos résultats tiennent pour une large classe de fonctions d’utilité.

Avec l’ouverture des économies et le développement des échanges internationaux croissent les craintes des consommateurs de voir arriver sur le marché national des produits de piètre qualité et potentiellement dangereux pour la santé humaine ou l’environnement. Afin d’assurer un niveau de sécurité adéquat, l’Organisation mondiale du commerce (OMC) autorise les pays à mettre en œuvre différentes normes sanitaires et techniques. Sur le principe, ces normes ne doivent pas être protectionnistes, néanmoins, certains décideurs publics peuvent être tentés de les utiliser pour protéger les producteurs domestiques de la concurrence étrangère.Quel est l’effet réel de ces normes sur le bien-être des consommateurs et sur les flux de commerce entre pays ? Leurs définitions et applications sont-elles influencées par certains groupes de pression pour leur propre profit ?À partir des résultats de recherches menées depuis près de deux décennies, l’auteure propose plusieurs pistes d’action, tant pour une meilleure coordination des réglementations entre les pays que pour une meilleure insertion des pays en développement dans la politique réglementaire internationale.

Cet article propose une réévaluation de la croissance économique en France entre 1985 et 2010, en intégrant la production domestique aux indicateurs de richesse du produit intérieur brut (PIB) et des revenus du travail. Au cours de la période, la croissance du PIB est surestimée de 0,35 point de pourcentage. Une décomposition temporelle révèle que la croissance est clairement surestimée au cours de la période 1985-2000, tandis qu’elle est plutôt sous-estimée au cours de la période 2000-2010. Le ralentissement de la croissance du PIB après les années 2000 est nettement moins évident lorsque l’on utilise l’indicateur élargi à la production domestique dont le taux de croissance passe de 1,6 % à 1,5 %.

Le 1er janvier 2020, la France comptait un peu plus de 67 millions d’habitants dont 14,4 millions avaient moins de 18 ans. Le nombre de naissances (754 000) continue de baisser et le nombre de décès (612 000) d’augmenter. Le solde naturel demeure le principal moteur de l’accroissement démographique. Le flux d’entrées d’étrangers originaires de pays hors de l’Espace économique européen et de la Suisse s’accroît (+ 4,9 % par rapport à 2017, 249 474 personnes en 2018). Un entrant sur dix est mineur. L’indice conjoncturel de fécondité est quasi stable (1,87 enfant par femme en 2019) et l’âge moyen à la maternité continue d’augmenter. Parmi les naissances, 0,5 % sont issues de mères mineures. Le nombre d’IVG (230 000) et l’indice conjoncturel d’IVG (0,58) sont en légère hausse en 2019. Le nombre d’IVG de femmes mineures poursuit en revanche sa baisse et représente désormais 3,5 % des IVG en 2019. Le nombre de mariages (235 000) et le nombre de pacs (209 000) ont augmenté en 2018, toutefois l’écart entre eux s’est encore amenuisé. Les mariages sont toujours plus tardifs en France (35,4 ans pour les femmes et 37,9 ans pour les hommes). En 2018, 2,6 % des mariages sont célébrés entre personnes de même sexe et 4,1 % des pacs. Les remariages sont de plus en plus rares après un divorce ou un veuvage et, en moyenne, chaque divorce concerne moins d’un enfant mineur (0,91). Enfin, l’espérance de vie progresse encore mais à un rythme ralenti. Elle atteint 79,7 ans pour les hommes et 85,6 ans pour les femmes en 2019. La mortalité avant 15 ans est très faible et ces décès sont concentrés dans la première année de vie. La mortalité infantile ne diminue plus en France depuis près de 10 ans, contrairement à de nombreux autres pays européens.

The essential role that institutions play in understanding economic development has long been recognized across the social sciences, including in economics. Academic and policy interest in this subject has never been higher. The Handbook of Economic Development and Institutions is the first to bring together in one single volume the most cutting-edge work in this area by the best-known international economists. The volume’s editors, themselves leading scholars in the discipline, provide a comprehensive introduction, and the stellar contributors offer up-to-date analysis into institutional change and its interactions with the dynamics of economic development. This book focuses on three critical issues: the definitions of institutions in order to argue for a causal link to development, the complex interplay between formal and informal institutions, and the evolution and coevolution of institutions and their interactions with the political economy of development. Topics examined include the relationship between institutions and growth, educational systems, the role of the media, and the intersection between traditional systems of patronage and political institutions. Each chapter—covering the frontier research in its area and pointing to new areas of research—is the product of extensive workshopping on the part of the contributors. The definitive reference work on this topic, The Handbook of Economic Development and Institutions will be essential for academics, researchers, and professionals working in the field.

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.

This article analyzes the evolution of spatial inequalities in mortality across 90 French territorial units since 1806. Using a new database, we identify a period from 1881 to 1980 when inequalities rapidly shrank while life expectancy rose. This century of convergence across territories was mainly due to the fall in infant mortality. Since 1980, spatial inequalities have levelled out or occasionally widened, due mainly to differences in life expectancy among the elderly. The geography of mortality also changed radically during the century of convergence. Whereas in the 19th century high mortality occurred mainly in larger cities and along a line from North‐west to South‐east France, it is now concentrated in the North, and Paris and Lyon currently enjoy an urban advantage.

We show that the development of city commercial banks (CCBs) across China has alleviated the constraints from China’s domestic financial-market inefficiency on the export activity of domestic private firms. Considering the export behavior of 260 cities between 1997 and 2012, we confirm the well-established under-performance of domestic private firms in financially more vulnerable sectors compared to foreign affiliates in China. We show that a greater number of CCB branches raises domestic private-firm exports disproportionately more in financially-dependent sectors, which is in line with improved financing conditions for these companies. This improvement in export performance appears to result from both an increase in the number of destination countries and a decline in prices. CCB development is moreover associated with a reduction in the systematic disadvantage of domestic private firms relative to foreign-owned firms in export markets resulting from their greater financial exclusion. We, however, also find that private-firm export performance has deteriorated relative to that of state-owned firms, casting doubt on the ability of CCBs to end the systematic bias of lending in favor of the state sector.

Cet article utilise différentes sources et méthodologies pour analyser l’évolution des inégalités spatiales de revenu entre départements depuis 1922. La contribution la plus notable est la reconstruction du revenu moyen par département avant et après impôt sur le revenu grâce à la collecte et la numérisation inédite d’archives du ministère des Finances. Nous observons les faits stylisés suivants: (i) une très forte baisse des inégalités interdépartementales de revenu fiscal par adulte sur un siècle, avec deux périodes de baisse continue : entre 1922 et 1939 et depuis 1948 ; (ii) l’impôt sur le revenu réduit significativement les inégalités interdépartementales mais son effet a fortement varié au cours de la période considérée ; (iii) depuis 1948, tous les départements se trouvant sous une ligne allant du Calvados au Gard ont vu leur situation relative s’améliorer.

A Practical Guide to the Economic Analysis of Non-Tariff Measures is a joint-publication by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and the World Trade Organization. This publication provides the main tools for the analysis and empirical assessment of the trade effects of Non-Tariff Measures. Written by experts with practical experience in the field, this publication outlines the major concepts of the economic analysis of Non-Tariff Measures and contains practical guidance on how to apply them to concrete policy questions.

This article analyses the development of inequalities across ages and generations in France using a pseudo-panel developed from the successive waves of the French Household Expenditure Survey that took place between 1979 and 2011. The standard of living of individuals, evaluated using individualized disposable income or private consumption, including housing expenditure and imputed rent, is decomposed by sex and educational attainment. The estimation of Age-Period-Cohort models reveal that men with lower education attainments who were born after 1950 experienced a significant decline in disposable income with respect to those who were born between 1918 and 1950. Conversely, when the whole population of men is considered, no decline in disposable income is observed. The evolution is rather different for women: those with lower education attainments did not experienced any decline whereas the whole population of women benefitted from a strong increase in disposable income across generations.

Les inégalités intra-générationnelle sont les inégalités qui prévalent au sein d’une même classe d’âge. A l’aide des enquêtes « Revenus fiscaux » et « Revenus fiscaux et sociaux » menées entre 1996 et 2014, ces inégalités sont évaluées à l’aide du coefficient de Gini et du rapport inter-décile pour les revenus avant et après la redistribution opérée par le système social et fiscal. Des modèles Age-Cohorte-Période sont ensuite estimés pour distinguer les effets d’âge et de génération. Au cours du cycle de vie, les inégalités intra-générationnelles ont un profil en cloche et atteignent un maximum à 55-59 ans. Les inégalités sont significativement plus faibles chez les plus jeunes, quel que soit l’indicateur d’inégalités retenu, et chez les plus âgés, si on les mesure avec le rapport inter-décile. La comparaison des revenus avant et après redistribution révèle que le système social et fiscal réduit plus particulièrement les inégalités chez les jeunes. Lorsqu’elles sont mesurées avec le coefficient de Gini, les inégalités intra-générationnelles augmentent significativement de génération en génération. Lorsqu’elles sont mesurées avec le rapport inter-décile, la hausse est très forte pour les revenus bruts des générations nées à partir des années 1970. Le système social et fiscal a néanmoins compensé cette hausse car l’analyse du rapport inter-décile appliqué aux revenus disponibles ne révèle pas de différence significative entre les générations.

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.

The purpose of this contribution is to consider a discrete time formulation that would allow for clarifying some salient features of a vintage based understanding of the capital stock..ree main lines of conclusions are established on an analytical basis. First and for an elementary configuration with linear utility, it is proved that the rate of growth of investment is prone to andoscillating—convergent, sustained or unstable—motions. Second and for an environment with a linear production technology and a AK setup, the dynamics of investment is explicitly solved and it is established that the rate of growth of investment may either converge to the steady growth solution in oscillating way, diverge from that solution in a oscillating way, or even undergo permanent sustained oscillations with a periodicity of two. .ird, it is proved that no perennial .uctuations can emerge within a benchmark environment with strictly concave utilities and production technologies. On a methodological basis, few restrictions are superimposed, the arguments remain fairly general and the proofs are elementary.

Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face.Les lauréats du Prix du meilleur jeune économiste livrent dans cet ouvrage leur perception, leur compréhension, leurs analyses et leurs propositions de ce que pourrait ou devrait être l’avenir du monde. Ils répondent aux questions fondamentales que se posent aujourd’hui les économistes et les principaux dirigeants. Les inégalités qui se creusent depuis la fin du siècle dernier sont-elles encore tolérables ? L’État social a-t-il encore un avenir ? La mondialisation est-elle vraiment la cause de tous les maux ? L’Europe reste-t-elle un espace économique pertinent ? La science économique s’ouvre-t-elle enfin aux autres disciplines ? Chaque auteur exprime dans cet ouvrage son parcours, sa vision de la société et les actions qu’il propose d’entreprendre pour agir face aux dérèglements auxquels le monde doit faire face. Créé en 2000 par le Cercle des économistes et le journal Le Monde, le Prix du meilleur jeune économiste est décerné chaque année à un économiste de moins de 40 ans, sélectionné en raison de la reconnaissance de son expertise et de sa participation active au débat public et économique.

MENA region is undergoing rapid demographic transition, where 50% of the population is under the age 25 and high youth unemployment rates are argued to be one of the main sources of political instability. In this paper we evaluate the economic impact of the demographic transition for selected MENA countries, namely: Iran, Morocco and Egypt who experience different speeds of transition. We have developed a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with a cost of capital mobilisation as a proxy for financial markets’ efficiency and simulated the demographic trends in each country. We find that the demographic shift will be an important driver for growth in the upcoming decades. Furthermore, our results show that a more efficient financial sector leads to better economic performance. Specifically, youth are the primary beneficiaries: an increase in the financial sector efficiency can reduce up to 8 percentage points of the the unemployment rate for the youngest age group.

We here ask whether the U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age is flatter for those who are partnered. This is the case in cross-section EU-SILC data, where the drop in life satisfaction from the teens to the 50s is almost four times larger for the non-partnered than for the partnered, whose life satisfaction essentially follows a slight downward trajectory with age. However, the same analysis in three panel datasets (BHPS, SOEP and HILDA) reveals a U-shape for both marital groups, although still somewhat flatter for the partnered than for the non-partnered. We suggest that the difference between the cross-section and panel results reflects compositional effects: there is in particular a significant shift of the relatively dissatisfied out of marriage in mid-life. These composition effects will flatten the U-shape in age for the partnered in cross-section data.

We compare consumers’ attitude towards and willingness to pay (WTP) for gene-edited (GE) apples in Europe and the US. Using virtual choices in a lab and different technology messages, we estimate WTP of 162 French and 166 US consumers for new apples, which do not brown upon being sliced or cut. Messages center on (i) the social and private benefits of having the new apples, and (ii) possible technologies leading to this new benefit (conventional hybrids, GE, and genetically modified (GMO)). French consumers do not value the innovation and actually discount it when it is generated via biotechnology. US consumers do value the innovation as long as it is not generated by biotechnology. In both countries, the steepest discount is for GMO apples, followed by GE apples. Furthermore, the discounting occurs through “boycott” consumers who dislike biotechnology. However, the discounting is weaker for US consumers compared to French consumers. Favorable attitudes towards sciences and new technology totally offset the discounting of GE apples.

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.

A growing literature has concluded that terrorism affects the economy, yet less is known about its impact on individual welfare. This article estimates the impact of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing on well-being, exploiting representative daily data from the American Time Use Survey and Well-Being Supplement. Using a combined regression discontinuity and differences-in-differences design, with the 2012 Boston marathon as a counterfactual, we find an immediate reduction in well-being of a third of a standard deviation. In particular, happiness declined sharply and negative emotions rose significantly. While the effects do not persist beyond one week, they may entail adverse health and economic consequences.

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.

Le 1er janvier 2020, la France comptait un peu plus de 67 millions d’habitants dont 14,4 millions avaient moins de 18 ans. Le nombre de naissances (754 000) continue de baisser et le nombre de décès (612 000) d’augmenter. Le solde naturel demeure le principal moteur de l’accroissement démographique. Le flux d’entrées d’étrangers originaires de pays tiers s’accroît (+ 4,9 % par rapport à 2017, 249 474 personnes en 2018). Un entrant sur dix est mineur. L’indice conjoncturel de fécondité est quasi stable (1,87 enfant par femme en 2019) et l’âge moyen à la maternité continue d’augmenter. Parmi les naissances, 0,5 % sont issues de mères mineures. Le nombre d’IVG (230 000) et l’indice conjoncturel d’IVG (0,58) sont en légère hausse en 2019. Le nombre d’IVG de femmes mineures poursuit en revanche sa baisse et représente désormais 3,5 % des IVG en 2019. Le nombre de mariages (235 000) et le nombre de pacs (209 000) ont augmenté en 2018, toutefois l’écart entre eux s’est encore amenuisé. Les mariages sont toujours plus tardifs en France (35,4 ans pour les femmes et 37,9 ans pour les hommes). En 2018, 2,6 % des mariages sont célébrés entre personnes de même sexe et 4,1 % des pacs. Les remariages sont de plus en plus rares après un divorce ou un veuvage et, en moyenne, les divorces concernent moins d’un enfant mineur (0,91). Enfin, l’espérance de vie progresse encore mais à un rythme ralenti. Elle atteint 79,7 ans pour les hommes et 85,6 ans pour les femmes. La mortalité avant 15 ans est très faible et ces décès sont concentrés dans la première année de vie. La mortalité infantile ne diminue plus en France depuis près de 10 ans, contrairement à de nombreux autres pays européens.

Le 1er janvier 2020, la France comptait un peu plus de 67 millions d’habitants dont 14,4 millions avaient moins de 18 ans. Le nombre de naissances (754 000) continue de baisser et le nombre de décès (612 000) d’augmenter. Le solde naturel demeure le principal moteur de l’accroissement démographique. Le flux d’entrées d’étrangers originaires de pays tiers s’accroît (+ 4,9 % par rapport à 2017, 249 474 personnes en 2018). Un entrant sur dix est mineur. L’indice conjoncturel de fécondité est quasi stable (1,87 enfant par femme en 2019) et l’âge moyen à la maternité continue d’augmenter. Parmi les naissances, 0,5 % sont issues de mères mineures. Le nombre d’IVG (230 000) et l’indice conjoncturel d’IVG (0,58) sont en légère hausse en 2019. Le nombre d’IVG de femmes mineures poursuit en revanche sa baisse et représente désormais 3,5 % des IVG en 2019. Le nombre de mariages (235 000) et le nombre de pacs (209 000) ont augmenté en 2018, toutefois l’écart entre eux s’est encore amenuisé. Les mariages sont toujours plus tardifs en France (35,4 ans pour les femmes et 37,9 ans pour les hommes). En 2018, 2,6 % des mariages sont célébrés entre personnes de même sexe et 4,1 % des pacs. Les remariages sont de plus en plus rares après un divorce ou un veuvage et, en moyenne, les divorces concernent moins d’un enfant mineur (0,91). Enfin, l’espérance de vie progresse encore mais à un rythme ralenti. Elle atteint 79,7 ans pour les hommes et 85,6 ans pour les femmes. La mortalité avant 15 ans est très faible et ces décès sont concentrés dans la première année de vie. La mortalité infantile ne diminue plus en France depuis près de 10 ans, contrairement à de nombreux autres pays européens.

This article analyses the development of inequalities between the generations in France using a composite indicator including income and life expectancy. Mortalityadjusted disposable income has greatly increased over the generations. However, a breakdown by sex shows that this increasing trend is attributable to rapid growth in women’s income, while men’s income has stagnated for all cohorts born since 1946.

Le 1er janvier 2019, la France comptait tout juste 67 millions d’habitants (66,99) soit 13,1 % de la population de l’Union européenne des 28. L’année 2018 se caractérise par le faible nombre de naissances (759 000) et un nombre de décès qui dépasse 600 000 pour la première fois depuis l’après-guerre (614 000). Le flux d’entrées d’étrangers soumis à l’obligation d’un titre de séjour est en augmentation (237 742 personnes, + 9 % par rapport à 2016). Ce flux se masculinise du fait de la part croissante des personnes en provenance d’Afrique et d’Asie. La France se caractérise par un taux d’immigration parmi les plus faible d’Europe. Avec un indice conjoncturel de fécondité de 1,87 enfant par femme, la France reste le pays le plus fécond d’Europe. L’indice conjoncturel d’IVG est pour sa part de 0,56 par femme en 2018. Petit à petit, le nombre de pacs rejoint le nombre de mariages (4 pacs pour 5 mariages). Les unions entre personnes de même sexe représente une part stable en 2017 (3,1 % des mariages et 3,8 % des pacs). Enfin, l’espérance de vie augmente encore mais à un rythme ralentit. Elle est la plus élevée d’Europe pour les femmes, ce qui n’est pas le cas pour les hommes (9e). Si la France se démarque par une prévalence faible des décès par maladie cardiovasculaire, la situation est nettement moins favorable pour la mortalité aux âges jeunes et notamment très jeune (mortalité infantile).

This paper shows that the macroeconomic and fiscal consequences of international migration are positive for OECD countries, and suggests that international migration produces a demographic dividend by increasing the share of the workforce within the population. The estimation of a structural vector autoregressive model on a panel of 19 OECD countries over the period 1980–2015 reveals that a migration shock increases GDP per capita through a positive effect on both the ratio of working-age to total population and the employment rate. International migration also improves the fiscal balance by reducing the per capita transfers paid by the government and per capita old-age public spending. To rationalize these findings, an original theoretical framework is developed. This framework highlights the roles of both the demographic structure and intergenerational public transfers and shows that migration is beneficial to host economies characterized by aging populations and large public sectors.

This article examines the causal relations between immigration and the characteristics of the housing market in host regions. We constructed a unique database from administrative records and used it to assess annual migration flows into France’s twenty-two administrative regions from 1990 to 2013. We then estimated various panel vector autoregression models, taking into account gross domestic product per capita and the unemployment rate as the main regional economic indicators. We find that immigration has no significant effect on property prices but that higher property prices significantly reduce immigration rates. We also find no significant relationship between immigration and social housing supply.

Do past employment characteristics of central bank governors affect financial regulation? To answer this question, we construct a new data set based on curriculum vitae of all central bank governors around the world in 1970–2011. We interpret work experiences as indicators of preferences toward deregulation. Over the average duration in office (5.6 years), a governor with financial sector experience is associated with three times more deregulation than a governor without experience in finance. Similar results hold for past experience at the IMF; in contrast, past experience at the BIS and the UN are associated with less deregulation.

We study the instability of hyper-specialization of exports at the 4-digit level in 1998–2010. (1) Specializations are surprisingly un-stable. Export ranks are not persistent, and new top products and destinations replace old ones. Measurement error is unlikely to be the main or only determinant of this pattern. (2) Source country factors are not the main explanation of this instability. Only 16–20% of variation in export growth is accounted for by source country plus source country-product factors that do not vary across destinations. The high share of idiosyncratic variance (source-product-destination residual) of 41–55%, indicates the difficulty to predict export success using source country characteristics. While we are cautious in interpreting factors that are jointly determined in global general equilibrium, our results suggest that destination and product-specific factors importantly matter at least as much as source country factors.

We study wage adjustment during the recent crisis in Italy using a unique dataset on immigrant workers that includes those employed in formal and informal sector. We find that before the crisis immigrants’ wages in the formal and informal sectors moved in parallel (with a 15% premium in the formal labor market). During the crisis, however, formal wages did not adjust down while wages in the unregulated informal labor market fell so that by 2013 the gap had grown to 32%. The difference was particularly salient for workers in occupations where the minimum wage is likely to be binding, and in “simple” occupations where there is high substitutability between immigrant and native workers. Calibrating a simple partial equilibrium model of spillovers between formal and informal markets, we find that less than 10% of workers who lost a formal job during the crisis move to the informal sector. We also find that if the formal sector wages were fully flexible, the decline in formal employment would be in the range of 1.5–4.5%—much lower than 16% decline that we observe in the data.

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

La France a subi un changement structurel rapide au cours des trois dernières décennies. Elle n’est plus seulement spécialisée dans quelques domaines du secteur manufacturier mais s’est tournée vers celui des services : recherche et développement, activités de commerce ou du secteur financier. Le marché du travail, en accroissant la proportion des emplois à bas et haut salaire au détriment des emplois intermédiaires, s’est fortement polarisé – et la crise de 2008 a exacerbé ce phénomène, probablement lié à l’essor des nouvelles technologies et à l’élargissement de la mondialisation. Vecteur d’inégalités salariales, la polarisation de l’emploi ravive aussi les tensions sociales et les passions politiques. Pour autant, les effets négatifs de ces changements majeurs ne sont pas inévitables. A. Reshef et F. Tubal ouvrent ici des pistes de réflexion originales sur le devenir de l’emploi en France. Et proposent des politiques publiques d’ajustement et de formation qu’il faudrait adopter pour que les gains engendrés par le progrès économique soient mieux répartis.

We examine the impact of language training on the economic integration of immigrants in France. The assignment to this training, offered by the French Ministry of the Interior, depends mainly on a precise rule: the training is provided if the test score of an initial language exam is below a certain threshold. This eligibility rule creates a discontinuity in the relation between the test result and the variables of interest, which is used to estimate the causal effect of language training, through the method of Regression Discontinuity Design. We find that the number of assigned hours of training significantly increases labor force participation of the treated individuals. The language classes appear to have a larger effect for individuals with higher levels of education, while there is no robust differential effect by type of migration, gender or age. Our estimated coefficients are remarkably similar when we rely on local linear regressions using the optimal bandwidth with few observations around the threshold and when we control parametrically for a polynomial of the forcing variable and use the whole estimation sample. We conclude with a discussion of the candidate mechanisms for the improved labor market participation of immigrants.

We propose an aggregate growth index that explicitly accounts for fat tails in the firm size distribution and for the negative scaling relation between the size of the firm and the volatility of its growth rates. Using Compustat data on US publicly traded company, we show that the new index tracks aggregate fluctuations much better than simpler measures of central tendency of the dynamics of firms, like the growth rates sample average, confirming that the statistical properties characterizing the micro-economic dynamics of firms are relevant for the dynamics of the aggregate. To better characterize the origins of aggregate fluctuations, we decompose the index in two parts, describing, respectively, the modal (typical) value of log growth rates and the tilt (asymmetry) of their distribution. Regression analysis shows that models based on this decomposition, despite their simplicity, possess a remarkable explanatory and predictive power with respect to the aggregate growth.

Les couples seniors sont souvent constitués de conjoints qui travaillent l’un et l’autre avant de partir à la retraite. En bonne santé, ces couples peuvent commencer une nouvelle vie après leur vie professionnelle. Cela devrait les amener à synchroniser leur départ à la retraite pour profiter d’un plus grand quantum de loisirs partagés. Chiffres à l’appui, les auteurs montrent que ce n’est pas le cas. Les couples seniors français, contrairement à leurs homologues américains par exemple, ne coordonnent pas leur départ à la retraite. Pour comprendre pourquoi, cet ouvrage offre une dissection de la vie des couples retraités et montre que le temps partagé n’est qu’une partie de la vie après la retraite.

We revisit the standard theoretical model of tax competition to consider imperfect mobility of both capital and labor. We show that the mobility of one factor a_ects the taxation of both factors, and that the race-to-the-bottom narrative (with burden shifting) applies essentially to capital exporting countries. We test our predictions for a panel of 28 OECD countries over 1997-2014. We _nd capital taxation to be less sensitive to capital mobility in net capital importing countries than for net capital exporters. Various robustness checks support this conclusion. Qantitatively, though, rising capital mobility contributes much less than population ageing to the decline of capital tax rates over the period studied.

We explore various means of quantifying integration using two of the D4R Challenge datasets. We propose various integration indices and discuss their output. We combine the data from the D4R Challenge with data from the GDELT Project and with data on transactions on the housing market in Turkey. We also describe research directions to be undertaken in the future using the D4R data.

Using a choice experiment in the lab, we assess the relative importance of different attitudes to income inequality. We elicit subjects’ preferences regarding pairs of payoff distributions within small groups, in a firm-like setting. We find that distributions that satisfy the Pareto-dominance criterion attract unanimous suffrage: all subjects prefer larger inequality provided it makes everyone weakly better off. This is true no matter whether payoffs are based on merit or luck. Unanimity only breaks once subjects’ positions within the income distribution are fixed and known ex-ante. Even then, 75% of subjects prefer Pareto-dominant distributions, but 25% of subjects engage in money burning at the top in order to reduce inequality, even when it does not make anyone better off. A majority of subjects embrace a more equal distribution if their own income or overall efficiency is not at stake. When their own income is at stake and the sum of payoffs remains unaffected, 20% of subjects are willing to pay for a lower degree of inequality.

We show that economic uncertainty in foreign markets affects firms’ economic decisions, particularly those of the most productive firms. Using export data at both the industry and firm levels, we uncover two empirical regularities. First, demand uncertainty in foreign markets affects export entry/exit decisions (extensive margin) and export sales (intensive margin). If all destination countries exhibited the lowest volatility observed across destinations, then total French exports would rise by approximately 18% (an increase primarily driven by the extensive margin). Second, the most productive exporters are more affected by a higher industry-wide expenditure volatility than are the least productive exporters. The 25% most productive firms export, on average, 27% more in value than the 25% least productive firms in less volatile markets, while this difference decreases to 12% in the most volatile markets.

Cet article propose une réévaluation de la croissance économique en France entre 1985 et 2010, en intégrant la production domestique aux indicateurs de richesse du Produit Intérieur Brut et des revenus du travail. Au cours de la période, la croissance du PIB est surestimée de 0,35 point de pourcentage. Une décomposition temporelle révèle que la croissance est clairement surestimée au cours de la période 1985-2000, tandis qu’elle est plutôt sous-estimée au cours de la période 2000-2010. Le ralentissement de la croissance du PIB après les années 2000 est nettement moins évident lorsque l’on utilise l’indicateur élargi à la production domestique dont le taux de croissance passe de 1,6% à 1,5%.

This paper studies the effect of social responsibility scandals on the imports of consumer products, by focusing on an event which generated massive consumer mobilization against neglecting firms, namely the collapse of the Rana Plaza building affecting the textile industry in Bangladesh. We investigate the import repercussions of this major shock in the perceived quality of clothing producers sourcing in Bangladesh. In line with the well-documented home bias in trade and home-country media slant, we assume that consumers’ reaction will be stronger when domestic firms are named and shamed. Our empirical strategy uses a difference-in-difference approach that compares imports from Bangladesh of countries according to whether some of their companies were directly associated with the collapse of the Rana Plaza. Our results are consistent with demand being sensitive to social responsibility scandals. While aggregate imports from Bangladesh continue to increase during the whole period (2010–2016), there is a marked disruption that affects countries whose brands were named and shamed by activists and the media after the disaster. In addition, the decline in imports is all the greater as the number of NGO campaigns on the misbehavior of national textile retailers is high.

MENA region is undergoing rapid demographic transition, where 50% of the population is under the age 25 and high youth unemployment rates are argued to be one of the main sources of political instability. Fighting youth ex- clusion from work is one of the main challenges in the region. In this paper we evaluate the economic impact of the demographic transition for selected coun- tries which experience di_erent speeds of transition, namely: Iran, Morocco and Egypt. The impact of demographic shift on the evolution of human capital stock and physical capital stock, has been highlighted by the literature. Since _nan- cial markets play a crucial role to allocate capital and channel the funds to the productive sector, it is hence fundamental to take into account the role of the _nancial markets in the growth process associated with demographic change. We have developed a general equilibrium overlapping generations model with a cost for capital mobilisation as a proxy for _nancial markets’ e_ciency. We have found that the demographic shift will be an important driver for growth in the upcoming decades. Furthermore, our results show that a more e_cient _nancial sector leads to better economic performance. Speci_cally, youth are the primary bene_ciaries: an increase in the _nancial sector e_ciency can reduce up to 8 percentage points of the youngest age group unemployment.

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

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.

This paper aims to evaluate the economic and fiscal effects of inflows of asylum seekers into Western Europe from 1985 to 2015. It relies on an empirical methodology that is widely used to estimate the macroeconomic effects of structural shocks and policies. It shows that inflows of asylum seekers do not deteriorate host countries’ economic performance or fiscal balance, because the increase in public spending induced by asylum seekers is more than compensated for by an increase in tax revenues net of transfers. As asylum seekers become permanent residents, their macroeconomic impacts become positive.

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.

We build a model of conflict in which two groups contest a resource and must decide on the optimal allocation of labor between fighting and productive activities. In this setting, a diaspora emanating from one of the two groups can get actively involved in conflict by transferring financial resources to its origin country. We find that the diaspora influences the war outcome and, above a certain size, contributes to the escalation of violence. Given the characteristics of the conflict equilibrium, the two groups of residents prefer to negotiate a peaceful settlement if there exists a sharing rule that makes both of them better off than war. We then identify the characteristics of the economy such that the diaspora acts as a peace-wrecking force or triggers a transition towards peace. Finally, we develop two extensions of the model, respectively, accounting for endogenous migration and the possibility of migration from both groups. Overall, our theory can help us make sense of several features of the interaction between real-world diasporas and conflict.

Cet article propose une relecture des déterminants de l’évolution de la part des dépenses publiques et privées de santé dans le produit intérieur brut. Une analyse critique des travaux antérieurs et un modèle comptables simple suggèrent que les facteurs démographiques ont été déterminants entre 1990 et 2010.

In this paper, we consider illiquid life annuity contracts and show that they may be preferred to those illustrated by Yaari. In an overlapping generations economy, liquid life annuities are demanded only if the equilibrium is dynamically inefficient. However, an equilibrium displaying a positive demand for illiquid life annuities is indeed efficient. In this latter case, the welfare at steady state is larger if illiquid life annuity contracts are available.

Il est fréquent de voir des guerres civiles éclater simultanément dans des pays voisins. Cela tient notamment à ce que ces pays présentent des caractéristiques communes, et aussi à ce qu’une guerre civile favorise l’apparition de conflits dans les pays voisins. La littérature empirique dissocie habituellement ces deux explications. Nous proposons un modèle de la contagion des guerres civiles qui illustre que certaines caractéristiques des pays sont affectées par le risque de contagion. En particulier, un gouvernement peut éviter la contagion en investissant dans la qualité de ses institutions. La complémentarité stratégique entre les institutions de pays voisins génère des regroupements de pays selon leur capacité étatique. Cela suggère que les effets de contagion ont pu jusque-là être sous-estimés par la littérature empirique.

Becker, Philipson and Soares (2005) maintain that including life expectancy gains in a welfare indicator result in a reduction of inequality between 1960 and 2000 twice as great as when measured by per capita income. We discuss their methodology and show it determines the convergence result. We use an alternative methodology, based on Fleurbaey and Gaulier (2009), which monetizes differences in life expectancy between countries at each date rather than life expectancy gains. We show that including life expectancy has no effect on the evolution of world inequality.

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.

What happens to the people who apply for asylum in France? How many obtain protection? And what proportion of unsuccessful asylum seekers are admitted for residence on other grounds, such as employment or family reasons? Analysing data since 2000, Hippolyte d’Albis and Ekrame Boubtane calculate the share of asylum seekers admitted for residence in France and describe the variations by year of application and by reason for admission.

Cet article utilise les Enquêtes Logement réalisées de 1973 à 2013 et analyse leseffets démographiques sur la dynamique du marché de l’immobilier neuf en Francemétropolitaine, ainsi qu’en Ile-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, dans les régionslittorales et dans les régions enclavées. Le calcul des fréquences d’acquisition d’un logement neuf au titre de la résidence principale par âge permet de souligner les effetscomportementaux et les effets démographiques (en distinguant taille de la population etstructure par âge) sur la dynamique du marché. L’article analyse l’impact du vieillissement de la population et propose des projections relatives aux besoins de construction d’ici 2060.Alors que l’évolution de taille de la population a été favorable aux acquisitions sur l’ensemble de la période étudiée, la structure par âge devient défavorable dès le début des années 1990.La décomposition révèle des effets très spécifiques aux régions étudiées.

We examine the quality‐screening role played by intermediaries in international trade, exploiting export data at the product level for Chinese exporters. We uncover substantial heterogeneity among intermediaries, and distinguish two types: generalized and specialized intermediaries. We find strong evidence of a quality‐verification role for specialized intermediaries: they are more prevalent in products with greater quality dispersion among local exporters, and export goods of higher quality than do generalized intermediaries. Our results suggest that specialized intermediaries have the capacity to reduce the incidence of quality problems.

Les demandes d’asiles ont augmenté ces dernières années en France, tout en représentant une part décroissante du total des demandes adressées aux pays de l’Union européenne. L’afflux récent de demandeurs d’asile a en effet beaucoup moins concerné la France que certains de ses voisins européens. Environ un quart des demandeurs qui s’adressent à la France obtiennent sa protection. La proportion varie de 18 % à 32 % selon l’année de dépôt. Plus d’un quart ne l’obtiennent pas mais sont finalement admis au séjour pour un autre motif (études, famille, travail) souvent de nombreuses années après. Parmi les personnes ayant déposé une demande en 2000, près de 60 % ont été admises au séjour au 31 décembre 2016, un tiers d’entre elles au titre de l’asile (comme réfugié, apatride ou bénéficiaire de la protection subsidiaire), et un peu plus de la moitié pour motif familial.

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.

Cet article utilise les Enquêtes Logement réalisées de 1973 à 2013 et analyse les effets démographiques sur la dynamique du marché de l’immobilier neuf en France métropolitaine, ainsi qu’en Île-de-France, Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, dans les régions littorales et dans les régions enclavées. Le calcul des fréquences d’acquisition d’un logement neuf au titre de la résidence principale par âge permet de souligner les effets comportementaux et les effets démographiques (en distinguant taille de la population et structure par âge) sur la dynamique du marché. L’article analyse l’impact du vieillissement de la population et propose des projections relatives aux besoins de construction d’ici 2060. Alors que l’évolution de taille de la population a été favorable aux acquisitions sur l’ensemble de la période étudiée, la structure par âge devient défavorable dès le début des années 1990. La décomposition révèle des effets très spécifiques aux régions étudiées.

Cet article s’intéresse aux inspections sanitaires à la frontière européenne et aux risques de rejet affectant les exportations chinoises de produits agro-alimentaires au cours de la période 2000-2011. Les auteurs combinent des données sur les rejets enregistrés par les autorités européennes et des données d’exportations d’entreprises chinoises par produit, destination et année. Ils montrent que les externalités informationnelles et les effets de réputation sont importants. Les rejets aux frontières accroissent le turnover des entreprises à la marge extensive du commerce. Le risque de rejet est particulièrement fort pour les petits exportateurs entrainant une concentration des exportations chinoises au sein des grandes entreprises.

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.

This paper provides a systematic cross-country investigation of the relation between a firm’s growth volatility and its size. For the first time the analysis is carried out using comparable and representative sets of data sourced by official business registers of an important number of countries. We show that there exists a robust negative relation between growth volatility and size with an average elasticity equal to . We check the robustness of this result against a number of potential sources of bias and in particular with respect to sectoral disaggregation and against the inclusion of firm age. Our result is consistent with the idea that independently from specific country characteristics there exists a common underlying mechanism driving the elasticity between size and growth volatility. We then propose two mechanisms able to explain our result and we conclude discussing its relevance with respect to the recent literature on granularity.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of how the funding of consumption at different ages is shared between the State, the individual and the family. By applying the National Transfer Accounts method for France, we developed a unique database to analyze how the funding of consumption is secured at each age, how its structure has changed over time, and how the consumption is financed in France compared to that of a set of other developed countries. We find that the elderly in France finance themselves increasingly by their own means, even though public funding of this age group remains significant in France in comparison to other countries. Conversely, the young rely more and more on the State to finance their consumption. Within our sample, France is the country where the young benefited most from public transfers.

We investigate the supply-side repercussions on Chinese imports after the entry of multinational retailers in China. We exploit sector- and origin-country level import data for a panel of Chinese cities between 1997 and 2012, and differentiate between retailer and non retailer goods and across countries of origin of imports. We find that international global retail presence in Chinese cities produces a disproportionate rise in retail good imports from the retailers’ country of origin. Our results point to a trade-cost reducing role of Western retailers that make it easier for foreign retail-good producers from their home country to export to China. Global retailers then act as a bridgehead for the penetration of the Chinese market by producers from their home country, in a way that goes beyond higher sales of imported retail goods by the retailers themselves.

This paper studies the population dynamics of cultural traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission with a perfectly-forward looking cultural leader. We show that there exists a threshold size in terms of population above which the cultural leader becomes active. We also show that a policy affecting some key parameters (such as the cost of providing the religious good) has a different impact in the short run and in the long run due to over-reactions or under-reactions of the different cultural groups. Finally, we study the cultural competition between two forward-looking cultural leaders with opposite objectives. We show that the steady-state cultural equilibrium depends on the time preference structure of the two leaders.

This paper aims to evaluate the economic and fiscal effects of inflows of asylum seekers into Western Europe from 1985 to 2015. It relies on an empirical methodology that is widely used to estimate the macroeconomic effects of structural shocks and policies. It shows that inflows of asylum seekers do not deteriorate host countries’ economic performance or fiscal balance because the increase in public spending induced by asylum seekers is more than compensated for by an increase in tax revenues net of transfers. As asylum seekers become permanent residents, their macroeconomic impacts become positive.

We analyze the effects of the 2011 Egyptian protests on the relative labor market conditions of women using panel data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS). Using unique information from the Statistical Database of the Egyptian Revolution, we geocode each “martyr”, i.e. demonstrators who died during the protests, based on the location of the political incident. We construct our measure of the intensity of the protests – the district-level number of “martyrs” – and rely on a Difference-in-Differences approach. We find that the 2011 protests have reduced intra-household differences in labor force participation by increasing women’s employment and unemployment relative to men. Women’s employment relative to men increased in both the private and informal sectors. Our estimates suggest how economic uncertainty such as the one associated to the recent protests may undermine the importance of cultural factors and attitudes towards female work. We link these findings to the literature showing how a relevant shock to the labor division between women and men may have long run consequences on the role of women in society.

Civil conflicts spill over into neighboring countries. This paper proposes a theory of the contagion of civil wars. Weak territorial control facilitates the emergence of a regional market for war inputs in the “porous frontier.” The contagion effect is nonlinear and creates multiple equilibrium situations of regional complexes of civil conflicts. This helps explain the observed patterns of regional clustering of conflict and institutional quality, and raises identification issues in the measurement of the contagion effect. We also derive a positive spillover of civil wars: governments are sometimes in a position to avoid contagion by improving their institutions. Finally, we explore the policy implications for military intervention, and military and institutional cooperation.

We revisit the standard theoretical model of tax competition to consider imperfect mobility of both capital and labor. We show that the mobility of one factor affects the taxation of both factors, and that the race-to-the-bottom narrative (with burden shifting) applies essentially to capital exporting countries. We test our predictions for a panel of 28 OECD countries over 1997-2014. We find capital taxation to be less sensitive to capital mobility in net capital importing countries than for net capital exporters. We also show that labor mobility has a negative impact on labor taxation but a positive impact on capital taxation. Finally, we show evidence of a non-linear effect of labor mobility on capital taxation depending on the level of skills.

Becker et al. (2005) maintain that including life expectancy gains in a welfare indicator result in a reduction of inequality between 1960 and 2000 twice as great as when measured by per capita income. We discuss their methodology and show it determines the convergence result. We use an alternative methodology, based on Fleurbaey and Gaulier (2009), which monetizes differences in life expectancy between countries at each date rather than life expectancy gains. We show that including life expectancy has no effect on the evolution of world inequality.

Using a choice-experiment in the lab, we look at preferences over pairs of income distributions within small groups in a firm-like setting. Is one type of distribution capable of attracting votes unanimously? It turns out that Pareto-dominance is the most important choice criterion: in binary choices over two distributions, all subjects prefer larger inequality when it makes everyone weakly better off. This is true,no matter whether income distribution is based on merit or luck. Unanimity only breaks once subjects’ positions within the income distribution are fixed and known ex-ante. However, even then, 75% subjects prefer Pareto-dominant distributions. This suggests that efficiency motives are of primary importance, more so than the origin of inequality.

This paper evaluates the fiscal effect of international migration. It first estimates a structural Vector Autoregressive model on a panel of 19 OECD countries over the period 1980-2015, in order to quantify the impact of a migration shock. Empirical results suggest that international migration had a positive impact on the economic and fiscal performance of OECD countries. It then proposes an original theoretical framework that highlights the importance of both the demographic structure and the intergenerational public transfers. Hence, OECD countries seems to have benefited from a demographic dividend » of international migration since 1980.

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.

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

This paper studies the spatial joint evolution of cooperative behavior and a partially assortative matching institution that protects cooperators. We consider cooperation as characterized by a cultural trait transmitted via an endogenous socialization mechanism and we assume that such trait can diffuse randomly in space due to some spatial noise in the socialization mechanism. Using mathematical techniques from reaction-diffusion equations theory, we show that, under some conditions, an initially localized domain of preferences for cooperation can invade the whole population and characterize the asymptotic speed of diffusion. We consider first the case with exogenous assortativeness, and then endogeneize the degree of social segmentation in matching, assuming that it is collectively set at each point of time and space by the local community. We show how relatively low cost segmenting institutions can appear in new places thanks to the spatial random diffusion of cooperation, helping a localized cultural cluster of cooperation to invade the whole population. The endogenous assortative matching institution follows a life cycle process: appearing, growing and then disappearing once a culture of cooperation is sufficiently established in the local population.

In this paper, ambiguity aversion to uncertain survival probabilities is introduced in a static life-cycle model with a bequest motive to study the optimal demand for annuities. Provided that annuities’ return is sufficiently large, and notably when it is fair, positive annuitization is known to be the optimal strategy of ambiguity neutral individuals. Conversely, we show that the demand for annuities decreases with ambiguity aversion and that there exists a finite degree of aversion above which the demand is non-positive: the optimal strategy is then to either sell annuities short or to hold zero annuities if the former option is not available. To conclude, ambiguity aversion appears to be a relevant candidate for explaining the annuity puzzle.

Construites à partir des données sur les titres de séjour, les statistiques migratoires présentées ici offrent une cartographie précise de l’immigration au niveau local. L’étude de la répartition géographique des personnes immigrées révèle une forte disparité entre les territoires, parmi lesquels l’Île-de-France qui exerce une forte attraction sur l’ensemble de la population et plus encore sur les personnes immigrées.

This article analyzes the evolution of spatial inequalities in mortality across 90 French territorial units since 1806. Using a new database, we identify a period from 1881 to 1980 when inequalities rapidly shrank while life expectancy rose. This century of convergence across territories was mainly due to the fall in infant mortality. Since 1980, spatial inequalities have levelled out or occasionally widened, due mainly to differences in life expectancy among the elderly. The geography of mortality also changed radically during the century of convergence. Whereas in the 19th century high mortality occurred mainly in larger cities and along a line from North-west to South-east France, it is now concentrated in the North, and Paris and Lyon currently enjoy an urban advantage.

We here consider how Chinese firms react to higher minimum wages, exploiting the 2004 minimum-wage Reform in China. After this reform, we find that the wage costs for surviving firms that were more exposed to minimum-wage hikes rose, but also that their productivity significantly improved, allowing them to absorb the cost shock without any change in their profitability and with limited job losses. Our results are robust to pre-existing trend analysis and an IV strategy. However, the survival probability of the firms that were most exposed to minimum-wage hikes fell after the Reform. Firm-level productivity gains partly came from better inventory management and greater investment in capital, at the cost of a reduction in firm-level cash.

Au premier janvier 2018, la France comptait près de 66,9 millions d’habitants, soit 122 300 personnes de plus que l’année précédente, mais l’accroissement annuel moyen, et tout particulièrement l’accroissement naturel, n’ont jamais été aussi faibles depuis 20 ans, voire 40 ans. L’indice conjoncturel de fécondité poursuit sa baisse, observée notamment chez les femmes les plus jeunes. Le nombre de titres de séjour délivrés augmente en 2016 (près de 220 000). La nuptialité continue de diminuer, tant pour les couples hétérosexuels que pour les couples de même sexe. En 2017, la mortalité recule de nouveau, mais le nombre de décès dépasse 600 000, chiffre lié au vieillissement de la population. Les causes de mortalité dont les évolutions sont les plus préoccupantes sont le cancer chez les femmes, les maladies par troubles mentaux et les maladies du système nerveux. Les événements démographiques ne se répartissent pas uniformément au fil de l’année : les mariages et mises en union libre sont plus souvent observés au printemps et en été, les naissances en été et à l’automne, tout comme les entrées sur le territoire ; alors que l’hiver et la fin de l’année marquent une recrudescence d’enregistrements de pacs et des pics de mortalité.

The paper provides an original empirical approach to investigate multi-product firms’ export patterns across destinations by considering the whole mix of products exported by a firm, formally defined as a product-vector. The proposed methodology allows to take into account a firm’s choice of both exporting and non-exporting a product to a destination and to consider different forms of product complementarity that can generate product combinations. The empirical analysis uses a panel of transactions level data for the universe of Italian and French firms and complements the existing evidence along a few dimensions. First, we show that there is a high level of sparsity: selection of products at destination is indeed very severe. Second, we document that firms export several different combinations of product vectors across markets. Relatedly a high level of diversity is detected also when considering the intensive margin, pointing to a substantial departure from a stable global product hierarchy. Finally, we provide evidence that at the same time there exists a stable component in firms’ product vectors across destinations composed by products which are not necessarily the most important in terms of sales, suggesting rich form of complementarities across goods. Products belonging to this stable component are less likely to be discarded as a consequence of an exogenous shock such as the dismantling of the MFA quotas after accession of China to the WTO.

Cet article présente les recherches récentes sur l’évolution de la mortalité humaine, telle que synthétisée par l’espérance de vie. Il montre en particulier l’effet crucial de l’évolution de la mortalité aux grands âges.

This paper studies the effect of activism on the imports of consumer products, by focusing on an event which generated massive consumer mobilization against neglecting firms, namely the collapse of the Rana Plaza building affecting the textile industry in Bangladesh. We hypothesize that this episode was a main shock in the perceived quality of clothing producers sourcing in Bangladesh. Using detailed import flows on textile goods from OECD countries, we analyze whether the imports of consumer products were affected by the disclosure of information, in countries differently exposed to the collapse. To proxy the amount of information received by individuals in different countries, we use the nationality of the firms involved in the Rana Plaza building: soon after the disaster, NGOs and the media insisted on the origin countries of the neglecting companies, publishing the list of misbehaving firms by nationality. We use a difference-indifference approach to compare the imports from Bangladesh of countries having been differently associated in the news to the Rana Plaza collapse. Results show a post-disaster decrease in imports for countries whose firms were directly involved in the Rana Plaza building. The effect has to be interpreted relatively to the evolution of imports of similar countries, however not linked to the collapsed Rana Plaza knitting factories. While aggregate imports from Bangladesh continue to increase during the whole period (2010-2016), there is a marked disruption that affects countries whose brands were named and shamed by activists and the media after the disaster. No such differential pattern is observed for non-textile goods. Our results are robust to a variety of checks.

This paper shows that the macroeconomic and fiscal consequences of international migration are positive for OECD countries, and suggests that international migration produces a demographic dividend by increasing the share of the work- force within the population. The estimation of a structural vector autoregressive model on a panel of 19 OECD countries over the period 1980-2015 reveals that a migration shock increases GDP per capita through a positive effect on both the ratio of working-age to total population and the employment rate. International migration also improves the fiscal balance by reducing the per capita transfers paid by the government and per capita old-age public spending. To rationalize these findings, an original theoretical framework is developed. This framework highlights the roles of both the demographic structure and intergenerational public transfers and shows that migration is beneficial to host economies characterized by aging populations and large public sectors.

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.

Retirement policies are individually designed, but the majority of older workers are partnered, and are likely to coordinate their employment decisions with their spouse. The goal of this study is to estimate the direct and indirect (via the spouse) effects of a pioneer French pension reform on both spouses’ retirement decision. The extent of the reform varies by birth year, which enables us to identify its retirement effects on both spouses, since the husband is, on average, two years older than the wife. We use labor-force survey data to implement a sharp regression-discontinuity framework, in which the running variable is the distance of the individual birth month to a certain reference month, as well as an incremental differences-in-differences approach. We find a significant drop in each spouse’s probability of retirement. The husband’s retirement probability also drops immediately by 2 percentage points if the wife is affected by the reform, while her retirement probability does not respond immediately if he is affected.

In this paper, we evaluate whether the efficiency of industrial policies depends on the consistency of their focus with the local productive structure. We use sector-level data from Chinese manufacturing surveys over the 1998–2007 period to show that the efficiency of the export-promoting policies implemented in export processing zones depends on whether they target activities for which the necessary capabilities and resources are available. We find export benefits from the EPZ policy which are greater for sectors with denser links with the local productive structure. Our results suggest that industrial-policy effectiveness is magnified by pre-existing productive knowledge.

We develop a model where, in the first stage, minority individuals have to decide whether or not they want to assimilate to the majority culture while, in the second stage, all individuals (both from the majority and the minority group) embedded in a network have to decide how much effort they exert in some activity (say education). We show that the more central minority agents are located in the social network, the more they assimilate to the majority culture. We also show that denser networks tend to favor assimilation so that, for example, it is easier to assimilate in a complete network than in a star-shaped network. We show that the subgame-perfect equilibrium is not optimal because there is not enough activity and assimilation. We then endogeneize the network and show under which condition the ethnic minorities either assimilate to or separated themselves from the majority group.

This paper questions the demographic consequences of birth postponement in Europe. Starting from the fact that there is no obvious link between the timing of first births and fertility levels in Europe, we deliver some indication that under certain circumstances, birth postponement involves the potential of facilitating rather than impedes starting a family. We apply a synthetic cohort approach and distinguish between different socio-economic determinants of the timing of first births by using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Data is compiled specifically to reduce endogeneity and to eliminate structure effects. We find that the probability of becoming a mother is higher for those women who postpone first childbirth due to education and career investment in comparison to those who postpone due to unrealized labour market integration. Educated and economically active women certainly postpone first childbirth in comparison to women who are less educated and who are not working, but they end up with a higher probability of starting a family in comparison to women who are less educated and not working. The article contributes to the academic discussion of the circumstances that may lead birth postponement to result in higher fertility for younger cohorts in European countries.

During the last two centuries, fertility has exhibited, in industrialized economies, two distinct trends: the cohort total fertility rate follows a decreasing pattern, while the cohort average age at motherhood exhibits a U-shaped pattern. This paper proposes a unified growth theory aimed at rationalizing those two demographic stylized facts. We develop a three-period OLG model with two periods of fertility, and show how a traditional economy, where individuals do not invest in higher education, and where income rises push towards advancing births, can progressively converge towards a modern economy, where individuals invest in higher education, and where income rises encourage postponing births. Our findings are illustrated numerically by replicating the dynamics of the quantum and the tempo of births for Swedish cohorts born between 1876 and 1966.

We use the National Transfer Accounts methodology to calculate the lifecycle deficit in France for the years 1979-2005. During this period, consumption profiles were roughly constant over age, while labor income profiles shifted to higher ages. The share of the aggregate lifecycle deficit in GDP rose sharply in the 1980s due to an increase in the mean age of the population. In contrast, the per capita shares of the lifecycle deficit attributed to the population under 20 and over 60 varied little during this period, even though the relative weights of these two age-segments has shifted continuously in favor of the latter.

Dans cet article, les effets de l’âge (ou du cycle de vie) et de génération sur le niveau de vie sont estimés à partir d’un pseudo-panel construit avec les différentes éditions de l’enquête Budget de famille entre 1979 et 2011. Le niveau de vie des ménages est apprécié avec le revenu disponible ou la consommation privée par unité de consommation, en isolant ou non les dépenses de logement et les loyers implicites. En s’appuyant sur la stratégie d’identification développée par Deaton et Paxson (1994) pour les modèles âge-période-cohorte (APC), deux principaux résultats sont mis en évidence. Tout d’abord, le niveau de vie augmente fortement avec l’âge, de 25 à 64 ans. Par exemple, la consommation des 50-54 ans est supérieure de 35 % à celle des 25-29 ans. À partir de 65 ans, l’évolution dépend de l’indicateur de niveau de vie considéré. Par ailleurs, le niveau de vie des générations du baby-boom est supérieur à celui des générations nées avant-guerre mais inférieur ou égal à celui des générations qui les suivent. Par exemple, la consommation de la cohorte née en 1946 est de 40 % supérieure à celle de la cohorte née en 1926 mais de 20 % inférieure à celle de la cohorte née en 1976. Si l’on prend l’ensemble des cohortes nées entre 1901 et 1979, aucune génération n’a été désavantagée par rapport à ses aînées. La discussion de ces résultats, notamment au regard de ceux issus d’autres stratégies d’identification ‒ la méthode âge-période-cohorte-détendancialisé (APCD) qui retire une tendance linéaire aux variables et une stratégie originale, la méthode espérance de vie-période-cohorte (EPC) qui remplace la variable d’âge par l’espérance de vie à chaque âge – souligne leur robustesse. Elle révèle l’importance de la croissance économique dans l’élévation du niveau de vie des générations et confirme qu’aucune génération n’a eu une consommation inférieure à celle des générations qui l’ont précédé.

We study the allocation and compensation of human capital in the finance industry in a set of developed economies in 1970-2011. Finance relative wages generally increase—but not in all countries, and to varying degrees. Trading-related activities account for 50% of the increases, despite accounting for only 13% of finance employment, on average. Financial deregulation is the most important factor driving up wages in finance; it has a larger effect in environments where informational rents and socially inefficient risk taking are likely to be prevalent. Differential investment in information and communication technology does not have causal explanatory power. High finance wages attract skilled international immigration to finance, raising concerns for « brain drain.

Using a panel dataset of 70 countries spanning 42 years (1970-2011), we investigate the distinct effects of social globalisation and trade openness on national trends in markers of diet quality (supplies of animal proteins, free fats and sugar, average body mass index – BMI – and diabetes prevalence). Our key methodological contribution is the application of a grouped fixed-effects (GFE) estimator, which extends linear fixed-effects models. The GFE estimator partitions our sample into distinct groups of countries in order to control for time-varying unobserved heterogeneity that follows a group-specific pattern. We find that increasing social globalisation has a significant impact on the supplies of animal protein and sugar available for human consumption, as well as on mean BMI. Specific components of social globalisation such as information flows (via television and the Internet) drive these results. Trade openness has no effect on dietary outcomes or health. These findings suggest that the social and cultural aspects of globalisation should receive greater attention in research on the nutrition transition.

This paper shows that differences in fertility across European countries mainly emerge due to fewer women having two children in low-fertility countries. It further suggests that childcare services are an important determinant for the transition to a second child to occur. The theoretical framework we propose suggests that (i) in countries where childcare coverage is low, there is a U-shaped relationship between a couple’s probability of having a second child and the woman’s potential wage, whereas (ii) in countries with easy access to childcare, this probability is positively related with the woman’s potential wage. Data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) confirm these implications when estimating a woman’s probability of having a second child as a function of education. This implies that middle-income women are the most affected ones by the lack of access to formal and subsidized childcare.

This article examines the influence of malaria on human capital accumulation in the village of Diankabou in Mali. To account for malaria endogeneity and its interaction with unobservable risk factors, we exploit natural variations in malaria immunity across individuals of several sympatric ethnic groups—the Fulani and the non-Fulani—who differ in their susceptibility to malaria. The Fulani are known to be less susceptible to malaria infections, despite living with a similar malaria transmission intensity to those seen among other ethnic groups. We also use natural variation of malaria intensity in the area (during and after the malaria transmission season) and utilise this seasonal change as a treatment. We found that malaria has an impact on cognitive and educational outcomes in this village.

We study cultural diffusion in a random network where the transition probabilities are determined by a cultural transmission technology with endogenous vertical transmission rates (à la Bisin and Verdier, 2001). We present a two-way epidemic model in which both the infection and the recovery rates are endogenous and depend on the topology of the network. We characterize two balancing conditions satisfied by the network degree distribution and the vertical transmission rate distribution to ensure the sustainability of long run cultural heterogeneity. We discuss the effects of cultural homophily and paternalistic motivations for cultural transmission on the persistence of steady state cultural diversity.

Using a panel dataset of 70 countries spanning 42 years (1970–2011), we investigate the distinct effects of social globalisation and trade openness on national trends in markers of diet quality (supplies of animal proteins, free fats and sugar, average body mass index, and diabetes prevalence). Our key methodological contribution is the application of a grouped fixed-effects estimator, which extends linear fixed-effects models. The grouped fixed-effects estimator partitions our sample into distinct groups of countries in order to control for time-varying unobserved heterogeneity that follows a group-specific pattern. We find that increasing social globalisation has a significant impact on the supplies of animal protein and sugar available for human consumption, as well as on mean body mass index. Specific components of social globalisation such as information flows (via television and the Internet) drive these results. Trade openness has no effect on dietary outcomes or health. These findings suggest that the social and cultural aspects of globalisation should receive greater attention in research on the nutrition transition.

We present a model of technologically interconnected countries that benefit and potentially contribute to advances in the world technology frontier. Greater inequality between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs increases entrepreneurial effort and a country’s contribution to that frontier. Under plausible assumptions, the world equilibrium is asymmetric, involving different economic institutions and technology levels for different countries. Some countries become technology leaders and opt for a type of “cutthroat” capitalism with greater inequality and innovations, while others free ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more “cuddly” form of capitalism with greater social insurance for entrepreneurs.

We address the trade-off between centralized and decentralized decision making subject to influence from privately informed lobbies. We focus on informative equilibria with separating differentiable contribution schedules and identify an information transmission effect under centralized structures. Such effect decreases capture and increases welfare when lobbies have « aligned preferences. » The opposite effect holds for « polarized preferences. » We present two examples of this framework: local public goods and customs union agreements. Finally, we compare the policy outcomes from this political economy perspective to those under a normative mechanism design approach, and extend our analysis to the discussion of pooling equilibria.

Au premier janvier 2017, la France comptait près de 67 millions d’habitants, soit un accroissement annuel de 4,0 ‰. L’indice conjoncturel de fécondité poursuit sa baisse en 2016, notamment chez les femmes de 25 à 29 ans, groupe d’âges dans lequel la fécondité est la plus forte. Le nombre de titres de séjour délivrés augmente légèrement et est à son plus haut niveau depuis 1998. Les ressortissants bénéficiant de ces titres représentent 0,32 % de la population française au 1er janvier 2015 (contre 0,30 % en 2014). Le nombre de mariages continue de baisser pour les couples hétérosexuels et les couples de même sexe, alors que les pacs augmentent. Les couples mixtes, composé d’un conjoint de nationalité française et l’autre de nationalité étrangère (18 % du total des unions) se distinguent par un plus grand écart d’âge entre conjoints. En 2016, la mortalité recule de nouveau après une année 2015 marquée par une épidémie de grippe. L’écart d’espérance de vie entre les femmes et les hommes diminue encore et atteint 6,1 ans en 2016. D’un département à l’autre, les comportements démographiques présentent de fortes disparités, probable reflet d’inégalités sociales et économiques des territoires, ainsi que géographiques (départements frontaliers) et culturelles (mortalité et nuptialité).

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.

In this article, the effects of age (or lifecycle) and generation on the standard of living are estimated using a pseudo-panel developed from the various editions of the French Household Expenditure Survey (Budget de famille – BdF) between 1979 and 2011. The standard of living of households is calculated using the disposable income or the private consumption per consumption unit, including and excluding expenditure on housing and imputed rent. Using the identification strategy developed by Deaton and Paxson (1994) for the Age-Period-Cohort (APC) models produces two main results. Firstly, the standard of living increases significantly with age from 25 to 64 years old. For example, consumption is 35% greater for 50-54 year olds than for 25-29 year olds. From 65 years old, changes depend on the living standard indicator considered. Furthermore, the standard of living of the baby boom generations is higher than generations born before the Second World War, but lower than or equal to the generations that follow. For example, the consumption of the cohort born in 1946 is 40% higher than the cohort born in 1926, but 20% lower than the cohort born in 1976. Considering all cohorts born between 1901 and 1979, no generation has been less fortunate than its ancestors. Discussion of these results demonstrates their robustness, particularly with regard to the results of other identification strategies, including the Age-Period-Cohort-Detrended (APCD) method which removes the linear trend from variables, and an original strategy, the Life Expectancy-Period- Cohort method (LEPC) which replaces the age variable with the life expectancy at each age. It shows the significance of economic growth in increasing the standard of living of generations and confirms that no generation has consumed less than the generations preceding it.

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.

Background: This article questions the demographic consequences of birth postponement in Europe. Objective: Starting from the fact that there is no obvious link between the timing of first births and fertility levels in Europe, we find that under certain circumstances, birth postponement potentially facilitates rather than impedes starting a family. Methods: We apply a synthetic cohort approach and distinguish between different socioeconomic determinants of the timing of first births by using the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Data is compiled specifically to reduce endogeneity and to eliminate structure effects. Results: We find that the probability of becoming a mother is higher for women who postpone first childbirth due to education and career investment than for women who postpone due to unrealized labour market integration. Conclusions: Educated and economically active women certainly postpone first childbirth in comparison to women who are less educated and who are not working, but they end up with a higher probability of starting a family. Contribution: The article contributes to the academic discussion of circumstances that may lead to birth postponement resulting in higher fertility for younger cohorts in European countries.

La méthode des Comptes de transferts nationaux est utilisée pour quantifier les transferts économiques entre les âges. Aux âges actifs, les individus produisent en général davantage qu’ils ne consomment. L’inverse s’observe pendant la jeunesse et la retraite, la consommation étant alors financée par une redistribution des ressources entre les âges. Entre 1979 et 2011, la période de la vie durant laquelle les revenus du travail sont supérieurs à la consommation s’est raccourcie. Les profils de consommation se sont déformés au profit des plus âgés qui consomment désormais davantage, en termes relatifs, que les plus jeunes.

We study how the composition of capital imports affects relative demand for skill and the skill premium in a sample of developing economies. Capital imports per se do not affect the skill premium; in contrast, their composition does. While imports of R&D-intensive capital equipment raise the skill premium, imports of less innovative equipment lower it. We estimate that R&D-intensive capital is complementary to skilled workers, whereas less innovative capital equipment is complementary to unskilled labor—which explains the composition effect. This mechanism has substantial explanatory power. Variation in tariffs, freight costs and overall barriers to trade, over time and across types of capital, favors imports of skill-complementary capital over other types. We calculate that reductions in barriers to trade increase inequality substantially in developing countries through the composition channel.

There is a small literature on the economic costs of terrorism. We consider the effects of the Boston marathon bombing on Americans’ well-being and time allocation. We exploit data from the American Time Use Survey and Well-Being Module in the days around the terrorist attack to implement a regression-discontinuity design. The bombing led to a significant and large drop of about 1.5 points in well-being, on a scale of one to six, for residents of the States close to Boston. The happiness of American women also dropped significantly, by almost a point, regardless of the State of residence. Labor supply and other time use were not significantly affected. We find no well-being effect of the Sandy Hook shootings, suggesting that terrorism is different in nature from other violent deaths.

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.

This paper quantitatively assesses the interaction between permanent immigration into France and France’s macroeconomic performance as seen through its GDP per capita and its unemployment rate. It takes advantage of a new database where immigration is measured by the flow of newly-issued long-term residence permits, categorized by both the nationality of the immigrant and the reason the permit was issued. Using a VAR model estimation of monthly data over the period 1994-2008, we find that immigration flow significantly responds to France’s macroeconomic performance: positively to the country’s GDP per capita and negatively to its unemployment rate. At the same time, we find that immigration itself increases France’s GDP per capita, particularly in the case of family immigration. This family immigration also reduces the country’s unemployment rate, especially when the families come from developing countries.

In terms of economics, individuals divorce if their expected gains from marriage fall short of their expected utility outside the current marriage, and children represent a marriage-specific type of investment, which generally increases the value of marriage for the spouses. However, children may also disrupt marital stability as they will induce dramatic changes into the household allocation of money and time. In particular, children conceived before or after first marriage may be valued differently by the spouses and this may lead to marital conflicts. It is difficult to assign a priori the direction of the effect of children on marriage stability, and causality may run either way, as couples who anticipate a separation are more likely to have fewer children than those who are happy together, while children born before first marriage may be associated with a lower marriage attachment of their parents. Here, we follow an empirical approach and take advantage of the richness of the data on pre-marital history from the 24 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth79, to estimate the effect of children conceived before or after first marriage on marital stability. We find a significant deterrent effect of young children conceived during first marriage to the likelihood of divorce, while children conceived before first marriage are found to have a disruptive effect on marital stability.

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.

The process of globalization is characterized by an impressive growth of global value chains, as well as the proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) interacting with multinational firms. This paper presents a model of offshoring and NGO–firm interactions in which offshoring to a low-regulation country allows a monopolist to implement a “dirty” technology undesired by consumers. Consumers can reduce the incentive for dirty production by financing an NGO monitoring the firm. NGO emergence and offshoring can arise as joint and interacting outcomes. For a range of trade costs, NGO emergence allows firms to capture gains from globalization, which would otherwise be unattainable. Somewhat paradoxically, NGO emergence can be at the expense of consumers possibly leading to welfare losses through offshoring.

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.

We propose a theoretical framework to study the determinants of ethnic and religious identity along two distinct motivational processes: cultural distinction and cultural conformity. Under cultural conformity, ethnic identity is reduced by neighborhood integration, which weakens group loyalties and prejudices. On the contrary, under cultural distinction, ethnic minorities are more motivated in retaining their own distinctive cultural heritage the more integrated are the neighborhoods where they reside and work. Using data on ethnic preferences and attitudes provided by the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities in the UK we find evidence that might be consistent with intense ethnic and religious identity mostly formed as a cultural distinction mechanism. Consistently, we document that ethnic identities might be more intense in mixed than in segregated neighborhoods.

This paper presents an analysis of the differential role of mortality for the optimal schooling and retirement age when the accumulation of human capital follows the so-called “Ben–Porath mechanism”. We set up a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply at the extensive margin that allows for endogenous human capital formation. This paper makes two important contributions. First, we provide the conditions under which a decrease in mortality leads to a longer education period and an earlier retirement age. Second, those conditions are decomposed into a Ben–Porath mechanism and a lifetime-human wealth effect vs. the years-to-consume effect. Finally, using US and Swedish data for cohorts born between 1890 and 2000, we show that our model can match the empirical evidence.

Exploiting data on the product-destination-level transactions of a large panel of Italian firms, we provide evidence that financial constraints affect price variation across exporters. Constrained exporters charge higher prices than do unconstrained firms that export to the same product-destination market. This pattern is the result of a two-fold effect. Distressed firms pass on their higher production costs through prices. However, they also charge higher mark-ups. We explain this evidence referring to models in which rival firms produce different brands of the same product for customers with significant switching costs and producers face capital market imperfections when they need external financing. Our empirical investigations corroborate this explanation: price gaps are higher when switching costs or other forms of demand rigidity are expected to be more relevant.

Trade liberalization of the agri-food sector is a sensitive topic in both Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions. This article provides an overview of current trade flows and trade barriers. Then, using a general equilibrium model of international trade (the MIRAGE model), it assesses the potential impact of these two agreements on agri-food trade and production. The results suggest that the US agri-food sectors would gain from both agreements while almost all their partners and third countries would benefit less, and might register losses in some sectors. However, the two agreements are not competing, since all the contracting parties’ interests are complementary. Finally, we show that the Atlantic trade may be impacted by the inclusion of harmonized standards within the Pacific agreement but not by its extension to additional members (e.g. China or India).

We establish the following stylized facts: (1) Exports are characterized by Big Hits, (2) the Big Hits change from one period to the next, and (3) these changes are not explained by global factors like global commodity prices. These conclusions are robust to excluding extractable products (oil and minerals) and other commodities. Moreover, African Big Hits exhibit similar patterns as Big Hits in non-African countries. We also discuss some concerns about data quality. These stylized facts are inconsistent with the traditional view that sees African exports as a passive commodity endowment, where changes are driven mostly by global commodity prices. In order to better understand the determinants of export success in Africa we interviewed several exporting entrepreneurs, government officials and NGOs. Some of the determinants that we document are conventional: moving up the quality ladder, utilizing strong comparative advantage, trade liberalization, investment in technological upgrades, foreign ownership, ethnic networks, and personal foreign experience of the entrepreneur. Other successes are triggered by idiosyncratic factors like entrepreneurial persistence, luck, and cost shocks, and some of the successes occur in areas that usually fail.

Cet article propose un cadre formel permettant d’étudier la coévolution entre institutions et culture et leurs implications en terme de résultats socio-économiques. Le changement institutionnel est décrit comme un processus permettant de résoudre des problèmes fondamentaux de crédibilité politique entre groupes sociaux. L’évolution culturelle est modélisée comme un processus de transmission intergenerationnel au sein d’une dynamique de populations. Nous caractérisons les dynamiques institutionnelles et culturelles comme pouvant être de type renforçantes (complémentarités dynamiques) ou de type atténuantes (substitutions dynamiques) et nous discutons des implications empiriques en termes de dynamique comparative. Un exemple d’application au cas d’une économie en processus de modernisation et de changement structurel est présenté.

Despite the fact that nonprofit organizations play a large role in the production and distribution of goods and services in modern economies, and the rising role of non-governmental organizations in carrying out projects in developing countries, our knowledge of their governance, and of its’ implications for their behaviour and performance, is limited. This special issue tries to uncover some of the mechanisms and institutions that characterize the governance of non-profits and NGOs, as well as its implications. In particular, the papers focus on: (i) the determinants of NGO governance and its implications for reducing poverty in developing countries, (ii) the governance of non-profit organizations, (iii) the impact of governance characteristics on the performance of non-profit organizations, and (iv) the effect of non-profit governance on the interaction between the non-profit and for-profit sectors.

This paper assesses how the competition between China and the EU in export markets has affected the trade performance of European countries. It first draws on a comparison between Germany and France before turning to discuss the economic and social impact of China’s internationalization on Europe’s economies. The results suggest that even in the recent years when China has gained prominence, it should not be blamed for more than half of the measured effects for emerging countries.

In this paper, the effect of proximity to multinational exporters on the creation of new export linkages (the extensive margin of trade) is debated. Using panel data from Chinese customs for 1997-2007, the capacity for Chinese domestic firms to begin exporting new varieties to new markets is shown to respond positively to the export activity of neighboring foreign firms. These spillovers are shown to be product and country specific. This conclusion is robust to fixed effects and instrumental variable specifications that control for both supply and demand shocks that could bias the estimations. The impact is sizable. The marginal impact of product-country-specific foreign export spillovers is five times as large as the effect of a 10 percent increase in the demand for the product in the destination country. Foreign export spillovers are also shown to be primarily limited to ordinary trade activities. Overall, our findings suggest that even for a country with an important cost-advantage such as China, there is room for initiatives from policy-makers that will diffuse best practices regarding export experience among exporters.

In this paper, we study how firm-level export performance is affected by Real Exchange Rate (RER) volatility and investigate whether this effect depends on existing financial constraints. Our empirical analysis relies on export data for more than 100,000 Chinese exporters over the 2000-6 period. We confirm a trade-deterring effect of RER volatility. We find that firms’ decision to begin exporting and the exported value decrease for destinations with a higher exchange rate volatility and that this effect is magnified for financially vulnerable firms. As expected, financial development seems to dampen this negative impact, especially on the intensive margin of export. These results provide micro-founded evidence suggesting that the existence of well-developed financial markets allows firms to hedge exchange rate risk. The results also support a key role of financial constraints in determining the macro impact of RER volatility on real outcomes.

The article examines the causal effect of financial constraints on firms’ exports. We exploit a firm-level proxy of constraints based on credit ratings and available for a large panel of Italian exporting and non-exporting firms. Our estimation strategy allows to cure for self-selection into exports and endogeneity of financial constraints. At the same time, we can control for unobserved firm fixed effects both in the selection and in the export equation, thus identifying the effect on exports of within-firm changes in financial constraints status. We find that financial constraints produce a sizable reduction in the value of a firm’s foreign sales.

Previous literature has investigated the drop in household consumption after the retirement of the household head, referred to as the so-called ‘retirement consumption puzzle’. This article expands on these studies by taking the retirement of the wife into consideration, thus distinguishing between ‘dualearner’ households and those in which the wife is a ‘housewife’. A regression discontinuity approach is used to estimate the effect of each partner’s retirement on household consumption. The analysis data are derived from the 2001 French Consumer Budget Survey that collected two-week expenditure diaries. The findings indicate a significant and sizable decrease in clothing expenditure upon the retirement of the male partner.

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.

We characterize the determinacy properties of the intertemporal equilibrium for a continuous-time, pure-exchange, overlapping generations economy with logarithmic preferences. Using recent advances in the theory of functional differential equations, we show that the equilibrium is locally unique and that prices converge to a balanced growth path and are determined.

This paper investigates how tariff liberalization has aected exporting at the product-destination level in emerging countries. We use a highly disaggregated (6 digit level of the harmonized system HS classication) bilateral measure of market access to compare taris applied in 1996 and 2006, which includes the timing of the Uruguay Round and episodes of bilateral liberalization. Our econometric estimations consider impacts of tari cuts on three components of the trade margins: extensive margin of entry (new trade relationships at the product-destination level), extensive margin of exit (disappearance of existing relationships) and intensive margin of trade (deepening existing relationships). Our main estimates indicate that a reduction of bilateral applied taris of 1 percentage point increases the extensive margin of entry by 0.1% and the intensive one by 2.09%, while it reduces the extensive margin of exit by 0.25%.

We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand facing highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz (2003). In addition to differing in their productivity, firms differ in their skill intensity. We model skill-biased technology as a correlation between skill intensity and technological acumen, and we estimate this correlation to be large using firm-level data from Chile in 1995. A fall in trade costs leads to both greater trade volumes and an increase in the relative demand for skill, as the lowest-cost/most-skilled firms expand to serve the export market while less skill-intensive non-exporters retrench in the face of increased import competition. This mechanism works regardless of factor endowment differences, so we provide an explanation for why globalization and wage inequality move together in both skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. In our model countries are net exporters of the services of their abundant factor, but there are no Stolper-Samuelson effects because import competition affects all domestic firms equally.

Trade liberalization of the agri-food sector is a sensitive topic in both Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions. This paper provides an overview of current trade ows and trade barriers. Then, using a general equilibrium model of international trade (the MIRAGE model), it assesses the potential impact of these two agreements on agri-food trade and value added. The results suggest that the US agri-food sectors would gain from both agreements while almost all their partners and third countries would benefit less, and might register losses in some sectors. However, the two agreements are not competing, since all the contracting parties’ defensive and offensive interests are complementary. Finally, we show that the Atlantic trade may be impacted by the inclusion of harmonized standards within the Pacific agreement but not by its extension to additional members (e.g. China or India).

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.

In this paper we study households in which the woman is the main earner, encompassing both dual-earners with the wife outearning the husband and couples in which the husband is not employed. The literature in this area is very scant. Earlier studies find that the wife outearns the husband in roughly one of every four dual-earner couples in North-American countries. According to our estimates, the wife earns a higher hourly wage than the husband in one of every six French households, including couples with an inactive partner, and, moreover, this proportion is almost the same considering partners’ monthly earnings. Economic models of marriage would predict that the wife’s earnings dominance be compensated by the husband being younger or possibly more attractive than the wife. Using a large dataset of couples, drawn from the French Labor Force surveys, we find that larger spousal age differences correlate positively with the occurrence of couples in which only the wife works but negatively with dual-earners in which she outearns the husband. Therefore, a marriage selection type of story may explain the occurrence of female solo-earner households while the emergence of « power couples » may provide a rationale for dual-earners in which the wife outearns the husband.

Globalization has been accompanied by rising pressure from advocacy non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on multinational firms to act in socially-responsible manner. We analyze how NGO pressure interacts with industry structure, using a simple model of NGO-firm interaction embedded in an industry environment with endogenous markups and entry. We explain three key empirical patterns in developing-country industries under activist pressure: the degree of exit under more intense activist pressure, the differential response of industries to NGO activism, and the general rise of NGO activism following globalization.

This paper studies the population dynamics of preference traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission with cultural leaders who compete for oblique socialization. We show that by adding this new channel in the transmission of preferences, i.e. cultural leaders, in steady-state, there cannot be an equilibrium with total assimilation or total integration of the population.

Les évolutions de la natalité sont le plus souvent appréhendées à l’aune d’un unique indicateur, le nombre d’enfants par femme. Pourtant, le calendrier des naissances, c’est-à-dire les âges auxquels une mère donne naissance à ses enfants, éclaire utilement les dynamiques sociodémographiques. L’âge de la maternité se révèle, en particulier, être un marqueur social car il s’accroît avec les niveaux d’éducation et de revenus des parents. Aujourd’hui, parmi celles ayant le moins de perspectives sociales, on trouve souvent des filles-mères. Force est de constater que le calendrier des naissances est naturellement lié aux autres décisions importantes qui rythment le cycle de vie : nombre d’enfants, bien sûr, mais aussi temps consacré aux études et rôle des femmes sur le marché du travail. Même si on a trop souvent tendance à s’alarmer du report des naissances, les âges de la maternité ne sont pas des variables ni des objectifs des politiques publiques ; c’est plutôt le contraire : ils réagissent indirectement à certaines politiques, et peuvent de ce fait en annihiler les effets. Dans cet opuscule, le calendrier des naissances sert à lire certaines dynamiques sociales, économiques et démographiques propres aux sociétés européennes et, en particulier, aux sociétés française et allemande. Nous mettons en perspective le phénomène de report des naissances qui caractérise depuis plusieurs décennies la démographie européenne en analysant précisément ses ressorts et implications.

Cet article analyse les données administratives relatives aux titres de séjour qui sont utilisées pour calculer les flux de migration permanente et légale en France d’étrangers en provenance de pays tiers. Il présente et discute la base nationale AGDREF (Application de gestion des dossiers de ressortissants étrangers en France) et l’ensemble des hypothèses méthodologiques retenues pour la construction de ces flux. Les flux d’entrées et de sorties annuels sont établis pour la période 1998-2013 à partir des informations sur la détention de titres de séjour dont la durée de validité est d’un an et plus extraites annuellement de la base AGDREF. l’étude est décomposée en fonction des flux d’entrées par âge, sexe et nationalité des personnes migrantes, ainsi que par durée de validité et motif de délivrance du titre de séjour. Les flux d’entrées ont atteint leur niveau le plus élevé dans les années 2003-2005 et sont en légère diminution depuis. En 2013, le flux d’entrées s’est établi à 192 419 personnes. Les personnes immigrées sont majoritairement de jeunes adultes, ressortissants d’un pays d’Afrique et venant en France pour motif familial ou pour études. Au cours de la période 1998-2013, les sorties estimées sont toujours inférieures aux entrées.

We extend the trade restrictiveness index approach to the case of market imperfections and domestic regulations addressing them. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and potentially enhancing demand by reducing negative externalities. We apply the framework to the database of Kee et al. (2009) and derive ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) for technical measures. About 39% of the product lines affected by NTMs exhibit negative AVEs, indicating a net trade-facilitating effect of these measures. Accounting for these effects significantly reduces previous measures of countries’ trade policy restrictiveness obtained while constraining these NTMs to be trade-reducing.

This article provides a comprehensive picture of the National Transfer Accounts (NTA), a project that aims at measuring how people produce, consume, save, and share economic resources at every age. It stands today with a unique dataset that includes 47 countries from around the world, permitting a comparative understanding of economic flows within and between generations and over time.

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.

Recent years have seen a surge in economic integration agreements (EIAs) and the development of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing number of EIAs include provisions on NTMs. However, little attention has been given in the literature to the effects of NTM liberalization in the context of EIAs. In this paper, we focus on provisions for technical regulations and analyze whether the North-South harmonization of technical barriers affects international trade. Using a gravity equation, we test whether, as a result of the deep integration associated with standards provisions included in the EIA, the Southern partners’ trade expands with the North, but at the expense of their trade with non-bloc Southern partners. Empirical results provide strong support for this conjecture. Moreover, harmonization on the basis of regional standards negatively impacts the exports of developing countries to the North.

Corporate organization varies within countries and between countries. We develop a theory which explains the variation in levels of decentralization across firms and links it to the trade environment that firms face. We introduce firms with internal hierarchies in a Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) model of international trade. We show that international trade increases the conflict of interest between CEO/owners and middle managers within firms and these eventually lead to decentralized corporate hierarchies. We test the theory with original data on the internal organizations of 2200 Austrian and German firms and find that the empirical evidence is consistent with the model’s predictions.

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.

Earlier studies suggest that income taxation may affect not only labour supply but also domestic work. Here we investigate the impact of income taxation on partners’ labour supply and housework, using data for France that taxes incomes of married couples jointly. We estimate a household utility model in which the marginal utilities of leisure and housework of both partners are modelled as random coefficients, depending on observed and unobserved characteristics. We conclude that both partners’ market and housework hours are responsive to changes in the tax system. A policy simulation suggests that replacing joint taxation of married spouses’ incomes with separate taxation would increase the husband’s housework hours by 1.3% and reduce his labour supply by 0.8%. The wife’s market hours would increase by 3.7%, and her housework hours would fall by 2.0%.

In this note we show how a considerably simpler model than the one in our original JDE 2006 paper generates all the same results. We also acknowledge an error in the specification of a utility function in our previous paper.

The aim of this paper is to provide new evidence on the effect of partners’ wages on partners’ allocation of time. Earlier studies concluded that wage rates are an important determinant of partners’ hours of market and non-market work and also that house work may lower married women’s wage rates. However, the bulk of earlier literature in this area failed to account for the endogeneity of wages or the simultaneity of partners’ time allocation choices. Here we take a reduced form approach and specify a ten simultaneous equations model of wage rates, employment and hours of market work, house work and childcare of parents. Non-participants are included in the model. We exploit a rich time use dataset for France to estimate the model. We find that the own wage affects positively own market hours and negatively own house work and childcare hours. The wage of the father has a significantly negative effect on the mother’s market hours while her wage rate has a significantly positive effect on his house work hours.

We provide a model of product-based cultural change where trade integration leads to cultural convergence. A standard trade model of Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition is coupled with a micro-founded model of cultural dynamics. We show that access to varieties that are attached to a global cultural type changes the incentives of parents to socialize their children and transmit their type. The resulting increase in agents of the global cultural type leads to a magnification of the initial shock. A striking feature of the model is that even temporary shocks to openness may have permanent effects through the changing distribution of preferences in the economy.

Maids, household appliances and housework time are key inputs to domestic production. This study uses data from the UK and France to estimate the effects of resource prices on the demand for these inputs. We conclude that higher opportunity costs of time increase the likelihood of having maid services and appliances. Women’s time costs are also positively related to his housework time and negatively related to hers. Finally, maid service appears to be a closer substitute for housework time on weekend days than weekdays, suggesting smaller labour supply effects than anticipated by earlier literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

We explore the two-way relationship between corporate culture and market structure. We emphasize two market dimensions through which firms interact: the product market where goods are sold and the labor market where managers are hired. We model the firm’s principal–agent relationship by assuming that managers may be socialized to a corporate identity that leads them to behave more in concert with the profit maximizing goals of the firm (i.e. a corporate culture). We first analyse the optimal incentive scheme and corporate culture investment at the firm level. Then we consider the industry equilibrium with free entry and market clearing for managerial labor. We discuss how industry characteristics (market size effects), global market integration or technological shocks affect the pattern of equilibrium corporate cultural choices across firms.

This paper analyzes the solution of linear mixed-type functional differential equations with either predetermined or non-predetermined variables. Conditions characterizing the existence and uniqueness of a solution are given and related to the local stability and determinacy properties of the steady state. In particular, it is shown that the relationship between the uniqueness of the solution and the stability of the steady-state is more subtle than the one that holds for ordinary differential equations, and gives rise to new dynamic configurations.

We study environmental regulation and its role for trade in China. Specifically, we assess the effectiveness of an environmental policy in China that introduced stricter regulations on sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions in targeted cities. To identify the causal effect of this policy on exports, we use sectoral export data for a panel of Chinese cities and exploit variations in exports between cities and sectors, over time, and, in a second step, between firm types. We find a relative fall in sectoral exports in targeted cities after the implementation of the policy, which is sharper the more polluting the industry. Further, we find that the observed effect is mainly driven by privately owned firms, whereas exports of state-owned firms seem to be unaffected by the new policy. This finding is consistent with the preferential political treatment of state-owned firms in China.

Mission-driven nonprofit organizations compete for donations through fundraising activities. Such competition can lead to inefficient outcomes, if nonprofits impose externalities on each others’ output. This paper studies the sustainability of fundraising coordination agreements, using a game-theoretic model of coalition formation. We show that three key characteristics determine the stability of cooperation between nonprofits: (i) the alliance formation rule, (ii) the extent to which fundraising efforts are strategic complements/substitutes, and (iii) whether deviation from the agreements is by an individual or by a group of nonprofits. We analyze how the interaction of these three features induces (or not) the stability of Pareto-optimal full coordination in fundraising.

In this article, we assess the impact of counterterrorism measures on trade. Our work brings three value addition to the literature: (1) it develops a simple theory to emphasize the endogeneity between terrorism acts, counterterrorism measures, and trade; (2) it delivers an original strategy to identify empirically the effect of counterterrorism security measures on trade flows (using third country incidents); and (3) it uses a new data set on business visas issued by the United States to test further the hypothesis that terrorism is affecting trade through the security channel. Our results suggest that counterterrorism security measures matter for US imports. The level of the impact is up to three times higher when the acts result in a relatively high number of victims, when the products are sensitive to shipping time, or when they ask for networks and business people mobility in order to be sold.

We extend the trade restrictiveness index approach to the case of market imperfections and domestic regulations addressing them. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and potentially enhancing demand by increasing product quality or reducing negative externalities. We apply the framework to the database of Kee et al. (2009) and derive ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) for NTMs. Half of the product lines affected by NTMs exhibit negative AVEs, indicating a net trade-facilitating effect of NTMs. Accounting for these effects significantly reduces previous measures of countries’ trade policy restrictiveness obtained while constraining NTMs to be trade reducing.

The epidemiological transition has provided the theoretical background for the expectation of convergence in mortality patterns. We formally test and reject the convergence hypothesis for a sample of industrialized countries in the period from 1960 to 2008. After a period of convergence in the decade of 1960 there followed a sustained process of divergence with a pronounced increase at the end of the 1980’s, explained by trends within former Socialist countries (Eastern countries). While Eastern countries experienced abrupt divergence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, differences within Western countries remained broadly constant for the whole period. Western countries transitioned from a strong correlation between life expectancy and variance in 1960 to no association between both moments in 2008 while Eastern countries experienced the opposite evolution. Taken together, our results suggest that convergence can be better understood when accounting for shared structural similarities amongst groups of countries rather than through global convergence.

We investigate how the export performance in China is influenced by credit constraints. Using panel data from Chinese customs, we show that credit constraints affect the sectoral composition of exports. We confirm that credit constraints provide an advantage to foreign-owned firms and joint ventures over private domestic firms in sectors with higher levels of financial vulnerability. We show that these distortions have been lessened over the period in conjunction with the reduction of State control over the financial intermediation system.

Longer lives and fertility far below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman are leading to rapid population aging in many countries. Many observers are concerned that aging will adversely affect public finances and standards of living. Analysis of newly available National Transfer Accounts data for 40 countries shows that fertility well above replacement would typically be most beneficial for government budgets. However, fertility near replacement would be most beneficial for standards of living when the analysis includes the effects of age structure on families as well as governments. And fertility below replacement would maximize per capita consumption when the cost of providing capital for a growing labor force is taken into account. Although low fertility will indeed challenge government programs and very low fertility undermines living standards, we find that moderately low fertility and population decline favor the broader material standard of living.

Combining detailed data on export transactions and an informative firm-level measure of financing constraints, this article provides new evidence on the extent and dynamics of product and geographical diversification of constrained exporters. Financial constraints associate with: (i) narrower product/destination margins, (ii) higher probability to drop products and destinations, (iii) larger loss of export value associated to dropping product or destination markets, (iv) higher probability to discard products with relatively large share in firm total export values, and (v) larger likelihood to drop country markets that are bigger, richer, geographically closer and with a relatively larger share in total firm export value.

Maids, household appliances and housework time are key inputs to domestic production. This study uses data from the UK and France to estimate the effects of resource prices on the demand for these inputs. We conclude that higher opportunity costs of time increase the likelihood of having maid services and appliances. Women’s time costs are also positively related to his housework time and negatively related to hers. Finally, maid service appears to be a closer substitute for housework time on weekend days than weekdays, suggesting smaller labour supply effects than anticipated by earlier literature.

Ces dernières années ont été marquées par la signature de nombreux accords de commerce préférentiel prévoyant une réduction des entraves aux échanges entre pays. Un bon nombre d’entre eux incluaient des dispositions relatives aux mesures non tarifaires. Ce travail de recherche examine si les exigences techniques figurant dans les accords entre pays du Nord et du Sud ont un impact sur le commerce international. Plus précisément, les auteurs analysent dans quelle mesure l’harmonisation des règlementations techniques crée ou renforce une structure d’échanges du type «centre-périphérie» potentiellement dommageable pour l’intégration des pays du Sud au sein de l’économie mondiale. Les résultats empiriques de l’étude confirment cette conjecture.

Cette revue de littérature présente dans une première partie les contraintes d’accès au crédit des PME auxquelles différents mécanismes de soutien sont censés répondre afin de déterminer les composantes de ces programmes qu’il est pertinent d’étudier. Toujours dans cette première partie, les auteurs présentent les différentes méthodes d’évaluation d’impact et décrivent les méthodes réalisables selon les types de programmes de soutien à l’accès au crédit des PME. Ensuite, ils détaillent trois types d’instruments très utilisés : lignes de crédit, fonds de garantie et fonds d’investissement. Pour chacun de ces trois instruments, les auteurs reviennent sur les objectifs et les modalités de l’instrument, puis ils exposent les méthodes d’évaluations envisageables ainsi que les applications concrètes que l’on peut trouver dans la littérature. Ils tentent enfin, pour chaque instrument, de développer quelques conclusions spécifiques aux instruments de l’AFD.

Au premier janvier 2014, la France comptait 66 millions d’habitants (dont 63,9 millions en France métro politaine), soit un accroissement annuel de 4,2 ‰. En 2012, 180 000 titres de séjour ont été délivrés à des personnes immigrantes venant de pays tiers. Une majorité de titres concernaient des femmes. Les motifs des titres délivrés relèvent pour moitié de raisons familiales et pour un quart des études. La fécondité diminue légèrement, passant à 1,99 enfant par femme. Cette baisse, conjuguée à la diminution de la part des femmes en âge de procréer au sein de la population et à l’augmentation de la population totale, implique que le taux de natalité est également en baisse en 2013. Après une légère remontée en 2012, le nombre de mariages diminue à nouveau : d’après les données provisoires, on a enregistré 231 000 mariages en 2013. Le mariage a été ouvert aux couples de même sexe le 17 mai 2013 et 7 000 mariages ont été enregistrés entre mai et décembre 2013. Le nombre de pacs enregistrés en 2013 est de 168 000. Le nombre de décès en 2013 est provisoirement estimé à 572 000, et en France métropolitaine, il dépasse le seuil de 560 000. L’espérance de vie des femmes est de 85 ans et celle des hommes de 78,7 ans, soit un écart de 6,3 ans en légère diminution par rapport à l’année 2012.

This study analyzes the effect of financial constraints (FCs) on firm dynamics. We measure FCs with an official credit rating, which captures availability and cost of external resources. We find that FCs undermine average firm growth, induce anti-correlation in growth patterns, and reduce the dependence of growth volatility on size. FCs are also associated with higher volatility and asymmetries in growth shock distributions, preventing young fast-growing firms especially from seizing attractive growth opportunities and further deteriorating the growth prospects of already slow-growing firms, particularly if old. The sub-diffusive nature of the growth process of constrained firms is compatible with the distinctive properties of their size distribution.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the effects of geography on the transition process in authoritarian political regimes, and to investigate the nature of the links between political change, economic reforms and geographical location. A simple model of transition and democratization is presented wherein we show that the effectiveness of repression by the incumbent elite is a negative function of the distance to the ‘free world’. In consequence, geography has conflicting effects on shifts in political power. This article provides a rationale for the counterintuitive fact that the first authoritarian country to start a transition process towards democratization is not necessarily the one nearest to the free world.

Cette introduction, qui s’appuie sur l’économie récente de la transmission culturelle, présente les principales questions conceptuelles pertinentes pour l’étude des modèles d’intégration culturelle des immigrés et de leur interaction avec les résultats marchands et non marchands. Plus précisément, ce chapitre aborde brièvement les différentes théories de l’intégration culturelle développées dans les sciences sociales. Ce chapitre documente plus en détail l’approche économique de l’étude de l’intégration culturelle et discute des conséquences de l’intégration culturelle en termes d’impact socio-économique sur les pays d’accueil.

A laboratory experiment is conducted to evaluate the impact of globalisation on consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for food products. Successive messages on the products’ origin and the multinational firm’s strategy are delivered to participants. Interestingly, the significant decrease in WTP resulting from negative messages about foreign sourcing and the closure of processing facilities is reversed after the revelation of positive information linked to the multinational firm’s new products/services and investments made in the domestic country. The experiment also studies the effects of two labels (geographic indication and fair trade). The introduction of labels increases the consumer surplus.

Recent empirical research in international trade has revealed overwhelming evidence that, in all countries, a remarkably small proportion of firms report exports in Customs statistics. However, a large share of these are wholesalers. This suggests that the number of producers selling their products abroad might be much greater than that suggested by a simple count of the firms directly reporting their exports. This paper sheds light on the role of wholesalers in international trade. Our model uses very general assumptions to show that intermediated exporters may contribute significantly to the extension of countries’ export opportunities. The model predicts a twofold role in international trade. First, wholesalers alleviate the difficulty of reaching less-accessible markets. Second, they help less-efficient firms to supply foreign markets, thus increasing the number of exported varieties at the aggregate level. We use French firm-level export data to provide empirical support for these two predictions.

This paper studies how firm-level export performance is affected by Real Exchange Rate (RER) volatility and investigates whether this effect depends on existing financial constraints. Our empirical analysis relies on export data for more than 100,000 Chinese exporters over the 2000-2006 period. We confirm a trade-deterring effect of RER volatility. We find that the value exported by firms, as well as their probability of entering new export markets, decrease for destinations with a higher exchange rate volatility and that this effect is magnified for financially vulnerable firms. As expected, financial development seems to dampen this negative impact, especially on the intensive margin of export. These results provide micro-founded evidence that financial constraints may play a key role in determining the macro impact of RER volatility on real outcomes.

Our work contributes to the literature relating output structure and economic development by showing that growth gains from upgrading are not unconditional. Relying on data from a panel of Chinese cities, we show that the level of capabilities available to domestic _rms operating in ordinary trade is an important driver of economic growth. However, no direct gains emanate from the complexity of goods produced by either processing-trade activities or foreign _rms. This suggests that the sources of product upgrading matter, and that domestic embeddedness is key in order for capacity building and technology adoption to be growth enhancing.

In this paper, we argue that the political-commitment problem provides an explanation for why much income redistribution takes an inefficient form, particularly employment in the public sector. A job is a credible way of redistributing when it provides rents (such as in situations with moral hazard), and employment is optimal ex post. Moreover, a job is selective and reversible, and thus ties the continuation utility of a voter to the political success of a particular politician. We show that the need to make offers of employment incentive-compatible leads to inefficiencies in the supply of public goods. We also show that such inefficient redistribution becomes relatively attractive in situations with high inequality and low productivity. Inefficiency is increased when the stakes from politics are high, when inequality is high, and when money matters less than ideology in politics.

This chapter uses a welfare-based conceptual framework for the assessment of costs and benefits associated with nontariff measures in the presence of market imperfections such as asymmetric information and environmental or health externalities. The framework allows for evidence-based comparative assessments of alternative regulatory approaches addressing these imperfections. The conceptual work is illustrated with an empirical case study of labeling internationally traded fish products.

Dans cet article, nous étudions l’effet de la complexité économique sur la croissance du revenu par tête des villes chinoises. Nous construisons une mesure de la complexité économique pour chaque ville en suivant la méthode des réflexions d’Hidalgo et Hausmann [2009]. Notre indicateur reflète la diversité et l’ubiquité de connaissances présentes dans la localité. Nos estimateurs portent sur un panel de 221 villes entre 1997 et 2009 et indiquent que plus une ville dispose d’une structure productive complexe, plus la croissance à venir de son pib par habitant est élevée.

In this study, we explore the role of export spillovers on the capacity of French firms to penetrate Asian markets. We confirm previous results, that is, the presence of other exporters raises the probability that firms start exporting a given product to a given country in the case of France. We find that export spillovers are more important for exports to Asia than to other destinations. Moreover, the presence of other exporters appears particularly beneficial to small and less productive firms. More intense benefits for start-up companies are observed in tough Asian markets characterized by low GDP per capita and tough administrative procedures on imports.

Le marché porte sur la réalisation d’une étude proposant un panorama complet des transferts entreles générations pour la France sur un horizon temporel de 30 ans. Elle utilise une méthodologieoriginale, celle des Comptes de Transfert Nationaux (NTA), qui aujourd’hui fait référence sur le planinternational. L’idée générale est de comparer ce que chaque cohorte, définie comme l’ensemble desenfants nés une année donnée, consomme et produit à une date donnée. Par consommation, onentend consommation de biens marchands mais aussi de biens/services publics tels que l’éducationou la santé. Cette consommation est comparée aux revenus du travail (y compris les cotisationssociales salariales et patronales) pour définir les cohortes qui en excédent « subventionnent » lescohortes qui consomment plus qu’elles ne produisent. Cette méthode permet de percevoir de façontrès complète l’ensemble des transferts entre les générations au cours d’une année et sadéformation au cours du temps.Les travaux définis dans le cadre du marché ont été effectués. L’essentiel concernait la constructiond’un profil des excédents et déficits au cours du cycle de vie, c’est‐à‐dire la différence à chaque âgeentre les revenus du travail et les consommations privées et publiques. Il a été réalisé pour toutes lesannées allant de 1979 à 2005. Une décomposition par sexe du « profil de cycle de vie » a également été réalisée pour la période considérée. Les principales conclusions de cette étude sont les suivantes. Malgré les très importantschangements économiques, sociaux et politiques que la société française a connu depuis la fin desannées 1980, la part des transferts vers les moins de 20 ans et les plus de 60 ans dans le PIB a étéremarquablement stable. Ils reflètent un choix collectif pour une certaine égalité entre les âges,lorsque la variable d’intérêt est la consommation. Par ailleurs, lorsque l’on se limite aux biens etservices marchands, les transferts favorisent les plus de 60 ans par rapport au moins de 20 ans et,parmi les plus de 60 ans, les femmes par rapport aux hommes. Lorsque l’on intègre la productiondomestique, le constat est inversé et ce sont les jeunes et les hommes de plus de 60 ans quireçoivent le plus de transferts.

How well does the theory of the firm explain the choice between intrafirm and arm’s-length trade? This paper uses firm-level import data from France to look into this question. We find support for three key predictions of property rights theories of the multinational firm. Intrafirm imports are more likely in capital- and skill-intensive firms, in highly productive firms, and from countries with well-functioning judicial institutions. We bridge previous aggregate findings with our investigation by decomposing intrafirm imports into an extensive and intensive margin and uncover interesting patterns in the data that require further theoretical investigation.

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.

Our work contributes to the literature relating output structure and economic development by showing that growth gains from upgrading are not unconditional. Relying on data from a panel of Chinese cities, we show that the level of capabilities available to domestic firms operating in ordinary trade is an important driver of economic growth. However, no direct gains emanate from the complexity of goods produced by either processing-trade activities or foreign firms. This suggests that the sources of product upgrading matter, and that domestic embeddedness is key in order for capacity building and technology adoption to be growth enhancing.

We study a benchmark model with collateral constraints and heterogeneous discounting. Contrarily to a rich literature on borrowing limits, we allow for rental markets. By incorporating this missing market, we show that impatient agents choose to rent rather than to own the collateral in the neighborhood of the deterministic steady state. Consequently, impatient agents are not indebted and borrowing constraints play no role in local dynamics.

In this paper, we shed light on the selection of the benefi ciaries from the French competitiveness cluster policy which was launched in 2005 and extended to 2012. We disentangle the selection and self-selection eff ects, as emphasized in the theoretical literature on regional and industrial policy. Our main conclusion is that winners were (self-)selected at both steps of the procedure, and that this holds for the three cluster types: worldwide clusters , potentially worldwide clusters and national clusters . We thus provide a methodology which allows us to contrast the e ffective outcomes of the selection process and the official objectives of cluster policies in terms of targeting, and which thus helps in their econometric evaluation.

Demichelis and Polemarchalis highlighted the role played by the frequency of trade in the degree of indeterminacy of equilibrium in economies of overlapping generations. Assuming that time has a finite starting point and extends into the infinite future, they prove that the degree of indeterminacy increases with the number of periods in the life-span of individuals, which is assumed to be deterministic. We show that this result does not hold when individual longevity is represented by an exponential survival function: the degree of indeterminacy depends on individual preferences and monetary policy but is independent of the frequency of trade.

Au premier janvier 2013, la France comptait 65,8 millions d’habitants, dont 63,7 millions en France métropolitaine, soit un accroissement annuel supérieur à 4‰. Le nombre de personnes adultes bénéficiaires d’un titre de séjour de longue durée est relativement stable, ces personnes sont majoritairement des femmes et d’âge jeune. La fécondité est équivalente à l’année précédente, mais la proportion de femmes en âge de procréer diminue, entraînant une légère baisse de la natalité en 2012. La fécondité par âge s’est peu modifiée, mais celle des femmes âgées de 35 à 39 ans continue d’augmenter. Les naissances hors mariage se sont banalisées et concernent 57%des enfants nés en 2012. Le nombre des interruptions volontaires de grossesse (IVG) reste stable en 2012, ainsi que l’indicateur conjoncturel d’IVG et les taux par âge. Après une baisse régulière, le nombre de mariages aurait légèrement augmenté en 2012 d’après les données provisoires. La saisonnalité des mariages reste encore très marquée et la grande majorité des unions sont concentrées de juin à septembre. La mortalité a connu en 2012 un ralentissement en termes de progrès d’espérance de vie en raison des épidémies hivernales. Le nombre de décès a augmenté de plus de 4% entre 2011 et 2012.

We study the rise of finance across a set of now-industrial economies. The long run pattern of the growth of the income share of finance from the 19th century to current times in the United States is similar to some economies, but not all economies reach the same size and instead reach a plateau. The relationship between financial output and income is non-homothetic and changes three times in this sample. Most of the increase in real GDP per capita from 1870 occurred while financial output and the income share of finance were smaller than their size in 1980. After 1980 the elasticity of income with respect to financial output falls significantly. We find considerable heterogeneity in the size of finance in recent times. There is no evidence for an increase in the unit cost of financial intermediation. We find that information technology and financial deregulation can help explain the increase in relative skill intensity and in relative wages in finance, while common trends, which may be related to financial globalization, also play a role.

Une expérience de laboratoire a évalué la disposition à payer des consommateurs pour des produits alimentaires avec et sans huile de palme. La production d’huile de palme provoque des dommages environnementaux, et sa consommation présente un risque pour la santé. Cependant, la production d’huiles alternatives soulève également des questions quant à l’usage des sols. Avec cette expérience, des messages successifs mettant l’accent sur les caractéristiques des produits avec huile de palme et sans huile de palme ont été révélés aux participants. L’information a une influence significative sur les dispositions à payer quand elle souligne un impact négatif lié aux produits. Cet effet est plus marqué pour le produit avec huile de palme que pour le produit sans huile de palme. Cet article compare également les effets sociaux de deux instruments réglementaires, à savoir une campagne d’information auprès des consommateurs et une taxe unitaire. En raison des caractéristiques respectives des deux produits avec ou sans huile de palme, la campagne d’information améliore le bien-être social avec un impact beaucoup plus grand que la taxe.

I fit a two-sector general equilibrium model to U.S. data in 1963–2005 in order to infer technological processes that affect the college premium. In skill intensive services factor augmenting technological change is slower for college graduates relative to less skilled workers. I find the opposite in the rest of the economy. This indicates that technological change is more complex than what we observe at the aggregate level. The results are consistent with changes in occupational mixes: low-skill workers in services reallocate into computer complementary occupations to a greater extent than college graduates in that sector. Occupational mixes in the rest of the private sector shift in the opposite direction. Thus, theoretical treatments of the underlying mechanisms of skill biased technological change may be improved by taking into account occupational mixes within broad education-sector groups.

Recent years have seen a surge in economic integration agreements (EIAs) and the development of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing number of EIAs include provisions on NTMs. This paper focuses on provisions on technical regulations. We investigate whether the technical requirements contained in North-South Agreements affect international trade. More particularly, using a gravity equation, we assess to what extent North-South harmonization of technical barriers creates or reinforces a hub-and-spoke trade structure potentially detrimental to the integration of Southern countries in world economy.

This paper uses a lab experiment to investigate developed countries’ consumer valuations of characteristics linked to the environment and workers’ social rights in developing countries. It focuses on seafood products and distinguishes between regular, environmentally friendly and fair trade varieties. Consumer valuations are elicited with a multiple price list. Results show that environmental and social labels have similar effects on participant willingness-to-pay when they are first presented. Using welfare variation coming from the labels, we also show that the absence of negative information linked to the regular variety may lead to an underestimation of the value of information associated with the label.

Many studies specify human mortality patterns parametrically, with a parameter change affecting mortality rates at different ages simultaneously. Motivated by the stylized fact that a mortality decline affects primarily younger people in the early phase of mortality transition but mainly older people in the later phase, we study how a mortality change at an arbitrary age affects optimal retirement age. Using the Volterra derivative for a functional, we show that mortality reductions at older ages delay retirement unambiguously, but that mortality reductions at younger ages may lead to earlier retirement due to a substantial increase in the individual’s expected lifetime human wealth.

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.

Many experts have identified globalization as the new way in which firms organize their activities and the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration in the changing nature of the corporation. International trade leads to a ‘war for talent’ which makes it more likely that an organizational equilibrium emerges in the integrated world economy in which control is delegated to lower levels of the firm’s hierarchy empowering human capital. Furthermore, trade integration is shown to lead to waves of decentralization and to convergence in corporate cultures across countries.

We consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance by appealing to regional variation within one single country (China) over the 1997-2009 period. We find evidence in support of Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007), in that regions specializing in more sophisticated goods subsequently grow faster. We find substantial variation in export sophistication at the province and prefecture level, controlling for the level of development, and that this sophistication in turn drives growth. Our results suggest that these gains are limited to the ordinary export activities undertaken by domestic firms: no direct gains result from either processing trade activities or foreign firms, even though these are the main contributors to the global upgrading of China’s exports. As such, the extent of assembly trade and foreign entities should be distinguished in order to measure the true movement in a country’s technology and the contribution of exports to economic growth.

Existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption with home production, but do not consider joint behavior of couples. Here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production for both partners in a couple. Our identification strategy exploits the earliest age retirement laws in France, enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach. We find that own retirement significantly increases own hours of home production and the effect is larger for men than for women. Moreover, retirement of the female partner significantly reduces male hours of home production but not vice versa.

We consider a life-cycle model with bequest motives, and assume that the individual does not know his/her survival probability and has maxmin utility preferences; we show that it is optimal not to annuitize but to purchase pure life insurance policies instead.

This study focuses on the welfare impact of taxes, minimum-quality standards, and/or product labeling. A theoretical framework shows that the combination of a label and a per-unit tax is socially optimal. Alternatively, if the label is unavailable, the theory cannot directly conclude which instrument should be socially preferred. Estimations of willingness-to-pay (WTP) are useful for completing the theoretical analysis and evaluating policies ex ante on case-by-case basis. Using hypothetical WTP for shrimp, we confirm that the combination of a label and a tax is socially optimal. In the absence of a label, simulations show that a minimum-quality standard leads to a higher welfare compared to a tax.

This paper provides a systematic welfare-based approach to analyze the impact of non-tariff measures (NTMs) on trade and welfare in the presence of market imperfections. It focuses on standard-like measures such as technical barriers and sanitary and phytosanitary regulations. The approach overcomes the shortcomings of the mainstream approach based on the analysis of foregone trade caused by trade costs. The latter ignores market imperfections, and welfare is found to increases when NTMs are reduced and trade expands. We explain how to account for external effects and market failures in trade-focused welfare analysis, leading to a more balanced overall assessment of measures despite a potential reduction of trade flows. The relationships between trade, welfare, and NTMs are complex, and generalizations are best avoided. Very often, the optimum NTM is not the absence of regulation. An application to shrimp trade illustrates the feasibility of the proposed approach. The illustration shows that the reinforcement of a food safety standard can be socially preferable to the status-quo situation, both domestically and internationally.

Even in countries where there is a male-biased sex ratio, it is still possible for the marriage market to be balanced if men marry younger women and population is growing. We define a Missing Brides Index to reflect the intensity of the possible imbalance at steady state, taking into account the endogeneity of population growth. Taking international data on ages at marriage, fertility rate, and sex ratio at birth, we rank countries according to the Missing Brides Index.

We study the well-posedness of initial value problems for nonlinear functional differential-algebraic equations of mixed type. We are interested in solutions to such problems that admit a single jump discontinuity at time zero. We focus specially on the question whether unstable equilibria can be stabilized by appropriately choosing the size of the jump discontinuity. We illustrate our techniques by analytically studying an economic model for the interplay between inflation and interest rates. In particular, we investigate under which circumstances the central bank can prevent runaway inflation by appropriately hiking the interest rate.

We investigate the design of domestic incentive regulations in a small economy opened to trade and its implications for international specialization and for trade openness to remain welfare-improving. More specifically, we append to an otherwise standard 2 × 2 Heckscher-Ohlin model of a small open economy a continuum of intermediate sectors producing nontradable goods used in tradable sectors. Those goods are produced by privately informed regulated firms. Asymmetric information induces distortions with general equilibrium impacts. The small economy becomes relatively richer in the informationally sensitive factor so that asymmetric information might reverse trade patterns. Free trade is Pareto-dominated by autarky when it exacerbates agency distortions.

We consider a one-sector Ramsey-type growth model with inelastic labor and learning-by-doing externalities based on cumulative gross investment (cumulative production of capital goods), which is assumed, in accordance with Arrow (1962), to be a better index of experience than the average capital stock. We prove that a slight memory effect characterizing the learning-by-doing process is enough to generate business cycle fluctuations through a Hopf bifurcation leading to stable periodic orbits. This is obtained for reasonable parameter values, notably for both the amount of externalities and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. Hence, contrary to all the results available in the literature on aggregate models, we show that endogenous fluctuations are compatible with a low (in actual fact, zero) wage elasticity of the labor supply.

We study the allocation and compensation of human capital in the U.S. finance industry over the past century. Across time, space, and subsectors, we find that financial deregulation is associated with skill intensity, job complexity, and high wages for finance employees. All three measures are high before 1935 and after 1980, but not in the interim period. Workers in the finance industry earn the same education-adjusted wages as other workers until 1990 and significantly more afterward. By 2006 the premium is 40% on average, and 200% for top earners and CEOs. Earnings risk and firm size effects account for some of the premium, but the majority does not appear to be sustainable.

This chapter discusses the issue of taxation and redistribution in economies dominated by elites with limited state capacity. Within a simple aggregate framework, we discuss the political economy incentives of elites to tax, redistribute, and increase state capacity. In particular, the analysis highlights the role of complementarities or substitutability in the production process between the factors controlled by the elite and other social groups, and shows the existence of natural increasing returns for elites to increase state capacity. The chapter also discusses how the incentives for state capacity building are affected by political threats of power shifting

In this paper, the effect of a change in the distribution of age differences between sexual partners on the dynamics of the HIV epidemic is studied. In a gender- and age-structured compartmental model, it is shown that if the variance of the distribution is small enough, an increase in this variance strongly increases the basic reproduction number. Moreover, if the variance is large enough, the mean age difference barely affects the basic reproduction number. We, therefore, conclude that the local stability of the disease-free equilibrium relies more on the variance than on the mean.

We model a small open economy in which both domestic financial intermediaries and entrepreneurs face incentive constraints, as in Holmstrom and Tirole (1997), to study the general equilibrium impact of various types of capital inflows on the efficiency and governance of domestic banks. Banks have an advantage in monitoring firms, but the latter can collude with banks and offer side-payments to reduce the intensity of monitoring. Opening up to international capital flows makes domestic banks’ capital scarcer relative to uninformed capital, thus increasing the relative cost of monitoring. We show that capital account liberalization has ambiguous effects on the governance of the domestic financial system by sometimes increasing firms’ incentives to collude with banks. We characterize the conditions under which governance is more likely to deteriorate after opening up the capital account, and discuss the effects on investment, productivity and output. We also analyze the effects of foreign direct investment in the corporate and banking sectors. Stylized facts are consistent with the predictions of the model.

We study the relationship between ethnic identity and labour market outcomes of non-EU immigrants in Europe. Using the European Social Survey, we find that there is a penalty to be paid for immigrants with a strong identity. Being a first generation immigrant leads to a penalty of about 17% while second-generation immigrants have a probability of being employed that is not statistically different from that of natives. However, when they have a strong identity, second-generation immigrants have a lower chance of finding a job than natives. Our analysis also reveals that the relationship between ethnic identity and employment prospects may depend on the type of integration and labour market policies implemented in the country where the immigrant lives. More flexible labour markets help immigrants to access the labour market but do not protect those who have a strong ethnic identity.

La littérature empirique du commerce international souligne l’existence d’économies d’agglomération à l’exportation. Elle met en évidence l’impact positif de la présence d’autres exportateurs au niveau local sur la probabilité qu’une firme commence à exporter vers un pays donné. Nous explorons ce résultat en étudiant la nature de ces effets en fonction de caractéristiques hétérogènes des firmes exportatrices et de variables mesurant la difficulté d’accès aux pays importateurs : temps et nombre de documents nécessaires à l’importation dans le pays de destination, demande pondérée, et mesure du risque économique et global dans le pays.

We consider the effect of export sophistication on economic performance using regional variations within a single country (China) over the period 1997-2009. We confirm Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007)’s prediction that regions that specialize in more sophisticated goods subsequently grow faster. We find that at the province and prefecture level, there is substantial variation in export sophistication controlling for the level of development, and that this difference in turn matters for growth. Our results suggest that these gains are limited to ordinary export activities undertaken by domestic firms. No direct gains appear to derive from processing trade activities and from foreign firms even though they are the main contributors to the global upgrading of China’s exports. This finding suggests that the contribution of assembly trade and foreign entities must be distinguished when one wants to measure the true improvement in the country’s technology level and its contribution to economic growth.

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 studies the interaction between labour market integration, « work values » and entrepreneurial capital inside minority communities. A simple model of labour market segmentation with ethnic capítal and endogenous transmission of cultural values inside a minority group is presented. It emphasizes the role of entrepreneurial capital as an important driver of labour market integration and as a promoter of meritocratic work values inside the community. The case immigrants in France is then empirically studied as an example. We show that the contrasted labour market outcomes and work values of immigrants from Maghreb versus Southern Europe are, statistically, totally explained away by their different levels of entrepreneurial capital.

We are thankful to Michael Lundholm and Mahmood Arai for pointing us towards a coding error which invalidates the regressions in our paper. Correcting the code leads to a decrease in sample sizes, though much smaller than Arai et al. (2011) claim based on their « replication ». An appropriate redefinition of the variables and of the model specification allows us to reproduce the substance of the empirical analysis in our original published paper. Although the results are now less clear-cut, our analysis remains essentially unchanged.

We develop a dynamic model of identity formation that explains why ethnic minorities may choose to adopt oppositional identities (i.e. some individuals may reject or not the dominant culture) and why this behavior may persist over time. We first show that the prevalence of an oppositional culture in the minority group cannot always be sustained in equilibrium. Indeed, because the size of the majority group is larger, there is an « imposed » process of exposition to role models from the majority group that favors the diffusion of mainstream values in the minority community. In spite of this, an oppositional culture in the minority group can nevertheless be sustained in steady state if there is enough cultural segmentation in terms of role models, or if the size of the minority group is large enough, or if the degree of oppositional identity it implies is high enough. We also demonstrate that the higher the level of harassment and the number of racist individuals in the society, the more likely an oppositional minority culture will emerge. We finally show that ethnic identity and socialization effort can be more intense in mixed rather than segregated neighborhoods.

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.

This paper builds a model of competition through fundraising between horizontally differentiated NGOs. NGOs allocate their time resource between working on the project and fundraising, which attracts private donations. If the market size is fixed, the fundraising levels increase with the number of NGOs and the free-entry equilibrium number of NGOs can be larger or smaller than the socially optimal number, depending on the efficiency of the fundraising technology. If the market size is endogenous and NGOs cooperate in attracting new donors, fundraising levels decrease with the number of NGOs and the free-entry equilibrium number of NGOs is smaller than the one that maximizes the welfare of donors and beneficiaries. If NGOs can divert funds for private use, multiple equilibria (with high diversion and no diversion of funds) appear.

This paper provides a theory of the interactions between knowledge codification, firm-level organization structures, information diffusion and the dynamics of technological competition. At the firm level, we focus on incentives to design Knowledge Management policies based on the codification of soft into hard information. At the aggregate level, we discuss the endogenous nature of knowledge spillover and the implications for macroeconomic growth. The model predicts the existence of a bell shaped relationship between knowledge codification and technological competition.

La littérature empirique du commerce international souligne l’existence d’économies d’agglomération à l’exportation. Elle met en évidence l’impact positif de la présence d’autres exportateurs au niveau local sur la probabilité qu’une firme commence à exporter vers un pays donné. Nous explorons ce résultat en étudiant la nature de ces effets en fonction de caractéristiques hétérogènes des firmes exportatrices et de variables mesurant la difficulté d’accès aux pays importateurs : temps et nombre de documents nécessaires à l’importation dans le pays de destination, demande pondérée, et mesure du risque économique et global dans le pays. Nos résultats suggèrent que l’impact des externalités à l’exportation ne diffère pas significativement selon les performances des entreprises. Une augmentation du nombre de voisins exportateurs a par contre davantage d’impact sur la probabilité qu’une firme commence à exporter lorsque le pays de destination est difficile d’accès. Un voisin supplémentaire exportant un produit vers un pays donné augmente par exemple la probabilité qu’une firme commence à exporter ce même produit vers ce même pays de 1,95 point de pourcentage lorsqu’il s’agit d’un pays où les formalités en termes de documents sont plus lourdes que la moyenne, et de 0,69 point lorsque ces formalités sont plus légères que la moyenne. Nos résultats sont robustes à divers sous-échantillons et pour l’ensemble de nos mesures de difficulté d’accès. Ils suggèrent que les démarches collectives et le partage d’expérience encouragés par les pouvoirs publics ces dernières années sont d’autant plus importants que les entreprises souhaitent se lancer à la conquête de marchés difficiles.

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.

Non-tariff measures (NTMs) play an increasing role in the international trade of agri-food products. Although well-recognized, this role has not been extensively analyzed at a disaggregated level. This paper focuses on NTMs enacted by member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for 777 products. Using a cluster-analysis, the paper identifies the correlation between the occurrence of NTMs, their trade coverage, and the incidence of trade frictions for these products. The paper relates the statistical findings to the political economy literature on protection to explain cross-product differences in the occurrence of NTMs and trade frictions.

Nous analysons les effets à long terme de la présence importante des Juifs en Europe de l’Est avant la seconde guerre mondiale et de leur extermination pendant l’Holocauste. Nous utilisons la «Zone de résidence», le territoire dans lequel les Juifs ont été confinés sous l’empire russe, en tant que source de variation exogène de la taille de la population juive avant la deuxième guerre mondiale. En utilisant des résultats des élections et des enquêtes, nous établissons que les résidents présents dans la «Zone de résidence» (comparés aux habitants à l’extérieur de la «Zone de résidence») votent plus pour les partis socialistes s’opposant au marché, sont moins favorables au marché et à la démocratie, sont moins entrepreneurs, mais expriment plus de confiance dans autrui. En même temps, la «Zone de résidence» n’a pas d’effets durables sur les niveaux moyens de consommation, de revenu ou d’éducation. Les régressions de discontinuité à la frontière de la «Zone de résidence» contribuent à l’identification du phénomène. Nous montrons que l’impact de la «Zone de résidence» est lié à la présence passée des Juifs plutôt qu’à l’arrivée de nouvelles populations sur les territoires habités précédemment par les Juifs. Nous proposons un mécanisme pouvant expliquer cet effet et présentons une évidence empirique à son appui : la population non-juive, lorsque les deux groupes ont vécu côte-à-côte, a développé une culture anti-marché et une confiance ‘fusionnelle’ (bonding) fondée sur la haine ethnique. Nous montrons, ce qui est compatible avec ce mécanisme, que les résidents contemporains des villes proches des endroits où les pogroms ont eu lieu, sont moins favorables au marché et expriment plus de confiance envers autrui, même lorsque nous contrôlons pour la part historique de la population juive et la « Zone de résidence ».

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.

The magnitude and the direction of net international capital flows do not fit neoclassical models. The fifty U.S. states comprise an integrated capital market with very low barriers to capital flows, which makes them an ideal testing ground for neoclassical models. We develop a simple frictionless open economy model with perfectly diversified ownership of capital and find that capital flows among the states are consistent with the model. Therefore, the small size and “wrong” direction of net international capital flows are likely due to frictions associated with national borders, not to inherent flaws in the neoclassical model.

In this article, we study the joint dynamics of the demography and the economy. We explore how economic conditions affect fertility choices, and in return how the population growth rate affects both financial and labor markets. Our main contribution is to consider a realistic demographic setup that allows characterizing the age at which individuals decide to give birth to their children. In such a framework, we aim at studying the existence of an equilibrium. We notably prove there exists a monetary steady state if the average age of consumers is greater than the average age of producers.

We estimate the relationship between export sophistication and economic and export performance in China. We confirm Hausmann, Hwang and Rodrik (2007)’s prediction that regions that develop more sophisticated goods grasp greater gains from globalization and grow faster. We find that these gains are limited to export activities undertaken by domestic entities. Direct gains do not appear to derive from foreign entities typically engaged in processing trade even though they are the main contributors to the global upgrading of China’s exports.

Cet article a été écrit pour la Conférence François-Albert-Angers, du 50e Congrès annuel de la Société canadienne de science économique du 12 au 14 mai 2010. Je remercie les participants pour leurs réactions et commentaires. Toute erreur restante demeure mienne.

This paper investigates the presence of local export spillovers on both the extensive (the decision to start exporting) and the intensive (the export volume) margins of trade, using data on French individual export flows, at the product-level and by destination country, between 1998 and 2003. We investigate whether the individual decision to start exporting and exported volume are influenced by the presence of nearby product and/or destination specific exporters, using a gravity-type equation estimated at the firm-level. Spillovers are considered at a fine geographical level corresponding to employment areas (348 in France). We control for the new economic geography-type selection of firms into agglomerated areas, and for the local price effects of firms agglomeration.

Contemporary economic analysis is largely subject to rather bizarre schizofrenic syndromes. On the one hand, over the last thirty years or so, macro theories have tried to squeeze the interpretation of whatever aggregate dynamics down to some sort of decision-theoretic framework in which the increasingly mythical »representative agent » was doing all the action. Whatever statistical properties of the time-series, being it productivity and GDP growth, fluctuations, employment, investment, had to be explained as the equilibrium outcome of some sophisticated inter-temporal maximization exercise by such an agent. Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models are the dominant genre in this spirit. On the micro side largely the opposite has happened. Empirical analyses drawing upon an increasing ensemble of micro longitudinal datasets have powerfully highlighted the ubiquitous, large and persistent heterogeneity in all dimensions of business firms’ characteristics and dynamics one cared to look at.

In May 2003, the United States, Canada and Argentina launched a World Trade Organization (WTO) case against the European Union concerning its authorization regime for genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The complainants challenged three types of measures: (i) an alleged general moratorium on the approval of GMOs; (ii) delays in the processing of product-specific applications; (iii) national safeguard measures adopted by certain Member States banning the marketing of certain genetically modified products. In November 2006, the WTO condemned the European regime. Using the most recent advances in gravity equation, we estimate the reduction in exports of potentially affected products from the complainants to the European Union. Export losses are calculated by product, complainant country and measure at stake. Our results tend to confirm the foundations of the dispute: the European moratorium and product-specific measures have a negative effect on trade, as do safeguard measures adopted by Germany, Italy and Greece.

Dans cet article nous étudions la présence de spillovers à l’exportation, à la fois sur la marge extensive (la décision de commencer à exporter) et intensive du commerce international (le volume exporté), en utilisant des données d’exportation françaises au niveau firme, produit et pays de destination, pour la période 1998-2003. Nous cherchons à savoir si la décision individuelle de commencer à exporter et le volume d’exportation des firmes sont influencés par la présence au niveau local d’autres exportateurs du même produit et/ou vers la même destination. Pour cela nous estimons des équations de gravité au niveau firme. Les spillovers à l’exportation sont étudiés à un niveau géographique fin correspondant aux zones d’emploi (348 en France métropolitaine). Nous contrôlons pour les effets de sélection de type nouvelle économie géographique des firmes les plus productives dans les zones agglomérées, ainsi que pour les effets prix liés à l’agglomération des producteurs. Nos résultats concluent à la présence de spillovers à l’exportation sur la décision d’exporter mais non sur le volume exporté, ce qui peut laisser penser que ce phénomène microéconomique a lieu au niveau du coût fixe à l’export payé par la firme et non au niveau du coût variable. Les spillovers à l’exportation sont spécifiques au produit exporté et au pays de destination. La même variable, tous produits et tous pays confondus, n’a pas d’impact significatif. Enfin, la structure spatiale des spillovers à l’exportation laisse apparaître un effet décroissant avec la distance qui sépare les exportateurs voisins de la firme considérée.

The growing importance of multinational corporations in world trade has been widely documented in the empirical literature. UNCTAD (2002), for instance, finds that the sales of foreign affiliates of multinational corporations have increased much faster than exports of goods and non-factor services. Trade in intermediate inputs has also expanded substantially and FDI in the service sector has grown at an unprecedented pace.

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate or outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focuses instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining the power allocation between headquarters and subsidiaries. We provide a framework to analyse the interaction between the decision to serve the local market by exporting or FDI, market access and the optimal mode of organization of the multinational corporation. We find that subsidiary managers are given decision power to run the firm at intermediate levels of host country competition. We then provide comparative statics on the optimal organization of the multinational corporation for changes in fixed FDI entry costs, trade costs, as well as changes in information technology.

This paper studies the population dynamics of multiple preference traits in a model of intergenerational cultural transmission. Parents socialize and transmit their preferences to their children with endogenous intensities. Populations concentrated on a single cultural group are in general not stable. There is a unique stable stationary distribution, and it supports two or more cultural groups, in particular those with greater intolerance with respect to others’ traits. The larger the heterogeneity of intolerance levels across cultural groups, the smaller the number of traits that are supported in the stable stationary distribution.

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.

Why are many large non-governmental organizations (NGOs) becoming multinational entities? What are the welfare implications of this integration of markets for development donations? To answer these questions, we build a simple two-country model with horizontally differentiated NGOs competing in fundraising. We find that NGOs become multinational if the economies of scale in fundraising are sufficiently large. In that case, national NGOs in the smaller country disappear, while some national NGOs remain in the larger country only if country sizes are sufficiently different. Social welfare is higher in the regime with multinationals than under autarky.

This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a « political-pecking order » in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not; Secondly, the geographical and sectoral presence of foreign capital alleviates credit constraints faced by private Chinese firms. Thirdly, geographical and sectoral presence of state firms aggravates financial constraints for private Chinese firms (« crowding out »). Therefore it seems that ongoing restructuring of the state-owned sector and further liberalization of foreign capital inflows in China can help to circumvent financial constraints and can boost the investment of private firms.

Les flux commerciaux internationaux de biens culturels ont connu une croissance rapide au cours des dernières décennies et leur libéralisation sera une question importante des futures négociations commerciales multilatérales. Dans ce document, nous nous concentrons sur le commerce bilatéral de biens culturels et étudions ses déterminants. En outre, nous utilisons le commerce des biens culturels comme un indicateur de la proximité culturelle des pays et nous étudions si les pays ayant des goûts culturels proches ont des échanges bilatéraux plus intenses. Nos estimations montrent une influence positive et significative des flux culturels sur le commerce global, ce qui suggère que les réglementations encourageant la création culturelle nationale pourraient avoir des impacts allant au-delà de ce qui est généralement attendu.